15-34. Unreasonably Brutal

The city was even larger than Elijah was led to believe. Everywhere he turned, he saw vast structures. Most followed the established style, with long, sweeping curves made of scalestone. There were a few exceptions, though.

Thirteen, in fact.

Elijah had been impressed by the Vyrin embassy, both in terms of size and style. However, it lost a little of its impact because he’d grown so accustomed to the wealth of his adopted clan. Gold and silver just didn’t have the same effect on him anymore.

But just as Kirlissa’s embassy had established its own style, the other great clans had taken liberties with their designs as well. The first one Elijah saw was the Ky’hrin embassy, which had been planted in its own quarter dominated by stark white buildings trimmed in deep, blue ice.

The entire area was cold enough to kill a mortal in seconds, and even walking near the gates made Elijah’s breath mist. The drakes on guard all wore ice-encrusted armor and carried weapons made of white steel, completing the image.

Over the course of the rest of the day, Elijah saw most of the other embassies, and they were just as on theme. For instance, the compound dedicated to Kaela’s Ignara clan featured buildings made of porous black stone trimmed in obsidian and a miniature sun floating above their highest tower.

The other embassies showed their preferred attunements as well. Just as Ky’hrin focused on ice and all its permutations, Umbranix was dedicated to shadow. Their domain was pitch black, with buildings made of dull, lifeless stone that tended to fade into the background. Unless Elijah focused, he barely even noticed them.

The embassy for the Tyrix clan floated above a massive chasm surrounded by fluffy white clouds. The only means of access was to fly, either via an artifact or through the power of a dragon’s own wings. The buildings in the center of that chasm were appropriately delicate, with radial designs that paid no heed to up or down.

They put Elijah in mind of snowflakes made of diamond.

The Draveth embassy stood at the bottom of a huge, underground lake. Elijah was obviously disallowed from entry, but according to what the talkative guard told him, it was surrounded by beautiful kelp forests and protected by a leviathan that the clan kept as a pet.

Next, Elijah found his way to the Soryn embassy, and he was surprised to find that it looked like some palace out of a fairy tale. It would have been at home in an animated princess movie, save that it was surrounded by swirls of intense light refracted through a series of massive crystals. Those beams acted as walls, and Elijah was told that they were intense enough to burn even mid-tier deities.

Elijah very much wanted to test that out. Perhaps light would prove to be a body cultivation tool. But he chose to restrain himself, largely because he didn’t want an audience. And perhaps because he knew it would cause a fuss.

He wasn’t really inclined to think politically, but in this case, it seemed the prudent course of action. After all, he’d only just arrived in She’evoth. It wouldn’t do to start thumbing his nose at their customs.

Not yet, at least.

In any case, the others were more of the same. The K’levahar clan was dedicated to an earth attunement, with a mountainous embassy that might’ve been a natural formation if it hadn’t been so neatly arranged. The Zareth embassy was surrounded by a hurricane, which was quite a thing, considering they were still underground.

But the oddest one Elijah encountered was the Veklarin embassy.

“Best not take another step, my lord,” said a tetradrak standing guard before a long, thin bridge that seemed to lead to nowhere. It looked as if the world just ended, giving way to the endless darkness of space. Elijah tried to make sense of it, but the incongruency threatened to shut down his brain.

“Really? What will happen?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know, my lord,” he answered. Then, he held up a pendant. “All I know is that if you don’t have one of these, you probably won’t be seen again.”

“This is another embassy?”

The tetradrak looked up at Elijah and nodded. It was sometimes easy to forget just how large his dragon form was, especially in a city like She’evoth where almost everyone was a dragon. Most were larger than him, which made it difficult to remember that he was still more than two-hundred-feet long. By comparison, the tetradrak was tiny.

But the guard was a low-tier deity, so he’d packed a lot of power into that relatively small package.

“Aye. Dual embassy. The Veklarin and Tharys clans have always been close,” he explained. “Time and space attunements usually go together, and the two clans have intermarried so much that it can get right difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends.”

“Time and space,” Elijah muttered. It was easy to believe that both clans might’ve had a hand in constructing the Coreway.

“If you step on the bridge, you might find yourself walking for all eternity,” the guard explained. “Or you might take one step that takes a thousand years. That happened once, you know. A poor messenger – serpentor boy – wandered onto the bridge, and when he came out a second later, he had a long, white beard and a host of age-related maladies. Died a few days later. Body just shut down. He was less than a century old, but he looked as ancient as any man I’d ever seen.”

“Hmm.”

“Plus, I’d have to kill you if you tried. No offense, my lord.”

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“None taken,” Elijah replied with a nod. After talking with the guard a little longer, Elijah moved on to the final embassy.

The Orvex Clan’s keep was overbearing. They’d built it atop a massive cliff, where it could tower over everything. It looked a bit like someone had decided to blend a bomb shelter and a castle, then accentuated the militant aspects of both. It wasn’t precisely brutalist in design, but it wasn’t far off, either.

Elijah hated it the second he laid eyes on it.

And the guards weren’t nearly as friendly, and despite their much smaller size, they managed to look down on Elijah. He wanted nothing more than to bite them in two.

“Don’t take it personally,” said a passerby that noticed Elijah’s seething. He turned to see a dragon with mottled silver and black scales. She was at least twice his length, though much slimmer. And she lacked wings, which wasn’t entirely unprecedented, but rare enough that it was noticeable.

“What’s that?” Elijah asked.

“The Keep. That’s just how it is.”

“I don’t understand.”

Then, she explained that the Orvex Clan was known for dominion, which was the parent attunement of control.

“They ruled the empire for a few million years,” the silver-and-black dragon explained. “Sad story how that ended.”

She went on to tell a tale of grave betrayal, regicide, and unrequited love. When she’d finished, Elijah asked, “How much of that is true?”

She laughed – a joyous sound with the barest hints of falseness – then said, “Just the high points, honestly. But the love story makes it that much more impactful, doesn’t it?”

Elijah could only agree, though the swirl of ethera around the dragon told him that it wasn’t entirely unprompted. She probably had an Entertainer archetype, and even though she’d not actually cast any spells or used any abilities, every word she said came with at least some enhancement.

It was a reminder that Entertainers were not to be underestimated. They weren’t so blunt as to be true mind controllers, but they definitely tread some of the same territory. At the very least, their arts could be considered mind manipulation. And most troublingly, his defenses seemed incapable of blocking them.

Was that because of his perception that they weren’t a threat? Or was it an unforeseen loophole? Perhaps he could find another item that would address that gap in his defenses.

In any case, he cut contact with the Entertainer too quickly to be considered polite, and soon enough, he was on his way. He left what he now knew was the Embassy District and entered the city proper, only to find that it was much as he’d found during his first trip. All the hallmarks of a city were there, just tailored to dragons. Mostly, that just meant that everything was bigger, but there were other instances that hammered home the differences.

Like when Elijah saw a public bath where an army of attendants buffed a dragon’s scales until they shimmered. Or the tavern that served its products in vats instead of mugs. Or a dozen other details that would have seemed a bit silly had they not made perfect sense in context.

Either way, by the end of the day, Elijah felt more than a little overwhelmed.

Rather than return to the embassy, he asked around for directions out of the city. At first, no one would tell him. Not out of rudeness, but because they assumed that, as a mere demigod, he would never survive the wilderness. But eventually, he found someone who didn’t care if he lived or died. That dragon just pointed him in the appropriate direction, then went on about his day.

The one thing Elijah appreciated about She’evoth was that, because of its size, crowding wasn’t really an issue. Not unless a truly massive deity came through, but there was an unspoken rule that if someone was just too big, they would use their humanoid forms.

“Come to think of it, that might not be unspoken,” Elijah reasoned as he finally reached the edge of the city. If his attributes weren’t so inflated, the trip would have taken days. But as it was, he reached the exit after only a handful of hours.

As it turned out, She’evoth’s planet was a lot like Earth, at least in terms of its interior. It was much larger, but just like the Hollow Depths, there were entire subterranean biomes. For the first couple of hours, the terrain was still curated, though. Which meant that there were no truly dangerous monsters and sparse vegetation.

However, once Elijah took to the sky – such that it existed in an underground cavern – he started to cover ground incredibly quickly. After only an hour or so, the terrain became much wilder, with grand mushrooms sprouting into expansive forests of fungi.

As Elijah continued on, he sensed more and more wildlife. Some of it was entirely innocuous, but there were some truly powerful beasts in there. Thankfully, none of them paid him any mind. Either he was too inconsequential to matter, or catching him would prove too frustrating to bother.

Sure, a couple of beasts chased him, but their hearts weren’t really in it.

More interesting was the fungal forest itself. Just as he’d seen in the city, the mushrooms were all part of the same colony. Functionally, it was a single organism that had spread across tens of thousands of square miles. For all Elijah knew, it had infested the entirety of the planet.

The only saving grace was that it couldn’t survive on the surface, but that was true of most living things. Only those specifically evolved to do so could live in that fiery environment. Even powerful deities found it uncomfortable, and the heat was more than enough to stifle the spread of the fungal colony that grew across the planet’s version of the Hollow Depths.

In any case, so long as Elijah kept his Mantle of Authority deployed, the spores couldn’t affect him. That gave him the freedom to explore the forest until, at last, he found something truly interesting.

The mushroom was huge.

At least a mile across at the cap, with a stalk built to support that kind of weight. What was even more intriguing was that it was obviously not a part of the predominant colony. Elijah landed near the base, only to see a war playing out in real time. Mycelia fought against other fungal tendrils in an eternal battle. The big mushroom held its own, but it couldn’t spare any energy for true propagation.

Elijah flew to the orange-and-white cap, landing at the apex. There, he shifted into his human form, took a cross-legged seat, and closed his eyes. A second later, his mantle slipped through the mushroom’s fungal flesh to connect to its soul and, as a consequence, into its rudimentary consciousness.

He took a deep, shuddering breath as he beheld the sheer magnitude of its mind.

Or minds.

It was like the thing was composed of billions upon billions of individuals, but they were all connected. Like the pseudo-hive mind he’d encountered in Mitharin, though more thoroughly woven together than even those red-robed humans.

At first, Elijah felt overwhelmed, but the combination of his advanced mind and soul cultivation enabled him to slowly get himself under control. Once he managed that small feat, he attempted communication.

A billion voices screamed in his mind, nearly knocking him out. Barely, he maintained consciousness, but doing so came with a piercing headache that felt like someone had shoved a spear through his eye socket.

Elijah endured.

But the voices never stopped screaming.

Only after half an hour did Elijah realize the truth of the matter. The mushroom’s constant war against the other fungi had driven it mad with pain. He wasn’t certain if the agony was physical or the result of loss, but there remained one inescapable fact. It was beyond communication.

That just reaffirmed something Elijah had always known. Nature was brutal, frequently unreasonably so. From the outside, it looked healthy. Beautiful. Majestic. But inside, it was constantly dying.

There was a lesson there, Elijah was certain. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

He remained there for quite some time, playing witness to the eternal death of a majestic creature.