Ar'Kendrithyst

With his senses unencumbered by illusions, and with Kydyr seemingly content to not instantly attack, Erick took in the magnificence of the dragon’s house and the dragon himself. Or rather, what was left of that magnificence after it was covered by a hoard of books. An obscene number of books filled every available space, most of them piled upon defunct organization systems like shelves and wooden boxes. The next room over was a dining room and kitchen space that was filled with books; tomes of all sorts layered upon the table and chair, and spilled out of the sinks. They piled in the cooling boxes, all of which looked as though they had not been used for their original purposes in a long time. Bedrooms were filled with books. The library —both the one on the first floor and the two on the second floor— were absolutely chock full from floor to ceiling, with absolutely no place to stand in any of them. Bathrooms had their plumbing pinched off so that water couldn’t come up from the cistern down below and ruin the literature.

This place was clearly meant for non-metal, fleshy-habitation, even though Kydyr was a bismuth wrought. With these few clues Erick understood that Kydyr had owned this house for a long, long time, but his transition to dragon was a rather recent occurrence. ‘Recent’, meaning sometime in the last few hundred years, or something like that.

Everything Erick saw hinted at a complete shut-in who was deeply incapable of interacting with the outside world like he had in the past. But Kydyr had always been a bit of a shut-in, focused on defense and avoiding battle, and interaction.

The walls of the mansion were a meter thick and unadorned, like the walls of a bunker, and lined with multitudes of runic webs, like a Faraday cage stuck inside concrete. The wardlights up above were utilitarian things, strung around the edges of the space and lighting up the center, but nothing more than that. The plumbing in the bathrooms and the kitchen, before it had been sealed off, went down into a sealed cistern where it looked like it could get recycled on the daily, but there was no water system for taking in more outside water. There were no windows. There wasn’t even a front door. If there had been a front door then it was long gone.

But all that just informed Erick who Kydyr was, now that the illusions were gone. Why had they broken, though? Because of a single conjured bird? It had to be, for that conjured bird lay tipped on its side, in a space filled with concentric circles of broken tile. At least two piles of books had been shoved to the side in the casting, which had also somehow broken the Faraday cage of runic webs located below the tile, and for three meters in every direction. It was a small break, but somehow that break had propagated across the entirety of the web. Many tangled nodes inside the web were gone, like the centimeter-thick platinum rods had somehow burned away without leaving residue, or melted platinum.

Erick had no idea how his spellwork had done that, but all signs pointed to this being his fault.

Dragon Kydyr certainly seemed to think so. The bismuth dragon curled tightly around one of the larger piles of books, bunching and stressing as his tail flicked at the ground, breaking more tiles. His white claws tore at the ground as he snarled.

Erick hadn’t known that wrought could be dragons, but there were many ways to explain what he was seeing. Dragon Essence was easily transferred and grown, as it almost had done inside Jane. The other answer was that Kydyr was a natural born dragon, though Erick suspected this was not the case. There were likely other answers, but Erick didn’t know them, and whatever the truth was would have to wait to be answered.

“What did you DO!” Dragon Kydyr shouted, heat and wind billowing out of his open maw with every angry word, flowing directly over Erick. His breath smelled like metal.

Erick gestured to the bird doll on the ground between them, saying, “I made the doll with feathers this time.” He glanced at the blue box that hovered in his field of view. “And I think I got the good version of the spell; [Fairy Item].”