Dragonheart Core

Chapter 139: Ruminations of War

Wake up.

Seros twitched. A single shiver, racing from spine to tail, a murmur past the gentle lull of sleep. Water, swirling around him, humming at the edges of his awareness like mana in his home; but not there. Why wasn't it there? No answer to his gravitas.

Wake up.

Something… pulling at his claws, wrapping around his limbs, pinning his fins to his sides. His gills fluttered and breathed evenly but he wasn't moving, wasn't drawing water over their surfaces beyond typical inhalations. Water, swirling around him. Not under his control. Why?

Wake up.

Seros woke up.

The world was dark and dim, water grey and unlit by quartz-lights or the luminescent blooms of capturing coral—just shadows, and the shadows their shadows gave birth to. But it was a room, instead of a world, instead of the endless expanse he'd learned the cove had. Old stone, eight walls, encircling around him.

Closed.

Seros woke up again, this time in fury.

He roared like the dawn of a breaking mountain, lashing upright; tatters of amber-gold clung to his limbs and wrapped around his tail, humming with mana and inlaid deliberate scratches, but his Otherworld mana pulsed once and they tore off his scales like they'd never been. Chains? They dared chain a draconic monitor?

His bellow shook the foundations of the stone.

With a sweep of his claws he threw himself up, ricochetting around the room and hammering his might into every corner, shattered webs of weakness blooming under his blows. Violence incarnate, hunger and death and destruction—he rampaged and roared and laid ruin to what thought to cage him. Then–

A voice.

Soft, murmuring, barely a whisper—but in his mind, not the water. Not the click-tongue or piercing screeches of merrow, nor the faint tune so unlike yet opposite his Otherworld mana. A voice.

Hello, it said.

It sounded like the Core.

He slammed his claws into another wall with a crack like thunder.

No other being was the Core. No other being was allowed to pretend to be the Core.

I am not, it whispered, like it had heard him, like it had sunk its awareness into his mind and peeled past the layers even Veresai had never managed to claim—Seros roared again, mana sparking around his eyes. Hold, dragon-friend. I mean you no harm.

A fine thing to say, when he woke up caged in a prison of stone.

The merrow of Arroyo, it said, like he didn't know that already. Bubbles frothed between his fangs.

They are coming back, the voice murmured, fragile, gentle as a spider's thread; liable to snap at any moment. Seros wanted to snap it, to shred it under his claws and bite away even the idea of something being more powerful than the Core—but something urged him to hold. Something older.

Melodic, almost.

Seros hissed, lashing his tail. He had no use for useless words so he snarled in his mind instead, a vicious, burning sound that rippled with gravitas—he pushed all of his ire and fury and rage within. He would kill them. He would devour their souls and drag their corpses back to the Core. He would lay ruin to this merrow city that had thought to contain him.

The voice, instead of fleeing in terror as it should, just returned to him with a faint tinge of amusement. They have not killed you because they fear you, it said, quiet. But give them enough to fear and they will damn the consequences.

Seros had killed everything he had ever feared. These merrow made no sense. He couldn't even be pleased that they hadn't killed him—not that they would be able to—because this damnable voice had told him it thought they could.

He was a draconic monitor. Merrow, caught between scaled perfection and humanoid weakness, would never be the ones to bring him low.

Damn the consequences?

He was the consequences.

A snarl rumbled in his chest but he stopped his ceaseless rampage, ripping his claws out from where they'd been embedded in the walls; though he'd shattered the outer layer and torn rock from its previously stability, there was only more underneath, and he wouldn't waste his strength against unliving targets. Water rushed by, filling his senses, but he knew there was something beyond it—the only reason he was still breathing, instead of exhausting the air in this water and choking on nothing. The merrow had put him in here and closed the entrance. The merrow had contained him.

And now a voice spoke to him like it knew them, and it said it didn't mean him harm.

Seros wasn't one to take chances.

I am no merrow, it hummed, with a flavour of– something he didn't know. Not quite humour. Not quite exhaustion. I am one of thirteen. Now it was even quieter—weaker. He could hear its strength bleed as it spoke, no mana to force its voice to echo like the Core was fond of doing. But I have lost my connection to my followers. Your–

And there. The first true emotion beyond amusement and urgency. A sense of deep, profound anger—and resignation.

Your dungeon separated us.

Seros bared his fangs.

He remembered this, in a swirling mixture of his own memories and those of the Core—the merrow, attacking, cracking a hole through the wall and storming in like they were born to win. Him and the crocodilian beast had convinced them thoroughly of the opposite, stripped them of power, ate their corpses and devoured their mana.

Including that of the strongest, a sea-green merrow with a diamond-tipped staff who called herself a priestess and had come for the core.

The voice softened again, barely a whisper. Her avarice undid her. But your dungeon took her staff and with it, my voice.

Well, it was talking to him now. So clearly its voice wasn't all gone.

More amusement, faint. You are of the one that took my staff, it murmured. To you alone, of all these waters, can I speak.

Movement, outside the room. His roar hadn't gone unnoticed. And though there were no breaks in the stone, no ways to escape beyond the impossible small holes his hydrokinesis could sense, he had watched them tunnel through solid rock before—if they wanted to reach him, they would. And oh, was he powerful, was he a monster; but that was in the dungeon.

Seros was not one to admit weakness.

But he knew, that in the sea, he was not as strong as he could be.

He snarled, shredding the last of the kelp-chains and digging his claws into the stone floor; his tail lashed and the last of his mana crawled sluggishly into the surrounding waters, lurching to his call. The faint hum again, melodic, urging him to abandon himself to it—he shoved past it with all gravitas and forced the waters to obey, to swirl at his command.

They did so, begrudgingly.

How the hells did sea-drakes do it?

They listen, the voice said. They listen to the one thing greater than them.

He hadn't asked it.

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You didn't, came the response, just as unwanted as the last one. You are strong, but you are blind—mortals cannot be all. You will not know power until you know the Song.

The Song.

Seros slowed, if only for a moment.

The way the Core spoke to him was full of tune and harmony and life—the Otherworld mana spun within him like a ballad. This voice was tinged with the sea, with something deep-ocean and waves and the glimmer of water through the dappled surface, but it–

The Song.

There was something about that phrase.

Outside, the sound of the merrow grew louder. Stone, cracking, the echo of something thundering and powerful; the water within his earthen prison trembled. He hissed, bubbles trickling out of his mouth.

The Song. He couldn't stop thinking of it.

I am Abarossa, the voice whispered. And I will teach you the power of the sea, if you will bring me to your dungeon.

-

Pathetic.

He ripped his fangs out of the desiccated corpse, huddled with its odd, fleshy limbs—only four of them, quite the downgrade—extended outward even as it died. It looked almost like one of the tall-long-invaders, those he had grown stronger killing, back when they had posed a challenge; but smaller, with green-grey skin and a useless lack of armour. Where was its skeleton? On the inside?

Some creatures really were past saving.

And he was, more often than not, the one to kill them.

The jeweled jumper was all-powerful, at the peak of his prime, and, fundamentally, bored.

He had felt this once before, when his venom only killed instead of corroded, when the Drowned Forest had been his home and all he knew—and that boredom had been new, unique, and enough to drive him to lower levels. Then he had terrorized those green tunnels, slain every beast who dared to exist in his presence, and then–

Then he had been bored again, but the thought of going deeper hadn't appealed. He would find the same thing there; more threats just barely stronger than him until he killed them and the boredom struck again. The voiceless being that made him lavished praise over water and mist and other choking things, rose thelong-scale-beast instead of him. Territories, yes, but not ones worth claiming. Just more barely-strong creatures that had no defense against one good bite.

The being hadn't provided him a challenge, even in the floors below, even surrounded by monsters—they were either fast and avoided him, or they were slow and they died. What challenge was that? How could he prove himself the best and the strongest and the deadliest if there was nothing that could stand against him?

He would never hate winning. It was what he was, who he was; though he wasn't like the pale, bulbous things in the Drowned Forest that should have been kin but were far too lazy for the title, who spoke to each other in murmurs and thoughts, he was quick of body and mind. He knew how to hunt. How to kill.

But killing.

His fights were two acts—he found his target, and he bit them. They died. He consumed their mana and flesh and moved on.

And that was what the had-been-home wanted him to be; an unseen-ghost-killer, taking one thing out and scuttling away while the larger beasts slayed the rest. And he was good at it. Frightfully good at it.

Two acts. He either bit first and killed them—or they saw him first and killed him.

There was no challenge in luck.

So from the had-been-home he left, disappearing from the swirl of mana that never filled him and the beasts that had never beaten him, and headed to the dark and shadowed tunnels beyond.

He learned many new emotions in very quick succession.

First was a love of the dark—the had-been-home kept itself strung with odd, non-moving bugs that glowed instead of attacking, or plants that wriggled and spat lights in the air. The tunnels of his second territory had been dark, yes, but an endless dark. There had been no hiding in shadows when the entirety was shadows.

But here; there was light from hanging-green-plants and distant corridors, with tall-reach-stones that cast enormous fields of grey for him to tuck himself into. Prey walked in the light and he in the darkness, and he killed them from it, and they never saw him coming.

Second was hunger—he had always been hungry, for mana, for territory, for fights, but he had sated himself on all three with only the latter. But now he had to kill for mana to feed instead of to strengthen, and there was no territory to claim as he crawled ever-on in search of greater challenges. Fights came and went, much as before, in empty hordes of one and single bites to claim victory. He wanted more.

Third was fear.

He did not care for this emotion.

It had come one night as he skulked through stone-shadows, hunting for something to fill his bottomless stomach now that constant mana didn't sustain him, and then the stone rebelled. Not a creature, not a beast—just stone, falling, shaken by something larger than him or the hand-been-home or understanding.

Simple stone, falling.

If he had been beneath it, he would be dead.

There was no challenge in that; there was no victory. The stone did not advance from its corpse; he would not advance from avoiding it. Just a death, waiting, pointless and wasted and there.

If he were to die, it would not be like that. So he needed to be stronger.

But stronger how?

He didn't want to be like the scaled-water-beast, large and enormous, who fought hordes with brute strength and claws; he loved the shadows and the hunt and feeling of venom sinking into flesh unknown. He loved watching his prey die while he stood unharmed.

But he wanted them to know.

He wanted to fight groups, armies, worlds full of beasts, all at the same time; to strike from the shadows as they stomped and shouted and tried to run; to sit in darkness as they knew he was there but couldn't flee from him. To not have it just be luck that they didn't see him; for them to know he was coming and be killed regardless.

He wanted to be a nightmare.

He wanted to be inescapable.

And he remembered, because there was memory now, there was more than just thinking of future fights but now recalling previous ones, to remember being bored and what he had done and what he hadn't—he remembered changing, long ago. The change from webs to fangs; the change from red-grey to crimson; the change from weak to fearless. And though the had-been-home no longer fed him mana, he could feel he was full of it, straining at his body, urging him to change once more.

But not yet. Not until he had figured out how to have what he wanted.

Which was why he was here, in the tunnels darkened by shadows and walked by larger beasts, prodding one clawed foot at the husk before him.

It was large but not more than the tall-long-invaders; strong, yes, but only for its size. No fangs, no claws, just an odd, tree-stick-length thing with a sharpened tip it had made one pitiful stab at him with before dying.

But where there had been one tall-long-invader, there had been more.

Perhaps this beast was similar.

The jeweled jumper skittered over its corpse, claws sinking into its tender flesh, the weakness underneath. He had grown from the last days of his boredom, larger than any kin he had known, but even then he could tuck all his limbs in and fit on the face of the creature. Size wasn't important, it seemed. Not when he could strike from the shadows. Not when he could kill.

But he had found so few avenues for strength yet, not in all his time hunting in these dark tunnels, and he would wait to see if more of this beast would come. So he scuttled off to the top of its head, the highest vantage point to see the rest of the sprawling room, and waited.

Time, endless, enough his hunger doubled and doubled again—and then movement.

More of them.

He sprang off its corpse and tucked himself in the shadow of a tall-reach-stone, limbs splayed and eight eyes fixed on the desiccated husk of its body. Vibrations, rumbling over the stone; two approaching things, tall, the same weight and size of the one he killed. Prey. Venom dripped from his fangs.

From the dim, two green-grey-beasts entered the room.

Their eyes, pale with white instead of black, locked onto the corpse. They were kin, then. The same. Both held tree-stick-lengths, those fake-claws on top, with no armour but scraps of flowing liquid-solid-grey. Beasts.

And then they opened their mouths.

Think-words, but instead of in the voiceless manner of the being that had made him, they were in the air. Not quite vibrations, like he was attuned to—or, rather, they were, but weak and pitiful. Likely sounds alongside them, something that stirred the hairs on his legs.

Some beasts had no idea how brutish they were, using think-words like this instead of within one's mind. The jeweled jumper didn't harbour much appreciation for the voiceless being, but at least it hadn't had to rely on this strange, fumbling form of communication.

But the mana within him; the leftover curls and peals from the had-been-home, wanted him to understand, though he had no apparatus to do so. It wanted him to know.

Useless knowledge. But he couldn't do anything to stop it.

"Hells," the first green-grey-beast hissed, in a voice that rippled with vibrations and caught at the air. "Somethin' killed Hinqe."

Hinqe? Was that the name of these beasts? Useless. He didn't need to know this—he needed to know where they were, how many there were, and how to kill them in hordes.

The first one swept its eyes—just two, again, did no creature other than him understand how to be strong?—around the room, teeth bared but without any mandibles to bite outside of the flat of its face. The jeweled jumper stayed still, hairs on his legs twitching; deep in the stone-grey was he, lost to the shadows, and they wouldn't see him.

They didn't. It was as it always was.

The other crouched over the corpse, prodding along its body with odd-flat-claws, flipping it over and brushing at the bloodied back of its lower-limb. Where he'd struck it with all venom. The thing hissed, not unlike the scaled-beast, jabbing its odd-flat-claws in the ground.

"Ikiar," it spat, gutless and pointless as it was. "Shadow-killer. Fuck else do these mountains have?"

The other spat something on the ground, a waste of precious moisture. The lot of them were fools. "Home didn't have shit like this," it growled, odd-flat-claws tightening around its tree-stick-length.

"Won't be gettin' home if bastards keep killin' us," the first snapped.

In unison, they both snarled. A rumble like the scaled-beast. Was that a promise of greater strength in numbers? Were they more powerful together, when their sounds could bounce off each other?

More venom dripped from his fangs.

He wanted to know.

The jeweled jumper wasn't like the other spiders back in the had-been-home; who lounged in delicate webs and waited for prey to land wriggling in their mouths. Who spoke to each other in thought-whisper-smells and joined together.

But he could win.

And when the green-grey-beasts hauled the corpse of the fallen one on their backs and made to head down a path he hadn't yet explored, the jeweled jumper followed, and prepared to make war.

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