Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 5 - Paradise with Teeth (Patreon)

Elijah soared through the air, enjoying the feeling of wind on his wings as he searched the forest below.  Silvara was everything he’d hoped it would be.  It was as dangerous as it was majestic, and he felt more at home in its forests than he had anywhere since leaving the Hartwood Grove.

There were so many commonalities between the Plane of Nature and his island.  The most obvious was the wildlife.  For years, he had known that his grove played host to many wonderful beasts, most of which were far more developed – physically, mentally, and ethereally – than most non-guardian beasts on the mainland.  However, he’d never really stopped to wonder why that was the case.

He simply assumed that it was what came with the territory of living in or around a Druid’s grove.

Now, he’d begun to think about the situation a little more critically, largely because he felt something similar in Silvara.  That same indefinable something that separated the natives of his grove from everything else seemed to have been woven through the entirety of the Plane of Nature.

Was it what he often referred to as the Call?  Maybe.  It was certainly related, as he could hear it more clearly now than at any time back on Earth.  It pulled against his consciousness, cooing at him to simply give in and merge with nature. 

So far, he had resisted, but Elijah knew that wouldn’t always be the case.  Simply existing in Silvara taxed his consciousness in ways he’d never prepared himself to endure. 

That made it great for mind cultivation.

But it also put him on a tightrope with no safety net.  So long as he maintained his balance, he would be fine.  But one little twitch in the wrong direction, and he would fall to his identity death.  He knew that as certainly as he knew his own grove.

Elijah also considered that the Call might simply be a byproduct of his attunement interacting with a pure form of nature.  It reminded him of water.  It was one of the building blocks of life, and drinking loads of it was generally regarded as a healthy choice.  Yet, consuming too much would still prove harmful.  Even deadly.

Most people would never scrape that level of consumption, but it did happen.

Or maybe it was more like alcohol.  That analogy seemed a little more appropriate, because if Elijah let himself go and embraced nature completely, he started to feel something analogous to inebriation.

None of his comparisons were really accurate, though.  Nature and his relationship with it were wholly unique things, and his reactions to overindulgence fell into their own category of dangerous.

Because if he let his guard drop, he wouldn’t end up stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning.  He would lose the parts of him that relied on sapience. 

No pressure, he thought to himself as he banked.

Above, he saw a few massive birds gliding along.  They were each the size of a jumbo jet, and Elijah could feel the wind of their passing even from a few hundred yards away.  Mostly because of Ride the Wind, but also because they displaced so much air.

Above them were the clouds and a bright, blue sky.

No sun, though.

Light was ambient, and at certain points, darkness simply covered everything.  The days were roughly two or three times the length of Earth’s, which threw off his sense of time.

Not that Elijah had a good relationship with that anyway.  He couldn’t count the number of times he’d looked up only to find that weeks had passed while he toiled away at whatever task he’d decided to undertake. 

For what it was worth, he blamed his time on Gorveth.  Back then, loose timekeeping was a survival mechanism.  Otherwise, he’d never have stayed sane while spending years alone with nobody but Treebie for company.  It was much easier to maintain his wits if he sank into his tasks without regard for the outside world or its timescale.

Decades had passed since then, but the effects had been carved into his mind to such a degree that he didn’t think he’d ever rid himself of the scars.

Once he was certain that the birds wouldn’t attack him, he turned his attention to the forest below.  The trees didn’t look that different from what he might find back on Earth.  They were different species, with differing details, but a tree was a tree the multi-verse over. 

Elijah took comfort in that.

Yet, he also had to acknowledge that that assessment only went so far, because many of those trees were subtly powerful in ways he couldn’t wholly predict.  They emitted an aura not unlike the ancestral tree at the center of his grove, but with a lot more force behind it.

It reminded him of the difference between a dog and a wolf.

Both could be dangerous in the right circumstances, but domestication had robbed dogs of a certain edge that simultaneously made them fit companions for humanity and made them ill-suited for the wild.

His ancestral tree was like that.

Regardless, Silvara played host to a number of other flora that were a good deal more dangerous than anything back on Earth.  The first experience with that came only a few moments after their arrival, when those venomous vines attacked Illska and Ok’tarik, but many more incidents had followed.

Of the members of their group, only Elijah could traverse the land relatively safely.  Even then, he needed Guise of the Stalker to ensure he wasn’t constantly attacked. 

Shape of Trees had proven to be his safest form, though.  Not only did most animals simply ignore trees as threats, but Elijah’s abilities meant that he could establish what he’d begun to think of as a pseudo-domain that gave him limited authority over his surroundings. 

Was it perfect?

Far from it.

But it did allow for peace that none of his other forms gave him.  However, it also came with a price – chiefly, that being a tree shifted his perception so fully that everything he associated with normal, everyday life became something of a chore.  Perception of time was the worst of it, but there were plenty of other drawbacks, too. 

The end result was that Elijah knew he needed quite a lot of time before he would be comfortable using Shape of Trees for more than a few hours at a time.  Anything more, and he would run the risk of losing track of everything.  Time.  Himself.  The notion of his humanity.

If he was alone, he might’ve risked it anyway.  At some point, he’d need to go down that road and master the shape.  However, with three other people depending on him, that just wasn’t in the cards. 

So, his experimentation with the form had been somewhat limited.

Even so, Shape of Trees was obviously extraordinarily powerful.  In some ways, it was his most powerful transformation.  Certainly, he could think of hundreds of ways it could have helped him in the past, ranging from healing other people to his terraforming of the Cyst back in Gorveth.

Elijah even had plans for when the Poet finished putting Orveth Kaal back together.  After all, he still had quite a few fungal colonies to work on.  That would be a lot easier – and faster – in Shape of Trees.

He even believed he could get it finished by the time the trial finished in a few decades.  Would it matter?  The ancestral world’s rules and rewards were tied to its status as a former piece of the Empire of Scale.  If, as the Poet put it, Elijah claimed it, would the trial still exist?  Would the rewards?

Answers he wouldn’t get for quite some time, Elijah was certain.

A little less than a year, give or take a few days.  Maybe longer, if it took him a while to figure out how to claim a planet.

At least he knew that Fungee was okay.  He could still feel the fungal colony, though his perception of the area around his dolmen was thin.  Was that due to him being in a different plane?  Or was there something else at play?  Either way, he could feel the barest hint of the Poet’s efforts, almost like listening to a song from a distance.  The general beat was obvious, but anything beyond that was muffled by distance.

Elijah suspected that was for his own good.  If he could hear it clearly, he would probably be destroyed.

Those thoughts flitted along the surface of his mind as he searched the forest.  He didn’t really know what he was looking for.  The buffalo-beast he and Gunnar had slain a day ago was more than enough meat to see them fed for a couple of weeks, even with Illska’s and Ok’tarik’s appetites.  So, he wasn’t hunting for food.

Instead, Elijah was looking for something else he couldn’t really define. 

He hadn’t strayed too far from the cave where the others remained.  A few hundred miles at most.  But the lack of familiarity painted the area with a tinge of dread he couldn’t really shake.

Then, Elijah saw a mountain in the distance move.

At first, he thought it was just a trick of the eye.  Then, when it moved again, he wondered if it was an earthquake.  But as he drew closer, he realized that neither was the case. 

When he got within a few miles, he finally heard the sound of its movement.  Snapping trees and thundering steps that shook the land all around.  After that, Elijah saw what he thought was a cloud but soon turned out to be something else entirely.

Birds and insects surrounded the moving mountain in a swarm that was visible from miles away.  And they clearly weren’t happy with one another.  As Elijah got closer, he realized that each of those creatures had a wingspan of hundreds of feet, which meant they weren’t that much smaller than the birds he saw flying far above.

They were nothing compared to the moving mountain.

Or as Elijah discovered, the turtle.

Its shell was at least a mile long and half again as long, though it was covered in sediment and trees, which was why he’d mistaken it for a mountain.  Otherwise, the beast looked little different from any other turtle Elijah had ever seen, and it very much resembled a Galapagos giant tortoise. 

Because of its massive size, it looked like it was moving in slow motion.  However, each step covered a quarter of a mile, so it covered ground far more quickly than Elijah’s initial estimates suggested. 

He flew forward and into the turbulence created by the birds and insects.  Oddly, former looked a lot like hummingbirds, while the latter resembled honeybees.  What wasn’t odd was that they clearly didn’t like one another, and they were engaged in an epic war between avian and bug.

The chaotic mess set the atmosphere swirling, which made Elijah’s flight path a little more difficult to manage.  However, Ride the Wind let him counter it well enough, and he slipped between the warring creatures.

A few moments later, he landed on the turtle’s shell.

The second he made contact, he realized that the beast was well into the animal equivalent of transcendence.  He could feel the dense flows of vitality rushing through it, and he sensed the vastness of its ancient life. 

If it had been back on Earth, Elijah would have called it a guardian.

But in Silvara, it was something else.  Something beyond the categories he’d used to define animal life.  Elijah wasn’t certain exactly what that meant, but it was confirmation that Silvara hosted life well past the power scale to which he’d grown accustomed.

Was it as strong as someone like Kirlissa?

Elijah couldn’t rightly say, which was an answer in and of itself.  That didn’t mean a sapient transcendent couldn’t kill the creature.  Almost assuredly, they could do just that.  Just like a human could hunt an elephant or slaughter wolves on a scale that left them endangered.

But regarding sheer individual power?

The animal was impressively strong.

It was also just as plainly an animal.  It might’ve been capable of rational thought, but it was nowhere near sapient.  How that worked, Elijah wasn’t sure.  But he knew it all the same.

And that was just after a moment’s touch.

Elijah desperately wanted to study it more.  So, without hesitation, he settled down on his haunches – careful to keep Guise of the Stalker going – and cast his awareness downward. 

And immediately drowned in the vastness of the tortoise’s spirit.

The touch only lasted a second, but in that time, Elijah almost lost his connection with reality.  It was like suddenly finding himself at the bottom of the ocean, unable to deal with the darkness or the pressure. 

Thankfully, he had some experience with such things, and he managed to withdraw after only a moment.  Even that left him gasping for air.

But it also gave him hope.

Was poking a transcendent-equivalent tortoise’s spirit advisable?  No.  But it would be a great resource of mind cultivation. 

Elijah settled in and devoted his attention to maximizing the gains he could make from that strategy.