Chapter 414: The Mother of Dragons

The first thing a Demon had said to me was a question. He had asked me: Have I seen the face of God?

I did not understand the question, and now I wondered whether it came from the Demon or was a byproduct of the corruption tearing my soul to pieces and taking me to places a mortal soul should never reach.

The question hung in my mind like a blade suspended by a thread. Everything I had learned in this place, the Pivot, the System, the Dragon God’s return from the void, it all pointed to something that I had glimpsed in my visions since childhood. The golden pyramid behind my home, pulsing with red light, breathing like a living thing. The cave that had rejected me when I tried to enter it. The dreams that had haunted me every month since I was a child.

But the Caeliths had not fallen yet. They were still out there, in the void, waiting. The golden pyramid could not be just a Caelith. It had to be something else.

Why were the Caeliths drawn to this world? Where did the System come from? If I left this world, would other worlds have the same System? Those shapes in the void- were they a byproduct of a broken heaven?

Dorrik was watching me. I could feel his ancient eyes on my face, reading the shift in my expression, the sudden stillness that had come over me.

"Elric," he said. "You have gone somewhere. Where?"

I looked up at him, and I felt the weight of what I was about to say. "Have you... seen the Pivot that the Dragon God brought from the void?"

Dorrik frowned, "I have not, but if this System can be found, it would be on Aelmar, the birthplace of dragons."

I flinched and nodded. Aelmar, my home continent, had an ancient past; it was the birthplace of the dragons. I wondered if that was why there were so many dragon heads in the floating prison in the sky, or why I had seen the shadow of the Dragon God in my visions of the past... perhaps my connections with the dragons were deeper than I thought.

∞

I went back to the tablet after a while because what I had to do next was clear... I needed to go out in the world and find the truth, even if it meant that I had to challenge the Dragon God himself.

However, I knew nothing about Terra; this world was alien to me, and the fact that I came from its future did not mean I understood anything of its past, especially when it was so convoluted.

If I wanted answers, I needed to know the layout of this world and all eleven continents, their gods, races, and the current state of things, and when I gathered everything I could from here, it would be time for me to leave.

Then I thought about the laws stirring inside me, and I changed my plans again: learn about the world, comprehend one or more shards to push more of my abilities to the Sovereign Tier, and then I could leave. Although I wondered if I would be able to meditate on the laws with the seal over my soul, and that was not even considering the fact that my soul was shattered and was slowly recovering.

I hadn’t forgotten that there was an ongoing war, but it wasn’t under my control; there was just too much on my plate, and I could only tackle it one thing at a time.

Now it was time to learn.

∞

As my soul healed, I spent the next weeks reading. The tablets were not arranged in any order I could discern, and so I read them as they came, letting the knowledge flow into me like water into a dry riverbed.

Keeping my mind free, I delved into a fountain of knowledge that I had stumbled upon, and for these few days, I felt I was an Initiate again, new to magic and all the mysteries of the world.

From the earliest account, and this one came from one of the dragon gods, Terra had been born from the collision of two dying stars, and the first life had emerged from the molten rock, shaped by the will of the world itself over many years, and those had been the dragons.

Because of the special nature of Terra’s birth, her children were very powerful and special, and it was believed that Terra’s ability to swallow other worlds came from the unique nature of her birth.

I learned that the Dragon God had been one of the first, and that he had been the strongest. His power had redefined what it meant to be strong, and up till this moment, there was not a single god who could match him. Perhaps the Mother of Dragons had this capability, because she was the firstborn of Terra, but no one could tell, since she was now stark raving mad, and her flesh was now corrupted.

The Dragon God had a name, but it had been struck out from all records by his own hands. His magic was so powerful that even the names recorded in stone were gone, and it was now impossible to remember the god he once was... now he was just the Dragon God.

This was fascinating to me, because even in the future when the names of gods were all but forgotten, even the mortals still remembered the name of the Dragon God, the tyrant that enslaved all of humanity before the mages rose up and shattered his reign and destroyed his court and lesser gods.

Of course, I now know most of those accounts were false; still, it was fascinating that the title of Dragon God endured after all the changes that had swept through the world.

From all accounts I could read of the Dragon God, he had not been cruel, but he was proud and always hungry for a challenge, which meant that a lot of times he had been bored, as there was no one foolish enough to fight him, but one peculiar nature about dragons still remained, and that is their obsession with death.

As I learned, dragons did not die of old age; they were functionally immortal, and if they were not killed, they would go on living forever and growing bigger.

That thought made me wonder how big the Mother of Dragons would be, seeing that she was proclaimed to be the first child of Terra.

This peculiar nature of dragons meant that they had a rather strange fascination with death, and any being that was able to kill them was sort of revered, because among many things, Dragons were known to be extremely hard to kill, and it took a lot to kill one of them.

There was an account here that spoke about the killing of a dragon, and the act could be called a merciless butchery and not killing, because it went on for nearly ten years, and the god that killed that dragon had to cut the dragon to many small pieces before all of its life force was exhausted, and the blood that emerged from the butchered dragon filled an entire river, and caused the continent to smell like blood for centuries.

Oh, and one more important fact: every continent I knew, including the four new ones I was looking at, was named after dragons.