Once I was done thoroughly checking myself over, I reformed my scales, mentally wishing for myself to revert back to Vuthe’s form, something I discovered–much to my surprise and delight–to not require a mental image at all.
Probably because that was her original–or perhaps ‘true’–appearance.
Nodding to myself in satisfaction, I turned my attention to the more esoteric applications of shapeshifting. Forming arms into weapons, or turning myself from bipedal to quadrupedal, adjusting my body without a fixed appearance in mind.
This, I quickly learned, turned out to be a lot harder than everything else I’ve tried so far. I had a theory for that, of course. No matter what revision of Vuthe and her story you read, none mentioned the new draconic lore even once. And given Abyss’ words that this was a sort of hodge podge, plus extra, it could just very well be that the Vuthe in this interpretation just simply hadn’t ever made use of that ability. Hence, she also wouldn’t have the instincts for me to siphon off.
Having a fixed appearance was quite a lot easier, since it was just telling the body to reform entirely. But if you wanted to make small changes on the fly, you had to think more carefully, adjust things in ways that wouldn’t be as natural.
That meant that I would have to actually put some training in. Especially if I wanted to use this ability more aggressively in the future. Being able to change your shape during combat sounded majorly useful. And that meant finding some way to adapt the combat knowledge I had gotten from Vuthe to something entirely new. I wasn’t sure how well that would go, even with all the skill she, and now I, possessed.
Dismissing the latest version of an elongated arm, and returning to Vuthe’s hybrid form–I probably should stop calling everything ‘hers’, given that I was inhabiting her body now–I decided to try one last thing before I would go back to weapons and magickal training.
I wanted to see her–my–true form. The thought had me giddy to the point I was wondering if draconic instincts were influencing me. Although, to be fair, it could just be my own love for dragons.
And, compared to the exercises I had gone through over the last couple of minutes, this came to me immediately.
I barely had time to remember to dismiss the mirror, something I probably should’ve thought of sooner, when my body was once more engulfed by the impenetrable black smoke. The cloud that formed around me grew rapidly within seconds, ballooning outwards and into the form of a mighty beast.
I stretched, letting out a roar on instinct, the smoke trailing off my new form. Everything had happened so fast that I hadn’t even noticed how quickly my point of view had changed, growing higher and higher. I blew out a noseful of smoke, not from fire, but pure shadowstuff.
Flexing my muscles I craned my neck, taking in my new appearance.
I had always envisioned Vuthe as based off of a mix between a more traditional western dragon, and the frenzied flagship of my favourite game series. And I had to say, this beat all my expectations by a landslide.
With a wingspan of roughly a hundred meters (328 feet), and a length from snout to tail of just short of seventy (230 feet), she wasn’t the largest dragon out there. Hells, she wasn’t even the largest in her own friend group, even if you discounted Tizanta who, as a Serpent, was larger than dragons on average anyway.
Despite this, she was probably the most dangerous looking. Sharp scales of a deep obsidian, powerful legs, a long tail adorned with a massive blade at the tip, wings sporting razorsharp claws at the joint, and a serpentine neck leading all the way to a head straight out of a dinosaur movie–an impression only intensified by the four, forward growing horns easily larger than the average adult humanoid.
The most imposing part, though, were her wings. Large and jetblack, hosting a faint purple colouration that somehow managed to glow with sheer power instead of light, and membranes that didn’t so much end as turn into wafting waves of shadowstuff, giving them an ethereal quality.
Finally, although I couldn’t see it right now, I knew she had glowing purple irises that held all the weight and presence of a being who had ascended to divinity.
I could feel the massive hearts inside my chest beat faster at the thrill I felt, before I slowly folded in my wings, instinctively taking hold of my shoulders with my wing claws, causing my wing membranes to cover my back like a cape. That was probably my favourite design detail of the monster that had served as inspiration.
Raising my neck, I looked around, marveling at the freedom of movement I had despite my large size. Of course, dragons could move quite fast if they wanted to, magick permitting just about everything if correctly applied. But I was still a bit surprised by how easily I found it to adapt to this new form of mine.
Really, a part of me just wanted to take flight and enjoy myself a little, but I knew that that would be a bad idea. Even if I were to disregard that someone might see a mighty dragon take flight, the city might be big, but it wasn’t so big as to allow this form any sort of space if I wanted to remain within the borders for now.
So, with a sigh of disappointment, having proven my capabilities, I dismissed my draconic form, returning to the hybrid one I had woken up in. The cloud of black smoke surrounded me yet again, and seconds later I shrunk back to a more reasonable size.
Definitely would want to give the dragon form a go later, though. Once I had decided to leave this place.
I nodded to myself in satisfaction, having proved all the capabilities I should possess at least in principle. I had already made up my mind to spend most of my time training and adapting to the knowledge just waiting to be transferred, at the very least until the month was up and the mystery visitor would finally show herself.
For the moment, however, I decided to turn my attention to other matters. Specifically, information gathering.
While I found it unlikely that I would find all the answers I was looking for without leaving the city proper, I at least wanted to get a start on what exactly had happened. And, considering the state of the majority of the city, I figured that the best way would be to go through the latest documents in the palace.
Truth be told, I still felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of going through the more personal spaces, but even I realised that I could only placate myself with meaningless gestures for so long before the reality of the situation necessitated more direct measures, if I wanted to get a proper grip on things.
It was a bit of a gamble, really. It could very well be that, towards the end, Vuthe and friends hadn’t had the time to note everything down. Depending on how quickly the end approached, I could very well imagine that they were far too preoccupied trying to protect the capital and the nearby cities.
But even if that were to be the case, I hoped that at least some of the older documents might have survived. Documents from before the immediate conflict, given that the war was supposed to have lasted for millennia in nearly all revisions of the story.
I kept my steps steady, but without a hurry. It wasn’t like I was short on time, and despite everything, the city still was quite awe inspiring to watch. It made me wonder just what it would have looked like before. Of course, I had my mental image of it, but that was a bit of a vague thing. A city wasn’t as easy to envision as it was a character.
Arriving back at the top of the stairs, I slowly made my way through the front gate and into the palace. The building itself was, as I had noted prior, mostly intact, which gave me hope that the royal library was still in one piece. And even if it wasn’t, perhaps Tizanta’s study would be able to help.
Given that the former was closer, I decided to check that one first.
Arriving at the massive doors to the throne room I stopped, turning to the right and walking along the hallway leading further in. Given that I had never specifically given a proper description of the place, I was mostly guessing where I had to go, although I had, at the very least, come up with a rough draft of where things generally should be. If only so I could keep things consistent while writing.
As was to be expected, though, the rough draft wasn’t really sufficient.
It took me roughly half an hour, if I had to guess, plus and minus maybe fifteen minutes, before I finally found signs of the library. The only thing I had ever truly settled on when it came to the library was the design of the doors, inspired by… I couldn’t quite remember. Some design I had seen somewhere, although I was blanking on the details.
I stopped in front of the doors, far smaller than the one leading to the throne room, but still impressive in their own right. Taking a moment, I gently traced the outline of the carvings in the wood, before I put my hand against the material and softly pushed.
The door opened without any apparent complaints.
Inside I found a rather large room, although smaller than I would’ve expected to see for a collection of knowledge reaching back millennia. Of course, part of the reason was the access to magickal infrastructure that Thelvadore had, due to the various magickal craftsmen in its employ.
Magickal infrastructure, mind you, I wasn’t even sure I could properly access anymore. And, given that the layout of the library was entirely alien to me, I would likely have to spend some time going through everything. I sighed at that. Even if my assumption about sleep was, indeed, correct, this would still cut rather deeply into my time reserves.
If only I had someone here to help me…
Silence reigned for a long moment, only interrupted nearly a minute later when the sound of a slap rang out.
I was a fucking idiot.
Taking a very deep breath, resisting the urge to facepalm a second time, I shook my head.
I didn’t have anyone else here. Hells, even if Abyss was listening to me, it was unlikely that she would dane to accommodate my requests for help going through a library, the contents of which she likely already knew by heart.
But I didn’t need that. Because I was inhabiting the body of Shade Dragon Vuthe de Thal, Dragon Queen of Thelvadore, Arch-Sorceress, and expert in all things shadow magick.
I swallowed the embarrassment of having forgotten the one aspect of shadow sorcery that had laid the groundwork for the character as a whole. Namely, the ability to conjure up shadowstuff. Something that, no matter how far back you went, has always been part of Vuthe in the various renditions of the story.
It had been the first ability I had ever given Vuthe. Directly followed by the ability to shape said shadowstuff into an army of clones. In fact, it was that foundational ability that had laid the groundwork for the lore surrounding her title of ‘Living Nightmare’.
I sighed again.
“Sometimes my incompetence is truly frightening.”
Waving a hand, and drawing upon my instinctual knowledge of all things Shadow magick–something that had only gotten easier, ever since I began playing around with it–I summoned up a handful of shadow clones. It barely took any effort on my end, although that also meant that these clones were not suitable for any physically demanding tasks.
They looked to be a perfect copy of myself, to the point that Vuthe had often used this ability during her time in the guild to sow confusion and chaos, but each of them were only about as strong as a teenager, perhaps a young adult.
I could, potentially, make them solid and powerful enough to be a match with me when it came to physical prowess. But that would demand orders of magnitude more mana and concentration, something I currently wasn’t confident in, to the point of not being a feasible application against anyone of gold rank or higher. Even if I kept it to one clone at a time.
The thought distracted me idly. Would ranks even exist in this version? It had been an experimental thing during my attempts to revise the story, but only during some of the versions. Really, it was only really relevant for one version of the story, which included a version of Rin, that being the name Vuthe held prior to her being reincarnated as a dragon on Satien, that had been reborn on a world with a game-like system.
An idea I had ultimately scrapped, considering that the whole idea behind the different versions of Vuthe was fundamentally breaking all rules about souls and their uniqueness. Probably the biggest fuck up in continuity that the story had suffered.
Aaaanyway. Back to the topic at hand.
Each shadow clone wasn’t particularly powerful, but they were more than sufficient to handle simple tasks. Like going through a library and looking for any texts that might have to do with the history of the continent and country I was currently on.
They could work somewhat autonomously, although the clones themselves did not have any consciousness of their own. It was more a semi-subconscious remote control of conjured shadowstuff constructs. Rather complex, but not really all that difficult for someone on Vuthe’s level.
I glanced around, watching the half dozen or so clones wander off to fulfil their duty. Even with this it would take me some time. Better not slack off.
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