Draka Chapter 309: As He Moves, So Do The Trees Quake (Patreon)

“Gods, I’m exhausted,” Kira mumbled as we left Grace and Presence’s lair. “I hope there’s a Rift nearby. Oh, I wish I could sense them, like you and Mak can. It’s so unfair that she gets to see in the dark and sense Rifts. I can do neither!”

“You get to grow people’s bits back,” I countered.

“I suppose I do,” she agreed happily. “Still wish I could sense Rifts, though.”

“Well, no worries,” I reassured her. “We won’t have to go far. I don’t think we’ll even need to fly.”

And I was right. Only a few minutes to the north by foot was a Rift surrounded by torn bushes and saplings. The whole area was bathed in the scent of troll, but I wasn’t bothered. I was bigger than any troll, and while Val had once described them as just cunning enough to be stupid, that cunning was enough for them to know not to tangle with something that could easily tear them apart.

No trolls came to object as Kira eagerly drank in the Rift. My most draconic part was a little disappointed, and Instinct agreed, grumbling about wanting to try our new teeth and claws in battle. But I quickly set that aside, because the way Kira came alive again as the final dregs of shadow and light drained into her was a pure joy to see.

“Oh, Mercies, what a difference,” she said, shaking her hands and jumping in place. “It really takes it out of me, healing a dragon other than you like that. Shall we do another few rounds of healing? There’s some daylight left.”

“I suppose…” I said. She was right. There were probably another two or three hours of sunlight. Not that nightfall would make much difference to me, but Kira had a pretty normal sleep schedule. And I couldn’t see Grace turning us away if we wanted to begin accelerating his mate’s healing already. “You know what? Yeah,” I decided. “Let’s head back. Then we’ll find another Rift, and keep going for as long as you can.”

“Wonderful,” Kira said. Her smile was hilariously wide, and I was sure, as sure as I could be, that she would have been just as happy with my decision if I’d had no influence over her at all. She had a patient to help, and the fact that said patient was a dragon made no difference. That was just who she was.

Grace was, in fact, only too happy to have Kira begin healing Presence in earnest. Mother didn’t object either; so long as we stayed within the ruins where she could easily spot me, she didn’t seem to care too much where we went. We healed Presence twice more that night, replenishing Kira’s magic at a Rift each time. She wanted to continue, but after that last Rift she was a bit unsteady; not like she was about to fall asleep, but more like she was a bit drunk. I decided to call it there, and she accepted my decision without complaint.

The next day we were back at it bright and early. We waited respectfully outside of the building where the two males had their lair, but not for long—Grace quickly came to usher us in once I called for him. In the lair proper was a smell of blood and meat, though no remains; my guess was that Presence just ate what Grace brought him bones and all.

The whole situation was a little odd, really; as far as I could tell, Presence hadn’t moved more than a few feet since I first saw him in his current sorry state, and even if he had, I couldn’t see how he’d get up to the surface level with his injuries. Meaning, he couldn’t have left the lair. Was he not drinking at all, then? How did that work? Did he get all his hydration from his food? For that matter, what was the hygienic situation? I couldn’t say, and after a few suggestions presented themselves, I decided I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter anyway.

What did matter to me was how the two males treated Kira. They were respectful. In my limited experience, dragons as a rule might or might not like humans, or even just specific humans, but they rarely spoke of or treated them with respect. At best they saw them as pets; cute and amusing, but in every way beneath themselves. And while I’d never claim that Grace and Presence treated Kira as an authority, or even as an equal, they at least took her seriously, and acknowledged her without hesitation when they met. That in itself was huge in my eyes.

For the next few days, Kira and I were extremely busy. Kira was entirely singleminded: heal, Rift, heal, Rift, heal, Rift. If I’d let her have her way, we wouldn’t have stopped even to eat or rest. But I was the one with the wings, and I said that she needed to take a break every few hours to take care of herself, as well as a proper night’s rest every day, both for her own sake and for Ardek’s.

Those breaks also gave me an excellent opportunity to check in on everyone. The humans had gone back to exploring and cataloguing every nook and cranny of the cellars; the place was huge, a whole damn underground complex. They kept finding doors, opening them and then finding more hallways, more rooms, and more doors.

They’d even gone so far as to push open the door to the food court and confirm that Behold Her’s killing mist had dissipated. I was slightly miffed that they’d done so without consulting me, but no one had been hurt, and they promised that they’d be staying out of the stairwell in the great chamber, in case the magical radiation from the cracked crystal was still dangerous.

As genuinely curious as I was about all that though, the most important thing for me was to check in on Herald and Mak. Conscience had put this awful notion in my head that they might be feeling rejected or discarded, and I wanted to make sure that if they ever got such a notion into their heads it would soon be dispelled. Whenever I saw them I made sure to ask how things were going and to listen with interest to their answers, and to especially tell Mak how pleased I was with their progress. They both saw right through me, of course. Herald even said as much, and insisted that I didn’t need to worry so much. But no matter what Herald said I could tell how pleased my attention made Mak, and I had no intentions of stopping.

After three days of healing, Presence was entirely free of any sores, and scales had begun to grow back in on all the large raw patches of his hide. To Grace’s delight, he had also begun to see random flashes whenever Kira came close to his face with the lightstone. His eyes were growing back, and the respect that the two males showed Kira increased by just a hint.

It was a wonderful thing to see, both her power and the respect it earned her. And the confidence it gave her, both in her abilities and in dealing with dragons, was about to become invaluable.

That afternoon Unquenchable and Quake returned. They’d been away for several days at that point, and my guess had been that they left to survey the territory that was now, discounting some fuzziness around the borders, theirs. I hadn’t thought much of it; we were supposed to go together, to agree on the exact borders on location, but I really had no objection to them having a look themselves. Nor did I really react when I saw them in the distance as I brought Kira back to the palace to rest. I only knew something was off when Mother quickly descended to join us in the clearing by the ruins, telling me, “The silver’s flight was disturbingly unsteady. Remain in cover. I will go and investigate what is wrong.”

When she returned less than an hour later she was more annoyed than concerned. “They fought that red wyvern,” she said, “young fools that they are.”

“How are they?” I asked. Not so long ago I would have been pleased, but now they were my allies. I’d given them territory so that they’d fight on my side, and they’d be absolutely useless to me if they were laid up healing for weeks, like Presence had been.

“They will live,” she replied dismissively. “I doubt the female could reach her hoard, wherever it is, but with the rich air here and her mate to hunt for her, she will recover in time.”

That didn’t sound great. In fact, it sounded very much like she’d be unable to fight for Mercies knew how long, and like her mate would absolutely refuse to leave her side for longer than it would take to hunt her a deer or a bear or something else to eat. And Instinct was no less annoyed than I was, which became evident when she insisted on speaking. I let her.

“We will offer Kira’s services,” she declared immediately. Mother looked at her skeptically, but Instinct continued unperturbed. “We cannot have all of our allies lying about. Bad enough that the copper male is groundbound; now we may as well have no allies at all, and at a terrible cost in territory. No, we must have Kira heal her. That way we will restore an ally and show them the benefits of remaining loyal to us in one swoop!”

“Hrrrm…” Mother rumbled thoughtfully. “Your Kira, has her healing of the copper male been effective?”

“Very much so!” Instinct’s voice dripped with pride for our little healer. “He will likely be able to see again before long.”

“Then it may be worth a try,” Mother agreed. “Gather her, and we will go.”

At that point I had to take back control and pump the brakes. “Kira needs her rest,” I protested. “She has been draining herself all day, and she’s slowly flagging. Give her some time. Half an hour to nap, at least. Then we can go.”

“Very well,” Mother agreed. “Be ready then.”

We were, and Kira was all too eager to see this new potential patient. She was scared, sure, and she would have been mad not to be; nothing about Unquenchable or Quake suggested that they might be anywhere near as considerate to her as Presence and Grace had become, and even if Mother’s presence should rule out any risk of a deliberate attack, a fully grown dragon could do plenty of damage on reflex or from carelessness. But she didn’t let her fear touch her. The only concern she expressed was that splitting her attention would be inefficient, and would only lead to each taking twice as long to heal.

On that point I could reassure her; Presence would be our priority. Our only goal right now was only to give the younger pair a demonstration of what she could do, and to take the edge off whatever pain Unquenchable was surely in. Only once Presence was able to leave the lair would we, if the Unquenchable and Quake agreed, focus on healing whatever unknown injuries Behold Her had inflicted.

The two younger dragons had claimed a large section of the southern city. It held one of the four giant trees inside the walls—three now, if you discounted the one Behold Her had claimed as her roost, and which still smoldered from Mother’s fire—but they didn’t use it, preferring to make their lair somewhere among the regular trees.

We landed in a large glade, which by the way the soil grass had been torn up had often been used for takeoffs and landings. Once there, Mother announced our presence by roaring into the forest in Draconic. We didn’t have to wait long. Only minutes later the forest seemed to ripple and shimmer, and there, quite suddenly, was As He Moves, So Do The Trees Quake. Kira jumped; I barely managed to keep from jerking back. Mother was not at all surprised, but of course she wasn’t; she had that Advancement of hers.

Quake spoke to Mother first, and only after a short exchange did he turn his attention to me. “Your mother says that your human is a healer of unusual power. That she can heal even dragons. Should you offer her services, I would accept on behalf of my mate.”

“Should your mate not accept for herself?” I asked. I was slightly miffed that he’d barely even looked at Kira, but that was supposedly how most dragons treated humans.

“Perhaps she will, but her mind is clouded with pain.” He half turned back the way he’d come, showing us four long parallel tears in his flank. “I invite you to our lair. But let me approach her first, to soothe her. Otherwise I suspect she may see not a member of our ally’s flock, but a convenient morsel to help her recover.”

The way he looked at Mother when he said that told me that he knew exactly how catastrophic it would be for his mate to cause any kind of harm to Kira— though I figured that in his mind it was likely more a question of harming me by taking or destroying something that was mine. That he still chose to lead us to her pointed to one of two things: either she was not quite so out of her mind with pain as he’d suggested, or she was really bad, and he’d risk it on the chance that Kira could actually help.

After leaving the glade we quickly entered an incredibly dense section of the forest. It was easy to tell that the pair had cleared the path we followed after their arrival; low stumps still stood, copper, orange, and tan where nature hadn’t yet bleached or darkened the splintered wood, and the trunks lay scattered to the sides. Some looked like they’d had chunks gnawed out of them, making me wonder if either or both of them—Quake being the more likely—could eat wood. It would certainly fit with the emerald male’s name, in a very literary sense. The trees quake, indeed.

Then we reached their lair, and all I could do was to stop and stare.

I’d seen Night’s lair, deep inside a mountain where no dragon but him could go. Magic had obviously been involved in creating that, with the smooth, even tunnels and regular chambers spread throughout the rock. But it could possibly, with enough skilled laborers, have been done by hand. What Quake had created in the forest—and I was sure it must be he who’d created it—could not have existed without magic.

I’d expected something like what Grace and Presence had done—a cavern dug out of the cellars of some grand building. Failing that, I’d expected them to make their lair inside one of the less collapsed ruins, or perhaps even something that, like the temple and library in the high city, still stood. Not so. The depths of the earth or stone walls were not for Quake, it seemed. He’d made a lair for them on the surface. And what a lair it was.

“This is absolutely incredible,” Kira said, hushed and awestruck by what lay before us. And she was right. Incredible was one of a few appropriate words for it.

Quake had reshaped the forest. By some magic of his, he had not only moved fully grown trees, hundreds of feet tall, to where he wanted them, but bent them to better suit his needs. They stood in two great curved lines, fifty feet apart at one end and curving inward to meet in the distance. They were so close as to be bark to bark, and their trunks bowed inward, branches weaving together all the way and their crowns so densely intermingled at the peak of the structure that it must be rain-proof. The effect was almost a fantastical longhouse made from living wood, and it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen. And all around it the trees bowed in to cover it, so that from the air, nothing would look out of place.

It was beautiful, brilliant, and magical, and I was so mad that it was Quake of all dragons who’d made it. Sure, he was my neighbor and ally now, at least nominally, but he and his mate had been my enemies until just recently. It felt wrong that he should be capable of something so pleasant!

Quake didn’t look back as he entered the open side of the living cave he’d created. “Had you seen this already?” I asked Mother as we waited, and what sounded like an argument in Draconic began inside.

“I had not,” Mother replied. “I have seen emeralds who could exert some measure of control over plants before, but this is beyond my experience. It is… pleasing, is it not?”

“It is,” I agreed. Whatever else I was feeling, I had to admit that I was glad to have seen this absolute marvel.

Soon the noise from within the tree cave quieted down, and Quake emerged. “She is willing to see you,” he said. “Though I recommend you go first, Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flame. Her temper sometimes gets the best of her.”

I wasn’t going to argue there, and Mother didn’t hesitate. She approached Unquenchable and Quake’s fantastical lair, and I followed, keeping a cautious distance as we went to the aid of my one-time rival.