B2: Chapter 23 - Leave It Alone (Patreon)

“Wow…”

I was sitting on the edge of the nest and staring up. Maybe a sane person would have gone running if a bird started talking inside of their head, but I mean… come on. I had so many questions and I’d gotten tripped up on the very first one.

“Just… wow,” I said again. “You’re three thousand years old?”

“Three thousand and seventy-two if my internal clock is correct. Although, I did spend much of it asleep.” The Kestrowl tilted her head and leaned down closer, turning so that one eye could better see me. “You are far smaller than the last Lord of Dusk. Why is that?”

“Wait, you knew him?” I asked, then thought about it for a second. “Also… am I, or are you just a lot bigger?”

Her head shook and pulled back, tilting further.

“But the trees here are so large too… Are you saying this entire area is gigantic? How fascinating,” she mused, looking around the branches. 

“Did you know Damian Dawnmere? Who is he and why haven’t I heard of him?” I pressed, trying not to let her take me on a tangent. 

“I was barely more than a chick when he brought me to what, at the time, was a small woodland and left me in this tree and unfortunately he didn’t quite explain why. Many humans assume my kind’s intelligence is limited. Once he had left, it wasn’t long before I grew tired… Next I knew, I woke fully grown and I felt born anew,” she explained.

“When was that?”

“Three thousand–”

“No, not when you fell asleep… When did you wake up?” I asked, feeling just a bit rude cutting the giant Kestrowl off. She didn’t seem offended… not that I knew what an offended bird looked like, which made feeling rude about it a little odd. Although “a little odd” was increasingly becoming the norm this time around so I chose not to dwell on it.

“About six and a half weeks ago by system time,” she explained. 

I was still in disbelief that she somehow had access to the system. I couldn’t think of a single creature I’d ever encountered that had the same access as humans. Maybe Wingguard, but that monster never gave me a chance to talk and find out what it knew. But… it explained how she knew I was the Lord of Dusk. The title was plastered right below my name after all. Not sure why she chose to call me that instead of my name, but here we were. 

“Do you have a name?” I asked. 

“We have little need for names like you humans do. However… I believe I remember someone referring to me as O’akina when I was still in my mother’s nest.”

“That’s a mouthful. Can I just call you Kina?”

Somehow she seemed to look more confused, then lifted a wing to start preening herself. 

“If you’d like. I have no attachment to the last one.”

“Did Damian leave that relic stuck to your back?” I asked, deciding to push on when she buried her beak deeper into her feathers. This seemed to catch her attention and she turned back to me.

“The what? Is that the thing that my wing keeps bumping against? It has been rather annoying when I hunt. The Lord of Dusk left several things in the nest with us, but I do not remember what it all was.”

My eyes went wide and I felt another hunger pang.

“Can I take it off of you?” I asked. 

Normally, when you tried to just ask the defender of one of these things if you could take it, things ended in some sort of wild chase. Maybe there’d be a few traps, some swarms of lesser Manaspawns, you know, something that could be a little bit of fun. I once even had to run away from a giant boulder, though I’m still not sure why I insisted on wearing a fedora during that particular heist. 

But if it was bothering Kina, then wouldn’t I technically be doing a good thing if I helped her out by removing it?

“That would be very helpful. I doubt you’d like a thing poking you nonstop from the moment you woke up, would you?” 

And there it was. Permission.

“Nope, not even a little bit. Okay, give me just a second,” I said, taking to the air and flying around to Kina’s back. I didn’t drift this time, moving with enough speed that she trembled and pulled slightly away from me. Then she caught herself and settled back down. 

I could take it, bring it to Danwood and start experimenting. Maybe I could test—

I came to a stop, floating a meter away from the Great Bounty, its energy pulsing almost like it was coming in waves. For the first time in… maybe ever… I found myself hesitating to actually close the distance. Because, for once, I wasn’t sure if I should take it. 

You couldn’t hide a relic’s tooltip like you could with other magical items. It was one of those unchangeable system rules with little explanation and if I brought it into town, every single Activated would know it had once been owned by not just one Dawnmere but two, one of which was somehow also the Lord of Dusk. 

I could hide it… bring it somewhere close to town but not all the way in and that would maybe do the trick. But there was no way doing that wouldn’t have some sort of implication for Danwood… Which meant that I’d have to tell Daniel. Manaspawn Wards weren’t perfect, and I had to assume the relic’s effect might be strong enough to overpower it and let things pop into existence around us. Sure, it was entirely possible that it wouldn’t, but that wasn’t an assumption I could outright count on. 

The town should theoretically be inside of the relic’s range right from here, but the diminishing gradient could also be at play, and the town’s distance could be the main thing protecting it. Especially considering the size of the Manaspawns that existed so close to the actual relic. 

And if Daniel knew and I insisted on bringing the relic closer to town, then he’d insist that the Council needed to make the decision as a group. He’d insist I could speak to them and convince them why it needed to be kept secret and that somehow nothing bad would come from that. While he was a good leader in a lot of ways, the man was just a little bit too optimistic.

But no secret could survive eleven people. They could barely survive two…

“Lord? Are you still there?”

“Corbin. Call me Corbin,” I said, my brow furrowing. I moved in closer, lifting one of the massive feathers as I examined the relic a bit closer. 

I’d learned about the Dawnmeres pretty extensively over the years. They’d been one of my top research priorities once I realized I’d be doing this nightmare again and again. In all that time I’d never seen a single mention of a Dawnmere named Damian. I couldn’t even think of one that started with the letter D either when I really wracked my brain. That was obviously true for a lot of other letters too, but completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Was it a secret to everybody? Or… could I talk to Veronica? The thought made me shudder. 

Kina adjusted, her feathers rustling. I managed to keep hold of the one I was looking under and found myself frowning.

“It looks like it’s lodged in here a bit,” I said without raising my voice. 

The spikes ringing either end of the oblong relic weren’t exactly sharp, but that only seemed true on the side facing outward. As I moved my head in closer, looking to see why it wasn’t just falling away, I could see several of the spikes closer to Kina’s body were extended, pushing right into her flesh like it had latched onto it. 

I ran a hand over the outer-facing side, the surface pleasantly warm. The powerful energy buzzed the air around me in a way that I could only describe as mouth-watering and I wondered if it would hurt her if I just yanked the relic free. 

It would be fine. I could bring it closer to town without bringing it all the way in. The Ward would do the trick and then I could tinker and harness the relic for—

Kina’s wings extended and she let out several sounds that immediately made me wonder if another Saberstalker was trying to attack… until she started flapping her wings and trying to move away from me.

“No, my Lord, please!”

A dark, amorphous cloud was at the edge of my vision and I suddenly realized that my Cloak had fully emerged. Kina was practically hopping to the edge of the nest and I felt the hunger increase as I stared at the escaping relic.

Then I took a deep breath, and retracted the Cloak.

Kina didn’t immediately come back, but she settled, her head going low as she almost seemed to cower. I’d seen large beasts do this before… but this somehow felt different and I frowned.

“Sorry… didn’t mean to let that out. Just been a while since I’ve been so close to such raw Mana,” I said, hoping the explanation would help. She slowly started to recover. “Concentrated Mana is addictive once you’ve gotten a taste for it.”

“It’s… it’s okay. Will you be removing it now?” she asked, the fear more or less gone as she hopped back over and settled back down atop her eggs.

I considered it for a moment and frowned again. 

Right now, whether I liked it or not, the relic was actually in a relatively safe spot. You know, as long as a bigger Saberstalker didn’t suddenly spawn. If it was detached, even if I asked Kina to watch over it until I knew for sure how to handle it, I was risking something else getting drawn to it and running off. There was a gnawing feeling in my gut and furrowed my brow as I considered the implications. 

“Was that Saberstalker the only thing that’s tried to attack since you woke back up?” I asked, hoping Kina wouldn’t be thrown off by the non sequitur.

“Many things of many sizes have come. I assume they are after my children. Most of what I’ve sustained myself on has been the remains of those who have tried,” Kina explained in an impressively casual way. I kind of liked that she was mostly straight to the point. “Unfortunately, your attack did render that last one inedible, even had it not vanished.” 

I looked back out at the forest, trying to see if there were any other Manaspawns in hiding. The feeling of the relic’s energy was a bit smothering, so even if there were Manaspawns nearby, I doubted I’d be able to feel the minute amount of energy that was detectable with enough concentration. I still tried… I just wasn’t surprised when it made my stomach grumble and my attention try to shift back to the relic. 

Kina could be right. Her eggs were taller than I was, meaning for some predators–especially the ones that have become entirely too big–they’d make a really good meal. So would Kina for that matter, but even I could admit it was probably wrong to want something capable of speech to be eaten. Sure, I’d kill things that could talk with little to no thought sometimes in my past lives. But eating them? Regardless if they were humanoid or not, that was just a step too far. Even at my worst, the Lord of Dusk had to have limits. 

But the food angle just didn’t add up when the more obvious one was quite literally trying to get me to bite. Plenty of Manaspawns suffered from the same hunger that I did, the same desire to hoard powerful magic. Those things normally had no idea what to do with them once they got them of course, but the idea of giant Manaspawns killing each other and that relic getting moved from creature to creature just wasn’t a risk I wanted to take. 

That just sounded like giving myself way more work…

“I think it’s stuck for now,” I said without moving closer to actually verify. “Would you be okay if we left it alone for the moment? I can figure out how to safely remove it once I’ve been able to finish some research. There’s so many questions that both you and that thing have brought up… gonna need to be careful not to disappear down a rabbit hole.”

That last part came out like a mumble, my hand reaching up to rub my chin. Maybe I should have told her that the other Manaspawns were being drawn to the relic instead of her, but if that were the case, there was no way she’d let the thing stay anywhere near her nest. No mother would. So… maybe it was wrong. But I didn’t have a lot of options that I did actually like.

Based solely on what it was, even if I tried to take the relic and go hide it deep in the Salt Waste Desert, there was a high likelihood that it would cause a sudden burst in life, some new Manaspawn would appear and scoop it up, and I’d be in an even worse spot. If she pushed back… then maybe I’d try to think of something passable. But I couldn’t spend my whole life deciding that I had to suddenly look out for everybody’s best interest. 

“I won’t just run off and leave it forever,” I added after a few moments passed. “I can even help you hunt something new to make sure you have some food before I head out of here if that helps.” 

“That would be much appreciated.” Kina visibly perked up. She was definitely sapient, but it was clear animal instincts were still the driving factor. Was I justifying talking this ancient bird into acting as the guardian of something that I didn’t want to get rid of just yet? 

Yes, obviously I was. I tried not to grumble too much about being mentally aware of what I was doing. Then I pulled my bow back out and grabbed a few arrows, specifically ones that hadn’t been dipped in a Salve of Decay. 

“Okay, sit tight. I’ll lure some stuff this way. Then I can leave you with a nice little feast.”

There. Now I was helping her out too. It was a perfectly fair, totally equal exchange.

Considering how things affected other people was just the worst sometimes…