Dragonheart Core

Chapter 2: The Mountain's Maw

I awoke to knowledge.

It was a strange sort, like remembering conversations I knew I'd never had. Old memories of deep stone and pressing darkness flooded through me, information about mana and the formation of life I'd never learned before. If I thought of air I could still remember currents under my wings, the bite of cold easterlies; I also remembered finding openings in caves by breezes through the rock, the pressing importance of keeping caverns full of oxygen.

The sensation was strange enough it took me several minutes to notice my own corpse.

I wasn't looking with eyes, though I remembered having them—faint wisps of mana floated out of me and whatever they touched I could see, brushing against the dark stone of the mountain and whispering through patches of grass. But beyond that, below me, a great dragon's corpse cooled against the rock.

Gods, even dead I was gorgeous—lowly sky-drakes were pale blue and the whelpings that lived in the forest could be a mossy green, but only the sea-drakes were the deep, rich teal that so gleamed under the sun. Even smote against the mountainside, dust settling over scales and silver horns broken and cracked, it glittered with perfection.

No, not it. Me.

My attention wavered.

I was a dragon. I knew that. Idiotic cowards had killed me but I had refused to die, had cast the one magic all dragons feared but knew, had ripped out my own heart–

Mana drifted backwards, resting on its source, and I could see what I had become.

A scarlet sphere, interlaced with streaks of black like veined marble, sat nestled in the embrace between two boulders. Blood traced its path away from the corpse where shreds of mana had ripped it from my chest, transforming it even as I fell, flawlessly round and riddled with runes shaped of pure mana. I peered deeper.

Dragonheart Core

You are a Dungeon Core, awoken from a dragon's dying wish for revenge. Your birth symbolizes the arrival of a new dungeon to be created. Through you, mana from the Otherworld flows and is yours to command, bringing many miracles within your grasp. Thank the Gods for your life by revitalizing the world around you and bringing life to lands starved of new mana.

As a Dragonheart Core, all of your creations will be your hoard, absorbing mana from you to fuel their strength and evolutions. You may Name creatures by bonding their soul with yours, letting them draw the same Otherworld mana as you and granting them a blessing. All dead things within your walls will be yours to rebuild.

Awoken from a dragon's dying wish?

My mana swirled as I beheld the difference I could already feel—my memories of a life cresting the high seas, gathering silver to languish on and hunting fools who dared challenge me, were fading. They still existed and though I clung desperately to each, able to pull them up and relive the pull of ocean currents on my tail and the rasp of polishing my claws, they no longer were the memories I saw first.

Old instincts of a life I'd never lived came instead, of cavernous underground lakes and the scuttle of bats and lizards. The memories of a dungeon.

I had been a dragon and my mind was still my own—but now I was only a dragon's heart, and a core first. A core with instincts that came from the gods themselves, guides for an impossible life. It urged me to dig deep, to gather the most vicious of monsters to protect myself, to release tamed mana into the world.

A lizard padded through my awareness.

I broke off, mana settling around the new arrival. A little under three feet long and covered in pebbled blue-grey scales, it poked its head cautiously out from a gap in the stone, blinking eyes hooded to protect from the sun. It flicked out a pale tongue, gauging the risk, before fully emerging and beginning to crawl down.

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Towards my corpse.

Dungeon instincts be damned; I roared, gathering my mana. The lizard paused, glanced around, and nosed under a few broken scales to reveal the silver-pink skin underneath. Its fangs flashed.

It was a uniquely horrifying thing to watch someone eat you.

I rained mana down on its back, great spikes of raw power that would have killed gods had they been tangible, but the lizard continued to feast. Instincts wormed their way past my rage and I pieced together the worst of it—I was a dungeon core. Outside of a dungeon, claimed and under my control, my power was almost nothing.

I could only sit as a rock and watch my mana diffuse past my control.

The instincts, now that I'd given them a moment to exist, flooded in full force—overwhelming fear at the open sky above, almost cripplingly so. Dungeons were never supposed to be exposed and I was entirely so, unable to contain my mana as it drifted away. Anyone could bind me.

The lizard paused from its vile, rotten actions and glanced up, tail twitching. My mana hadn't extended far enough to sense what it had, but soon echoes bounced down the mountain, only whispers reaching my cloud of awareness. Some sort of thick, brutish human tongue, intelligible like its species–

A strand of mana flickered back to me, pressing over my core, and their garbled speech became words.

"–if he killed it, I don't see why he couldn't bring it back," someone said with a grumble. "It isn't like he's going to let us keep anything."

"Shut up!" Another voice barked, clipped and scared. "Don't say that where he could hear you."

A power I'd certainly never had as a dragon—really quite a fascinating one, actually, would I be able to understand every language I came across?—but absolutely not the most important thing right now.

Humans.

Nasty, murdering, cowardly humans, ones coming to take my beautiful body down to the man who had killed me, to pose over my stolen hoard and my glorious treasure–

I was seconds from throwing the entirety of my mana down the mountain to murder the vermin when the lizard moved.

It crouched, splaying flat over the ground until its pebbled scales blended with the stone of the mountain. Eyes wide and panicked, it left my body and made to disappear back into the crack of the mountain it'd come from, fleeing from the humans.

The humans that were coming.

A dragon raged and roared, never accepting any slight against it and destroying all in its path, ripping kingdoms down to foundations and burning what was left. They were the apex predator of the skies and seas.

But dungeon cores were built of fear.

If a human found me here, exposed without any creations to protect me, they could bind me to them. They wouldn't have to be the highest ranked of all Aiqith, just any scum off the street with the capacity for complex thought. My endless rift of mana pulled from the Otherworld would be theirs, my soul contracted to aid them, gutless as a puppet. I would be caged.

So instead I gathered my mana, the swirling, spinning mess already trying to escape my control, and surrounded the lizard. It paused, sensing my power—I pressed with all my might, clawing into its mind. Pick me up.

The mountainside echoed with the force of my command.

The lizard hesitantly looked out at the rippling waves of the cove just a few feet away, at the voices still approaching. I found an actual spiral of its innate mana, marking it at least a step above most mundane creatures, and forced my words into its insipid little mind. Pick me up.

Slowly, it crawled back towards me. I was tiny, I realized quite suddenly—though the lizard was less than a foot tall it towered over me, lantern-yellow eyes filling my awareness. It gingerly picked me up in its mouth.

Dungeon cores weren't meant to move except under their own power. I shuddered, mana collapsing and spluttering, as the lizard gripped me between its fangs and scuttled back into the mountain just as a human appeared at the edge of my mana cloud.

Darkness– the lizard wriggled through limestone smoothed by waves and emerged into a cavern, sprawling and massive. My mana only had seconds to expand but I could sense other living creatures, from mushrooms to bats to moss; but there was still sunlight from other cracks in the cavern walls. The humans could still find me.

The lizard continued on.

It scuttled over the stone floor, big enough it didn't have to worry about hiding from other small cavern predators, disappearing through another crack in the far wall. A tunnel slithered on beyond that, my mana furiously expanding as I tried to understand what I was seeing. The lizard plodded ever on. I could only catch the faint feeling of stone and lichen before I was pulled along, blind, the only constant the click of claws against rock.

We traveled for hundreds of feet, deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain. My mana heaved and trembled before the lizard wriggled through one last opening in the stone and came to a stop.

If I'd still had lungs I would have been panting; cores weren't meant to move, their mana rooting them deep into their environment, and certainly not for as far as I'd gone. The horrible taste of lost mana filled me, shreds and scattered waves I'd lost in our frantic retreat. I shuddered. I'd never realized how lucky living creatures were to have permanent eyes.

Slowly I managed to unravel more mana from my core, billowing it out in great sheets to be able to see—the lizard dropped me in the back of the cave, padding away. Good riddance. I hated the concept that I needed the beast that had eaten my flesh and the sooner I didn't have to see it, the better.

Piece by piece, my mana swept throughout the room, threading through the air until it hung heavy over the enclosed space. It was enormous– well. With my current size, it certainly seemed so, but it couldn't have been more than ten feet long and half that wide, with a shallow, pressing roof.

For a creature that had once hunted the great whales of the Ilera Sea, I was profoundly uncomfortable with my new size.

The room, at least, made sense. With its aversion to sun and humans the lizard probably rarely ventured out from its cave, making its nest deep in the stone walls. There had been mana under its scales, though I couldn't guess what it was used for—maybe something used to sense my death and come feasting.

Speaking of.

I directed my mana in the best configuration of a glare as I could manage at the idiodic creature waiting placidly by the entrance to its nest. With my mana settling I could get a better look at it, not needing the light other baseline creatures did to see, flitting my awareness over its shape.

If I was feeling charitable—which I was not—I could almost have called it acceptable to look at. What I had taken for pebbled scales were sleeker than I thought, a deep blue-grey indistinguishable from the rocks behind if not for the flash of iridescence on the edges. Its tail was long and whip-thin, the hoods over its eyes prime to develop into proper fins.

But it had eaten me.

I declined to offer it further thought. Go away, I ordered, the power of my command echoing through the cloud of mana slowly filling the room.

The lizard blinked.

Baring unfortunately metaphorical fangs, I reached deep into the heart of my scarlet core and tugged, dragging out the mana needed to crash down on its vapid little mind, scaring it from my new lair to hopefully run straight into the grasp of another predator–

And came up empty.

I panicked, lasering my focus back on my core—what had once been swirling runes of pure mana were now dim, the information nearly intangible.

Dragonheart Core

Mana: 2.1 / 25

Mana Regeneration: +0.5 per hour

Patrons: None

Titles: None

I could feel empty, now that I was paying attention. It was a gnawing sort of hunger, the same itch I'd felt as a dragon when I was spoiling for a fight and didn't much care whether my opponent felt the same or not.

The rift in my soul that connected me to the Otherworld slowly filled, drip by drip, with fresh mana. But with all the excess I'd bled out in unenclosed areas and the waste trying to get the lizard to bring me to safety, it would be two days until I was full; an impossible wait. I wasn't nearly patient enough for it.

But dungeons had other means of collecting.

The lizard curled up in one corner of its—I suppose his, if I had to wait with the awful creature until I could chase him away—nest, watching with lantern-esque eyes. My mana, what scraps I had left, finally filled the cave and revealed every last detail to me, albeit through the darkness. We had traveled hundreds of feet before reaching his nest and there was no sunlight reaching here, the only way I could pick out colours and textures through the fluttering sense of my mana.

But this was how a dungeon functioned.

It would be a great while until I could find the cowardly bastard who had killed me, and even longer until I was strong enough to take him down. He had slain a dragon with one lance—it would take more than me shoving the lizard in his direction to kill him.

I glanced at the reptile, who was still watching me.

There might be merit in the idea.

But for now, I extended the bulk of my awareness to the only colour breaks in the entire cave; mushrooms, thin and fragile, growing from a bed of pale green algae. I could hear the flow of an underground river through one of the walls and thin beads of water snaked down the stone, feeding the budding mess of plants.

My Otherworld memories told me what I needed to do. For a dungeon to gather schemas and grow stronger, they needed to gather creatures, to strip them apart and learn how to recreate them.

To attract creatures, I would need bait.