Hoard

“You know Kaln as a smooth talker and a people-pleaser,” the shadow declaimed while they all pushed their will against the force of its words. “Now, I know we’re none of us on intimate terms, but I’m willing to bet that some of you can’t help reacting with contempt to that, even as others have quickly learned to appreciate it. But you know what I think? I think the impression Kaln has made here has not prepared y’all to understand just what a badass you’re dealing with.”

“I don’t need you to talk me up,” Kaln grated. It was a struggle to get words out, to do anything at all—and not the kind of struggle against which he could test his muscles or magic, but an internal one. Like attempting to push on through fatigue. At a glance, he could tell the other dragons, for all their phenomenal power, were fighting the same battle.

Emeralaphine’s warning had definitely been on point. The three elder dragons at least were probably more powerful beings than the Entity, but that didn’t matter when contending with gods. No amount of power would help you against a creature which got to decide what the rules of reality were.

“Buddy, you’ve had ample chances to take the reins yourself,” the shadow retorted, its tone subtly condescending yet not unkind. “Now this is my show. Don’t worry, I won’t make you look bad. I came here resolved to tell the truth, and imperfect person though you may be, the truth reflects well on you, Kaln.”

Its wavering form, already barely visible in the darkened chamber, suddenly collapsed. Shadows swarmed across the huge walls, strategically obscuring the glowing Timeglass panels to cast crazy patterns across the flat surfaces—abstract and seemingly random at first, but when the Entity’s voice echoed again out of nothing, beginning to form shapes.

“I have followed this man, who had been a humble scribe and will be a god, as he achieved feats which would cement the reputation of any adventurer! I was by his side as he stepped across the boundary line of the planes themselves, crossing from the haunted ruins of ancient Nourvath into the unearthly home of those tormented shades—the Moonless Tower. Through its darkened gates, through its black halls echoing with the lamentations of the damned, down into its very vaults—and then back out, to the freedom of the mortal plane. Unscathed, unimpeded, and victorious.”

The shadows across the walls formed an eerie puppet theater while the Entity spoke. Separated by the vertical columns of the room and sections where the Timestone was open to reveal ancient machinery ticking and whirring away, across every segment of blank wall, scenes came to life. Silhouettes of a man—of Kaln—navigating the uncanny geometry of the Moonless Tower, its traps and the hostile undead thronging those corridors.

It gave him a deeply uneasy feeling to recognize every one of those scenes. Even viewed from outside himself as mere shadow puppets…he could match each one to a memory. Every ghost appeased or avoided, every broken stretch of corridor successfully traversed, each trap disarmed or evaded. The Entity wasn’t lying.

Kaln knew very well that the best deceivers lied as little as possible.

“You did that, Kaln?” Vadaralshi asked. No nickname, no mockery; she just sounded plainly impressed.

“And that was before we journeyed to Khvel Ravine!” the Entity crowed.

“Wait—that’s full of trolls,” Pheneraxa protested.

“Trolls!” agreed the shadow in a booming voice, as all around the walls the images shifted, silhouettes now showing Kaln navigating the treacherous bridges and creeping stealthily past enormous shapes which, vague though they were when depicted only in shadow, bristled with distinctive spiky hair, dangled protruding limbs from their nests, swelling and contracting ominously with heavy sleeping breath. “If I were embellishing this story, this is a great place to throw in something about troll-slaying, but I think by this point you all know our boy better than that. It’s plenty impressive enough by my way of thinking that he got past them, deep into their nests down in the old ruins at the ravine’s base, and emerged with treasure in hand.”

“What was so important that you’d risk that?” Vanimax demanded.

“Mere trinkets,” replied the Entity as the shadowplay around the walls altered again. “Oh, treasures to be sure—wealth beyond reckoning to anyone except dragons, not that Kaln is one to be motivated by such…pedestrian concerns. No, no, all of this was in pursuit of mere bargaining chips! Tokens, to be exchanged for the real target, in a feat which played more to his own strengths.”

The shadows all but roiled, reminding Kaln of the sinuous yet abrupt movement of the lesser devils he had encountered on the way to… That one, there it was. As the dragons craned their necks to watch, the shadows seemed to converge upon one panel of blank Timestone, showing a horned figure quite unlike their own smaller forms, brandishing a heavy scepter, then shifting and resolving into that figure sitting across from the smaller shape of a man, heads leaning together deep in conversation.

“From no less than the devils of the Ravening Host did we need the penultimate piece of this puzzle, and with no less than an archfiend did Ar-Kaln barter his hard-won treasures for it. Bartered, secured a favorable bargain, and departed in peace.”

“None of that was anything like you make it sound,” Kaln protested, finding it easier to speak. Was the Entity relaxing its grip, or had he only now gathered enough will to push through? “I don’t know why you want to promote me like this, any more than I understand why you’ve done any of it. But in all those adventures, I did nothing but follow meticulous instructions. Step by step, it was you who led me through it! I was just your puppet.”

“You see what I’m working with?” the Entity complained. “I have tried and tried to build him up a bit, but to this day all I hear is this. Ladies, help me out here!”

“Loath as I am to validate this thing,” said Tiavathyris, “it is correct, husband. These are incredible feats for any mortal, and all the moreso for a scribe with no combat training to speak of. It seems very strange indeed, to me, that you would devalue your accomplishments simply because you had help.”

“And help only in the form of direction?” Izayaroa shook her head. “Regardless of that, the courage that must have taken!”

“I appreciate modesty in a man,” Emeralaphine added, “but yours is very nearly pathological, husband. Also, not for nothing, the ability to correctly follow precise instructions is not so insignificant. No, I am not simply being glib—to remember and execute a complex plan while under the kinds of stress described reveals great strength of mind, and of will. Traits which mark the greatest of mages. Or kings, or warriors, for that matter.”

“I have heard of one individual who stood before a devil of the Ravening Host and walked away without having to strike it down,” Tiavathyris said gravely. “Five minutes ago, that number was zero.”

“Okay, I agree, our boy’s serious business,” said Vadaralshi, “but maybe we should be a bit more careful about going along with the spooky shadow revenge god?”

“Stubbornly refusing to do anything it seems to want is the same kind of trap,” Pheneraxa said quietly, “and one a god of manipulation would know very well. We’re already good and committed to supporting Kaln, after all. There’s no harm in saying so.”

“So the question is: why?” the Entity exclaimed.

Kaln found himself grudgingly in awe of its sheer stage presence; he’d never seen it play to an audience before. The creature delivered lines like some combination of bard and priest, effortlessly commanding the attention of the room, dragons, ghosts and all.

“By this point, you all know Kaln well enough to find it surprising—not that he could achieve such things, but that he would be interested. I’m sure it has begun to tickle at the back of your minds: this, this is the man who slew Atraximos the Dread? Sure, anyone who seized on the secret of apotheosis right under the old monster’s nose could have done the same, but why would this guy even want to? He’s so…nice. Humble, and funny; down-to-earth, caring, a real people person, an inveterate supporter. Someone whose first instinct when surrounded by awesomely powerful and incredibly beautiful women under his nominal control was to start figuring out how to make you all as happy as he was able. What drives the nicest dude on the block to brave these terrors, to accomplish these feats?”

“There is an old Nourid proverb,” Pheneraxa said unexpectedly. “’Repay not kindness with betrayal, for ‘tis when the gentlest soul is pushed too far that the very devils quail.’”

Everyone turned to stare at her, including the vague shape of the Entity.

She shrugged. “Just because we can’t get rid of this thing doesn’t mean we need accommodate it. I am stealing its dramatic timing.”

“No matter how hard or long I work at it,” Vadaralshi said mournfully, “I just cannot compete with your sheer pettiness, Pheneraxa.”

The blue dragon sneered, and for once Kaln found himself hoping they were going to properly start in on each other again, but this time it seemed the Entity’s hold over them remained; Pheneraxa had exhausted her store of rebellion, and the dark god continued uncontested.

“I see you’ve read a book or two in your time! You have it exactly. Which brings us to what I know you’ve all been really waiting for: just what made the gentlest soul you know snap.”

Darkness rushed across the walls, the silhouettes resolving into the phantom skyline of Rhivkabat, viewed from multiple angles. They tilted and shifted as if the viewers were rushing toward each at high speed, a disorienting spectacle seen from so many directions at once, but resolved into an interior space Kaln knew all too well, even when seen only as a flat shadow: the great entry hall of the Royal Archives.

Insight burst upon him, and now that it was too late, he understood the trap.

It was the dread that cued him in. Kaln knew what the Entity was about to begin narrating, and in that last anticipatory moment he found that what he feared wasn’t his new family learning these things, but having to sit through a recitation of it again. Having all that pain dragged up and himself dragged through it, after all he’d been through to distance himself from it. With that, like a row of falling dominoes, the pieces began to tumble into place.

Godlings were beings of transition, and per Emeralaphine’s teachings, it was Kaln’s experiences which would shape the divine being he was slowly becoming. Particularly intensely emotional experiences…such as he was about to be subjected to. In the presence of his dragon family, bound to him not only by his innate divine power over dragons, but the actual, personal bonds he’d begun to develop with them. They would see and share Kaln’s pain, the betrayal and grief, the rage and drive for vengeance. It would resonate further with him, attuned to dragons as he was. From his established aspect of dragon power, shaped through his remembered anguish and their vindictive natures, linked together by that power—a feedback loop focusing him on the revenge he had once so craved.

He’d been blind to it—or rather, deftly misdirected by a master manipulator. The Entity didn’t care about Haktria or the Lord Scribe or any of Kaln’s troubles in Rhivkabat. In fact, it was probably afraid to venture there and antagonize the Nine. For the Entity’s purposes it wouldn’t matter if the dragons never turned their attention to Rhivkabat to enact Kaln’s revenge. Indeed, there had never been any chance of it; that was Izayaroa’s territory, and if even Atraximos hadn’t dared trespass there, the rest of them wouldn’t. She would never lash out in anger, no matter how provoked, but would act meticulously within the law to excise the corruption growing in her court. No, none of that mattered.

It was all about Kaln, about divinity. About bathing him in remembered pain and fury, shaping his godhead toward what the Entity wanted. A match, apparently, for its own.

A new god of vengeance.

“This is where a bardic god would spin you some piffle about destiny,” the Entity proclaimed, “about our hero’s secret heritage or some such. I am pleased to tell you there will be no such nonsense today. Ar-Kaln was an orphan, left behind by perfectly common parents of no particular peculiarity save the relative youth in which their tragic and premature demise occurred. He was lucky enough to have been orphaned in Rhivaak, rather than the many places where that was a sentence of desperate poverty and an early grave. But in golden Rhivkabat, the state likes to give orphans a solid upbringing, a thorough education, and a swift route into civil service.”

By all the gods, was it going to start that far back? Of course it was, Kaln realized; it was making a presentation, not just relaying facts. Its whole plan was to deliver maximum emotional impact, and he didn’t doubt it had as much storytelling mastery as any bard.

What could he do? The weight of the Entity’s will hung heavy upon him again. He could not speak, couldn’t leave, could not do anything to interrupt this disaster. Couldn’t even struggle against a hand holding him in place, because it didn’t weigh on him like an outside force, but simply…the rules of the world. An invisible, intangible principle of this little patch of reality: the law that Kaln was not to interrupt the shadowy god, any more than he could flap his arms and take off.

That left…himself.

It was a thin chance and a desperate gambit, but it being the only one before him, Kaln seized upon it, doubling down immediately when he realized the Entity’s will did not block him from focusing within.

Kaln closed his eyes and concentrated.

Tuning out the creature reciting his most painful experiences, complete with visual aids in the form of silhouette plays spread across the walls around them, took a supreme effort of his own will. Fortunately Kaln could tune out distractions and focus. He was proud of that skill, as it did not come naturally but had been laboriously acquired and extensively practiced. None other than the Lord Scribe had begun to drill him in his early teens, having noticed Kaln’s tendency to lose track of what he was doing and chitchat with anyone who spoke in his vicinity, or wandered across his field of view. He drew upon all of those teachings now, blotting out the Entity, the dragons, the ghosts, the story, all of it. Turning his attention fully within himself.

Upon the divine glow always waiting there.

Now, with the Entity’s own power laying heavy over them all, Kaln could appreciate it better. It was a candle against the sun, the nascent power of a fresh godling compared against that of a full-grown deity. Though the comparison didn’t favor him, he could see the similarities. Different colors of ink, but nonetheless similar substances.

Flexing his divine strength against the Entity’s would be hopeless, he could see that at the merest glance. Fine; contests of brute force weren’t his strong suit, anyway. He studied the power of divinity flowing around them. Focusing thus, he found he could sense the way the Entity exerted its will, contrast it with magic. Magic, which he knew from his affinity with the dragons regardless of his inability to use it himself, was a kind of energy, an animating force that crackled with potential, a glow illuminating all those aspects of creation which it touched. Divinity was…something else. Studying the way reality and magic seemed to curve and flow around the Entity’s power, he felt a stir of recognition. Something in his memory was…

Gravity! Kaln was no scholar, but like most scribes was an avid reader of any eclectic material which happened to catch his interest, and unlike many scribes was a people person who loved to entice his acquaintances to gush about their own passions, and listen intently to them. He’d stumbled across the theory in some scroll, asked a couple of scholars about it over drinks, and spent the rest of that evening listening with amusement and fascination as these increasingly tipsy natural philosophers ranted about the fundamental mysteries of reality. Most of it had gone over his head, but he distinctly recalled their insistence that gravity was not a force, but an effect. That mass, all mass, created a kind of indentation in the fabric of reality, which caused other mass to flow toward anything larger.

Divinity was like that: not exerting power, but reshaping existence itself, causing power to flow through the channels it prescribed. He was a tiny moon orbiting the Entity’s much greater existence—which itself was held in a course of balance dictated by other, larger divinities. The four, the Nine, even maybe Hii-Amat in her nearby territory. Kaln couldn’t sense any of them directly right now, but as he tightened his concentration he found he could perceive the impact they made simply by existing.

Wow, Emeralaphine was once again right: the Entity was nothing compared to these ancient gods. Just as he was nothing compared to it.

“Oh, that bitch!” Vadaralshi exclaimed in outrage, rocking his concentration.

Against his will, Kaln found himself rising up out of his deep well of focus, mentally rehashing everything that had happened while he’d been in that near-meditative state. Right… The Entity had explained Haktria to them, from his very first encounter with her to the end, when her father had learned of their affair and taken exception, and she had cast him off like a broken plaything without hesitation.

He knew what was next. Haktria’s father, unsatisfied with the end of their relationship, determined to remove Kaln and all the potential scandals he might cause as a factor. With a powerful man leveraging assets against him, he’d turned to the Lord Scribe for help…

And found he had been very much mistaken about his mentor’s priorities.

Kaln struggled to re-center himself. He didn’t know whether he could truly achieve anything by examining his and the Entity’s divine essence. Maybe there was something there he could exploit, but even if not, he had to shut himself off from this recitation. The only victory he could attain here was by refusing to let it affect him emotionally.

It was harder this time. Before he’d dreaded having to listen to this story; now, he’d heard the greater half of it already, and though he had succeeded in denying the Entity his full attention, the words had still reached his ears. They were now worming into him, threatening his fragile concentration.

The memories they brought up. The agony. The betrayal.

The rage.

Kaln clung to serenity, to focus. Shut out disturbances, ignore voices, do the work. Just as the Lord Scribe had taught him. The same Lord Scribe who had then…

A new distraction intervened.

Even with his eyes closed, Kaln could feel Emeralaphine’s focus center upon him as if it were his own. He sensed her look at and through him, with her eyes and with more senses than he could imagine existed, through the lens of her countless years of mastery. He felt her take in his entire being, recognize in an instant what he was trying to do.

And then she offered it to him. In silence—in fact, he could also perceive the intricate layer of magic and concentration and borrowed divinity of her own, leveraged from the countless gods whose power she had learned to use, shielding what she was doing from the Entity’s own perception. It swirled around him, open and willing.

Kaln seized it as easily as he had the wards in Atraximos’s chamber. Moreso, this time, as he was not passively taking power from a dragon, but entering active and willful cooperation.

Emeralaphine’s presence within his mind was cooling, calming, both a foundation upon which he could stand and a bastion protecting him from outer interference. Her arts of the mind flowed through him, and suddenly he was concentrating not with the skill of an out-of-practice young scribe, but the mastery of a sorceress older than modern civilization.

Suddenly, he was analyzing divinity and magic through the perspective of the ultimate master of this craft.

Kaln relaxed into her, allowed her to lead. She nudged his consciousness, guiding him in swift detail along the intricacies of the power surrounding them. The shapes the Entity was carving in reality. At first Kaln tried to concentrate upon the effects holding them all still and silent in its narrative grasp, but Emeralaphine pushed against his mind, guiding his concentration away from that.

Instead, she directed him to the fissures and indentations in reality connecting him to the Entity. She led his attention meticulous across subtleties of form that he hadn’t even been able to perceive unassisted. Though she did not project words into his mind—Kaln could sense just from the magic she was using that actual telepathy would risk the concealment she had laid and give away what they were doing to the Entity—she skillfully guided his attention into minute details, making sure he absorbed the purpose of each before moving on.

Around them, the Entity declaimed and pantomimed, dragging the surrounding dragons through the emotional ordeal it desired to inflict upon Kaln. Silently guided by his consort’s skill, he let it wash over his consciousness, impervious.

He could see it, now, the shape of what the Entity was doing. Not what it was doing in this moment, but overall—the strings it was trying to tie to Kaln. Or rather, the lack of them.

It was not control the god desired, but only…influence. From such simple hints he could still not intuit why it was doing all this—everything Emeralaphine had said about gods indicated that creating more gods was out of character for them. He could sense her curiosity and confusion at this, too. But together, they mapped the flows of the Entity’s agenda, at least with regard to Kaln, and found…

Very little. It wanted him to become a creature like itself, a divine force of vengeance.

And then, seemingly, it only wished to unleash him upon the world. Not to control him.

Why? Well, that was a question for another time. What mattered here and now was that he would not be shaped by this creature. He would be the master of his own destiny.

Kaln opened his eyes, and looked right past the shadow of the god before him, meeting Emeralaphine’s blue eyes. A smug smile curled across her muzzle, and she nodded to him once. Within himself, he felt a gentle push from her. It did not have words, but the meaning was so focused he could not help forming them himself.

Go forth, husband, and conquer.

“And there he sat,” the Entity said sonorously. All around them, the shadows on the walls showed darkness, each panel centered upon a huddled figure as the surrounding gloom closed in upon him, descending until there was only blackness. “Alone and bereft of all aid, in that cell in the deepest of Rhivkabat’s prisons—a hole reserved for its most dangerous criminals, not for some harmless scribe who had done no wrong. Worse than the imprisonment itself was the nature of it—outside the law, obscured from all record, the documents doctored and wardens lied to. He was only to be there just long enough for the very few who knew of his presence to lose interest. And then…it would be a quiet knife in the back, not any lawful punishment of the state. Kaln’s enemies did not even want revenge, only…silence. Vengeance is the province of those who have been wronged.”

Slowly, the darkness receded. First revealing the pale coppery color of Timestone, then illumination as the unnatural shadows relinquished their hold on the Timeglass panels.

“We know,” the Entity proclaimed in a thunderously ringing tone, “who has been wronged here.”

Kaln could feel it in them all: exactly what the Entity had tried to create in him. The emotions roiled in all the dragons save Emeralaphine, who had shared her focus with him upon their work. Each of them felt different shades of it, but there were universals. Outrage, revulsion, grief born of their bonds with him. Even Vanimax, to his surprise, was incensed at the tale of Kaln’s suffering. Izayaroa’s anger had layers and depths he could scarcely begin to fathom.

But he…had escaped it. Kaln stood calm and unaffected. This had not been a trauma to shape his being and resonate through his connection with the dragons.

He’d won.

The Entity loomed over them all as a pillar of shadow, confident in its victory.

Kaln shrugged, smiled, and spoke.