Chapter 567: Dragonlore

Owyn ate ravenously. His body felt like it had lines seared into it across a hundred places, as though someone had sliced him apart and forged him back together, which very well might have been what happened in magical terms, but that didn’t matter because there was food in front of him and he so badly needed to fill himself.

Kordia kept it coming, swapping with Malzkael after the first hour, then swapping back, as Owyn just kept eating and eating, sitting on the floor amidst the now-inert spell formation and stacking up plates a meter into the air at a time as he ate even the bones of what he was fed. Until at last he started to slow.

"Are you ready to listen?" Malzkael asked the moment his eyes seemed to grow a bit more lucid.

"I’ve been listening?" Owyn looked around, as if waking up yet again. How much did I eat?

"How many times have I asked you that question then?"

"This is the first?" Owyn replied.

"The first this hour. You’ve been eating for about half a day. Kordia swapped with Cassiel, and you didn’t even notice."

"That can’t be right..."

"Being a dragon takes a lot of mass. And magic. Both, in their own way, require calories, and you’ve just put away enough to make an elephant. Which is probably about how big you’ll be in dragon form, though distributed, of course."

"I don’t... I don’t know what an elepheasant is."

"Don’t worry about it," Malzkael sighed. "Point is, you’ve got some things to learn, and some secrets to keep to understand your situation. Nothing big, or particularly world-shattering for this town, but you can consider it a test of trust. And because of what you had us do, you don’t get the option to refuse."

She let the words sink into Owyn, who processed them as his being tested. He nodded eventually, continuing to eat as she began to speak. At some point, he’d accumulated a pile of uneaten dishes, half of which seemed to be desserts that looked glistening and tempting to his mind, but unappetizing compared to the platters of meat and bones.

"Right, so, before you ask how I know any of this, I’ll cut to the chase and say there’s a bunch of lifetimes floating around in my head, and that’s just a fraction of the number of copies of us that were created by Heaven and the Creator for the last... I don’t know, thirty thousand years or so."

Cut to the chase? Owyn didn’t understand the turn of phrase, but it sounded like she meant to just tell him what he needed to know.

She paused to let this sink in, which to Owyn felt like an impossibility, but he wasn’t about to deny anything with a mouth full of crunching chicken bones.

"That’s another secret for you to keep, by the way. From everyone, including Arc and any of our kids."

Owyn flinched. He didn’t like the thought of keeping secrets from someone he very much wanted to get to know.

But she continued before he could reply. "The main thing you need to keep a secret is that it’s not just angels and demons people can transform into, it’s beastkin and dragonkin... like yourself now. We’ve only used it as a stabilizing measure for people who crossed over the veil in similar conditions to yours, and the results have been mixed and... problematic sometimes. Especially with certain people trying to frame all the outsiders we picked up over the last twenty years as liars, thieves, and cutthroats. Adding ’monstrous murderers’ into the mix didn’t help."

Owyn nodded, resuming his eating almost automatically as he kept his eyes on the angel.

"Aside from that, here’s the little secret history lesson: All flying dragons are as human in origin as every race on Ayther. The land and sea ones, mostly upscaled lizards from the fact that mana is pretty much an evolutionary accelerant. But for a long, long time, humanity had the keys to its own form in hand, and they went wild with it. They had long-lived gods who helped them figure out the secrets, metatron, actually, like what Arc and her father are, and some of those gods helped humans turn into dragons."

"Why?" Owyn asked.

"Because they could. Because they existed in a world of abundance and had nothing better to do with themselves and humanity than test the bounds of their creative abilities. All intentional, of course. Then, at one point, they started breaking up into factions. Dragon shifters started becoming weapons, and then, when all was said and done, the metatron gods got themselves sealed away when the angels pulled a coup and took over what used to be Heaven. They got out eventually, but the important bit for you is that by then, dragon shifters had become dragonkin, and that meant that if they shifted into dragon form without enough capacity for mana to shift back, they’d get stuck like that."

Owyn swallowed. He didn’t want to get stuck as a dragon forever...

"Since none of the metatron gods stuck around, that meant there was no one to look after them, so generation after generation passed, and they started losing things they couldn’t easily do or didn’t need. Like complex language, the ability to use tools... You get where I’m going? Only took a few thousand years for any semblance of humanity to leave them... except for the use of magic. Without magic, they can’t fly. They heal at human rates, which, for the size of wounds they can take, can be slow enough to be fatal. Their little hoarding tic is probably some lingering memory of using magic-conducting metals as an exchange-balancing medium to accelerate the flow rate out of their mana gates... Advanced Academy stuff you’ll probably want to learn soon."

"Will I still be able to use magic?" Owyn asked.

"Of course you will! Just stay away from big spells for, I don’t know, the next five years or so while your body stabilizes."

Owyn blanched. That was just under a third of how long he’d lived so far. "Are you saying I can’t learn at the Academy anymore?" If he had this done to himself to help Arc, only to wind up separated... a part of him felt utterly enraged at the notion, but he tamped down on it quickly.

"No. I’m saying, don’t strain your capacity, especially not while transforming, or you’ll wind up mutating yourself or worse. Enhancement magic is fine as long as you don’t overdo it. There are ambient spells you can try to supplement the sorts of bursty, showy shit some of the professors there like."

"Ambient spells?" The more she explained, the more Owyn realized how little he knew about the world, much less magic.

"Stuff that draws from mana in the world. Domain stuff... not that most people even know they have one. You might consider switching tracks to becoming a druid or-"

"What about a bard?" Owyn asked, realizing that using magic out in the world might be what he experienced when he tried his hand at singing that one night.

Malzkael raised an eyebrow. "Sure, I guess. They mostly work on apprenticeships, though. So you’ll have to convince one. And as far as I know, the Academy just keeps a few around for music lessons, not actual bard magic."

Owyn nodded, setting down his current plate. He still felt hungry, but the level was small enough to be ignorable now. "I, um..." he looked at his hands, which were filthy with grease and bits of what he’d been eating.

"Yeah," Malzkael said. "You’re not leaving this hospital until you get enough of a hold on your form to at least look like you used to, though my guess is some of your changes might wind up permanent... at least until you can form a soulstone and engage in a little self-creation."

"I thought only monsters carry soulstones..."

"Monsters, spirits, angels, demons, advanced mages and mavens... Evolve far enough, and you pretty much wind up made of mana, and little things like flesh, eating, sleeping... become optional. Arc’s already got a seed in her because a metatron gets pushed to evolve as part of their lifecycle. You have a seed in you now because I put one there, and no, that is not a secret you can spread because if people knew, we’d have half the city clamoring for mana enhancement and the other half trying to burn it all down before that half gets theirs... assuming I’m dumb enough to go with such a ridiculous practice."

"Why would that be a bad thing?" Owyn asked, genuinely confused at why such a supposedly egalitarian place - at least compared to the outside world - would withhold access to greater magics.

"On its own? It wouldn’t be, necessarily, assuming all parties involved can find a compatible source of enhancement so no one winds up exploded. But think on it. Has everyone you ever met been the sort of emotionally mature person who wouldn’t cast a fireball if someone called their mother a whore?"

"No," Owyn said.

"Exactly. And adding that sort of fuel to the fires that were already burning before the Veil trapped us in here would just suck out all the oxygen and leave everyone dead. Even though we hate it, the House of Stars has spent the last couple of decades keeping the peace because we’re already at the baseline level to be considered gods, which isn’t close to what we’ll be after a few centuries... assuming my memories are true. Especially if there’s no one out there to hunt us."

Owyn swallowed. The prospect of living centuries was... too much for him to fathom.

"I can see from the look in your eyes that you understand you’re going to be in this for a long, long time," Malzkael tilted her head. "Welcome to the House of Stars, Owyn. Do your best not to die."