BOOK 11: CHAPTER 25: NATURAL ARMOR

25 – Natural Armor

Victor navigated the menu on the System Stone, adding project after project to the queue. Meanwhile, the sacks, boxes, and chests full of Energy beads that he’d stacked at the base of the stone were quietly depleted—the System took its payment noiselessly. He read over the many System-generated projects he’d approved, hoping to bring the stone to the appropriate level to open up world travel: Energy storage, mapping, trade beacons, communication relays, an auction and trade hub, and, finally, an astral observatory.

If he was reading the System advancement tree correctly, he was pretty sure the “world travel” option would open up after those improvements were completed. Some could be done simultaneously, but others had to be done consecutively, and none were “instant builds.” He mentally tallied up the construction times. “Three weeks or thereabouts.” Of course, that was just one of the requirements; he also had to level the stone enough times, but that was simply a matter of feeding it beads.

Shrugging, he gathered up the leftover beads and then walked past the long line of former thralls and soldiers waiting for their turn to tell the System they wanted to be citizens of Victor’s nascent kingdom. He’d been getting ready to head up to his newly cleaned quarters in the castle when he’d had the thought that he ought to start purchasing the improvements immediately, just in the off chance that the dragon heart would put him out of commission for longer than he anticipated.

The soldiers, growing familiar with his presence, saluted or bowed. Many called out or nervously muttered a greeting. The former thralls of Fausto, though, were just as likely to cower or look to the ground when he passed. Victor tried to radiate a calm, pleasant demeanor, but even without his armor, he was an impossibly imposing figure. Besides, hadn’t he just slain an individual who’d lived as a god among these people? It made sense that they’d be a bit awestruck.

He made his way through the gardens, and then into the palace where soldiers were busily cleaning decades of dust and cobwebs, and generally making up for years of neglect—oiling hinges, washing the hardwoods, polishing the brass and silver. He even saw people up on ladders, meticulously cleaning the delicate, colorful stained-glass windows.

With the curtains thrown open and the dark, blackout draperies taken down, the castle was a surprisingly bright and gracefully beautiful place, and it made Victor wonder just what kind of man Fausto had been centuries or millennia ago, before he’d become the monster that Victor had slain.

He walked through the hall, his boots clicking on the freshly polished marble, then took the ornate stairway up to the second floor. Soldiers were busily working on scrubbing and polishing the brass banister, and their work drew Victor’s eye to the intricate design of the metal—vines, trees, and creatures of all manner were carved into it, including a great, serpent-like dragon whose head rested atop the bottom post.

Upstairs, Victor walked down a bright, open hallway—soldiers had pulled black curtains off the high windows that lined its entire length—toward a pair of bronze doors that were carved in such a way that Victor felt certain they were made by the same artisan who’d crafted the banister. When he pulled the doors open, he came face to face with the chambers formerly enjoyed by the vampire, Fausto. They were utterly bare.

Victor had instructed his soldiers to strip it to the walls and floor. He wanted everything taken out—every piece of furniture, every curtain and rug, every personal belonging. Of course, some of the furnishings and art pieces were probably priceless, so Victor had instructed his people to bring them to one of the unused halls in the castle for later appraisal. Meanwhile, Victor had an empty, clean suite of rooms.

He pushed the brass doors closed with a satisfying mixture between a resounding thunk and a metallic clang, and then he turned, regarding the expanse of black marble that covered the floor of the central parlor. It wasn’t solid black, but shot through with cream and lighter tones that tended toward an almost metallic silvery white. In all honesty, it was one of the most beautiful floors Victor had ever seen—on par with anything he’d encountered on Sojourn or Ruhn.

The space was grand, but not obnoxiously so. The ceilings were very high and arched toward a conical peak where a mechanism powered by brass gears would allow him to turn a lever and open the top half to the sky. He’d tried it once while the soldiers were cleaning and found that it brightened the space considerably. When the direct sun hit the black marble, it looked almost blue. Victor had the feeling Fausto had only opened it at night.

Nodding to himself, Victor summoned some of his storage containers and dug through them until he found a large area rug. It was a burgundy and gold one he’d purchased for camping, and it wasn’t right for the room, but for the moment, it would serve. He tossed it down in the center of the space, then turned toward the door and once again summoned his bear. He fueled the beastly totem with inspiration-attuned Energy, hoping it would make him clever and discerning in his actions.

The bear burst out of a cloud of steam that glowed with an inner golden light. Of course, it roared, but its golden-brown eyes weren’t angry when it examined its surroundings, sniffing with great steamy huffs as it poked its muzzle around the door’s perimeter.

“Haha, getting a good picture of things, hermano?”

The bear snorted, then turned to regard him, shaking its huge, dark brown pelt in a shivering undulation before sitting down on its haunches.

“Comfortable?”

The bear grunted.

“Okay, watch over me while I eat an enemy’s heart. Don’t kill my people, but if anyone makes the mistake of opening up that door, let them know it's time to leave.”

The bear yawned, vocalizing it with a groaning roar as it settled down the rest of the way to the marble floor, laying its enormous head on its forearms.

Victor stepped forward to give him a good scratch around the ears. He chuckled with the joy of it. Bears, when they weren’t trying to kill something, were very… cuddly-looking animals. He’d always thought so, and he knew people had gotten themselves in big trouble for thinking that back on Earth. Here was an enormous bear that he could fully trust not to hurt him. If he wanted to, he could lie down beside it, resting his back against its big, furry side and sinking into the thick layer of fat beneath its hide. He grinned at the idea, but shook his head and walked over to the rug he’d thrown down.

Once again, he reached into his spirit space for the correct container and then retrieved Dro Vah’s still partially frozen heart. Victor frowned. It didn’t look all that appetizing, primarily thanks to the fact that he’d blasted the dragon with nullfrost when he’d killed it. Did freezing meat with his breath weapon count as “cooking?”

When he cooked meat to consume using his magma breath, he had to be very nuanced and delicate with his exhalations, gathering the potent Energy in his pathways but only using it as a source of heat so that he could send scorching air out through his lips. If he applied the actual magma to the meat, he’d ruin it—burning it to char and coating it with liquid rock.

Having practiced that quite a lot in recent months, Victor held the great, frigid heart in the palms of his hands and slowly exhaled air that was hot enough to burn flesh, delivering the fiery heat of his abyssal magma to the heart of his vanquished foe. He rotated the enormous organ, smiling as the hot, cooked parts came into contact with his palms. His flesh was resistant to burning, and the hot meat made him increasingly anticipatory of the first bite.

When he’d burned off all the frost and given the outer layer a good char, Victor took a moment to relax his control on his body and once again stretched his titanic flesh until he was about half his potential maximum. Even sitting on the ground, his head rose toward the domed ceiling, and his girth stretched to cover most of the carpet he’d put down. Nonetheless, the heart no longer looked like an oversized roast in his hands, but rather a few bites of moist, steaming meat.

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Without further ado, Victor lifted the organ to his mouth and ripped a good-sized chunk off. He chewed, savoring the roasted flavor and the tender, rare meat beneath the sear. Coppery blood mixed with his saliva as he chewed, and when he swallowed, the heat that erupted in his guts was instantaneous. Victor could feel the potency of the Energy the heart was providing, and he could sense the lingering will of the dragon’s spirit in the meat. Dro Vah hadn’t been an old dragon, and he certainly hadn’t been the strongest of his kind, but he’d been a dragon, nonetheless.

Victor could feel it working on him with even just that one bite. The strange magic of his bloodline was pulling the fragment of Dro Vah’s spirit from the meat and synthesizing it with the rich, heady Energy that was packed into every cell—every molecule—of the heart’s tissue. Victor hastily took another bite, and then another, crunching the meat to bits in his mighty jaw, swallowing the hot, bloody tissue like a starving man thrown a morsel.

When it was gone, he licked the fatty juices from his palm and lowered himself to the marble floor, curling onto his side and locking eyes with his bear totem’s golden ones. They stared at each other for a few seconds before Victor’s spirit was pulled away, and he sank into a strange vision of another time and place.

###

Chorak’yrvan’nagakeen cut the air with his wings, dipping the left one and using the force of the wind to speed his turn. Two seconds in, he whipped his tail, aiming the heart-lance at its tip straight at Leva’rano’kran’s black-scaled breast. The brute was too slow to see it coming, and the diamond-hard tip caught him just between two of his ancestor scales, slipping in and pounding deep with enough force to shatter a granite boulder. Leva’s death was instant and sudden—like the bursting of a blood river in an ancient elder’s brain.

Chora roared his victory to the world, following the tumbling corpse toward the soil a thousand spans below them. They were halfway to the ground when his pumping wings caught him up, and he snatched the body with his claws; no sense letting the rocky ground do further damage to his foe! He wanted to display his rival’s corpse on the spiky crags outside his aerie—a fitting trophy to remind Tyva’liveen’anda’losh of his prowess and dominance. Perhaps it would sway her to brush wings with him in the upcoming Dance of the Seven-hundred Spires.

Grunting with the strain, Chora pounded his wings against the frigid air, pulling himself and his burden higher. He gripped poor, dead Leva around his hind legs, for even in death, the black dragon’s scales were too hard to pierce. Not too hard to strike between, however, if one’s aim is true.

Scales. Chora glanced down at where his hind talons gripped his fallen foe, tracing the length of his coppery scale-covered legs. His own scales were much smaller, individually, than Leva’s. They were like the fine jewelry some of the older dragons made while they wore their lesser forms. They weren’t as strong as the plate-like armor that had covered his rival, but what value were indestructible scales when you were slow and plodding, unable to dodge a perfectly aimed blow?

Chora had cultivated his beautiful, glittering scales over centuries, finding the perfect balance—for him—between armor and maneuverability. Leva’rano’kran was just the latest in a long string of challengers and rivals who’d learned that lesson the very hard, very final way. Many dragons had heavy, thick scales, but they were clever or experienced enough to learn battle techniques that overcame their reduced mobility. Then there were those whose power made the weight of their natural armor irrelevant. Chora hoped to reach such heights one day, but it would be many cycles of the origin stars before he gained such might.

“This will help,” he growled with a chuckle, hefting his trophy as he climbed toward the eastern spires that flanked his aerie. He’d cultivate from Leva’s cooling Breath Core for a moon or two, and surely that would help him move his own toward its next breaching.

The sun was bright, still climbing the eastern skyline, and he squinted into it, basking in the warmth against the chill of the air. It was good to be victorious in the face of the rising sun. It sent portentous waves of fate into the aether and would, given time, bring back echoes of similar energy. With that positive thought warming Chora’s Core and sending comfortable tingles down the ridge of his spine, he lifted his left wing and banked toward the spire he had in mind for Leva’s resting place—at least for the next month or so.

###

When Victor awoke, he was flat on his back, staring up at the metallic dome cap of his new chambers. He blinked several times, trying to clear the fog from his mind and remember where he was. He reached up to rub a fist into his bleary eyes, and then, with a groan, pushed his prodigious girth into a sitting position. Looking around the room and recalling where he was, he realized he was the wrong size for the proportions of the place.

With a grunt, he flexed his will, reminding his titan flesh who was in charge, and reeled back its potential, bringing him down to something more like a very large, some would say “giant,” human. As he did so, he felt something a little different, and he recalled his vision. Grunting again, this time with interest, he used his inner eye to look more closely at his vessel, peering into the depths, the nooks and crannies of his malleable, regenerative, and power-laced titan flesh.

Something new was there, and he had an innate understanding of it—he could grow scales if he wanted to. Finding the idea almost strange enough to laugh at, Victor held his left arm up, staring at the bronze flesh. With another exertion of will, he coaxed iridescent, perfectly layered, green scales into existence. They sprouted on his flesh from his wrist to his elbow, and when he moved the limb, turning it this way and that, they felt perfectly natural, moving and rippling with light as they flexed.

More of his vision came back to him, and Victor realized he could make any sort of scales he wanted. He could change their shape, size, density, and, of course, color. He wondered why his first impulse had been to pull forth those almost delicate-looking green ones. Shrugging, he flexed his will and pulled the scales back into his flesh. He didn’t need such natural armor at the moment.

Almost as if his self-discovery had prompted it, the System decided to give him a belated notification:

***Congratulations! You’ve earned a new feat: Scales of Dragonkind.***

***Scales of Dragonkind: Your titan flesh has awakened to a deeper potential, drawing on ancient echoes shared with one of the most feared elder species. At will, you may weave living scales from your own regenerative tissue—scales that shimmer with power, shift in form, and harden beyond steel.***

“No shit,” Victor chuckled, clambering to his feet. He turned back to the door and his sleeping bear totem. “Hey, hermano. Did you have to kill anyone while I was asleep?”

The bear opened its eyes, peering at Victor lazily. The general feeling he got from the bear was that, no, it hadn’t killed anyone. Victor chuckled and said, “Okay, big brother. Back to your stomping grounds for now, then.” He walked over and gave his companion another scratch and pat, then, as the beast grumbled, he severed the ties that held it on the material plane.

As the bear faded into glowing gold-hued mist, he walked to the metal doors and pulled them open. He was only a little surprised to find a soldier stationed in the hallway, standing stiffly against the wall outside his chamber. “Soldier,” Victor said, nodding.

“Milord!” The man nearly collapsed in startled surprise, reaching up to his chest in such a manner that Victor feared he was going to witness his first heart attack.

“Damn, man! Take a deep breath…”

The soldier, probably in his forties or early fifties, shook his head and straightened, blinking bloodshot eyes as he resumed his position of attention. “I’m fine, milord. I’m sorry, but I’ve been standing here a while, and my mind drifted.”

“It’s fine. By the way, you don’t have to stand at attention when you’re the only one around. Keep your knees loose and feel free to shift your weight around. Just straighten up like that when you see an officer approaching.”

“Yes, milord. Your chambers were so quiet, I thought perhaps you were out.”

“Who put you on watch here?”

“Captain Timmet, milord. We have a guard rotation schedule in the castle now.”

Victor nodded. “Good. How long have I been…occupied?”

“Um, begging your pardon, milord, but I’m not sure how long you’ve been occupied.”

Victor shook his head, chuckling softly. “I mean, how long have we had the castle? How long since I killed that vampire?”

“Just two days, milord. Well, three if you count the day you killed him.”

Victor nodded, smiling. “Good.” He clapped the man on the shoulder. “Now, at ease. I’ll go and check in with the captains and see how things are progressing. What’s your name?”

“Hans, milord!”

“Good work, Hans. I’ll keep your good performance in mind.” With that, Victor turned and started down the long, bright hallway, admiring the patterns of light on the wall thrown by the lead-paned windows up near the ceiling. The castle wasn’t nearly as large as his palace at Iron Mountain, and that place was surely sturdier and made of more costly materials, but there was something about the character of Fausto’s castle that Victor liked. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his first impression of it had been cloaked in shadow, and now it was full of light. It was as if he were living in the transformation, experiencing it—the place resonated with some part of him.

Smiling, he continued, approaching the stairs. All-in-all, he was happy with the experience he’d had consuming Dro Vah’s heart. Not only had he learned a valuable new talent, but he’d gotten another insight into dragon culture. It seemed the ones who lived in the wilderness, claiming their “aeries” and defending their territory, led very different lives from those who lived in cities and wore their “lesser forms.” He wondered if such a life had ever called to Tes. “Something to talk about next time we meet.”