Dragonheart Core

Chapter 98: A Queen's Arrival

The vampiric dryad was. Ah.

Not exactly what I'd expected.

I'd felt when she'd finished her evolution—feminine pronouns, certainly, judging from her thoughts as I dipped into her head—and flew to the Drowned Forest with all haste, eager to see the ending of the evolution I'd poured so much care into. Most of my creatures had stayed roughly similar to their previous form, gaining size and bulk and magic, but with the same overall shape. But not this one—the jump from tree to dryad would be something worth seeing.

And it certainly was.

The vampiric mangrove—the Ancestral Tree, I could feel now, a gravitas pouring off its bark. Still a vampiric mangrove, though, funnily enough. The tree had grown with the evolution, taller and broader, but had stayed eerily similar. If I didn't know it had evolved, I would simply assume it was a fantastically old specimen, nothing too special on its own. Maybe a defense mechanism? Look normal so pillagers didn't scour through the forest looking for the one tree they needed to burn down?

Or maybe it was because all of its energy went elsewhere.

The where was very apparent as the bark around its trunk shriveled back, peeling open to release the beast inside.

Because beast was a very apt description.

She was humanoid, but as if someone had tried to draw a human after only hearing stories of them; upright on two long, gangling legs, joints crossed over each other like the limbs of a cat. Her arms dangled until they nearly brushed the dirt, four claws more akin to thorns on their tips. Bark instead of skin or scale, great, bristling plates of scarlet-crimson all interlocking over her body like a coat of armour, protecting a thin, jagged body. Not like the bulk of the kobold warriors or Rihsu, but more with the lean elegance of a kobold hunter.

Not that she was, ah. Particularly elegant.

She hissed as she emerged, a low, vicious sound. Her muzzle twitched, bark arching over pure white eyes, thorn-esque fangs peering from her mouth. No hair but a crown of thorns curled around her head, trailing down her back like spines. In her first moments of wakefulness, all I could feel from her thoughts was hunger—a burning, reverent loyalty to her Ancestral Tree, and the desire to bring it sustenance.

Namely, blood.

Maybe the schema had been a little too generous in calling her a proper dryad. I knew there were variations out there, but most, if not all, the dryads I had encountered were mostly sapient, capable of living with other humanoid races with only the loyalty to their Ancestral Tree to keep them from fully integrating.

This was, ah.

Not that.

But oh, what a monster she would be. She shook herself, thorns rustling like quills, and examined her new body; peered at her jagged claws, test the points of her fangs, took hesitant, unsteady steps on new legs. She wasn't stupid, to be very clear; there was a certain intelligence in her thoughts, her life divided into three distinct categories of before, then Rhoborh's boon, and now her evolution. Already she was taking note of her surroundings, figuring out colours and smells and sensations.

It was just that most of her thoughts were dedicated to how she could utilize these new things to obtain blood.

She'd fit right in with my dungeon.

But not this floor, unfortunately. Rhoborh had already been looking in with the kobolds' evolutions, redwood presence lingering over my halls, and with the dryad he was now looking firmly in. He wanted those gone yesterday.

Think kind thoughts. It was a god, after all. I steadied myself.

The sixth floor was nearing completion, the last of the water splashing through—still no creatures down there, since I'd kept the fill tunnel narrow to stop any precocious little beasties from making their way down when it would be far too easy to get access to my core, but already I was setting the seeds in my creatures' heads. Thoughts about distant lands, crystal blue waters, the heaviness of the mana down there.

And once it was full, I'd be moving many of them down. The kobolds for one—I'd already carved out their den over the lagoon, and they were simply going to have to learn how to be sea-drake descendants if I was going to continue to give them respect—and most of my aquatic creatures, at least those I could adapt to a saltwater environment. When Seros awoke and I could make proper use of his bulk, he'd help me move the vampiric dryad's Ancestral Tree down.

Maybe when the empress serpent awoke as well. I was a little concerned that the dryad, while intelligent, was not necessarily smart enough to know that me moving the tree wasn't a threat against its existence.

It made sense that she would care so much, though. Dryads lived only for their trees; while they could technically survive without one, it was a pained, vicious existence, and one they did not suffer lightly. Protection of their Ancestral Tree was almost paramount.

For as long as the tree survived, the dryad could be reborn.

And that was a beautiful, beautiful power.

But for now I dipped into her mind, past the odd metaphors and open wonder at experiencing the world with sight instead of only touch. I gave her a vague impression of how to hunt, how to bite and claw things, and then pulled out. She'd figure out how to fight in the Drowned Forest, so long as she and the kobolds stayed separate, and then I'd move her down.

She hissed, a sound that came across more like the rustle of leaves, blinking her pure white eyes in a random direction. Then she stalked away from her Ancestral Tree, claws bristling, and set about on her hunt.

Lovely, lovely thing. Monstrous, sure, but monstrous in a direction I could influence. Could appreciate.

She'd do wonderful things in my dungeon.

And she wasn't the only thing. A floor above, simmering under a glow that faded beneath his fur, the midnight cave bear awoke.

I'd only just gotten over gushing about my vampiric dryad when suddenly I had a brand new target to appreciate.

He pushed himself onto his paws, shaking off the last of his bleariness; he'd grown, from his more stunted size compared to his mate, into a proper beast, almost twelve feet long and eight tall. Gone was the muddy brown fur—he looked like someone had poured ink all over him, staining him black as shadows and with an odd, almost absorbing property to his fur. Like he wasn't just made of shadows, but was actively producing them, dragging the light out of the air and leaving darkness in its wake.

Clever thing, that.

Nuvja's boon curled around him like welcoming a lost family member home; I could taste the star-rot of her godly powers as the shadows thickened around his form, trailing cloying tendrils through his fur and flickering between his ears. Even his eyes had changed, losing the golden-brown from before and becoming just black, ringing by thin white. Still white teeth, still pink tongue—but everything else was that inky black.

Midnight cave bear indeed.

He rumbled, a low, pressing sound, and padded around the limits of his den. Still the dead body of his mate was there—I hadn't wanted to take it from him while he slept, considering how much work he'd put into dragging it into his den before slipping into evolution—and he walked to it, crooning something soft. He nosed into her fur, avoiding the bloody hole in her head.

Shadows poured from him, deep, dark things that whispered and flickered like living things, and drowned her. Her earthen-brown fur disappeared beneath their calling embrace, hiding her in the shadows, swirling around her like a waterfall–

And then drifted away, returning back to his fur.

But something had changed.

What?

I poured more points of awareness over the problem, staring at her corpse—at her corpse, because she was dead, and nothing should have changed. But I couldn't shake the thought that something had, that the swirl of shadows had been something larger, something unseen, happening.

But, ah. What? The midnight cave bear was a friend of shade and shadows, yeah, using them to cloak himself, and Nuvja's shadows were moving things to help hide attacks and homes. But that was it. Nothing that could have influenced a corpse.

Still, it felt like something had changed.

Worrying.

But it looked like that was the last thing the midnight cave bear had needed. He crooned once more, ears flattening, but turned away. Padded out of his den, taking in the Fungal Gardens with new and improved eyes, admiring the changes he had been too insipid to notice before. I preened a little.

But then I guided him to the other den, where his three cubs—or cubs, considering they were well on their way to growing out of the juvenile stage—laid sleeping. He'd take care of them for a while, let them readjust to his changed form.

And then he would head down to the fourth floor. The Jungle Labyrinth was the perfect place for him to hone his shadow abilities, to be able to use them without Nuvja's assistance, and the pitch black tunnels would make a proper monster out of him.

I had high hopes.

Watching over him for a second longer, blooming a set of whitecap mushrooms beneath his paws because I was still a hatchling at heart, I skipped back down a few floors. Chieftess was doing fine, hammering out her new role as the leader of the kobolds, but she'd received my message—once the sixth floor finished, she would be going down to it, and that meant she couldn't lead the tribe in the Drowned Forest.

So she needed a successor. And considering I would not be allowing Nicau to stay behind, he was right out.

But the successor had already presented himself, funnily enough. A younger kobold, one barely out of his eggscale days, but with a toothy, biting intelligence and a ferocity that sat well on his crimson scales. He'd partaken in the invasion, part of Chieftess' squad, but been too young to evolve—but he'd learned. Watched her.

And now he was training to take the role.

I doubt he'd be as powerful as Chieftess, because she was a success story all by her lonesome, but he'd take the reins of the kobolds that would remain on this floor well enough. Already he was leading hunts, directing others, figuring out how much food they needed to gather to feed everyone and setting up piles of weapons to sharpen and maintain. The kind of thing that my dungeon was best at—training up little monsters filled with a fervent desire to grow stronger.

One day he'd evolve, and then he'd train a successor of his own and move down floors. That was the lovely part of it all.

I flew through the rest of my floors, ignoring the sixth with steadfast determination—unfortunately, even if I watched, the water wasn't filling any faster. The first two rooms were mostly full, only a couple feet left, but the five hundred foot depths of the third room was going to take longer. Irritatingly longer. I knew I had made it that deep in order to accommodate the growing fledgling sea serpent, but. Well.

Would it have killed me to only make it three hundred feet deep?

Life was often painful.

But today was full of surprises, it turned out, and there arose something to take away the bite of that pain.

Because deep in the Jungle Labyrinth, in the Stone Jungle at its core, something deep and ancient and powerful awoke.

Before she even finished, the other serpents fled from the den, making the presumably correct decision that they didn't want to be in her eyeline when she awoke—even the crowned cobra who'd worked so hard to make himself look like the leader abruptly decided to abandon said course of action, slithering outside amongst the rest. The horned serpent, who had finished evolving a day or so past and only made soft, clasping grasps for power since as she figured out her new abilities, sensed the danger first—she was one of the first to flee. The jeweltone serpents left a scattered trail of pure white scales in their wake.

The empress serpent opened her eyes.

Or. Her new ones.

Because she now had four.

She unfolded from her curled slumber on the bed of granite I'd spread out for her, uncoiling with all the casual ease of a predator—she'd lost her dark grey scales and was now almost blue, something deep and iridescent, black in the shadows. Four eyes, all a brilliant, burnished silver, peered at her surroundings, the back two flickering as she adjusted to her new field of vision. Instead of crystalline horns, a crown curled above her head, smooth and silver. Two main prongs, reaching back like a coil of vines. Glimmering with psychic energy, but now without the jagged tips her previous self had. No reason to pretend like they were of any evolutionary benefit to manifest in this form; they were purely for displaying her power.

And oh, what power it was.

There had been a… flavour, I suppose, to her previous psychic abilities. Nothing like the star-rot of gods, nor the ink of shadow abilities; more like silk, something soft and tugging. She'd used that to bewitch others into following her, setting up a siren's call that functioned much like how my mana urged creatures to descend to lower floors.

There was none of the gentleness now.

It billowed off her in waves, thick and cloying—every serpent on the floor, despite being rooms away, shivered. Their minds went blank. Even still waking as she was, adjusting to her new form, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if she wanted to control them, there would be no hesitation.

And she knew it.

Uncoiling fully, she examined her new form; she'd stayed about the same length, twenty feet, not growing much in bulk or weight. Made sense; she wasn't a physical hunter, not anymore. Her power came from a different place. And that place urged her to raise her head, crown of horns nearly scraping at the ceiling, and hiss.

A summoning cry.

Every serpent, halfway through their fleeing to a safe place, abruptly slithered back to the den. They piled in, nearly on top of each other in their rush to obey—and it wasn't even a display of her power, just the raw weight of her tyrannical presence. For all that most of them were evolved creatures and dangerous in their own way, they understood the power dynamic here.

It wasn't in their favour. So they came to her call, eyes lowered, crowned cobras keeping their hoods tucked to their sides and jeweltone serpents avoiding any flickering of their bare mana manipulation. They crowded around the den, low before her, waiting for judgment. Even the few luminous constrictors I'd put on guard duty, watching over the still-slumbering woman with naga ancestry, came to her call.

I'd been stuck babysitting that damned Kriya for a week and a half now, feeding and watering her while keeping her unconscious. I'd love for the empress serpent to figure out what to do with her so I could move on with my life.

She loomed over her subjects, crown flashing in the quartz-light. I felt her drag her psionic abilities over them, peering into their minds, tugging up memories of the week she'd been unconscious with a fumbling kind of precision—not quite the same as what she remembered having, but enough she was able to get the hang of it. Bits and pieces came to her as she figured out what had happened in the time they hadn't had her explicit leadership.

And in those memories, she saw both the birth of the new horned serpent and the crowned cobra that'd tried to claim leadership.

Snakes couldn't sweat, but they were both giving it their best effort.

She slithered forward, a predator in a room of prey, and called them both before her. They went, the horned serpent still floundering under the weight of her new antlers, freshly evolved as she was. The crowned cobra had lost all the arrogance he'd so proudly displayed over the last week—I imagined he was quite thoroughly regretting all the meals he'd languished on while forcing other serpents to bring him food.

Tyranny was well-appreciated in my dungeon, but only if you didn't get in the way of another tyrant first.

The empress serpent leaned in, and her crown lit up in deep blue-silver, splashing light over the surrounding granite. Both of her targets went still.

But she wasn't taking control of them, not in the way I knew she could. She was just talking to them.

The crowned cobra had made a horrible decision—the horned serpent had only just been born. She could still redeem herself with one simple action.

The horned serpent didn't hesitate. As soon as the empress serpent released her, she spun to the side and sunk her fangs into the crowned cobra's neck. Still fighting like a luminous constrictor—she coiled around him as he thrashed, hissing, spitting venom wide and far; but she kept his head pinned, entwining around him with a desperate fervour to prove herself.

The empress serpent watched, and there was a vague pride in her thoughts. Yes, this would be a worthy successor. Still fumbling and foolish, relying on physical might rather than the brilliant delicacy of psychic abilities, but she could be taught. Be trained.

And as she was now demonstrating, she knew not to challenge her empress.

What more could a tyrant appreciate?

Slowly, the crowned cobra died, slumping in the horned serpent's coils with a final, rasping hiss. She unfurled from around him, several scales sizzling with splatters of venom, but faced the empress serpent, bowing her head. Her horns flashed once with the beginnings of psychic powers.

The empress serpent hissed. An acceptance. Then she spread her reach over the rest of her horde—for she had slept for a good many days, and there had been no food for her upon awakening; if they valued their lives, they should remedy that.

The den emptied as fast as it had filled.

I preened—was this what fatherhood felt like? Watching what had once been just a clever little snake under my care grow into a proper monster? And this was only her second evolution; what would her fifth be like?

Oho. Glorious.

She'd more than earned a Name.

I had originally planned to wait until Seros had awoken—and it was soon, so soon I could feel it aching through my core, already the light starting to settle into his scales and simmer beneath—to see if he would take more of my ambient mana with his evolution, but I couldn't any longer. She had done everything I could have wanted from her with evolutions alone—what would she do with a Name?

Everything. The answer was everything.

Now only what to Name her.

Nicau had, unfortunately, come pre-named, and I was polite enough not to give him a new one. He should really have thanked me on bended knee for that.

But I was a sea-drake, and my followers would be named with the draconic tongue. I pondered this, staring at her—but in truth, I had already known what to do. I had, perhaps, always known, since she claimed her first follower and started her draconic rise through power.

Queen, I Name you.

Veresai

Blessing of the Oracle: all that is to be seen shall be seen.

Fucking fantastic.