Once someone got past their first millennium or so, they stopped counting the individual years. Usually by then they also knew better than to expect mortals to be consistent or reliable, better than for plans held dearly to actually work, better than for problems to be solved by running away from them. Ansae never really had gotten the knack of any of that.
Temper was a perennial problem for her, though really it had been a long time since it had been a problem. Once she could raze a city or two when someone insulted her, most people went out of their way not to. Or went out of their way not to deal with her at all, which was more or less fine with her. This time it had definitely been a problem, putting her at odds with the one person that had what she wanted. She’d brought trouble on herself before by lashing out, but it had never before threatened her very life. Ego was something that was synonymous with being a Power, and that was something she’d been for a very long time.
She’d broken through into being a Power fairly early, reaching past the god-given framework of her race and finding Primal mana waiting for her at the other end. That hadn’t fundamentally changed the calculus of threat and power, with a dragon’s need for mana and, of course, greed for valuables to feed. The hoard wasn’t entirely arbitrary of course. It took resources to channel mana, defend oneself against other powerful entities, and pursue the hobbies only those with long lives and enormous knowledge could pursue.
The huge pool of gold was pretty to look at, too.
In those days she had been foolish and Bargained freely, eagerly consuming the benefits of each and giving relatively little thought to the bonds and obligations they put on her. Each Bargain compelled her to act on the world on someone else’s terms, slowly marking her as a threat or an opportunity. Reputation draped over her like a shroud as she dealt with the foolish people who came seeking something they thought they wanted.
This one gave up a decade of life to be put on a throne, that one offered the god’s blessing that protected his family for the same throne, half a century later. A woman offered her Lineage Skill for her youth, another, her youth for power. Even as a dragon she hadn’t been immortal, not yet, and the extra years of life was one of her favorite acquisitions.
Of course all it had managed to do was ensure she lived long enough for a fifth tier Classer to rise up and come after her with a grudge and dragon-bane weaponry. That had been a humbling experience and, after resettling on a suitably distant continent, was the reason she’d been careful about Bargains and fellow Powers ever after.
Until now, when she’d been an absolute fool. Of course Depletion could be removed through a Bargain. Of course there’d been a Power involved. Of course she was dealing with one, because what else could create such clean mana flows? She should know better than anyone else, with her supposed mastery of mana, that even a regular Dungeon wouldn’t have managed something like that.
For the first time in her very long life she found herself contemplating making a Bargain with another Power.
It was a bad idea, of course. Even when the supplicant actually wanted what they got, the price was heavy. Bargains were immensely powerful things, more alive than not, growing and taking power from the potentials they absorbed. A sufficiently powerful Bargain could choke the very gods themselves, driving the whole world to the point of the Bargain being broken or concluded. Restoring her Depletion might well take that power.
She summoned her Status and glared at it. Two points. Two points were all that separated her from death and something worse than death, and despite all her power she was, effectively, too weak to grow her cap. Or maybe too strong. How much more would she have have to grow, at this point, to claw back anything from the massive Depletion sucking at her soul? How could she do it safely?
There used to be, in her youth, only a single source of Depletion, easily avoidable unless one was completely foolhardy. Which she hadn’t been, only mildly careless. Now, motes of it sank into the world’s mana, floating out to burn away the life essence of the unwary or unlucky. The Great Dungeons had all been infected by it. The mage-kings had somehow weaponized it, along with their enslaved dungeons, an affront that she dearly wished to correct but couldn’t. Not now. Not yet.
She knew why she’d been so upset. Part of it was just shock. She’d been living with that two point fraction of grace for centuries now, hiding under the mountains away from everything and everyone just so she could regenerate her lost stats, her health and stamina and mana refusing to recover after the beating she’d taken.
The other part had been wounded pride. Her grand plan to remove the source of depletion had done nothing but cripple her in body and soul, driving her into hiding on the far side of the planet. Yet this brand-new Power had stumbled into a way to grant immunity to Depletion and had spent it on a random, unleveled mortal who she was sure had some very fine qualities but was nothing in the face of what the world would throw at her.
Envious? How could she not be,when a mere mortal was given a gift that Ansae would pay nearly any price to acquire? She so badly wanted to just reach out and take it. To summon her power and demand it, as she would in days of old.
She couldn’t. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t as strong as she used to be, because she was absolutely certain she could shred this Blue if he were so foolish as to attack her. It wasn’t just that he was a Power, though that would be enough to give her pause no matter how fragile he appeared. It was that she needed that depletion cure so badly that she couldn’t afford even the slightest risk.
There would have to be trust.
Trust, and hadn’t it just been an age since she needed that? Even before she’d hared off on her own and ended up stuck under this mountain there had been a very long time indeed where sheer power meant the only people who approached her wanted something. That was not a good starting point for trust, which was an irony she did not appreciate at all.
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Ansae stood up and paced her cave, small and pathetic as it was. There was a time when she had a lair that took up entire mountains, entire cities, depending on her whim, but she’d not had the stamina or mana to spare, when she made it back here. She still didn’t, considering her regeneration, which only supported a few hours of mild exercise a day without dipping into her reserves.
In hindsight, she wondered at Blue’s gift of a habitation. He couldn’t possibly have known, but it was precisely calculated to appeal to a pride and vanity most wouldn’t have guessed for her. It pained her to admit that many of her lesser brethren were perfectly satisfied with natural caves, but she surely wasn’t. It was the kind of offer that only the very lucky or the very perceptive might make. Or a Power with supernatural insight.
If Blue did have such insight, all the more reason to meet him on more favorable and honest terms. She’d have to meet him as an equal, which she hadn’t had in...well, it had been a long time. It’d take some reflection on older memories, long before the current crisis.
She closed her eyes, looking for trust and honesty, rifling through aged and well-set memories to get a feel for them again. It turned out they were not as deeply buried as she’d thought, easily rising to the fore and breaking crisp and bright about her.
There was only one moon in the sky in those days, riding pale in the afternoon sky as she swooped toward the mesa. The thermals made descent a languid, easy affair, drifting down with spread wings and aiming for a simple wooden cabin perched near the mesa’s edge.
The wolf-kin who was chopping wood just out front looked up at the crunch of her paws on dry grass, and turned to bow to her. “Milady dragon,” he said.
“An odd way to greet a partner in crime. Or at least, a partner in something.” She cocked her head at him, sitting down on her haunches and curling her tail about her forepaws, catlike. “I’m fairly certain setting everything on fire is frowned on by most mortals.”
“Is that what you did? I just asked you to give them a hard time.”
“You asked a dragon,” she said, drawing out the word. “What did you expect me to do, scratch at the door in the middle of the night?”
“I was hoping for fire,” he admitted. “But I thought it might be too forward to just assume.”
She flicked her tail, waving in the direction of a distant smudge in the air. “Well, there you have it.”
“And?” He mopped at his forehead with his shirt, leaving the axe where it was to make for a chair in front of the cabin.
“Better than some,” she said judiciously. “They were prepared for something, though not for me. They had a big hollow log and a stick to raise an alarm, which was a step up. A bell would be better but you lot still haven’t figured out casting on that scale.”
“Some of us only figured out we were better than animals a generation or two ago,” he retorted, throwing himself into the chair. “We’re new to the civilization game, so I wish you wouldn’t tease me with all the things I can’t have.” He cast a meaningful glance at the stone head of the axe he’d abandoned.
“If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be asking me to go annoy your kinsmen.” Ansae pointed out, inspecting a claw. “Speaking of which, it’s your turn, Shaman.”
Shaman Igase laughed, holding up his hands. “I wouldn’t think of going back on my word! Don’t you trust me?”
“I know you,” Ansae mock-growled, and Igase laughed harder.
“Yes, yes, but the people I trick are gullible youngsters!”
“For a dragon I am certainly not old,” she said archly.
“Ah, but you are certainly not gullible!”
“...when you say it that way, I feel like I should check my claws to make sure none of them are missing.”
“Dragon claws do make good ingredients…” He caught her look and threw up his hands. “I jest, I jest. Very well, I’ll show you, just give me a minute.” The Shaman eased himself out of the chair and settled on the ground, cross-legged.
The reason he caught her interest was because he was a Shaman, not a [Shaman]. He had rejected his Class, or perhaps never been given the option. The demi-human tribes were still new to the world, after all, and it was possible the world wasn’t quite used to them. And yet...he could use mana. Not just with the childish fumblings that presaged the formation of a Class, either, he had his own peculiar style.
She’d had her snout pushed in once or twice before by magic-users, but as a very young dragon she didn’t have a ready answer to mages and their ilk. If she wanted to do the same thing she’d have to commit to an Affinity, assuming she could find a mana spring of that Affinity, and go through her species breakthrough. Not something that she could afford time for, even if it were possible, given the predators already on her tail. Igase, though, had a way to use magic outside the confines of Class or, hopefully, species.
It had to be better if it broke the rules.
All he wanted in return was for her to harass the settlements that hadn’t been listening to him. She didn’t much care why that was, but she had to admit it was pretty fun to wreak some moderate havoc on people who had earned it. Probably earned it, anyway. Rampaging was in her blood, but there didn’t seem to be much point most of the time. Being karmic retribution, though, tickled her fancy.
Igase breathed in, out, in again, slowly and calmly. Around him, the ambient mana of the world shifted, drifted, and floated inward as he called upon it. Only he hadn’t called upon it, there was no Skill he was using there. She peered closer, unable to believe what she was seeing. By all appearances, the mana was attracted to him of its own accord yet, given that he was meditating on something, that was clearly not the case.
Mana spun and danced, pulled into Igase and then released, no longer of nature Affinity or wind Affinity, but of something new and unique. It was, perhaps, Igase Affinity, as nonsensical as that seemed. She’d never seen anything like it, though again she was a very young dragon.
Igase opened his eyes and the magic stopped.
“How did you do that?” She demanded. “What’s the trick?”
He just grinned at her.
The memory faded and Ansae felt...younger. Fresher. Some of the weight of history and Depletion had fallen away. It was that meeting, that mortal, so very long ago that had planted the first seeds of twin ideas. The first idea was his magic, which had grown into her understanding of Primal mana, something that had outlived the clever Shaman for millennia. The other was the glimmerings of what became her mantle and title, over years and centuries as she visited woe upon those who drew her wrath.
It was a perspective that helped center and calm her, and at the same time, bring some humility to the fore. Once again she needed the help of another, and that was not so shameful a thing. She had roots in such an exchange, and perhaps it was the world-shaking fate of a Power that brought her to it again, in such a pass. Her fate, or his.
She’d have to apologize, of course. It might take some amount of bowing and scraping to get back into Blue’s good graces, but she could handle that. Her life and her future were at stake, and there was no need for ego when that much hung in the balance. If he still wouldn’t talk to her, well.
No matter how far she’d fallen, she was still the Silver Woe.