SilverSidhe

This is one of my favorite chapters 😊

Kaz picked up the knife given to him by his Aunt Rega as she lay dying. She told him it had belonged to Kaz’s father, Ghazt, though Kaz didn’t remember ever seeing it before. Still, Kaz treasured it, not only because it reminded him of Rega and Ghazt, but because it was impossibly sharp and sturdy.

Recently, when he found the storage cavern full of the mosui’s most precious items, he had realized that his knife was made of adamantium, or at least an adamantium alloy, and he had learned from an elderly kobold warrior that folding metal repeatedly as it was forged removed impurities and made the metal much stronger than it would otherwise be.

The wavy pattern in the blade of his knife showed that it had been forged this way, which made it valuable not only to him, but to anyone else who saw it. That made him wary of showing it to anyone, especially his fellow kobolds, who would do almost anything to gain such an item for their own tribe.

Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz set the almost invisibly fine edge of the blade to the gleaming surface of the egg, ready to cut it in half, but stopped when Li whistled sharply. A picture came into his mind, of himself placing the orb into his own mouth, uncut.

Kaz lifted the knife away, staring at Li. “This could make you stronger,” he told her, but she turned her head away, deliberately closing her eyes.

Another image formed, of a sneaky little dragon squeezing into alcoves all over the city while a blue kobold lazily slept the night away. One after another, crystals vanished from their places, and the dragon grew larger and larger until she couldn’t fit into the small spaces any more.

Kaz huffed a laugh, laying down the knife and rubbing his eyes. “I knew you were eating the ones nearby, but you’ve been sneaking out while I slept?”

Self-satisfied affirmation. Li yawned again, curling around her own tail as she turned her back to him. Another image of blue kobold eating white egg, as a golden dragon’s belly swelled with crystals. Li was so, so full, she couldn’t eat this egg as well.

He shook his head. Just a moment ago, she had been eyeing his crystals as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks, and now she was too full to have even a small part of the ki-rich egg? He didn’t believe it for a moment, but he was grateful nonetheless. He couldn’t eat the things she could, but his body had been telling him since he first saw one of these eggs that it would help him grow.

Gently, he reached out and stroked her back, scratching the itchy spot beneath her wing, where he could see the pale gleam of scales getting ready to be shed. His little friend was growing rapidly, and if he didn’t want her to leave him behind, he should do the same.

Picking up the egg, he dropped it into his mouth, where he crunched it between sharp teeth. Fluid gushed out, along with something small and crunchy that wriggled for a moment before he bit down again. He closed his eyes as he swallowed, and ki overwhelmed him.

For the first time since he truly understood that what he saw as his core was actually only a picture conjured by his mind, he was drawn into that image unintentionally. There, he saw the four layers that made up his core, swirling wildly with ki. Usually, gold was the dominant color, with white, black, and red in lesser amounts, while threads of blue wound through it like sapphire veins.

Now both black and white fought with gold for dominance, but to his relief it wasn’t the aggressive and damaging sort of battle that took place in the cores of female kobolds who ingested cores contaminated by fulan. In fact, he had a feeling that if he simply gave it time, the ki would settle out into some new normal, which might allow him to produce more ki each time his core cycled, or might simply give him more ki to work with for some limited time.

Either way, he had hoped for more, and he remembered Lianhua eating the thing she called a cultivation pill. It had filled her with ki, which she compressed and used to force herself into the next level of body cultivation, healing her wounds in the process. He thought she must have already been close to advancing, and it certainly hadn’t seemed to be a comfortable process, but it was clearly worthwhile.

Reaching out with his mind, Kaz caught his core in a mental grip, much as he had done with the corrupted core that he excised from Ehlan. He pressed down, forcing the image of his core into a smaller space. At first, he was careful, afraid that he would press too hard and crack it again, but as soon as he took hold of it he could tell that it was far stronger than it had been before. His constant, habitual compression, and occasional need to force it to produce more ki as needed, had worked together to make the material it was made of into something much denser than the brittle substance it had been when he left his tribe.

Slowly, he squeezed harder and harder, soon finding it difficult to continue. The fresh black and white ki from the egg seemed to fight back, churning within his hold, like a wild creature trapped in a cage. For a moment, Kaz almost felt sorry for it, he and his friends having so recently been in a similar position, but then he reminded himself that this ki would soon be part of him, one way or another, and there was no way to free it now, even if he wanted to.

With renewed determination, he pressed down again, seeing the colors inside his core deepen into saturated shades so dark they were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Then something gave, and he almost jerked back, releasing it, but there was no pain, like when he broke his core last time. No, if anything, this was a relief, like he had had a muscle cramp for so long that he had almost forgotten about it, and now it had finally relaxed.

The relief of that yielding was so great that he almost let go again, feeling like he had achieved as much as he could, but he hesitated as he felt something else watching him. Turning his head, he saw Li hovering there, in her full draconic glory, without even the fuzzy outline of a fuergar that was all the illusion ring she wore could convince him to see. In a moment, the dragon’s self-image took over, and she swelled: doubling, tripling, then growing to a size where she could reach out and cover his own hand with her taloned paw.

Very, very carefully, she squeezed, and Kaz spasmed as another of those knots released, and then another. The barest hint of what his physical body felt reached him, though, and he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. Too hard, and too fast, too much at once. If he went on, even that partially refined muscle might burst, and everything he had done would be lost as he slipped into death.

And Kaz was in no way ready to join his ancestors.

Li seemed to come to the same conclusion, because she shrank back to only slightly larger than her actual size, though she didn’t disappear from his consciousness again. Instead, she hovered there, wings beating lazily, as Kaz cautiously released his core.

Ki flooded out, inundating his body with more power in general than it was used to, and far more black and white ki in particular. His body shivered in a way the frigid hoyi nest hadn’t been able to cause, but his heart gradually settled down into a new rhythm, slower but at the same time more robust than before, as if each beat could contain and then push out the entirety of the blood in his body. That was impossible, of course, and yet he was certain that the organ was beating no more than once when it would have had time for two before, but he didn’t feel weak or breathless at all. In fact, he felt better than he ever had in his life.

This time, when he shifted to look at the image of his core, it was entirely intentional, and when he arrived, he found the dragon already there. She was circling his core, peering at it with golden eyes that sparkled with blue, black, and white, and she gave him a very smug look before fading from view.

Kaz sent her amusement, which was met with a very firm feeling of ‘tired dragon, do not disturb’, so he moved on to see the results of his efforts. The first change was very obvious, and made Kaz happier than he would have thought possible. The handprint that Nucai had left when he compressed Kaz’s shattered core back into a whole was now far less noticeable. The fingertips were still visible as long oval depressions, but the rest of the fingers were almost entirely smoothed out, and the shape of the palm was less defined.

Beyond that, the silvery rivers of mana that had remained to mark the surface were narrower. Before, some of them had been almost as wide as Nucai’s fingermarks, but now Kaz doubted any were wider than his own fingers, which were much smaller. The colors the compressed mana separated were more saturated as well, especially the black and white, which gleamed with a light of their own, rather than the lambent luminescence of the entirety.

Delving beneath the surface, Kaz realized what had caused the sensations of release. Several of the larger remnants of the mana shell had dissolved, allowing the ki within to separate into the surrounding core. There were sparkles of silver in isolated areas where he remembered the leaden gray masses, and even as he watched, the swirling flow of ki carried some of them away, out into his channels.

The next layer, that of pure, unadulterated core, he found closer to the surface than before. There, the colors mingled as they were meant to, flowing almost playfully around each other, though again, the black and white seemed both more common and more saturated than they used to be.

He had learned by now to be very careful when passing beyond this relatively safe zone, and when he looked deeper, into the empty area surrounding the seed, he was glad he had. The force pulling him toward the gleaming golden seed hanging there was stronger than it had been last time he looked, and even more gold earth ki was draining away from the rest of his core. Fortunately, he was also producing more ki with each cycle, but if half of his earth ki had been vanishing into the seed before, now he thought it might be closer to three parts out of five, perhaps even a bit more.

Not for the first time, Kaz worried what would happen if the seed took all of his gold ki. He was fairly certain that the other four colors were enough to keep him alive, but he would be significantly weaker, since nearly half of his total ki was earth. Perhaps it was time to find a way to cut away or destroy the seed? Or maybe he should just leave it here in the city when he and the humans left for the Deep.

Something in him rebelled at the thought, though, and he decided to wait a little longer. He thought that the seed itself was changing as it took in his ki, and he still wanted to know what would happen if he somehow managed to fill it. If it started absorbing his other colors of ki, or disrupting rather than enhancing the flow inside his core, he would do something about it, but for now?

For now, this was good enough.

Opening his eyes, Kaz tried to sit up, but his body trembled as the muscles in his abdomen tightened. A spasm shook him, then another, and he curled on his side as an inexorable pressure rose in the back of his throat. His jaws stretched wide as a flood of black gunk spewed from his muzzle, spreading over the stone floor. Hacking and choking, Kaz curled around his belly, expunging more of the impurities his body had taken in since his birth.

Beside him, Li, who had been curled up nearby, scurried out of the path of the foulness, which trickled slowly toward her. A rancid stench rose up, and Kaz, too, attempted to shift out of the way, though he suddenly felt as if he had only imagined the power filling his body moments before. This was far worse than the last time he went through this, and his body was wracked with convulsions as it struggled to expel more filth.

When there was finally nothing left to vomit out, Kaz found himself lying splayed on his back, arms and legs spread wide. A narrowing black streak led to his current position, which was several feet from the pool lurking on the floor where he had originally laid. There was far less of the putrid sediment than he would have guessed, and he could have held it all in his cupped palms if he was so foolish as to attempt to do so.

The room stank, but Kaz was entirely unable to do anything about it. Weakly, he thought it would be nice if he had one of the yumi-fluff stuffed pillows the husede had given him, but they were all the way across the room. He sighed, closing his eyes, and had very nearly drifted into exhausted sleep when something soft pressed against his ear.

Blinking, Kaz rolled his head to the side, and his muzzle came to rest on the soft thing, which he could now see was one of the pillows he had just been wishing for. A small, but not tiny, dragon was pulling it, her teeth ripping little holes in the fabric, allowing bits of beige fluff to poke out. She tugged again, and a few pieces of the soft stuff escaped, poofing into the air and then coming down to rest on golden scales. The dragon sneezed sharply, once, twice, then returned to her efforts. A small trail of debris showed just how far she had dragged the thing, which was easily four times her own size.

Smiling, Kaz managed to roll over, lifting his head enough to lay it on the pillow. This left quite a bit of the poofy surface unoccupied, and Li climbed onto it, her weight barely denting it as she curled up beside his head. Then she sniffed, wrinkled her snout, and moved further away, though she didn’t quite vacate the pillow entirely.

They slept.