Dragonheart Core

Chapter 147: March Set

A sarco crocodile snapped lazily at the air as I pondered Seros' story.

With him back, swimming through the Hungering Reefs as exhaustion melted away under Abarossa's thrall, he had fully opened his mind to me, and I had welcomed it—let all of his memories and emotions flow through me. The ruined crater of Arroyo, the city-that-had-once-been, the destruction razed through its stone beyond the bloodline kelp at its center.

A pitch-shark, wrought and terrible, leveling destruction as easily as bleeding. And unlike the battle I had won, there hadn't been a corpse at the bottom, hadn't been proof it had been stopped—which implied that it won.

I would not feel sympathy for the merrow, not after the entrance they'd blasted through my Underlake and the death they'd poured into my halls like tar, but I could, perhaps, understand Abarossa's desperation to give her voice back to them. Maybe I could even understand why the Thirteenth Priestess had decided to risk it all to claim my core.

But. Back to the sarco.

Because there were two of them, fat and newly-born, sprawled over a patch of quartz-light-warmed stone with their tails dangling in the water. Three thousand feet wide in a circular room, a creeping river down to a sprawling pool, toothless plants and prey scattered about. The Haven, my birthplace of creatures to fill my halls, and gift of Nenaigch from our brokered deal.

Complete with useless webweavers scuttling over a ramshackle temple in the far back. Lovely.

But now, with all my Named back, I felt comfortable shoving mana into starting to populate it—apart from the destruction, there was little else to do here but populate, and I had built enough extravagant dens and clutch-holds that I had hopes there would be nothing else on their mind. It wasn't as if I had too many creatures that needed to be in here, anyway—things like the silvertooths and armourback sturgeons evolved plenty up from regular silverheads, and others were a touch too violent to be allowed in the peace.

No, the Haven was for my predators, the large and indomitable. Three thousand feet wide felt like an enormity until you saw how much room each creature took up, and then it was understood that I couldn't go wasting it on things like magma salamanders or jeweltone serpents. In theory, I could make the Haven larger—and I likely would be, once I felt comfortable enough—but I didn't want to push Nenaigch's acceptance. Keeping it for my monsters felt the most appropriate.

Thus—the breeding pair of sarco crocodiles. Already my Underlake was feeling the dearth of their presence, despite the new one I'd woven into existence to fill the gap. I wanted more, I wanted power; and for a reborn fossil that had to be an evolution, my mana couldn't keep up.

My knowledge of crocodiles was rather limited, due to their complete lack of even a lingering draconic presence, but I knew they laid eggs in clutches, and if they were even a fraction as diligent as the midnight cave bear as a parent, at least some would survive to rule the Underlake once more.

If the armoured jawfish didn't kill them when they were too young to defeat him.

It was, at times, difficult to grow attached to anyone within my dungeon.

Twin sarcos, a den in the back blossoming into a pair of lunar cave bears that immediately started pawing for whitecap mushrooms at their paws, and a smattering of lichenridge turtles in the pool, since the ones doing passable impressions of stepping stones in the Drowned Forest never really got around to mating. That was all for now, beyond the prey scurrying underfoot.

I would love to have more—love to have more predators. Particularly those I couldn't have, no schema tucked away in my core despite how much I yearned for it.

Buried deep in the Jungle Labyrinth, padding her way through blacklit tunnels with a peacock-feathered tail swishing behind her, the stalking jaguar hunted greater prey that her own lithe bulk to feast on their heart and drag the meat down to Akkyst. And above the starwrought bear, the blade-hawk spread his wings to toss rust-red feathers down at yipping mist-foxes, his shriek echoing through the stone.

Dangerous, wonderful, and dungeonborn, with my new title—but not mine, not in knowledge or understanding. Hells, I didn't even know if stalking jaguar and blade-hawk were their actual names, just what they called themselves. The damnable difficulty of not having a schema. Goblins marching about and a parrot with gold-edged wings similarly eluded me, and there was no way to get their schema nor increase their population.

…none of them happened to be pregnant, did they? Was the blade-hawk hiding a clutch of eggs somewhere?

Damn.

For a moment, the urge to take schemas from their corpses came to me.

But eons ago, when only scuttling bugs met my awareness and mushrooms came to my mana, I hadn't killed Seros, when every dungeon instinct screamed at me to do so. I hadn't killed him because I didn't know if I would have had the mana to recreate his schema, and who knew if more monsters were coming, and already he had proven himself capable of listening to instructions, and I wanted more, and–

And I would have been alone.

Dragon-friend, I had Named him.

Was I friends with the stalking jaguar and blade-hawk? Certainly not. Both were lacking the necessary scales, though the jaguar's blue-green feathered tail was at least the right colours. But to Akkyst they were friends, and I did not have slaves, not my Named. They were as close as I could have to companions.

So I would not kill his friends. Those that had followed him through mountain and misery to come to my dungeon.

Even if I wanted to.

Instead, my Haven held its current inhabitants, and it would remain at its capacity until I either earned another schema expensive enough to be worth placing here, or I finally found something a touch more serviceable as godly priests. For some wild, incongruous reason, murderous sycophants wasn't enough, even though the webweavers had tried their damnedest to supplement worship with sacrifices.

I had, apparently, taken up a profession in juggling godly requests. Nenaigch, watching over the webweavers with something burgeoning on disapproval; Nuvja, her open-ended contract still perched in my core; Abarossa, waiting for her staff. All of this was terrible. The worst. There was a reason I had been particularly fond of sleeping away the decades as a sea-drake instead of having to be so busy.

Well. Nenaigch was already looking in, watching me elevate her Haven to the sunlit clearing in the center of a thorned forest, so I might as well push my luck with her a little farther. My points of awareness shivered, stretching out, and floated down to the den at the far back of the Hungering Reef.

The den where, until a few hours hence, a human had been sleeping peacefully.

Abarossa's mana snaked through the air like a living thing, like the shark she was, and slowly the den was emptying out—not completely, because it was still a place of storage and cooking, but certainly less. Those healing under a shaman's magic curled in enormous piles of scales and sleepy hisses, others braced over fire with their claws extended, and in the back, Nicau blinked at a ceiling with a drawn bewilderment in his thoughts.

He was tired. He knew he should be tired. He wasn't tired. He was, in fact, feeling quite capable of venturing out into the world again.

His thoughts cycled through this on repeat. Gods, it must be exhausting to be a human.

Still not full of mana, because it had been three days out of my halls, but he was awake and alert and very confused about it. So when I slipped into his mind, mana coiling around his thoughts, Nicau sat upright, ducking his head into a shallow bow. "O' dungeon."

Obedience, my favourite of his limited beneficial characteristics.

Well awake? I asked, pushing a half point of mana into his veins.

He stood up from his moss-bed, patting at his thighs and pushing back his tangled locks of hair. "Yes," he said, blinking. "Very much so. Um. Thank you?"

Well, I'd certainly take the credit for it. My mana hummed. The path.

Three days, and he'd returned without any schemas, but with a thief and the wolf-wisp he'd stolen. Not an admissible trade, not something I would welcome constantly, but a suitable prize for the rage. Now I just needed him to fulfill the other part of his conquest.

Nicau nodded, peering out of the den. His Otherworld mana swarmed and barked against mine, waking up, Abarossa's power soothing through him like the coil of a serpent. Even the bags under his eyes—such an odd weakness, why did they have that?—were fading back to umber skin. "Of course, o' dungeon," he said, then paused. "How?"

Excuse me?

Nicau winced. I swiveled my points of awareness further in.

"I did find a spot," he hastened to add, because my mind was curling around his with teeth out.

Good for him.

"It's called the Overlook," he said, like I would become magically aware of the meaning. "Above Calarata?"

Above?

I was perhaps overstating Nicau's intelligence, but I did hope he had noticed I was a dungeon. We were, rather by definition, underground.

He closed his eyes and reached out—his mana, fumbling against mine, through the connection that tugged at his soul like a tether. Thoughts poured through, bright and brisk, darting about—Calarata, tack-white in the settling dusk, far below. A pale memory of a place, this Overlook, made of stone that held the echo of hammers and chisels with grass threading through the cracks. Nicau's lack of sleep stained all of the images with exhaustion, blurring the Marquesa de Wolf's face into blurry angles and only the sound of the old-bark-birch-leaf creature behind her, but the location was clear enough.

Buried in the Alómbra Mountains, high above the city but not directly, and with enough ghosts haunting its rockface that it wasn't likely to be drowned in adventurers who had the wherewithal to stick their noses into my entrance.

Acceptable. I supposed. And if anyone suspected me of having another way in, they would likely presume as I had that it would be low and grounded, closer to the dungeon. It would be a point of weakness, to have to snake a tunnel through so much unknown stone before reaching my entrance, but much like my first true kill what felt like a century ago, the tunnel would also be long enough that I would be able to manipulate the end even if an invader made it into the entrance. Then I could simply collapse the rock and bolster my defenses to keep it from getting in.

Not perfect, but up to my standards. The advantages were too much to pass up.

All that was left was to get to it.

And to do that, I would simply be digging.

Nenaigch had proven herself capable of moving tunnels, and presumably I could beg and plead her to smooth over my twisting mess of a path once I popped out in the right area. Trial and error—particularly with my own perfection—was worth it over sending Nicau out blindly and hoping I could still reach his mind when he was so far away.

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I dove into his thoughts again, embedding all his memories into mine. Though it was dark, I was magic incarnate, and I sharpened the images until I could see the faint glimmer of the pebbled beach, the Adventuring Guild, the spidering path that led to my dungeon.

There. A rough idea of where and how far, and plenty of precaution to lead my way there. Eating through stone had become rather an expertise for me, and with Nicau to serve as a guiding force, I could do that with one fraction of my consciousness while I busied myself with more important tasks. Burrowing through mountains, particularly for nothing more than a ten-foot tunnel without plants or creatures or water sources to create or maintain, would be simple.

Perhaps I'd even stumble on my fossils on the way.

You will walk, I said, plucking at his mana to guide him. I will dig. Together, we find the path.

Relief, sparking over his thoughts that he didn't have to emerge from the dungeon seemingly alive after barely avoiding Lluc's attention last time, and then confusion. "Right," he said, hesitantly. "Just… walk?"

And dig, I added helpfully.

Nicau stared at his hands like he was reconsidering most of his existence. "Of course."

He'd figure it out. He always did. Perhaps the long walk through the mountains would be good for him.

Being that this was Nenaigch's gift, I couldn't have it emerge from any other floor but the Jungle Labyrinth—no matter how much I wished to put it lower—but she wasn't the only one who could dig tunnels. The fourth floor would have my fourth entrance, and then I would weave a spider's web to connect to that.

Confusing, inefficient, but purposeful. Soon, all of my creatures, most particularly my Named, could leave my dungeon without detection to handle all the myriad tasks I required.

We'd need luck and time to finish this tunnel, but I would take that over the chance of discovery and destruction. Some wasted days over Nicau brought before the Dread Pirate in chains was moderately more acceptable.

Luck.

Well. I'd take all the advantages I could get.

Take the rat with you.

Nicau blinked. "What?"

The rat. I pushed a vague impulse of shadowthief rats, their black eyes and clever paws, and particularly one I poured a suitable amount of rage over from her taking my moonstar flower. For luck. Take her.

Nicau closed his eyes. Reopened them. Seemingly resigned himself. "Of course."

He didn't have to sound so enthusiastic.

I darted up a floor, swimming through the monotonous paths of death in the Jungle Labyrinth. Every one was identical, coated in thornwhip algae and faint glowing spores, and I chose a random spot opposite the Haven's entrance to press an imprint of mana into the stone. Nenaigch hummed around it, the weaving embrace of her mana wrapping through the grey, before her presence melded and shifted back—she would allow me to begin digging.

Lovely.

With that distraction handily wrapped up, Nicau morosely plodding through the kobold's den in search of his rat companion, I dipped past the Skylands, where the wolf-wisp's glowing cloud was crackling with lightning as her evolution came to a head, and back down into the Hungering Reefs. Seros swam through its depths, a roughwater shark fleeing from his braced claws, the reefback turtle paddling through the crystalline waters, Chieftess barking commands over a hunting squad.

Abarossa, woven throughout, struck her awareness against mine like the chime of a bell.

There was a prickle of annoyance from her cold-iron teeth, from the black eyes watching me like a shadow through dappled waters far above. She had rather expected me to take her boon and immediately get around to making her staff.

Well, bully for her. I had other matters to attend to, such as Nenaigch's growing irritation and the uncomfortable idea that I had limited time to scrape my side of the deal from her before our relationship would sour. Abarossa was fresh off an alliance and just a touch more open.

I pushed vague ideations of apology, images coalescing in my core—her staff could I make, form with her guiding hand like all powers reborn, but there wasn't much I could then do with it. In order to leave my dungeon and not become a permanent fixture of my hoard, I needed someone to take it out, and Seros was exhausted from his trip outside. A bit of time hunting in the Hungering Reefs, filling his stomach and letting Abarossa's new boon soothe the tiredness from his bones, would put him back in the shape necessary to push the staff outside of my dungeon.

And if I happened to do other things while I waited for him to recover? Well. I was a busy dungeon. I wouldn't apologize for efficiency.

Her star-burn scraped at the edges of my awareness like teeth. Now.

I bobbed polite acceptance and gathered my mana—only mostly cut in half by creating the sarcos and lunar cave bears, it was probably fine—and pushed it into the first room of the Hungering Reefs, far from the kobolds who could perhaps be stupid enough to grab it before Seros could transport it out. The old schema fluttered to the front of my awareness, sinking into the air like a mold to pour iron into—and piece by piece, it came into existence, the twist of water-sealed stone and diamond overtop. I hesitated for a moment but she pushed me, and I created the runes as well, carving lines too intricate for a merrow's claws, looping around the narrow width like a dance.

His hunt complete, half a fin disappearing between his fangs, Seros poked his head out of the water. His lantern-esque eyes gleamed as he watched me, his mana reaching out to entangle through Abarossa's. He knew the mission, knew the potential.

Faster and faster I worked, star-burn bright behind me, creating something that had tried to kill me into brilliance once again. The runes, the diamond, the pattern tucked under the surface—everything that had been.

But, as I finished it, my mana drained to under a quarter, it hung in the air and did nothing.

None of the Priestess' power, none of the glory she had hammered into my mountain home. Just a staff, as powerful as anything Nicau plucked from a tree and used to bash in a stone-backed frog's head. More detailed, yes, and the diamond was large, but that was it.

Until Abarossa reached out, jagged shark fangs sinking into the stone, and then I was a conduit for her mana—for her power, her presence, crashing through me like a tsunami.

Thirteenth of the Thirteen am I, she murmured, soft as sands beneath currents. Seer of shadows and maker of death; the hunger and the hunter. Teeth and trial are mine—the Song is sung—my voice will be heard!

There was a crash like thunder—the boom of violence torn into glimmering stars—fangs digging into the marrow of Aiqith itself—and–

The staff, previously dormant, crackled to life.

Each rune lit up in silver-black, a lightless glow that burned regardless, no brighter than their surroundings but thrumming with illumination. A paradox woven underneath the diamond, flashing with silver, runes scrawling up its side in a current's dance. My mana lashed out in echo, fleeing from the presence that reared its head like a tyrant, Abarossa's voice roaring through the Hungering Reefs.

I am Abarossa, she howled, exultant freedom. And I am here!

All over my floor, her power crashed and rose to a fever pitch, my creatures shuddering beneath it—their hunger drowned, their fear forgotten, only the hunt in their mind. Not the raid-frenzy, not the destruction, just the predator and the prey. Just the hunt.

Well. Ah.

I really hoped Abarossa wasn't lying about keeping the merrow from attacking me, because I did not need that power helping them claim my core.

Thank you, she said, and it wasn't a whisper; now she spoke freely and openly, similar to one of my Named, her grasp on Aiqith no longer weakened. Send it to Arroyo.

In most other situations, I wouldn't accept a command like that, but with the aftereffects of Abarossa's power still lurching through my floors, I was feeling a touch less confrontational.

Seros raised his head, paddling over to the shore as I gently set the staff down. Enormous and dangerous was he, but there was a lingering respect for Abarossa in how he leaned down and grabbed the staff between his fangs, biting just softly enough not to marr the runes. Conscientious.

Go, I murmured. Just to the cove. Not the city. They can find it from there.

Seros nodded—rather awkwardly with the some six feet of staff in his mouth—and began making for the Underlake. Abarossa followed him, her presence retreating in a burst of star-burn and cold-iron teeth.

Which.

I waited until she was far enough away—not truly leaving, but her focus was settled on Seros' back, following him out of the dungeon with the only voice she had left—before I reached out, tugging up a few points of mana.

Weaving them into the same shapes was easy, though I didn't manifest another staff and just let them hover in the air, pulsing with power. The innate literacy that came with being a dungeon core flowed through me, speaking each meaning to my soul, the weight behind the words, but–

But nothing. Without Abarossa there to bind them together, they were just runes. Just letters, just symbols, just meaningless things that read like stories for all the power they had. Not an enchantment, not a conduit.

What was I missing? What was the secret ingredient needed to weave mana into things, to make a schema perfectly but have it be more than a dead husk of a thing? What did I need to do in order to craft?

Dragons had no need, and an all-powerful sea-drake even less so. I had been perfect in most conceivable ways.

But if I truly was, then I would have been able to do this.

I let the mana drift away, runes dissolving back to white-silver motes that fluttered on the air. Enchantment, so powerful, so potent, caught on the wind before my claws could snatch it up. Abarossa had done it effortlessly, it seemed; spoken a few pretty words about her power before the staff had gleamed with divine power and her voice echoed like an underwater volcano. I was the one who had done all the work, made the staff, engraved the runes, crafted the diamond—but the enchantment was all her.

Loathe to admit it, but I had done nothing.

I sent Seros out into the cove to learn of the sea, to become one with the mystery that I loved more than words had the meaning for, and he had come back with the Song humming in the back of his mind and a sea-born goddess on his back. Not learned yet, because the immense vastness of immortal centuries couldn't be picked up in a fortnight, but he had breached his own self-importance to take the first step.

There was a journey before him to complete it—a path of victory and madness before he could be more than draconic and become dragon. And not just dragon, but sea-drake; a beast of the endless blue and danger within.

He needed to learn. I knew that. I wanted him to.

My mana coiled around my core like slithering kelp.

…perhaps I had something to learn, too.

Not from a goddess, not from someone more mana than mind, a collection of far-wrought stars in a nameless world with power that flowed like a river into a delta; no, I needed a teacher. Someone who had learned enchantment, rather than been born alongside it. Someone who understood what it was like to fight for the learning, for the knowing.

It would have to be a mortal. More damningly, it would have to be a mortal out of my control.

In all likelihood, it would have to be someone from Calarata.

That was a problem for a later fucking day, however, because I was still imagining Seros' fangs sinking into Gonçal's throat and death arriving for the Dread Pirate on black wings. Rather far from just allowing someone incredibly skilled with mana to just… prance into my dungeon like they owned the place.

No. Not yet.

I had other things to do before that particular indulgence.

My list of tasks was ever-encompassing, as my floors grew larger and more dense and bulging at the edges with potential. My first six had patrons, were frozen in place, though I still would be changing the sixth—and that meant I only had one to work on, and it was nearing completion in of itself. That wouldn't do. The Haven sat as an unhatched egg, waiting to come into itself, the tunnel currently boring itself through the Alómbra Mountains with Nicau trotting at its heels, the Scorchplains filling themselves out in the crackles of distant fire and belching of acrid smoke.

My fifth floor—air, flight, storms. The wings of my past self, the skies I had flown through like the currents that had been mine, the freedom I had taken for granted.

My sixth floor—water, oceans, reefs. The home that had been, perfection incarnate, both for monsters and for growth. The lagoon in its gentle embrace; the towers in their fury.

My seventh floor—smoke, wrath, fury. The predator I had been, hunting through murky waters to leap upon prey unknowing and striking from underneath.

My eighth needed to be something different. Though Abarossa was promising to hold the merrow back, I couldn't trust that, and Calarata was only going to get more bold—varying between floors meant they couldn't predict what was coming next. Meant I could allow my creatures to grow stronger, to develop into the beasts I knew they could be and not be hamstrung by needing to stay on higher floors away from dense mana.

Veresai would get a floor for herself, one day. One designed perfectly for her. But as I hesitated in the end of the Scorchplains, my mana poised to dig, I couldn't feel a strain—my dungeon instincts were telling me I could go deeper. I had more floors in me before I pulled the thread too tight and had to stop before it snapped. And I didn't want to keep her up high, keep her from full potential.

No, her floor would come later. And would Akkyst's, and Seros', and any other of my Named.

But an empress serpent did not belong on my fourth floor. The eighth floor would house her, while I prepared for something deeper.

A thousand ideas spun through my core, each more intricate and darting than the last—but from sky and sea and smoke, there was one I hadn't created, not truly, and I knew what I wanted.

My eighth floor would be a jungle. Not the Jungle Labyrinth, nor the stone-tree room at its center, nor the Drowned Forest with its tangled canals. No, I wanted a humid, choking mess of towering trees and shuddering underbrush, with creatures plucked from the bounty on my doorstep and all the fineries that Gonçal would earn his life by delivering. I wanted something for Veresai to prowl through, something for Seros to remember what it felt like to hunt on land, something for air so thick with water it could drown those walking, something impossible to exist under a mountain except for within a dungeon's embrace.

I wanted a wilderness, and what I wanted, I got.

My mana sharpened. I began to dig.

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