The Ruler of Ruin

I slept for thirty hours. The countdown in my vision read 39 hours when I woke up. Apparently the transformation, mixed with the fatigue from dealing with the Scavs, Arx Maxima rewriting the fundamental flow of reality, and all that other stuff had taken a toll on me I underestimated. Within minutes of my awakening, Liora emerged from a tree with a platter of nuts, berries, and half of a roasted bird. The Dryad seemed to have a distaste regarding the cooked flesh, but she didn’t make a big stink about it, either. I assumed this was a dryad sentiment, rather than all fey.

I fell back asleep shortly after stuffing myself. What is it they say about fey and food? Never accept a meal from the fey. Had Liora poisoned me? Fortress Restoration should, theoretically, take care of any poisons, drugs, or other harmful effects. Its passive restoration might take time, but it should take care of it all.

I found myself in the depths of darkness in a dream. A familiar black raven flapped out of the darkness and landed on my shoulder. Try as the bird might to scratch my new scales, all it did was put a few tiny holes in the thin black shirt.

“We meet in the strangest places. Nice new look you have there,” Corvusol said in greeting to me without properly welcoming me, and I couldn’t tell if the bird was being sincere or sarcastic, so thin of a line of propriety did the omen of calamity adhere too.

“Thanks, I always dreamed of being a dragon when I grew up,” I muttered deadpan. “What brings you to my dreams today, Corvusol?”

“As the Black Sun of Calamity, isn’t it my duty, nay, privilege, to keep a close eye upon the harbinger of disaster? You may not bear my concepts, little one, but you drag my flag behind you everywhere you go. I quite liked the way you flamed the hopes of those Xeno’Tarii, then crushed them brutally and exterminated every last one, even down to their pets,” Corvusol cawed a laugh that echoed through the darkness around us.

“The who?” I asked in earnest confusion.

“Oh, the beauty! The transcendent comedy. You murdered an entire hunting party of one of the most notorious species across the Gossamyr, famed for their willingness to hunt anything and go to any lengths to acquire the technology of the Ancients, and you didn’t even know who they were? Fantastic, truly a masterpiece of misfortune.” The crow jumped between my shoulders while it laughed.

“It doesn’t really matter who they were. They were in our way and wouldn’t get out of it, so they had to die.” I answered before I thought about it very much, and cringed inwardly at how defensive I sounded about it. Killing humanoid, thinking, talking beings capable of logic felt like something I should be ashamed of. The Scavs had been so alien and hostile that I hadn’t dwelt on my feelings about killing them. I’d avoided thinking about it entirely, it was just something to be done, and I took my lead from Chrys. Given the on-going tensions between Scavs and Gneisslings, maybe I should have thought about it a little more?

“I see why Arx Maxima chose chaos, now,” Corvusol hopped atop one of my horns, and tilted its head in a way that shouldn’t be possible, the beady black eyes of the crow looking into my own eyes.

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Arx Maxima is the little girl who could. She could rewrite reality. She could withstand anything. Until the incident, anyway. Vulnerable for the first time in thousands of years, and the parasites pounced. Mithras, Amon, and all their little friends fractured her and sealed her away, then went off to make their own worlds and kingdoms, free from the tyrannical legacy of the Enclave.”

Corvusol enjoyed toying with my lack of knowledge, and rather than explain anything, he constantly moved on before I could ask questions, those beady black eyes of his daring me to interrupt him. Pleading with me to interrupt him. The threat, the dare, the promise, to stop talking if I so much as dared to interrupt a single word was writ large in his eyes and demeanor.

How did I know that? I just did, the knowledge lurked in the back of my head. Danger sense, maybe? Or a sensation from distant Arx Maxima? Or maybe Corvusol projected his emotions and desires onto me with such strength I couldn’t ignore it?

“Your travel to the Plains of Valor will take you past the resting place of a large fragment of Arx Maxima. Retrieve it and restore the abilities of the Harmonizer to her repertoire, for within that fragment lies the power of Melchior, the mediator of the Stellarae Enclave,” Corvusol didn’t laugh or caw at the end of that, and instead stared at me. “Well?”

“What’s in this for you?” I asked immediately.

“The fragment is bound in the flesh of a follower of Amon who resides in the Plains of Valor. The cur stole something from me, years ago, and I would revisit his theft with brutal death at the hands of you, my dear little half-brother. Make it a painful end.” There was the laughter I expected from Corvusol.

“What do you mean, half-brother?” I demanded. Corvusol predated my parents by a very long time.

“Arx Maxima is my mother, of course. As you have been reborn under her matronly gaze, how can I not view you as a disgusting, dirt eating, poo smearing, repugnant little half-sibling?”

“Ow fuck,” I hissed. I had bit my tongue in anger, and my coppery smelling blood sprayed out with my spit words.

“Did little baby bro get a boo-boo?” Corvusol asked with mock sympathy, in the tone parents used with very small children. This asshole knew just how to push my buttons, and I casually swiped a hand at him.

He dodged it easily.

“You want to be my brother, crow? Then help me free Etienne from Mithras!” I shouted that with a little more exasperation than I wanted to let out.

“What do you think we’re doing, right now, small one? I have laid a trail of breadcrumbs for you to find success, now follow them. Be wary, little dragon, for not all that liberates is liberty, nor is all that binds bondage.” Corvusol cackled with that annoying, insulting, insufferable laugh that made me want to stab him. Then he hopped off my head and started to fly away.

“Stop!” I commanded, seizing all vectors of his movement in a way I never had before. My energy depleted rapidly. First by fifty, then by a hundred, then by five hundred, in mere seconds I was down to 800/1,500 energy.

But Corvusol couldn’t escape me.

Laughter, dark and ominous, thundered through the darkness around us. Then I ran out of energy, and Corvusol vanished.

But something new lay inside of me. A new ability had formed around the administrator concept, which was bound to my essence. Alongside Sense Vector, Modify Vector, a new point had manifest on the pentagon. Lock Vector. A skill so powerful it even worked on Corvusol, until I ran out of energy, at least.

When I first realized the exceptionally low energy cost of Create Wall I had thought my energy reserves were huge in contrast. Yet Modify Vector and Lock Vector sometimes consume massive quantities of energy. I could Modify Vector a rock into a wall for almost nothing, but larger tasks like launching one of my walls drained huge portions of my available power. I would need to play with Lock Vector and discern if it was variable like Modify Vector or if it would always deplete me as quickly on rocks as it did on Corvusol.

Then there was Galvanized, my lightning and wind speed boost ability. It consumed less power than the administrator abilities, but it was a hungry pig compared to Bedlam Bolt. I needed to find a way to bolster both my energy pool and my regeneration. Without the seeping mist of Arx Maxima to restore my energy quickly, my energy regeneration was disappointingly slow.

“Wake up, my sleeping dragon,” a silky voice whispered into my ear. A warm breath of exhaled air suffused my face, and a hand gently stroked my hair. Well, I suppose it was a mane like an animal might have, but it was on top of my head between my horns. Did that make it just regular hair? A mane? A crown? Being non-human felt overwhelmingly confusing, and no one had given me a handbook to teach me about my new anatomy.

I blinked my eyes open, the darkness gone, to see Amaranthine outlined by the ephemeral lights of her glade. The cast of blue and yellow to the lights made her crimson hair stand out all the more, and her lavender skin seemed paler in the blue light. Those red, gem-like eyes watched me in a very dehumanizing way, like I was her prize possession, or a pet who had gone the night without pissing on the floor. It wasn’t a romantic look in the least, but you have to understand the sheer beauty of Amaranthine in her own glade. She was an imperious queen of all creation in her realm, and vines wrapped around trees and ascended, leaving a trail of blood colored roses to fill the background behind her, all as if she were about to be painted by someone.

My mouth went dry. My attempt to swallow left me coughing. The power of her glamour had not diminished. I wanted to kiss the length of lavender skin her dress left exposed on her lower thigh. I wanted to do a lot more than that. It crashed on me in physical waves, but each wave that I resisted, somehow, became easier. I didn’t just desire Amaranthine, I needed her. But stubbornly, I fought and resisted that desire.

“You’ve grown. I’m barely holding my presence back this time,” Amaranthine pat me on the head and I felt like the most accomplished person in the world. I didn’t want to feel like that, though, unlike my attraction to her, that wasn’t real.

“Come, dinner awaits us. We don’t have much time left together, this time.” Amaranthine wore the clawed black gloves she had upon our last meeting, but none of her other adventuring attire was present. When I put my scaled hand into hers, she pulled me up from the ground easily, as if my draconic bulk weighed nothing.

I could look her in the eyes this time. If I had boots like she did, I’d be even taller than her. She bit her lower lip in admiration of my new body, and I thought about what mom would say if I pursued a Fey.

“Come along,” Amaranthine repeated in a no-nonsense tone. I fell into step behind her but noticed two things quickly. My energy had restored almost fully, and the count down timer in the corner of my vision was down to an hour. I slept the whole seventy-two hours away. Why had she brought me here, if she meant to ignore me the whole time?

I barely recall how long the walk was, what we walked past, or how we got to another ‘room’ in the glade. I found myself sitting on the ground, a small table between us. A dryad periodically walked out of one of the trunks of a tree to top off our tea or put a plate in front of us. We ate in relative silence, my hunger had grown to overwhelming proportions, and I used the chewing and savoring of the food to distract myself from thinking about sating other appetites.

Until I finally worked up the courage to speak.

“Why did you want me to come here?” I asked softly --- as softly as my gruff new draconic voice allowed me to.

“I wanted to see your progress; us Enkindlers frequently grow quite fast. Mostly, Corvi wanted to speak with you this time.” Amaranthine smiled a wicked little smile, and it felt like a feather had run up and down my spine. If my spine weren’t protected by dense scales.

Fey didn’t lie, but the words you heard were not necessarily the whole truth. She openly admitted she wanted to see me, but also shifted the responsibility onto Corvusol. What was the direct meaning of mostly? I wracked my brain, but I could only come up with contextual uses of the word, not a definition. My take away? She wanted to see me, but Corvusol’s urgency slightly exceeded her own desire to see me. She was an immortal fey creature with her own realm.

My mind latched onto the qualifier she added to the statement. This time. Did she want me to visit more, but Corvusol had wanted to share the details about the fragment of Arx Maxima in the Plains of Valor? Couldn’t he have done that in a dream from anywhere?

“Why didn’t you want to come?” Amaranthine asked, and all of my danger senses lit up.