The dragon's harem

Inside a clean, strange room, Arad sat. The room looked far from what was normal in Arad’s life. Hati had once made a trip to the far east alongside Kayden and his wife Lily, and wanted to build a similar one inside her house.

The room was far too small for Arad’s taste, especially with how huge he was. The floor was covered in a rough straw mat that Hati called tatami. It was soft, but Arad did prefer the wooden floor of his house, since it was made by Mira.

Nonetheless, Arad sat silently in the room, a small table in front of him with the cube on it, humming with wind magic. The gentle breeze coming from it whirled around, brushing over the wind chimes hanging on the large window at Arad’s left. Their ringing broke the silence, but for Arad, he was hearing much, much more noise.

Kayden was sharpening his blade in the room beside him. Kali and Serin are fighting in the other room, and Aella’s silent breathing as she sat alone on the roof right above him, basking in the sun and feeling the breeze. Her eyes fixated on the massive mountain on the horizon.

The massive mountain stood majestically over twenty kilometers tall, its peak piercing the roaring thunder clouds blocking the sun. Lightning roared around it and occasionally struck the peak, sending a massive roar across the whole beast lands. Right beside the mountain, something new flashed brilliantly; it wasn’t there before and had only appeared.

One of Merlin’s labyrinths was there, dwarfing the mountain with its peak that seemed to stretch infinitely into the heavens. Its light illuminated the ominous darkness engulfing the mountain.

Strangely, the mountain wasn’t like this before. Only today that this storm seems to have cursed it, bathing it in a pelting hail of lightning and rain. Of course, this change was intentional, caused by none other than the beast lands queen.

She stood at the base of the mountain, dancing on a clear and circular stone platform while protected by twenty of her countless daughters. She was the treasurer of the gods, the divine banker. It was she whom they gave their most prized, or cursed, possessions to store and safeguard. Her eternal barriers were that powerful.

Each graceful move of her dance was meticulously calculated, practiced thousands and thousands of times. Each item sealed had its own dance, the key to opening the seals and lifting the barriers. And this one in particular was a long, complicated dance.

Hati’s daughter weren’t standing around to protect their mother from attacks while she was dancing. Their job was to protect everyone else from her. The moves themselves carried powerful, eternal magic. One mere glance at her dancing was enough to drive a mortal into madness.

As the barrier slowly but surely lifted, more and more waves of eldritch magic seemed to emerge from the core of the mountain, causing the violent storm to rage and the wind to howl with hunger.

One large boulder got ripped out of the mountain’s peak and was flung outward. It flew, heading straight for Hati’s dancing platform. But the closer it got, the slower it became, the stone tumbled, halting mid-air several meters away from Hati, and, as if eons passed on it, the stone crumbled to dust.

Flying through the hellish storm in a flash of violet magic, Merlin’s eyes inspect the magic seeping out of the mountain’s heart. What she was seeing didn’t make sense, and she was forced to make several laps around the mountain, reconfirming what she saw.

Life, pure divine energy… was getting born from death. The magic clearly originated from a necrotic origin, but it brimmed with pure, holy power that might bring the dead back to life, cure the blind, and breathe life into deserts.

Merlin’s eyes turned toward the distance. Hati’s dancing figure looked like a haze, a mirage of ghostly waves of light that twisted and contorted inhumanly. Merely looking in her direction from this far away made Merlin’s head hurt, like she was trying to grasp something, but never being able to reach it.

She grimaced, immortality was but a myth, everything has to come to an end… but, how in the nine hells is that woman… eternal. She could swear that Hati had always been there dancing and that she would forever remain there, but Merlin knew for a fact that she wasn’t. She knew that Hati was in her house hours ago… so why is her existence seemingly eternal?

At that moment, Merlin felt two cold hands on her cheeks. When she blinked, one of Hati’s daughters was there, holding her face tightly. She slowly turned Merlin’s face to look away from Hati. It was just then that Merlin realised she had spent two hours staring at Hati, and her eyes were already dry and bleeding.

Without saying a word, Merlin flew back to the mountain. She now cast a spell that would blind her if she looked anywhere in Hati’s direction. That dance… It’s dangerous to look at. But it was then that Merlin felt another pair of hands on her face. This time, two fingers pushed a sour peach in her mouth, and she immediately coughed.

Looking forward, another one of Hati’s daughters was in front of her. And just like before, it was then that Merlin realised she stood in the same place thinking about Hati’s dance for another hour.

But this time, Hati’s daughter didn’t let go of Merlin’s face. She instead touched her forehead and plunged her sharp claws deep into Merlin’s skull. Sharp pain shot through her whole being, but she had already warned about this before.

If someone had seen too much of Hati’s eternal dance, merely trying to remember would put them into an eternal trance. Their brains locked, and trying to comprehend the dance for eternity. Once that happens, Hati had taught her daughters how to break that memory inside someone’s head to free them.

When Hati wanted to retain her clear consciousness, it was because of moments like this. Hati’s dance, the key to the seal, was this dangerous to look at. Then what was sealed inside couldn’t be anything less than pure madness. A dead heart of a being that lives, a cursed, holy object.

After getting her memory of the dance erased, Merlin went back to scouting the mountain. Unknown to her, she had already seen Hati’s dance before, and this was the ninth time her memories were wiped out.

Besides the small hiccups every now and then due to the turbulent magic, the preparations were going smoothly.