Dragonheart Core

Seros bared his fangs.

Deep in the enclosed cage, the water picked up and thrummed around him, shreds of kelp and white-tinged mana. Movement, echoing through the rock; the thing overhead, pressing into his mind.

Dragon-friend, the voice murmured, soft, bleeding strength, but with a frenetic energy simmering under the surface. Again the stone cracked, power tunneling through to his earthen prison—the merrow were approaching. Fast.

Seros would kill them. He would slaughter them like baitfish; chew through corpses and drag the remains back to the Core.

A flicker of annoyance. You do not know baitfish, it—Abarossa, apparently, whatever the name that wasn't a Name meant—said, sinking into his mind like a coiling serpent. You do not know the sea.

His tail lashed, kicking up a spiral of water in the enclosed space. He didn't need to, not when the dungeon was all he could ever imagine.

The cove, enormous, sprawling beyond his eyes; waters inky under night and no walls to be seen, larger than life, larger than existence. Seros snarled around the memories, shook them loose—the Core was all. The Core was powerful.

…the Core had sent him here to learn about the sea.

His evolution called him draconic monitor—no longer seabound, but now draconic. Still his scales were iridescent teal, still his gills fluttered and his webbed claws pulled him through water, but no longer was he explicitly for the depths.

But perhaps he could learn, for now.

Seros didn't need primitive words, loose conjoinings of names for things that thoughts could convey. He pushed derision and begrudging acceptance to the thing floating overhead, that he would acquiesce to hear its plan.

We do not have time, the voice urged, faster now, like it was worried. I cannot speak to them—cannot urge them to slow. You must Listen.

He was listening, if the damned voice would acknowledge that. But he would obey only the Core, and certainly not something that offered vague aspirations and wanted an audience with the mighty Core with he could feel its resentment–

The stone shattered.

A careful prison they'd contained him in—rocks tumbled away from each other, locked and grown around, a hole blasted through the wall. Voices, clicking to each other, useless talk for useless creatures; churning water from movement, from life. The tatters of their kelp chains floated around him, revealing Seros, the draconic monitor, the monster, the beast, snarling in the center of their cage and entirely free.

He would destroy them and their idea they could contain him.

The deep teal merrow, wooden thing clutched in its hand, tail lashing. More of them, the water boiling with swarming bodies, like silvertooths caught in the blood-frenzy—Seros bared his teeth, lunging forward, water lurching to his command–

Listen! It demanded. Listen and I will bring you home!

He didn't need it, didn't need empty promises–

You will kill them, it said, teeth threaded through the words. But what will you win?

Win?

He would win corpses, things to drag back to the Core to give it mana, to fill it with power and understanding. He would win strength and vicious success, bones to sharpen his claws upon and meat to shred between his fangs. He would win glorious memories to devour as he returned to the dungeon–

Back to the dungeon, far from where he was, lost beneath the merrow city.

Maybe it wasn't his thought, because he could not ever recall feeling fear of this kind before, maybe the voice was shoveling its pitiful weakness into his mind—but he couldn't chase it. He had lost the gold to black and woken up in this cage, no idea, no knowledge. Otherworld mana simmered in his chest but there was no trail to follow back to the Core, to return to that of his home.

Just water and death and merrow.

He would kill them. What would he win?

Seros was not afraid—Seros was never afraid—but something gummed up his thoughts like coagulated blood. The cove was larger than anything he had ever known, filling his understanding, starker than the eve of his unknown creation and the world that had always been big but was now unconquerable in its vastness. He alone was those of the Core's creations that could swim—it had nothing else to send after him, nothing to find him should he be lost. Nothing but regret, never knowing what had happened to him.

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It wasn't his fear; just the voice, filling him with wretched panic that was not his, but it grabbed him.

A merrow darted towards him, trident raised, ferocious rage in its white-ringed eyes—his fangs urged to bury into its neck, to fill the water with murky red and drown in his hunger, but–

But Seros opened his mind instead, and Listened.

A pulse of frantic relief—the voice, sensing him—and then a response.

Something swept through him, endless, the chill of deep-water depths and warmth of the currents. The pulse of ancient volcano vents; the bite of lightning forking through crashing waves; the dance of enormous schools and lonesome existence of titanic whales; the fields of waving forests; the beds of sprawling multi-hue reefs; the sand swirling in patternless dunes; the crash of glaciers and societies around skeletons; the rumble of stone larger than comprehension; the immortality of something past years, past centuries, past age–

He called the Core's voice a melody.

This was a Song.

Seros drowned in it; lost his mind and thoughts and mana under the impossible breadth of it. Time slowed to a crawl, the whisper of movement, buckling under the pressure. And above it all, the voice, anchoring him to Aiqith with the grasp it wrapped around him, cold enough to press through his scales.

I am the dappled water reflecting on dark backs, it murmured. I am the pale light on black eyes. I am the hunger and the hunter; she who hides the predator and reveals the prey. Many-toothed and jagged-finned; she who brings death.

The merrow, swarming before him, ready to beat him down and carve understanding from his scales—the Seros that had been would kill them, would shred them to miserable scraps and feast on the delight, slaughter, massacre, victory.

The voice rose to a crescendo.

I am Abarossa, it roared. Thirteenth Goddess of Arroyo, singer of the ancient Song, and you will live!

Water exploded beneath his claws.

Seros surged forward, a current crackling to life and enveloping him, a hurricane born in an enclosed room—the merrow crashed back, flailing, as the water rebelled and the Song erupted into fury, discordant memories and thrashing chords. It threw him into the carved tunnel, past shattered rocks; tridents bounced off his scales and spells washed over his back but he was flying, faster than he thought he could move, shaking under the pressure.

He crashed into the wall and tore past it, slamming into narrow pathways for slender merrow that crumbled under his bulk. Windows, water, towers; everything and nothing and just hollow stone to shatter past.

Past the cage, into the city—the city, not the rubble and ruins of a pitch-shark's destruction, but something more. Underground, walls of stone in all directions, hollow dens. And merrow; green, blue, grey, teal, azure, emerald, turquoise, cyan, dozens, hundreds. The civilization that had stayed hidden; the one that had been destroyed.

They looked at him; shock pulled their humanoid features taut and they reached for weapons, for magic, light crackling over their fingers at the predator in their midst.

But the Song did not slow.

In the center of their hidden city, gold—the pillar of kelp, amber-gold, thrashing, contained, spiraling up to a hole in the rock. How they hid, what he had come to before their wretched magic had stolen his mind and awareness. The voice howled anew and the current sprang forward, Song intensifying into a cacophony, Seros blitzing past like lightning. Like the ascended thing on the fifth floor; like the mana of the Core; like power.

It threw him into the trap and pushed him up.

Gold flashed before his eyes much as it had before, when he'd chased a merrow's illusion and lost himself in the hunt. But now he could feel the currents, could sense the three that twined through the passageway, one up, one down, and one twisting into a hollow pocket of dead water for the capturing. Movement, rippling up behind him, merrow trying for the chase as their prisoner fled—but the Song howled, and he exploded out of the kelp like a storm.

Back to the dungeon, back to the Core—Seros swam without swimming as something pulled him, tugged him out of the depths and guided him up, spiraling, faster than he had ever moved before. There were no commands; his mana only asked, only shifted his focus to the currents and showed them where he would want to go, and they arranged themselves for him. The Song flooded his mind, the depths beyond and beneath and above, currents that had flowed for lifetimes, for centuries, since the Breaking of the World.

Through the cove, the incredible vastness that he could feel, close his eyes and hear the murmurs of the far corners and lives tucked in every wave. The voice had said he didn't know baitfish, though he knew well the swarm of silverheads and billowing clouds of prismatic dartfish. But now he knew why, with the far-off rustle of millions, lives dipping and dashing through open oceans and creating societies in their wakes, paroles of sharks and birds and larger beasts, living only through tenacity and gathered resilience. Then, far below, the seabed and all of its mysteries, from fallen ships of rotten wood and boulders cast from mountaintops, carcasses of age-old beasts and scuttling things pulling pale flesh from their bones.

How had he thought the cove empty?

How hadn't he seen?

Then– a pulse of water carved through the base of the mountains, a jagged tunnel that hummed with mana familiar and brilliant, with power.

Around his claws, the current died, back to a murmur and the memory of what had been. Seros floundered for a pitiful second before his tail straightened and his limbs shifted back into swimming, pulling him forward with methodical precision and none of the haste. His mind still burned.

Hurry, the voice rasped in his skull, exhausted and faint. I have shown you the sea—but I must speak to your dungeon.

The deal that had been made—freedom from captivity a part of it, yes, but a Song for a meeting.

Seros did not like these nameless things overhead, that called themselves powerful and forced the Core to bow its mighty head. They were not warriors; they were not dragons.

But this one—this Abarossa–

Perhaps he would allow this one leniency.

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