Hoard

It seemed strange that Kaln’s first and strongest reaction was confusion.

Not that being towered over by an aggressive dragon was not viscerally alarming on a deep, animal level, but even that wasn’t the reaction that most preoccupied his mind. Maybe it was because he was growing accustomed to dragons, maybe because he was just accustomed to suppressing those instinctive reactions… In fact, it was probably both, plus the comparison between Vanimax and Atraximos didn’t favor Vanimax. His father had been able to project terrifying menace with complete self-control, making this display of temper look almost clownish by comparison.

But mostly, in that moment, Kaln found himself confused as to just what this dragon was trying to accomplish.

“I’m sorry, you what?” he said politely.

Vanimax spat a swift burst of fire over him, which of course did nothing save to char some of the surrounding bones. “Are you deaf, or merely stupid? Whichever is the most pitiable, I’m sure that is at issue!”

“Hey, now, that’s a pretty insensitive thing to say,” Kaln said severely, frowning. “I used to work regularly with a deaf scholar. She was among the kindest—”

The dragon thrust his head forward, close enough that Kaln could see right down his throat to the fiery glow therein, and roared. It should have been absolutely deafening; the wind alone was enough to flatten his hair back. Apparently anti-dragon powers also protected his eardrums from dragon-produced sounds.

His next realization was that he was making this worse. Kaln already knew, from his encounters with several ill-mannered individuals in his youth, that somebody already worked into a temper would only be antagonized more by a calm and measured response. The Lord Scribe had explained to him that it made their lashing out look ridiculous by comparison, and making them feel ridiculous would only make them angrier. The more so if there was an audience.

Which there now was: it had taken barely any time at all for every other dragon present to emerge from their lairs into the central hall to watch this. All of them, of course, in their full-sized reptilian forms.

“Vanimax,” Izayaroa snapped, stalking forward.

Tiavathyris cleared her throat loudly. “A challenge has been issued, Izayaroa. Intervention from any of us is not appropriate.”

“Yes, by all means, let’s see how this plays out,” Emeralaphine added, grinning.

Izayaroa shifted her head to glare at her, but rather than lashing out at Emeralaphine, redirected her focus. “Husband, please…”

“It’s all right,” Kaln assured her.

“Oh, is it?” Vanimax snarled, clawing at the floor and recapturing Kaln’s own attention. “We all saw what you did to Atraximos. I know very well you can blast me to dust with a thought. Do it, then, if you dare!”

“I am categorically not going to do that,” Kaln stated calmly. “I’m sure it would grieve your mother terribly, and her happiness is deeply important to me.”

“Aha.” Vanimax’s grin was now as self-satisfied as it was furious, which Kaln knew to be a very unstable combination of emotions. “Then it seems we shall learn what use a scribe of Rhivkabat is in proper battle!”

Oh. So that was his plan.

He lashed out with a front leg, his clawed hand longer than Kaln’s entire chest. Kaln could feel it coming, sense the intent; time itself seemed to slow, giving him ample time to formulate a response. He could easily dodge this, or deflect it, or retaliate. The inner glow of his power swelled, whispering seductively, urging him to use it.

Kaln didn’t need its urging. He had already decided what to do.

He stood there and took it.

Vanimax’s talons slapped against him and rebounded as harmlessly as if he had tried to rake a Timestone wall.

From somewhere behind Kaln came a feminine snort of amusement; he wasn’t sure whether it was Pheneraxa or Vadaralshi, but it wasn’t one of the elders.

“Ahh,” he said aloud, nodding. “You’re not just lashing out, this is a strategy. Your pardon, Vanimax, I underestimated you. However, you seem to have misunderstood how this ‘god of dragons’ thing works.”

“You are the god of nothing!” Vanimax bellowed, rearing up and flaring his wings. “Nor shall you grow to be!”

He lunged back down, clamping his jaws around Kaln and jerking his head to fling him across the room.

The only really bad part about it was that his breath at that proximity was not pleasant. Even that wasn’t so very terrible, though; it wasn’t a whole lot worse than the smell of this room in general.

Having failed to move Kaln an inch, Vanimax released him and lifted his head again, staring down in confused frustration. Bones flew as he lashed his tail once.

So, these anti-dragon powers even prevented a dragon from picking him up with hostile intent? It seemed they weren’t even pretending to respect basic physics anymore. This was starting to verge on the comical.

Well, this wasn’t going to help his relationship with Vanimax any, but with the entire rest of the family present and watching, it was an opportunity for Kaln to display the trait he apparently needed to most, and the one that came least naturally to him: dominance.

“I’ll tell you what, Vanimax. You know the weight of your dignity better than I, so would it be less humiliating if I pound you senseless, or stand here ignoring you until you tire yourself out? I am willing to accommodate you at least that far.”

The roar which answered him contained another ineffectual blast of fire, and an even greater rage than before. “Fight me like something resembling a man, you sniveling insect!”

“As you wish.”

It was surprisingly easy, despite him never having done it before; it was coded right into his instincts, now. He reached out with his mind, sensing and seizing the enormous wellspring of energy that was Vanimax’s being. Kaln could feel the opportunity, sense how he could push into it, swelling and dispersing it until Vanimax burst like a soap bubble, just as he’d done to Atraximos. He was very careful only to observe this possibility, directing no thought into carrying it out.

Instead, he grabbed the dragon’s essence in a far more physical sense. Just as he himself was impervious to a dragon’s strength, Kaln found that he could command a dragon’s very presence in three dimensional space without tampering with their inner being.

Faster than Vanimax could react, he was lifted straight upward until he slammed into the ceiling hard enough to drive the breath from him in a weak puff of smoke.

Kaln immediately released him, taking a judicious step back as the dazed dragon plummeted back to the floor. Bones clattered in every direction, but again the Timestone didn’t even quiver as Vanimax hit the ground hard enough to rattle his skull even further.

“Are we done, then?” he asked politely.

It took Vanimax’s eyes a second to focus back on him, but this was followed immediately by a snarl. He surged back to his feet, roaring. “You little—”

Rather than indulging any more of this, Kaln once again seized him with his mind—this time, by the tail.

Vanimax squawked in protest as he was whipped bodily around and hurled, slamming into one wall.

“Stop—”

Kaln yanked him across the room, smacking him into the other wall, and then the floor, and then the ceiling again. This time he fell at an angle, sprawling awkwardly on one wing with an undignified yelp.

“Yikes,” Vadaralshi commented, and then Kaln winced in sympathy, belatedly realizing he’d dropped Vanimax right on a collection of the indestructible Timekeeper gadgets poking up through the mess of bones.

“Are we done now?” he asked, injecting impatience into his tone.

Dragons were resilient creatures, it seemed, even proportional to their size and strength; that did not seem to have done much real damage. Kaln was pretty sure he’d be dealing with multiple broken bones and lacerations after similar treatment—or, well, a normal human would, he wasn’t so sure about himself anymore. Vanimax, though moving more stiffly now, managed to scrabble his way back upright.

He roared and lunged at Kaln again, and this time Kaln smashed him straight downward, pressing him into the floor.

It was as easy as holding a thought in the forefront of his mind. Vanimax was forced down by constant pressure, as if gravity’s hold on him alone had increased tenfold. And then more; he started attempting to struggle forward, and Kaln effortlessly cranked up the intensity until he could scarcely keep breathing, much less move.

“I am not going to kill you, Vanimax,” he stated. “I’m trying not to cause you any real injury, either—though if I do, I might be able to heal it. That’ll be an interesting thing to test. However, that isn’t the point right now. Yield.”

Vanimax found the strength to draw back his lips and growl.

“This is not a fair fight,” Kaln said. “Hells, this isn’t a fight at all. This is just me looking like a bully and you like a fool. Nobody’s winning anything, here. Do us all a favor and yield.”

The pinned dragon snapped his jaws, once, weakly. Even that feeble movement took all of his strength; Kaln could feel his condition clearly with his attention focused on him thus.

“In addition to misunderstanding my power, I suspect you’ve misunderstood my motivation. I am not soft-hearted or merciful; I am sparing you because my personal agenda requires you alive, Vanimax. It’s clear enough that you would consider it kinder for me to just kill you, so let me clarify that you aren’t getting that kindness. I would rather not subject you to the humiliation of slapping you around this room until you pass out, but it wouldn’t be the first regrettable thing I’ve had to do.”

Kaln clenched his mental fist, increasing the pressure by another decisive fraction. Vanimax tried to snarl, and it came out as a wheeze.

“Now yield!”

He really thought, for a moment, that he would have to intensify the pressure to the point of causing injury, or resume the beating. Vanimax held out just long enough to make it worryingly plausible. But he did, in the end, manage to inhale enough to force the words out through clenched jaws.

“I…yield.”

Kaln released him, and the dragon gasped, flopping over onto his side. He weakly stirred his wings, panting for breath now that he could freely expand his lungs again.

Bones crunched under enormous claws as another dragon stalked forward.

“Thank you, husband,” Izayaroa murmured, dipping her head to him as she passed. He nodded once, reaching out to pat one of her legs when it was briefly in reach.

Vanimax feebly raised his head at her approach. “Mother—”

“Idiot boy!” the Empress roared, and to Kaln’s bemusement, began pecking him. She repeatedly hammered the pointed tip of her nose down onto Vanimax’s head, pounding him into the floor. “What did you think would happen? Your father was a hundred times the dragon you are, and that man vaporized him! With his mind! Are you stupid?”

“In fairness to Vanimax, he just had the bad luck to be first,” Pheneraxa commented. “It was just a matter of time until Vadaralshi tried something equally dumb.”

Every dragon in the room with the exception of the beleaguered Vanimax turned and hissed aggressively at her. Pheneraxa immediately flattened herself to the floor in a posture of submission, neck outstretched and chin pressed to the ground.

Kaln, as the only one not towering over her, was probably the only one positioned to see her lips still curled in a smirk.

“Well, I suppose I’m not to end up as Vanimax’s consort after all,” Emeralaphine drawled, turning around to head back into her chamber. “What a relief, that was a close thing for a moment.”

Izayaroa paused in literally henpecking her son to snarl at her, but the white dragon was already fully about-faced and walking away.

Kaln heaved a sigh, then coughed. Gods above and beyond, the smell. He was going to have to do something about the state of this place. Maybe he could make Vanimax clean it as a punishment duty?

Later, he decided. Izayaroa had progressed to smacking Vanimax with her tail and loudly excoriating his character and intellect while he huddled on the floor with his wings drawn protectively over his head. It didn’t seem wise to get in the middle of that.

Tiavathyris, catching his eye, dipped her head deeply toward him in acknowledgment. Even in her larger form, Kaln could recognize her characteristic smile: small, enigmatic and aloof. Even as he held her gaze, though, it widened subtly. Not in amusement…her eyes were half-lidded as if in a state of relaxed happiness.

Gods and hells. And to think he’d expected Emeralaphine would be the difficult one to figure out.

“I’m going…out,” he stated, to no one in particular. “You all seem to have family business well in hand. I want to stretch my legs and think.”

“Thanks for the update, Pants,” Vadaralshi snipped, turning and sauntering back into her mother’s chamber.

Kaln chose to head back through the library to the ancient city out back. This necessarily took him past Pheneraxa, who had not moved from her position in the doorway, though she did lift her head to wink at him as he went by.

Yeah, getting out was the best thing by far. It wasn’t even noon on his first full day as the head of this family, and Kaln had managed to get some degree of personal engagement from each of the six. He was already exhausted with the lot of them. Some fresh air and exercise would be just the thing to brace himself for more of…this.

Not that he didn’t also have an ulterior motive.

He was mindful, of course, of Emeralaphine’s warnings, and did not take risks. The abandoned city was full of things that looked plenty hazardous to the unwary. Even without stepping foot inside any of the old buildings (because the gods alone knew what might be lurking in there), its architecture by itself provided ample opportunity for injury. The Timekeepers had liked terraces and elevated walkways; there were all kinds of things Kaln could have fallen off of, or into, were he to dash about recklessly. And that was just the architecture, before countless eons of time, weather, and nature had had their way with this place. Many paths were blocked off by rockslides, overgrowth ranging from slimy moss to colossal tree roots, or even torrents of water. Many of the drops that might have been to a Timestone floor at one point now descended into root-choked darkness, or raging cataracts.

Still, there was plenty of clear space to walk even aside from all that. It required picking his routes with great care, and frequently back-tracking considerably, but the layout of the city itself actually helped a great deal. Built as it was in tiers around the central lake, Kaln could see all of it from any point. Usually, he could also see a viable path to wherever he wanted to go.

He had to wonder what was down there in the center. To judge by the way water rushed in and splashed over buildings and roads rather than through intended channels, it had not been a lake when it was built.

Kaln picked his way along in no particular hurry, occasionally pausing to just soak in the incredible view, or reach back with his senses toward the lair. Even from this distance, he could discern the presence of the six dragons within, and even their approximate positions and conditions. Most of them were…he chose to interpret the varying impressions they gave as “more or less fine,” especially in contrast with that of Vanimax, who was stinging both physically and emotionally.

Doing this, he also detected Emeralaphine reaching out to him with a… A what? Something magical, probably some kind of scrying spell. Kaln knew very little about magic, but it was something cast by a dragon and so he could sense and interact with it actively.

As soon as grabbed hold of the spell, he felt her recognize what he was doing, and it dissipated.

Well, it was worth knowing she could do that. Knowing, and watching for.

It took him a good hour to wander most of the way around the rim of the valley. He avoided stairs wherever possible; there were a few places where he couldn’t progress around various obstructions without climbing or descending, but for the most part he remained roughly on a level with the lair’s entrance.

This was good exercise, particularly at the forgiving pace he set: steady, but variable enough not to be boring. After the amount of strenuous hiking he’d done over the last year, it wasn’t tiring at all. Kaln was pretty sure he had more stamina now than he had at this time yesterday, but at the gentle pace he’d chosen it was hard to tell. At some point in the near future he’d have to test that more rigorously, if only because Tiavathyris would make him if he didn’t.

Rather than going as far as he possibly could, he paused at what he judged a sufficient distance. Partly because he had found a really nice spot, some kind of plaza sticking out over the next tier below like a peninsula. A monument stood in its center, as inscrutable as everything else the Timekeepers had left, but still pleasing: it was a simple obelisk rising from a narrower, rounded base, all eight of its faces inset with colored Timeglass. In the late morning sun, they were pretty, but in the dark they would put off a glow that must be absolutely lovely. He’d have to make time to come back here and see that. At some point when he had a dragon’s company, or more developed powers—something that would make it less unwise to traverse all this in the dark.

Partly because he’d promised Tiavathyris, and partly just because it felt good, Kaln went through the quick routine of stretches and calisthenics mandated by the Lord Scribe. He didn’t remember it all being so easy. Was it just because he was in better shape after his active lifestyle of the last year, or was he already ascending beyond mortal limits?

In any case, with that done, he felt more relaxed and calmer. And ready to leverage the reason he’d chosen this spot: far enough from the dragons that nothing he did here would be immediately noticeable to them, but specifically not at the farthest point in the valley he could get from them. Going for the maximum distance would only make them wonder what he was up to, if any happened to notice.

Kaln paced forward to the very edge of the plaza, bracing his hands against the ancient Timestone balustrade and leaning his weight on it, gazing out across the city. The view was stunning from any direction, but this spot was particularly pleasant. It was in direct sunlight, now; given the height of the surrounding mountain walls, there must be a fairly narrow slice of time in the middle of the day when the city was fully illuminated. Even still, parts were dark enough that the Timeglass glowed from deep shadows—including some that were underwater. Right here and now, fully warmed by the sun and cooled by the spray of a nearby waterfall which cut off the path forward from this plaza, it was extremely pleasant.

He just soaked in the ambience for a few minutes, then cast his attention back toward the lair. Vadaralshi was off flying somewhere to the north, probably hunting or maybe just stretching her wings. The others were in their respective chambers; Emeralaphine was focusing on something, but not anything that connected her attention to Kaln or this location.

Finally, Kaln turned his back on the view, staring down at his own shadow. The angle of the sun made it look short and squat, almost puddled around his feet.

“Well?”

Though he wasn’t moving, the shadow stretched. Then squirmed, rippled, and suddenly shot forward. It lengthened like pulled clay, quivering as if with exertion, until it finally snapped free, rising up to float in the air before him.

“Well, look at you!” the Entity exclaimed, cheerful as always. “In all of history there’ve been a mere handful of heroes who have slain an ancient dragon. I think you’re the first one who’s ever done that and then bagged his wife!”