After the End: Serenity

Serenity shrugged. “If there’s no need, there’s no need. I’ve seen a lot of death over the years.” He paused and ostentatiously winked. “And anyway, I have some questions and I’d rather not have to raise her from the dead to ask them.”

Serenity paused and turned towards the white tiger for a moment. Was the White Tiger the one who wouldn’t accept peace in the Dreaming Tree’s prophecy? That certainly seemed to be the way it turned out, even though it wasn’t what Serenity had guessed. For that matter, the second prophecy’s implication that Serenity had to choose might well be fulfilled as well; he’d chosen Blaze over the White Tiger and it wasn’t even a question.

Serenity hated prophecy. Even when it seemed cut and dried it was far too easy to interpret different ways.

“I didn’t guess Incarnate,” Senkovar muttered with a shake of his head. “I guessed you were a minor deity, associated with magic, Worlds, or ley lines. I’m not certain how Death figures into that.”

Serenity shrugged. Senkovar’s guess was eerily accurate but he still didn’t really want to talk about it right this moment. “She doesn’t; that’s … something else. Blaze, can you make sure I didn’t accidentally kill the tiger?”

Serenity’s question seemed to snap Blaze out of a reverie. He moved forward and set his hand on the big cat’s flank without taking his eyes off Serenity. It made Serenity distinctly uncomfortable, because it reminded him all too much of someone moving carefully around a danger. He didn’t want Blaze to think of him as dangerous; he wasn’t dangerous to Blaze. Telling Blaze that wouldn’t help, at least not yet. Maybe they’d talk once Blaze had a chance to calm down.

To take his mind off terrifying his friend, Serenity checked the other people in the room.

The Black Tortoise Ikatha had retreated inside her shell. She was only now poking her head outside. He couldn’t be certain if she’d heard or not, but she didn’t seem to be paying much attention to him; all of her attention was on the injured White Tiger. Serenity took that to mean that she either hadn’t heard or didn’t know what being an Incarnate meant, something that clearly wasn’t true of Senkovar. Serenity wasn’t certain the White Tiger knew either; she certainly hadn’t let it deter her if she did know.

Come to think of it, did Blaze even know what it meant? That was something they’d need to talk about. Maybe he’d know something Serenity didn’t or maybe not, but either way Serenity needed to talk with him in private.

The cub was somehow still asleep on top of Brightleaf, while Brightleaf simply lay there unmoving. It was hard to tell if he’d heard anything or not; plants were always hard to read and Serenity had no idea how to tell.

“She’ll live, but you really did that fast, didn’t you,” Blaze commented. He sounded a bit more relaxed than before he checked on the tiger. Serenity suspected that he found the act of healing soothing. “I’ve healed some excess damage in her midsection; be careful of her left forepaw, she still has limited control of her claws.”

Serenity moved around to where the tiger could see him without moving. “Now, are you willing to talk? We have a lot to talk about. If we can come to an agreement, I’ll even have Blaze heal you.”

It took more than those few words, but not that much more, to get the White Tiger talking. Serenity wasn’t the person who figured out how to get her to talk. Instead, Blaze did. It was clear he had some experience with interrogation. With what Serenity knew of Blaze’s past, it might well be a childhood skill.

She was quickly convinced that she didn’t have many options, so it only took a little talking to and in front of her to get her to start giving her own commentary from her point of view. From there, she was willing to branch into what she was doing and what she actually knew.

Hiitska was one of the last White Tigers, at least as far as she knew. She knew of less than a hundred anywhere, and their population had been dropping for longer than she’d been alive, because the vast majority of cubs went insane before they reached adulthood and started attacking everything around them. They were especially murderous towards other cubs and would return to hunt them down if they were simply kicked out.

Hiitska hated that; she’d been raised by a mother who somehow found a World Core with a Black Tortoise infestation and hunted a shell for each of her cubs until there were no more. After that, she nested in the World Core and fed the cubs some of the Core itself; it seemed to work until a cataclysm struck the world. Hiitska escaped but her mother and most of her siblings did not.

Hiitska remembered the shell, if only vaguely, but between that and her mother’s stories she knew something about World Cores was important. That knowledge was enough to set her on a Path that eventually, after many lost cubs, led her to be able to follow her plan. She’d do the same thing as her mother, except she’d spread her cubs out to many planets so that one disaster wouldn’t kill them all.

It was difficult and painful to slash her way through reality to reach a new World, so she preferred to settle on a World until her older cubs started showing the first signs of problems, then spread them out in a long trip. She’d have to recover afterwards, but it wasn’t like she could manage it right after giving birth anyway; the cubs had to be old enough to leave on their own.

She was able to fill in many other small details, such as how she found Near Points with a Skill, but she didn’t really have all that much new information for them, but it made them all think.

Blaze, Serenity, and Senkovar decided to examine the Vrak’s leaves and the Black Tortoise shells. Blaze and Serenity both noticed the presence of miniscule bits of World Core dust concentrated in the leaves and shell, while Senkovar noticed a resonance between the leaves and Tzintkra. He suspected there would be resonance between the tortoise shell and Eitchen, but they weren’t close enough for him to feel it.

That discovery, along with Ikatha’s words, made Serenity decide it was time to visit his draconic mentor. It’d been a while, but it was time.

“Serenity?” Dragon hurriedly hid the illusion he used to watch the youngest Dragon Lord when he felt Serenity’s spirit enter his study. “You haven’t been here in several years; what made you decide to visit again? Do you need advice?”

Dragon looked down, then hastily banished the empty popcorn buckets. Serenity probably wouldn’t know what they meant, but at the minimum they were a clue that someone else often spent time in Dragon’s study.

Serenity emerged from behind one of the tall bookshelves into the sitting area. He seemed to be thinking hard. “No,” he answered slowly. “I think I’ve solved the problem you set me.”

Althyr blinked, somewhat confused by the disconnect between what he’d seen Serenity looking into and his student’s answer. He only remembered setting one problem for Serenity and he certainly hadn’t expected the man to tell him about it so long after he’d more or less solved it. “The messengers’ book on portals?”

Serenity looked up. He seemed startled by the question. “No, the quest.”

Serenity gestured and Althyr was confronted with a quest he’d assigned without any thought that it would be finished.

[Mentor Quest: Restore the Lost]

[Goal: Find out a way for dragons to have lower-Tier eggs and hatchlings to allow their minds and bodies to grow together and prevent them from becoming Lost]

[Optional Goal: Find a way to restore those who have been Lost from their spirit form, physical form, or both]

[Optional Goal: Learn about other species with this issue. Generalize the solution]

[Reward: Unknown]

[Failure Consequences: None]

[Message begins: I don’t really expect you to be able to do anything about the Lost any time soon, but you have the best chance I’ve seen in millenia. If you can’t, maybe a descendant of yours will be able to. Message ends.]

Althyr stared at the message for a moment, then looked quizzically at Serenity. He knew the White Tigers’ issue was similar to the dragons’ issue, of course; it wasn’t quite the same but he could see the similarity. What he didn’t see was why Serenity thought he had a solution.

Serenity started from the beginning and laid out everything he’d found out, starting with the World Eaters and the White Tiger cub. The improvement in the cub was hopeful but all it really told Althyr was that Serenity was close to a solution for White Tigers; the tortoise shell was probably enough if they weren’t too damaged; the Vrak leaves probably just sped things up. That did imply that directly eating the World Core wasn’t a solution; if it had been, the far smaller amount in the Vrak wouldn’t have helped the cub. It was like the cub needed it partially processed by something else.

There weren’t enough Black Tortoises or Vrak in existence to even make a dent in the dragons’ problem. They were rare and dragons were common. Althyr was prepared to work towards spreading them to more World Cores, but that would take time. It was a possible solution, but Dragon didn’t think that Serenity would be so eager to share the solution if that was what he had in mind.

As Serenity’s explanation wound down, he started speaking faster. He was definitely excited. “It goes back to something Ikatha said about dragons, something that makes a lot of sense: we need our Affinities. In many ways, we are our Affinities. So my question is: do young dragons who live on a planet whose World Core matches their Affinity survive better?”

Althyr sighed. “I’m not sure. It’s often hard to tell what the true Affinity of a planet is unless it’s extreme. We know that raising them in environments suited to their Affinity helps and there are certain draconic lineages that will only raise their young on certain Worlds that do seem to work for them, but even those lineages sometimes lose wyrmlings. It also won’t work for most dragons; after all, what World would be attuned to even something as common as lightning?”

If anything, Serenity seemed cheered by Dragon’s answer. “One World might. Earth’s Affinity is Arcane, magic itself! She said dragons spread to match their worlds, but she didn’t say how they survived before that. Which means there has to be a type of world that can support them, and if Dragons are their Affinities, the only Affinity that would work is magic itself. Even better, Earth is absolutely covered in World Core dust, dust that probably has been processed any number of times through the ecosystem. It’s in everything and everyone, so Earth food should serve the same purpose as Vrak leaves did for the White Tiger cub.”

Serenity stopped and seemed to wait for Althyr’s reaction.

Althyr just stared at Serenity for a long moment, thinking through what he said. Serenity had made a connection that Althyr hadn’t, a connection he probably should have. “Tranquility was Dragonhome.”