More than One Thousand Years Ago.
The [Great Abyssal Mother] lay dead at my feet, and I was annoyed.
I held my hand outstretched, fingers still curled from the [Greater Silence] that had ended her. The corpse stretched so far across the cavern floor that its large tail vanished into the dark beyond the reach of my sight. The beast had had twelve heads and now they lay splayed in every direction, each one larger than a boulder, each set of jaws frozen mid snarl. They never would again. The teeth alone were taller than most of my generals.
Around the beast, the remains of my horde littered the ground like so many fallen rainstones. Hellhounds lay in heaps, their bodies broken and strewn across one another. Imps had been crushed flat and a full regiment of Fiends -two hundred strong- had been reduced to a smear of viscera along the far wall.
It was truly a waste of my time. Only slaying a God would have let me get more experience points now. I lowered my hand and turned, regarding the man behind me.
"Zarvok."
The demon stood twenty paces behind me, leaning on his warhammer. Even leaning, he towerred over me. Zarvok was ten feet of red skin and muscle, broad enough to block the cavern tunnel entrance behind him. His warhammer was larger still, a slab of black iron on a shaft of bone that he dragged across the ground when he walked. The drag marks it left were a reliable way to track his movements through my fortress. He was also bleeding from his skull, and somewhere beneath his chestplate, if the steady dripping was any indication.
"Your Royal Darkness," he rumbled. His voice was deep enough to feel in the stone. "The beast proved more tenacious than the scouts suggested. Its ninth head alone accounted for-"
"Zarvok." He stopped. "I gave you three hundred soldiers and half a day. This creature has been nesting in my lower tunnels for a week. You could not manage this yourself?"
The giant shifted his weight. Even that small movement made the ground tremble. He had the good sense not to answer immediately. "The Abyssal Mother's regeneration was -if Your Darkness would permit me the observation- rather beyond the pale. Each head, once severed, returned larger than before. It was as though death itself recoiled from her and, finding nowhere else to go, simply-"
"Zarvok." I had not permitted him his observation.
"Yes, my Queen?"
"Shut up."
He shut up. I turned back to the corpse and regarded it one final time. I had campaigns to plan and a border war with the Elven Dominion to prosecute, and at least three generals who needed executing. I did not have time to clean up after-
There was a sound. It was small enough that it should have been swallowed by the silence. The sound was a wet, and keening thing. It came from beneath the Abyssal Mother’s bulk, where the massive body curved against the cavern wall. I paused.
"My Queen?" Zarvok took a step forward.
I raised a hand and he stopped. My gaze found the source. There was a nest. It was crude -made from bones and the shed scales of the mother, pressed together into a hollow against the wall. Inside it, half buried in the remnants of a shattered leathery egg, was a hydra.
It was no larger than the smallest hellhound. Three heads sat atop three thin necks, each one barely longer than my forearm. Its scales were dark and slick with the fluid of its birth. Its eyes -six of them- were open and fixed on me.
I stepped toward it. My mana answered before I called, settling into my right hand. The [Balefire] would be simplest. It would leave nothing to clean up later -there would not even be ash. Hydras were rather cumbersome to deal with if given the chance to grow. The creature would flee, perhaps best to vaporize it before it had the chance to. The creature did not flee. All three heads watched me with an intensity that bordered on absurd for something so small. Its body was trembling, though whether from cold or from the aftershock of its mother's death, I could not say.
"Well?" I said. "Attack me or run, death lies either way." It did not attack, nor did it run. "Your mother tried. She failed, obviously, but she tried. Surely you can manage the same."
The hydra's central head lowered. It pressed itself flat against the nest, its small body drawn tight. The other two heads followed. It lay there, watching me, and did not move. I held the [Balefire] ready. One thought was all it would take.
"Perhaps the fool child believes you are its mother, my Queen."
I turned and stared at Zarvok. The giant had the decency to look uncertain about having spoken. "Its mother," I said flatly, "lies dead behind me." Was the fool blind? Zarvok was a great many things, and intelligent had never been among them.
"Indeed, Your Darkness…and yet the hatchling does not run." He paused, and the thoughtful look on his face was one I had not asked for. "Zera would say the creature has chosen. Beasts do, sometimes, when they are too young to know better. They fix upon the first powerful thing they see, and they do not let go."
"Your sister's expertise in rearing beasts is noted and unwelcome."
The hydra had not moved. I looked down at it. It looked back up at me. Its six eyes were a deep, unremarkable black. I considered.
A hydra was no dragon, but it was closer to one than most beasts would ever be. [The Great Abyssal Mother] had destroyed three hundred of my soldiers before I had ended her. That was the bloodline of this thing. This, raised under proper direction, trained from birth - it might grow into something formidable. Trained by me, perhaps it could one day swat the greatest Dragon from the sky.
It was a strategic consideration. That was-
Something stabbed behind my eyes. A pressure, dull and heavy, bearing down on the inside of my skull. The Class. I felt it pull, the way it always pulled -toward the efficient choice, the correct choice, the one the world had written for me and everything around me. The hatchling was a loose end, and it had no place in the world’s story.
I gritted my teeth. My mana flared and I pushed back. The pressure did not relent, but it did not grow. It sat there, insistent. It could wait, it had always been able to wait longer than I could fight. I fought anyway. I clenched my jaw and it ached from the clenching. The [Balefire] guttered and died in my hand.
"My Queen?" Zarvok's voice was careful.
I knelt. The motion was stiff. The hydra flinched, then settled. Its central head rose, just slightly, and pressed its snout against my knuckle. Its scales were cool and damp. The beast had no name, not yet. Someday, the [System] would name it, if it became formidable on its own. There was only one other way to give it a proper name.
I opened my mouth and named it. The cavern faded, and the name faded with it.
The first thing I felt was warmth. The gentle warm of the thing that sat against my chest, pulsing in a slow rhythm. A twin to my own heartbeat. It was the egg, I knew at once. The remnant of the beast I had unmade and remade. I knew it, without needing to look. My arms were curled around it. My fingers had locked in place, and when I tried to move them now, every joint in my body complained.
There was something else, so very faint. The residue of a dream, perhaps? It had been a long time since I had dreamed of anything at all. I reached for it with my tired mind and found nothing. All I found was an impression of something that had once been important. The feeling faded before I could chase it further. I let it go, though some part of me did not wish to. I opened my eyes.
There was light, and entirely too much of it. I was forced to squint at first. The shutters were open, and the sun pressed against my face. I squinted until the room took shape around me. It was Martha’s hut, and this was my bed. There was a lantern on the table, burned to nothing.
I started to tally my injuries. The burns along my arms were a tender pink. My skin was new in places. I reached for my horns. They seemed perfectly fine. I reached on my hair. It was a little thin in places, and altogether too short, but that was better than I had expected. The Cradle mark pulsed on my left arm. A single white Line now, not a Spark. I felt the drain of mana from it. The drain was so very faint.
I tried to sit up. My ribs informed me this was inadvisable. I sat up anyway and that was when I saw the girl.
Sara sat on the floor near the door, her legs crossed beneath her. She had a stick, and she was drawing shapes in a thin layer of dirt. How the child had managed to bring so much dirt inside was a mystery. Why the child was even here in the first place was a greater mystery by far.
She noticed me before I could arrange my face into something appropriate. Her head snapped up and the stick froze. We stared at each other.
There was a bowl next to her. It was stew, from the smell of it. Even from here, I could tell that it had gone cold. She must have been here for some time, then. Sara picked up the bowl with both hand and held it toward me. She did not stand, nor did she speak. It took me a second to realize what this was.
“I do not need to be nursed, child.”
The girl did not move and the bowl stayed exactly where it was.
“I am perfectly capable of feeding myself when I choose to.” She did not react. “You may leave the bowl and go. That is acceptable.”
Sara’s arms did not waver. The girl looked the same as Martha had, on that very first day. My stomach growled, and it was a treacherous, craven sound. I took the bowl. The stew was cold as I had guessed. Nonetheless, I ate.
I ate in silence and Sara watched me. When I finished, she took the bowl from my hands, set it beside the door, and returned to her patch of dirt. She resumed drawing without a word. I did not know what she was drawing. It looked like little more than pointlessly meandering lines.
She did not leave and I did not ask her to again. The egg pulsed against my chest. I held it closer.
Ash arrived shortly after. She came through the door, walking on her tiptoes for some strange reason.
When she saw me upright, she stopped. Her eyes moved over me and something in her face shifted. Relief, perhaps, or something adjacent to it that I did not care to examine. There were deep shadows beneath her eyes. She did not come to me first.
“Sara,” Ash said, kneeling beside the girl. Her voice was warm. “You’ve been here since morning?”
The girl nodded. “Thank you for watching over her.” Ash placed a hand on Sara’s head. The girl beamed. I watched this exchange and felt something settle in my chest. It was not envy. The Demon Queen did not envy. That would be absurd.
Ash rose and turned to me and our eyes met. “You’re up,” she said.
I waited for the lecture, for I was sure to receive one no doubt. Heroes always loved their lectures, even when they were the greatest fools themselves. It did not come. Ash looked at me, and the absence of the lecture was somehow sharper still.
So, I broke the silence first. “How long?” I asked.
“Three days.”
Three days -I had lost three days. The Inker had given us seven, and we had already spent one, which meant-
“We have three days left,” Ash said. “The village is fine. Most of the damage was to the square and the northern huts. Nobody…” She paused. “Nobody died.”
“I did not ask.” Something inside of me unclenched.
Ash nodded, and then she touched Sara’s shoulder. “Come on Sara. Let’s let her rest. You can come back later, okay?”
I did not give her the permission to decide. I did not say this. The girl rose, collected her stick, and followed. At the door, she turned back and looked at me. It was just for a moment, and then she was gone. I sat in the quiet with the egg in my arms.
The shell was smooth under my fingers, smoother than any stone I had touched in this world. It was warm too. It gave off a gentle warmth, the kind that pressed back when I pressed in. I could feel the pulse through the shell. It was slow and it did not match my own heartbeat, though the two seemed to drift toward one another when I held still long enough.
I turned the egg over in my hands, slowly. There were strange markings in the gold -fine veins that caught the light as I moved it. Most of the shell was that deep gold, clean and bright. Most of it.
The rest of the shell was covered in black lines, thin as hair, tracing lines near the base of the egg. I ran my thumb across one. The black line was cooler than all the gold around it, just barely. It was a tiny difference, so slight that I might have imagined it, had I not been looking for it.
I frowned, and then pushed the Cradle's warmth toward it, just the barest thread of mana through my left hand. The gold around the vein brightened, until it seemed to shine. The black vein itself did not change. Whatever corruption lingered there, it sat deeper than I could reach. Perhaps it would fade on its own or perhaps it would not. There was no way to know, not with my current understanding of things.
I did not try to use the Requiem. The thought had almost crossed my mind and I dismissed it before it had fully formed. The risk was obvious. One did not use the power of decay on something one intended to keep alive. Something one intended to keep alive…when had I decided that?
I held the egg up and examined it in the light, slowly turning it in my hands. It was heavy enough to feel substantial in my hands, but not so heavy that holding it was a burden. Whatever creature lay inside the egg was growing, slowly but surely.
It would be a phoenix, presumably -or what remained of one. I had never seen a phoenix egg before. Never seen a phoenix either, until recently. They were creatures spoken of in old texts that even I could not verify. I had assumed they were nothing more than superstition. What hatched from this egg might bear no resemblance to the beast that had attacked the village. Or it might bear every resemblance.
I turned that thought over, even as some part of it bit at me. If the corruption returned, if the beast that came forth from this egg had four broken wings, then I would deal with it. I had ended the mother and I could certainly end the child. I looked at the egg and the thought rang hollow, even inside my own skull.
I set the egg down on the bed beside me. It was sensible to keep it there. My arms ached, and there was no tactical reason to hold this thing while I slept. The egg sat there beside me -its shell almost glowing under the light that came in from the window. I hesitated, and then I reached over to pick it up, gently.
This was a practical matter. The bed was slightly uneven, and the egg might roll. After all of the trouble I had gone through, it would be a waste to have the thing fall over.
I held it against my chest and closed my eyes. The warmth settled over me, and the pulse pressed gently against my ribs. I checked on the egg three times before I slept.