“Thanks.” I sagged in her teeth, and coughed as the smoke haze pressed down from the roof of the cavern, then groaned as a glowing blue ring jumped up in my HUD. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
[You are suffering from Mana Poisoning! -1 HP per second!]
“I know it’s kind of obvious, but we really need to get out of here.” Karalti dropped me and ducked her head. She held her tail low, her wings shivering by her sides. “I’m sure I breathed in some of those spores... I don’t know if I’m sick...”
“Don’t worry. If you caught a dose of mushrooms, I can cure you thanks to my boy Matir. We’ll sort you out once we’re home.” I stumbled around the cooling waves of magma, coughing as the Queen’s corpse continued to belch clouds of mana-laced smoke into the cave. “Can you loot the bodies?”
“Uhh... okay?” Karalti seemed slightly taken aback. She was immune to mana poisoning and could hold her breath a lot longer than I could, though, so she turned to do just that. “Do I have to? I just want to get out of here.”
“I’m working on it, but if we don’t get some decent loot from this dungeon, I’m going kick a baby dolphin into the sun.” I chugged a potion and stored the bottle just before I reached the door. At a loss for how to remove the Star of Endless Night from the Spear of Nine Spheres, I mashed the flat of the blade against the socket. To my great relief, the hole drew the weapon against it like a magnet and locked the stone into place.
A blue-black web of energy shot across the surface of the metal. Gears groaned and clunked from inside the walls as the doors began to slowly winch themselves apart. The halves made it about a foot to either side before the mana lines sputtered, and the whole thing lurched to a lop-sided halt with an ear-splitting squeal.
“Ow.” Karalti paced back to me, her tail and wings drooping. “Great. Just as well I can polymorph.”
“Right?” I glanced back at her. “No loot, huh?”
“I got some gross mushrooms?” She winced. “You know, if you ever feel like killing me.”
Sighing, I reached up to squeeze a handful of my hair. It had been a while since I’d had a bath, and the braided mohawk that ran from the top of my skull to the nape of my neck was a frizzled mess. “Come on, Tidbit. Let’s keep on going. We have to find grandma’s house before this fucking place kills us both.”
***
Karalti had to polymorph down to her human form to fit through the small crack in the door. We crept through into the dark, following a dry, hot corridor that wound for half a mile into the mountains before opening up into an airy obsidian hall lined with six dragon-sized biers, where the massive skeletons of Lahati’s Queensguard lay in state. The dragons were surrounded by heaps of treasure, curled as if in sleep. The polished stone around us reflected their images—and ours—up and down to infinity.
“Wow...” Karalti craned her head, looking around. “I think we’re nearly there.”
“I’d say so. And I’m pretty sure I know what’s through that gateway.” I broke into a jog, and my dragon followed at an easy run.
“You know...” Karalti drew up beside me, matching my pace. “Other than the dragons we fought at the Prezyemi Line, I’ve never seen another living dragon before. And they were so warped with Void energy that they hardly count.”
“Now you mention it, yeah.” I thought back, keeping an eye on my stamina bar. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just sad.” Karalti glanced at the biers as we passed by. “After this... after I gain the Path of Royalty... will we go back to Ilia? To save the others?”
“If we can, Tidbit.” I nodded, brows furrowing. “Believe me. That’s something that’s been on my mind ever since I left the Eyrie.”
I could still remember the first time I laid eyes on the Knight-Commander of the Order, Skyr Arnaud, and his white dragon, Talenth. The rider-dragon pair and a couple other Knights of St. Grigori had rescued me and the Lysian sorceress Rutha from the wreck of a slave ship on its way to Zaunt, the homeland of the Mercurions. Talenth had been breathtaking. Regal. From the moment I saw him, my fate was sealed. I would become a dragon rider, and I ran off to dragon school to do just that.
It took a few days before I sensed something was rotten in the Eyrie. Something was wrong with the Knight-Commander, and also the dragons themselves. My mentor, Skyr Tymos, tried to warn me. But he—like everyone else there other than Arnaud—was physically unable to reveal the dark secret at the heart of the Order. It was Karalti’s mother, straining against the restrictions of the powerful magical geas that bound her and everyone else to silence, who led me to the truth. The dragons in the Eyrie were slaves, blood-bound to the will of the Knight-Commander. And because the dragons were bound to the geas, their riders were, too.
It was only after months of living with a dragon, studying her species, and talking to people like Rutha and Rin that I understood how unnatural and warped the Eyrie really was. The Solonkratsu were a civilized race, with their own social order, mating rituals, family bonds, religion, even architecture. The Order suppressed it all. If Karalti had hatched in the Eyrie, the Knights would have turned her into a flightless broodmare, just like her mother.
That thought had haunted me ever since Karalti and I had Bonded. To save her, I’d had to leave her mother behind, chained deep underground. And the most fucked up thing about it? According to Rin, her suffering—and the geas itself—were non-canonical. The ethical shitstorm in the Eyrie only existed thanks to Archemi’s Number One Control Freak: Michael Pratt, the digital ghost otherwise known as Ororgael. The guy who I was pretty sure now wore Baldr Hyland’s avatar like a skin-suit.
“Soo... What do you think the Heart of Memory recorded?” Karalti asked. “About, you know...?”
I startled back to the present. “Huh? Oh, Baldr. Honestly, I have no idea. We’ll find out once we’re back in Kalla Sahasi.”
“Did he really beat you?”
“I’m pretty sure he beat my ass like a red-headed stepchild. Given he cheated to Level 9000 somehow, I’m not going to give myself too much shit for losing a duel.”
Neither of us even spared a glance at the treasure heaped around the bodies of the dead. We passed them by, heading up the small semi-circle of stairs. There, a pair of huge black doors swung in ahead of us on silent hinges, opening into a familiar chamber.
Chapter 8
All the lava flows in this mountain range emptied into the antechamber of Lahati’s Tomb. A black glass bridge arched over the lake of fire that lay directly ahead of us. As we entered, I looked to my left and saw the small door I’d used to enter this place the first time: a door that led to a small portal room. That portal would warp us back to the main draconic graveyard that lay under Krivan Pass, a vista not that far from Myszno’s capital city, Karhad.
My head jerked back as Karalti gasped, pointing at the billowing, darkly luminous figure who waited for us in the middle of the bridge. “Look!”
Lahati the Chrysanthemum Queen appeared just as she had the last time I’d been here. Her slender, dignified humanoid form towered over the pair of us. She was nearly seven feet tall, made larger by the rippling shadows of her floor-length hair and long gown. They blew out from her like a candle flame, trailing smoky coils of darkness into the air. Her eyes were blazing white, bright pin-points burning through the curtain of shadow. They were kind... and sad.
“My sweet daughter.” Lahati’s voice was louder here, clearer. It brushed over our skin with a faint chill that defied the roaring heat that billowed up from beneath our feet. “I know you both suffered to come here. I beg you to forgive my weakness. The passage to my tomb was made to weed out Aesari and human plunderers, and challenge those Solonkratsu who seek me or Matir. But it was not meant to be so severe.”
“You saw all that?” I asked. “Then you had to have known about the Dragonrot. Why didn’t you warn us?”
“See it? Hector, I am dead. I see nothing but the slithering progress of time, and hear nothing unless someone calls to me over the
chorus produced by the Caul of Souls.”
“It has a sound?” Karalti asked.
Lahati turned her head to her, the shadows of her face rippling like flames. “Yes. Millions of souls calling, singing, laughing. Since I last saw you, Herald, the chorus has become so much louder.”
I took a step forward. “If you pass on, does that mean that you’ll... that you’ll be gone? Like, will the Caul destroy you?”
Lahati cocked her head, as if puzzled. “Destroyed? No, Herald, of course not. The Caul does not destroy the souls of the dead.”
“Violetta and the vampire who tried to turn me... they told me that the Caul eats people’s souls after death.”
“Ahh...” The shade made a derisive sound. “That is nothing but Trauvin lies. Come, Paragons. Walk with me, and I will tell you what I know.”
Karalti pressed forward ahead of me, thrumming with nerves. I followed, and Lahati turned and swept toward the great five-petaled portal at the end of the antechamber.
“When the Nine were contemplating solutions to the Drachan, Devara, the Mother of all life in Archemi, asked a question of the world,” Lahati said, trailing darkness like a train as she led the way to her tomb. “She asked: ‘Would you be willing, in death, to stand guard against the Drachan and the Rostori and the other creatures of the Void for a term equal to the years you lived, before you move on to rejoin the planet and be reborn?’ And the world, devastated by the Drachan, said yes. The Caul is merely a station after death, Herald. Souls join it for a time, lend their strength to the magic, and once they have served their span, they move on. Unharmed. The Trauvin are the only eaters of souls in this world. Not even Rusolka the Mad would do such a thing.”
“Good to know.” A weight I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying slid from my shoulders. “I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. Bringing back the Warsingers, opening the Dragon Gates. Sometimes, I feel really sure about it. But other times, I wonder. Like, what if we’re actually just playing into Ororgael’s hands? Or the Drachan’s?”
“Those are valid questions,” the ancient queen replied. “When the Caul was created, we knew it was little more than a stop-gap measure against chaos. We hoped that if the Caul was ever unmade, it would happen only when the world was better prepared to face them. You, as the Paragon of the Sixth Age, must decide if the world is ready.”
“I don’t know if it is, grandmother,” Karalti said. “There’s so much we don’t know, and so much we lost. There are hardly any dragons left. Me and Hector have been all over the place, rediscovering ancient technology. Like the Warsingers, right? The world has nothing like the Warsingers any more.”
“No, but there is much that has been gained since my time. Perhaps the most significant difference is that we did not have great nation-states when the Drachan invaded. The Solonkratsu were numerous, but we were arrogant and indolent. The Mao’sak’ruwad, the empire of the Cat People, was a decadent, disorganized mess. It was split between bickering Priest-Queens who refused to cooperate with one another. When the Drachan first touched down on Archemi, the Aesari were tribal savages. They had powerful magics, but they were a species who lived in the present, with no perspective on the past or the future. The Drachan’s slaves were the first to rebel, and those slaves—humankind—have spread across the continent and the world since then. It is not just force of arms that will defeat the Drachan. It is the will, ingenuity, and determination of the world to survive that will shape the result of the battle.”
Karalti glanced at me. “I guess. But there’s a lot of evil humans, too.”
“Of course. And the presence of these evil people is to your advantage.” The pair of doors that led into Lahati’s burial chamber parted in front of her. “There is something you must understand about the nature of evil, my daughter. Evil is very dull. Very predictable. The only forms of creativity evil can manifest are cunning and deception. This is because all evil beings, whether they be human or Drachan, have exactly the same boring, repetitious desires. Consumption, power, wealth, attention, love, admiration, sex, safety... primitive, animal needs they pursue with single-minded boorishness at the expense of other living things. Why do you think they pursue these things?”
“Because they’re frightened?” Karalti said, uncertainly.
Lahati nodded. “Indeed. Specifically, they are frightened of lack. Of not having ‘enough’. There is never enough power, enough security, enough pleasure. They must have more and more of it. Search for those people who are aggressively hungry for power and never satisfied with what they have, and you will root out the evil in your midst.”
“The Drachan don’t seem scared of much,” I said. “None of the Void enemies we’ve fought even seem capable of fear.”
“On the contrary. They are the embodiment of fear,” Lahati replied softly. “The fear of oblivion. Of meaninglessness. Of pointlessness. In their terror of the vast, unknown universe, they attack it. They revile life, because it terrifies them to think that there is something with meaning, when they themselves have none.”
She led us through a narrow obsidian tunnel, barely big enough for Karalti and I to walk alongside each other. It was pitch dark, like walking into a wall of black velvet. But as we emerged, a soft ambient glow filled the room, reflected off an enormous lake of clear crystal as smooth as still water. Karalti pattered out on bare feet, her mouth hanging open, as Lahati’s shade drifted to the center of the room and submerged... through the crystal, down into the dark, still form that lay curled beneath it like a fly in amber.
Karalti let out a cry and sank down to her hands and knees, gazing down at the body of her ancestress. Lahati the Chrysanthemum Queen, ruler of the ancient dragon city of Hava Sahasi, was still beautiful in death. Unlike Karalti, most of her scales were a true jet black, save for a large starburst patch of white that bloomed from between her shoulders and out along her wings. Her long sweeping horns and elegant foreclaws were ringed with fine jewelry. Her elegant muzzle was sunken, but her eyes were closed, her expression peaceful.
I unequipped my shoes out of instinctive respect before joining Karalti. I rested a steadying hand on her shoulder.
“Blood of my blood. Child of my daughter’s daughter.” Lahati’s voice now came from all directions, curling from the air of the room. “You are everything I could have dreamed of, a flower who bloomed from a queen the Deceivers have striven to control and destroy. And because of this, you bear a great burden. There are few of us left, Karalti. So many dragons died in the Drachan War, and the ones who lived were enslaved by the Aesari and killed for the mana in their blood. That we survived at all is a miracle that we owe to the other races of Archemi, the humans, and Prrupt’meew who rose against the Aesari and toppled them. There are many more Solonkratsu alive on Daun, where the only other Queen of my bloodline lives, but she is too far away to hear my voice. The other Queens I know are enslaved, like your mother, or rule savage tribes in the wild, remote places of the world. As far as I know, you are the only free Solonkratsu Queen in all of Artana.”
Karalti bowed her head. “Yes, grandmother.”
“If we are to survive, you must free your kin from their chains,” Lahati continued. “And to do that, you must be able to command them as their Queen. My last act in this world will be to give you the bloodgift your mother could not. I did not have my body preserved like this out of vanity. I wanted it reserved in case it was needed by future generations of our kind. Take your true form, daughter. And you, Herald: stand back, or take your place between her wings.”
Karalti looked up to the ceiling and closed her eyes, concentrating. Her pale skin split with veins of opalescent light, which spread out to cover her as she smoothly shifted back into her natural draconic shape. Archemi’s dragons stood on their back feet, their tails stiffened for balance, their hand-like foreclaws held off the ground. When she was back to her full size, she crouched down and extended her wing to me. I climbed up half way, then used her wing claw to boost myself into a J
ump, landing between her shoulders like a cricket.
Lahati’s body didn’t move, but as we watched, she began to bleed black smoke into the crystal that surrounded her. It billowed through the glass like ink, pouring from between her scales. More and more of it came, until the clear crystal turned dark... and then liquified. It pushed the limp body to the surface, exposing the arch of Lahati’s ribcage and the underside of one wing.
“The bloodgift is normally given by a mother to her queen daughter by mouth,” Lahati said, her voice coiling around my ears like a cool breeze. “The wyrmling bites her mother’s tongue, and the blood carries the Words of Power into her body. My tongue no longer has any blood in it, Karalti. Only the core of me still has any to give. You will need to pierce the great vein beneath my wing with your fangs and draw blood from there.”
As a normal human-person, I probably would’ve hesitated at the idea of drinking some five-thousand-year-old blood out of my dead grandma, but Karalti was a predator and a scavenger with instincts that were decidedly non-human. She showed no sign of revulsion as she nuzzled under Lahati’s stiff wing with the point of her snout. I felt her draw a deep breath before she snapped forward, bearing the immense crushing pressure of her jaws on the other dragon’s skin. The ancient queen’s scales popped under her teeth, bending, and then snapping.
“This is not the only gift I give you, my daughter,” the spectral voice breathed. “To you and your Bonded, the chosen of my true mate, I bequeath all the treasures of my tomb and the Solonkratsu who are your ancestors. You may take the mana that lies in the caves all around my resting place. You may take the gold and aurum and other treasures from this place, and from the Hall of Heroes that lies under Kri’vauun, a great necropolis to the south of here. The warriors who fell in these ancient wars have long since served their time in the Caul of Souls and moved on. They have no more need of their grave goods. The remaining wealth of Hava Sahasi is yours, and I wish for you both to use it and enrich the land once more.”
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