To no one’s surprise, leaving a dragon to its own devices was a bad idea.
That said, it was pretty damn amusing watching Bahama bat Starbreaker around. It didn’t take long for the Djinn-souled to start fighting back. For the little good it did him.
“That… is terrifying,” Nexxa said as we watched Bahama shut down every spell Starbreaker attempted to use with a swipe of the back of her claw or a flap of her wing.
I nodded.
It’d be a lot more terrifying if I hadn’t spent three hours a week being interrogated by said dragon on a number of mundane topics. Interrogations that seemed to be about reflecting on the week before. One meeting a week, for three hours, because those were the rules, or so she’d said.
Was appreciating those rules a lot more at the moment. Amusing as watching Starbreaker bounce around was, I didn’t want to be subjected to the same. Bahama didn’t seem to be hurting him in a way he couldn’t survive. At Djinn-souled that left her plenty of room to be rough with the man.
“So… Memory Palace tomorrow?” I asked, unable to tear my eyes away from the display of dominance.
“Yep. We’ll talk properly about the oaths then too. And you’ll fill me in on anything else I’ve been missing.” Nexxa gave me a serious nod, both of us leaning back slightly as the backblast from one of Starbreaker’s thwarted spells swept over us.
“Probably for the best. Head might get too big without you around.”
“Head’s already too big. That’s why the spell’s so effective, isn’t it?” Nexxa knocked on said head, making me lean away from her even as I rolled my eyes.
I was about to suggest we turn in for the night when Bahama landed in front of us.
Despite landing over a thousand feet downslope from us, the massive black dragon’s face hung at our level. Despite our weekly meetings, I wasn’t used to dealing with her in her dragon form. Most of our meetings were done with her in the humanoid form.
Meaning I was in no way prepared to meet her colossal gaze as she tilted her head slightly to the side. “The prerequisites are complete. It’s time for your test.”
“Uh… wait, now?” I asked, looking past her to where Starbreaker was picking himself up out of a hole in the ground. I noted that the flaming dinosaur from earlier had been caught in the fight. It’d been bisected by a stray spell or… actually, given the quantity of teeth and bones Starbreaker was picking out of his side, it’d been courtesy of a Djinn-souled knocked to the ground via dragon. “I haven’t slept in…” I trailed off as Bahama held a hand up, realizing it wouldn’t matter I’d skipped the previous two night’s sleep.
“Fifty hours without sleep is one of the minimum requirements for initiating the test for a Pegasus-souled with your vitality.” Despite her mouth not being able to form a smirk, I swear I could almost see one anyway.
“Of course it is.”
“First we shall test your ability to detect the common affinities.” Behind her, Starbreaker had just lifted into the air when her tail came down and slapped him into a trench.
At the same time, she started shooting spells towards me.
Even as I blocked the first with Air Shield, Nexxa patted my shoulder. “Well, I see you’re busy. I’m gonna go get some sleep.”
“Thanks for the support,” I called after her even as I switched my sheild to the general purpose original.
Each of Bahama’s spells was low intensity, easily blockable. Reveal Magic let me pick out the affinities easily enough, and I called out each one even as I blocked them.
Yet she kept firing the same four basic spells. In the background, she continued knocking Starbreaker around. Was a bit harder to take pleasure in that when I was trying to figure out her test. “I did not ask you to enhance your eyes. Keep blocking.”
At first, I was confused. What did blocking a spell have to do with identifying affinites?
It took until I’d blocked over a hundred of the same fireball, scouring what I could of our previous conversations to remember a seemingly random question during our first interview. “And if you were to be assaulted while out for a day with your family, by a first order fire spell, what would the feedback tell you?”
When I admitted I had no idea, she’d moved on without making anything of it. It was far from the only strange question she’d asked. The important detail was there were ways to use a shield to read the affinities woven into a spell.
I hadn’t ever done so.
Dropping Reveal Magic, I started inspecting the effects each spell had on the shield. It was infuriating that I was doing it for the first time while being half-asleep. Even with my high neural dynamics, I struggled. It took almost half an hour before I realized the key was in how much of each type of mana the shield drew. The difference was tiny, but with a tweak to the inputs, I could easily get feedback.
As soon as I figured it out, the spells Bahama was bombarding me with changed to a whole new set of affinities. These weren’t the common affinities. At least, not what I considered common. Should’ve figured a dragon had their own definition.
The exercise continued for over eight hours. It wasn’t enough for me to figure out the pattern. I had to accurately call out the matching affinity too.
She hadn’t let Starbreaker go either. He’d tried doing his light-bending trick only to end up getting teleported back. And then got smached down. Eventually he’d simply remained in one of the holes she knocked him into and she left him alone.
I barely registered his struggles, focused on my own task. Eventually, she started using affinities I’d never seen before.
“I… how are these common? I’ve literally never seen this one?” I said as the impact caused my shield to twist.
“You have. This is just a different configuration,” Bahama informed me, the first thing she’d said in hours despite my many mutterings.
It took a while to track it down, though the moment I figured it out, I wanted to facepalm. It was a two-affinity spell. “Worlds and Arcane.”
Like before, the affinities changed as I identified each pair.
Then each triad.
It took a full twelve hours to finish the ‘test’.
At which point, when Bahama stopped casting spells, I simply stared blankly, trying to figure out if there was a component that made them invisible.
If only it had been so easy.
“Your first test is complete. Now we shall move onto the endurance portion.”
“Don’t suppose we can put the test on pause? I do have other things I need to attend to,” I said, though I was struggling to remember what those things were. Or where I was, despite the aurora hanging over the lake in the middle of the day.
“If you wanted to forgo the testing, you should have said as such during the interview period.” Bahama’s words lacked the smirk from earlier. It might’ve been the exhaustion, but I almost thought I heard some… sympathy?
“Now, up. You must fly.”
Oh. That kind of endurance. That was… could that even get tired?
Twelve hours later I could confirm that, yes, the flight muscle could get tired. It could get very, very tired. Apparently, it could also carry me hundreds of miles along the edge of the Everstorm before doing so, which is where it finally gave out on me.
Bahama caught me on… something. It was a bit hard to be certain what at the time, though when I woke up, I was on her back.
I was also deep inside the Everstorm. Not that I knew it yet. When I woke, all I could see were clouds and the continual flashing of lightning. The mana was thick. So thick it felt like a blanket, pushing down on the same muscle I’d exhausted before passing out.
At least the pressure wasn’t as tiring as flying.
“Ah, you’re awake. Good.” Even as she spoke, Bahama shifted direction. If not for gravity, I wouldn’t have known anything had changed.
A few minutes later, we broke free of the storm clouds. It was only noting position of the stars that let me figure out we were on the inside of the Everstorm. Well, that and the absolutely absurd number of dragons. At first, I thought it was a swarm of bats, they were so thick. Yet as we moved closer, it became apparent the figures were much larger than I’d expected.
They were also fighting.
Thousands of dragons, engaged in an eternal battle with monsters falling from the sky. The scale of it made the eternal war fought along the Front seem like a light skirmish.
“Is this part of the test?” I asked, swallowing.
“There was no test. Just preparation.” Bahama’s reply should’ve surprised me. I wasn’t sure if I was too drained, or simply overwhelmed by what I was witnessing, but it didn’t.
“What is…”
“We are not so different from you, humans,” Bahama said. She shifted her course once more, following the edge of the Everstorm. “We are not the behemoths we show ourselves as to most of the world. Nor so powerful. Not when we’re born. Like you, we must strive to survive.”
“I… how does no one know about this? You’re fighting… well, a lot.”
“There are those who know. Many of your dragon-souled. There is little reason for anyone to worry. We can handle this much, at least.”
As if to prove her point, Bahama swung inward. As we got closer, I realized most of the dragons were smaller than her.
Considering her incredible size, that didn’t mean much. The smallest dragon I could see was bigger than Fang, which was already bigger than most pickup trucks back on Earth. Unlike those trucks they seemed to only come in black, white, grey and offensively dark blue, the dragons came in every color I could imagine. Plus several I wouldn’t have. One had a red skull that led into thin lines across a green body. The lines ran all the way down its sides until spreading at the tail.
Mixed combinations were far more common than Bahama’s mostly black appearance, though the rainbow shimmer of her horns was omnipresent.
The longer I watched, the more I felt I could pick out patterns. Patterns I’d spent the previous day defending against. “Do the scales represent the dragon’s affinities?”
“Our most dominant, yes,” Bahama confirmed. It occured to me that I hadn’t seen anything that matched Bahama’s pitch blackness in all her testing.
What had she said?
She’d test me on the common affinities?
“So… what affinity are you then?”
Instead of answering, Bahama swung lower, skimming just over the waves, leaving a wake behind us that stretched hundreds of feet into the air. Taking the hint, I simply sat back and watched. Slowly we approached a giant whirlpool, the entrance the dragons were all swimming in and out of. It was so wide, even with Eagle Eyes, the far side was occluded by the atmosphere, despite a complete absense of fog.
If I’d thought the lake over Mistvale was impressive, the mana here proved me wrong. It wasn’t any more powerful, but the variety of affinities in the air, all in balance…
Every one of the ‘common’ affinities was present. Including those like celestial, worlds or granitas.
The mana wasn’t the most impressive part of the whirlpool.
Along the sides was a city, consisting entirely of dragon roosts. The architecture reminded me of gothic, with a plethora of spires. To my surprise, the number of dragons lounging about greatly outnumbered those in the sky, many of them curling a neck or tail about one or more of the spires. One of the more serpent-like dragons wound its way around at least a dozen of those spires, it’s golden-green scales contrasting with the grey stone that dominated the area where it rested.
A lot of the dragons looked in Bahama’s direction as we flew past, though none approached. That many dragons focusing on me was one of the most terrifying things I’d experienced in two lives.
Our flight continued for ten minutes as we skirted around the edge of the whirlpool. It was around minute three that I realized the water was rushing up and out. It wasn’t just the water. The air and mana were pushing upwards too.
Meaning it wasn’t a whirlpool, it was a fountain. One that held back the surrounding ocean. I decided not to think about that too much, simply adding it to the list of things I was taking on faith for the moment.
At least I’d finally slept. Not sure I would’ve believed what I was seeing if I hadn’t.
Eventually Bahama reached our destination. It had spires large enough even her massive form could’ve used them as back scratchers. Some of the claw marks nearby implied she might well have done so. We landed and her tail reached up and wrapped around me, depositing me on the stone next to her. My feet were surprisingly unsteady as I stood, Bahama shifting into her humanoid form in a flash of prismatic light.
“Come,” Bahama said, waving me after her.
Again, I was mostly operating on trust as I fell in behind. If she’d wanted me dead, she’d had many better opportunities. Honestly, it was hard to imagine what she did want. What could any of these dragons want from a mere Pegasus-souled human.
We passed inside a dark cave far too small compared to the entrance. Barely large enough for Bahama’s smaller form. It was the fact I couldn’t sense any mana at all that made me realize it was an illusion of some sort. A high quality one. Without the recent practice she’d subjected me to, I doubted I would’ve noticed.
Bahama led me deeper, to a chamber that looked… familiar. It was an entirely different scale, but the ascension scanner was made of the same silvery material.
It was also broken.
“Did you… bring me here to fix your scanner?”
Bahama paused, turning to look back at me, then over to the oversized device. Then she snorted. “Hardly. Though I suppose I could let you try, if you’d like.”
“Uh. I’m good,” I said, turning away from the device. “If not that, what am I doing here?”
“I told you when we first met. It has been ages since last I was called upon to assess a potential Citizen. I have done so. You are worthy.”
Bahama stopped in front of a near-black doorway that shimmered with a rainbow irridescence. Kinda like oil, honestly.
And much like oil, when it got on my clothes, it didn’t come off without a fight. Which I found myself doing after Bahama gave me a light shove, struggling to pull back as the viscous liquid sucked me in.
“I shall see you soon, Magus Protectus. Watch your head.”