Dragonheart Core

Chapter 6: A Fungal Floor

Dragonheart Core

Mana: 19.1 / 25

Mana Regeneration: +0.3 per hour

Patrons: None

Titles: None

I was happy to have Named Seros, really. Gaining a true companion, one that I could speak to and understand, brought a sense of the life I hadn't known I'd been missing.

But the bastard had almost halved the mana I absorbed from the Otherworld.

He certainly gave his theft the proper level of appreciation, slumbering away as motes of mana settled over the cracks in his claws and scales to heal them right as rain. In the two days it'd taken me to recover even a faint reflection of full mana, he'd spent the entire time sleeping, adjusting to his new Name and powers.

It was nice to finally figure out what he was, though. An underground monitor; not the largest nor most powerful of lizards, but certainly above common anoles or geckos. Now that he was properly mine, fed and powered by my mana, I couldn't wait to see what his evolutions would be.

Also, he was venomous. Not incredibly so, mostly paralytic rather than fatal, but still infinitely more than I'd thought. He could have been nice enough to let me know.

I turned away, glaring at the crumbled remains of my cave. Barely large enough for the platform Seros slumbered away on, dark waves lapping at the walls below. I could try to remove the water, tunneling it out to reconnect to the river, but all manner of living things needed water; on the same hand, I hardly wanted to reopen the connection that had just finished flooding me. Maybe I would just carve a small puddle into this floor, open enough of the wall to maintain a fresh current of new water to keep away the disease of staleness, not large enough to flood or overwhelm.

The idea spoke to me. I imagined the floor how it could be—naturalistic, to still serve as bait for wary creatures, wide and open to never let another moronic adventurer all but trip over me–

Well. I paused, glancing back at my core; the damning less than a point of mana per hour still haunted me. As large as I could make but still feasibly control. It didn't take much to eat away at stone walls so with my near twenty points I could make it infinitely bigger than it had been, plenty to make sure that no adventurers could sneak up on me again, but not enough that it spiraled out of my control.

I grabbed my mana, shaped it like hungry fangs and claws, and got to digging.

Limestone crumbled away from me, dust spiraling out and pebbles tumbling away; I carved up, angling towards where the first cavern entrance had been. Something like a slope would be interesting, forcing adventurers to pick their way down through a sprawl of fungal gardens to find their way—keeping the entrance as far away from me was my first goal, given as I still needed to be on my floor in order to control it. But I wanted this to be a mix between dangerous and enticing, tricking all manner of wild creatures into meandering into my waiting grasp–

Crack.

My mana brushed the wall and a hole crumbled through.

I flailed, pulling up stone and rock, anything to plug the water sure to start gushing through the break– the water. The… fresh air?

Well, fresh in the manner of a fresh corpse—it was stale and choked with dust, having come from somewhere deep in the mountains.

Huh.

I stopped all burrowing and started whittling away at that wall, the river thundering right beyond my touch—but instead of water, more air greeted my experiments. The taste and flavour of other caves.

By the time I'd carved a hole nearly four feet tall, I hadn't encountered the river but instead the black beyond of a fellow cave system. Dark and looming, of course, but humid and warm. The kind of environment that other creatures could live in.

The river raced above my cave, splashing down between the two openings I'd carved through my walls, but apparently continued straight on instead of spreading out, leaving a fully functional cave system with access to fresh water meandering on next to it. I had no way of knowing whether it was connected to the outside, if it merely looped back around and led back to the cove, but…

Well. I was self aware enough to know that I was a greedy bastard, and two openings held the promise of double creatures with only slightly less than double the risk of adventurers, if the second cave system didn't lead outside. I tugged up a temporary barrier of stone over the entrance, just something for peace of mind as I worked, and continued carving into the walls.

But now I started to flatten the wall between the two entrances, over fifty feet apart from each other. Shaping a pale reflection of an entrance I kept them on the same length as each other, giving neither the advantage, pushing more mana to make sure the stone would stay strong under the eroding push of the river.

Then I switched my attention to what would become the bulk of my cave.

I carved a slope, just enough to be noticeable without overly forcing my creatures to fight against gravity to make their way up, and scored deep trenches into the walls and ceiling for outcroppings; rugged crags and bluffs bloomed under my mana, shaping new stalactites and stalagmites, turning existing ones into massive, sloping pillars that stretched from roof to floor. I carved deeper, all points of awareness focused in front of me, and–

Only thirty feet from the entrance, the water lurked. My mana, bright with teeth and claws and all manners of horrid biting things, splashed uselessly against it; if there was a way to eat through it like limestone, no one had been polite enough to tell me. I glared.

It was hard to miss the irony that a sea-drake was having problems with a puddle.

I poured mana into a thin blade and carved a stream, barely a foot deep, throwing my metaphorical weight against the back wall to extend it—once I was far enough away from the entrances to at least look impressive I dug a proper little pond, enough to hold the water but not too deep. One day I wanted floors with more water than land, twisting rivers and streams and massive, sprawling lakes—but to build those, I needed to worry about oxygenation, about flow, about nutrients and algae growth and fish.

Not yet. For now I just needed a floor.

Then I dragged the stone floor under the water up, forcing it to rush down the stream—it splashed listlessly into my little puddle, away from the rest of my carving. Stay, I ordered.

The water gurgled.

Good enough. I turned back to my cave.

Mana draining much faster than I was comfortable with I worked, throwing intangible bulk until walls shredded away and new stone was revealed just to be destroyed. I carved the slope further down and inspiration struck—to the left of the pond I dragged an array of pillars up from the rock, carving hollows and perches over its surface. The largest I placed on top, those on the bottom cramped and uneven.

Dens for the creatures that would earn them.

Then to the right I bullied a plateau into rising, only a foot or two off the ground—there I would place the best mushrooms, the most mana-rich food. If they could make it to the top and fight off others that wished to take their share, they would be rewarded. My little gladiator's garden.

The idea pleased me; I swam through the rest of my room, carving dens at the base of walls and hollow pockets between the ceiling's stalactites. They would need places to rest and even moreso, reasons to fight, reasons to grow strong and full to guide their evolutions–

Horrible, gut wrenching emptiness.

Less than a point of mana left.

I trailed off, doing some equivalent of panting—time had lost its grip but I could tell it had been hours, enough to regain some few new scraps of mana before I'd used that too. But I had made this.

Nearly three hundred feet long and a hundred wide, what would soon become the two cave entrances perched on the tip of a gentle slope, trailing down through an endless maze of rock outcroppings and stalagmites and terraced steps. As physically far away from them as possible sat a rock puddle—I extended a fraction of a point to push it to be flush against the back wall, the unevenness was killing me—and within the dark water, a narrow little stretch of an island where I would sit. To the left, a scattered mountain range of dens and burrows, to the right, a garden-bed fit for royalty.

Twenty points of mana had created this. Just enough that I could control it, plenty big enough to hold all manner of creatures. I itched to fill it, to flood the cragged slopes with dens for luminous constrictors to lunge from and pillars with cracks for cave spiders to spin their deadly webs—but mana. It always came down to mana.

Gods if I wasn't sick of constantly having none.

I angled a glare at the vague lump of scales that was Seros, still peacefully comatose as his body adjusted to his new Name.

At least he could sleep. I just had to wait.

-

I lasted long enough to regret waiting before I started to poke through my cave.

The water called to me, as irritating as it had been on this floor, old memories I'd tried to smother not quite willing to let go. I jabbed a point of awareness under its dark surface.

My mana hadn't finished billowing through the cavern, regaining my full awareness as it diffused to fit the space, but I wasn't quite idiotic enough not to sense the sparks of life in the water.

The algae and mushrooms that had been swept up in the flood clumped here, limply swaying as they settled to the bottom; but while the whitecaps were decidedly more brown than their namesake implied, the algae seemed fine, just untethered. Made sense. I remembered the species from my days in the Ilera Sea, common enough it was more unlikely not to find it.

And feeding on them, a handful of thin silver fish.

Something resembling glee shot through me as I beheld their scales, the white of their underbelly, the dark of their eyes and fins. Fish! No possible better indicator that there was life in the second tunnel. And though they were clearly freshwater, I wouldn't be amiss to call them a cousin to the baitfish of the ocean, what with their similar size and profile.

Which meant they fed larger creatures.

Oh, I could have purred; I languished closer, swiveling points of awareness to see them from every angle. Narrow, thin-finned, but with a curious little scale more akin to bone plating over the front of their head. Only seven, what few had slipped through the cracks before I'd closed the river back up, but seven was plenty.

I would allow them to eat my algae for the time being; Seros would need food when he woke up, and I could wait to receive their schema.

The mushrooms, on the other hand; I ate through their drowned, bedraggled corpses, regathering motes of mana like specks of dust—not even enough for a full point, but anything to speed up the waiting. I would take it. Shifting through the mounds of dead, I chased a fish with an errant strand of mana as I ate the last–

That wasn't a whitecap.

My awareness narrowed in on something concealed beneath a slump of algae, waterlogged and splintering. I ate at the outer layer, nipping through the… sticky trails?

A lacecap.

I devoured the rest of it, stripping away its innermost pieces to examine the heart of its being—by some ungodly stroke of luck it'd had just enough time to finish evolving before it was killed, letting me learn from its schema even with its death. My mana flopped unpleasantly in my core.

Gods, I'd almost lost everything and gained nothing. I pulled out of the water, leaving a few points of awareness to keep track of the fish. Even with the glamour of my new cave I couldn't ignore that I'd only gotten it because I'd lost the first.

Movement.

Any distraction was appreciated; I swiveled my gaze back just in time to see Seros finally twitch, raising bleary eyes as he stirred from his healing coma.

Took his sweet bloody time.

He rumbled, stumbling up to his feet like a hatchling. His tail thrashed for balance on the island barely big enough to hold him, left claws splashing through water before he wrenched them back beneath him.

I paused.

He was… bigger, wasn't he? When he'd first crawled out of the mountain he'd been three feet long, plenty respectable for his species, bulky enough to tell me he'd settled into that size instead of being the lank of a growing youth.

But now he raised his head two feet above the ground, tail an easy six away from his nose. His eyes were the same lantern-yellow, his scales still camouflaged and bright with iridescent flecks, but even in the darkness of the cave I could see that he was more blue than he'd been before. More reflective.

Slept for three days and near doubled in length. If he could continue that, I'd have a proper powerhouse on my hands.

And, more pressingly, he had thoughts.

I had to assume he'd had them before—assume, of course, because no sapient creature would pull the dumbfuckery he had with the luminous constrictor—but now I could sense that he was curious, that he was hungry. Shockingly developed thoughts about waiting to let his eyes adjust to the cavern lit only by the glow of my runes, even some back pocket of his brain trying to piece together what had happened.

Naming him had done a world of good for the handful of brain cells he must have had before me.

I extended a faint touch of mana over the connection I could feel in my core of cores, the wavering song of our two souls locked together—he raised his head, blinking at me. I pushed a vague communication of welcome in his direction.

After a moment, his thoughts took a distinctly happy turn.

Gods, I was emotional as a hatchling.

No time to waste, then. Now that I had a proper answer in case anything came a-knocking at my two entrances, it was time to finish the floor—I bristled my quite mighty six points of mana and sent a pulse of suggestion that it would be best if he stayed on the island for the coming hours.

Seros blinked again in my direction, glanced around the cavern, and promptly slipped into my rock pond.

Cantankerous brute. We'd get along just fine.

I plowed through the terraced steps of my cave, slipping between pillars and outcroppings to gnaw at the stone—the river had brought shiny new nutrients to my doorstep, just enough to make a mockery of real dirt for my fungal garden to bloom from. Two points settled deep into the floor, rock dissolving into a lumpy, pebbly mess that I knew would support life.

Then came the question of water.

The river thundered unendingly overhead, the stone between us never quite thick enough to help me forget, but if I didn't feel ready yet for a proper pond there was no chance I would feel up to harnessing a river. Algae needed a thin stream of water anyway, and mushrooms had the unfortunate tendency to drown if they were too moist. Hmm.

I glanced at the limestone making up my walls.

It was already a highly porous stone, plenty of breaks between the crushed seashells and fossils making it up; if I could widen those holes, just a touch…

The wall between the two entrances was mostly flat, my fear of breaking through to the river beyond keeping me from expanding in that direction. I gathered a quarter point and pressed it into the stone, worming through cracks and infusing it with my power. My mana flickered.

With a twist, I dissolved a fraction of the bonds holding the rock together.

Water beaded over the silver-grey, splashing down in big fat drops—hundreds of streams no wider than a finger bloomed over my room, trickling down the slopes and terraced steps. I tracked a drop as it rolled down the surface of the wall, slinking over the floor until it finally slipped into the pond. I could barely restrain the pulse of my mana.

This was going to work.

Barely four points to my name but I use them with reckless abandon, seeding a full wall of algae between the entrances so the droplets pebbled over pale green before splashing down. I wasted half a point embedding the algae with specks of bioluminescence, a hazy glow skittering over the cavern.

For the steps below I threw waves upon waves of whitecap mushrooms, only sproutlings to reserve mana. Algae sprawled, thick and bristling, between beds of pale white. Stalagmites grew to be more green than grey.

I would have wept if I could as I made my first lacecap—gods, they were so expensive—but my excitement only grew from the first time I'd read their description. Taller than the common whitecap, a bit less than a foot at its peak, it traded the slender stalk of its predecessor for one wide and bulky, prepared to hold the weight of its cap.

And oh, what a cap it was—nearly half a foot in diameter, trailing its gills all the way to the ground like a fisherman's net. A bile sticky enough to trap a full grown cave spider dripped over the lace-like web, ready to catch all manner of bugs.

Bait, good and proper.

I seeded them throughout the floor until my sight wavered, mana crawling up a fraction of a point just to immediately turn to mushroom; hours passed in a terrible, pressing wait.

Until at last, the floor was a multicoloured mass of life.

For my last step, I went to my resting place. Seros gripped me hesitantly between needle-sharp fangs and I did my damndest to hold back the bellowed curses and roars as he padded me over to the back island from the little crevice I'd managed to wedge myself in during the flood. Movement ripped security from my thoughts with jagged, paranoia-covered claws but it was short, simple—in less than a minute he carefully set me down in the pillar I'd raised for myself.

I still took a moment to settle myself, mana wheezing. But then I could look.

Long and sloping, ripe with fields of mushrooms and algae, mana billowing overhead like a thunderstorm. Lacecaps waved enticing traps and algae glittered with hidden motes of bioluminescence, Seros splashing through his glorified puddle, pillars of silver limestone proud and bristling. Always the river rumbled ominously overhead, thundering at the thin rock roof. Natural enough to soothe concerns, unnatural enough to be haunting.

Tomorrow, when I regained enough mana, I would start weaving my creatures and filling the floor with endless hungry maws, beasts and monsters aplenty.

But for today, I was satisfied.