The arrival of the Words of Calamity was a quiet thing. They appeared gradually, slowly insinuating themselves into our world years before we realized the true danger they presented. It was only after the Second Calamity, the Calamity of Advent, that the Words were recognized as the first.
If we had understood then what the words portended, we may have been able to fight back from the first.
If we had been ready to fight back, it needn't have been a calamity.
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Chapter One
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307 DRA
It had been a long hunt, even by draconic reckoning, and Valthurian Goldenflame's hunts often lasted days or weeks more than those of his more impatient kin. Though if truth be told, less of the delay was due to his quarry’s skill at hiding or evading him and more due to his distraction with a certain lovely green drakaia who happened to be in the area.
He’d courted her many times over the decades, with varying results. He spent entire days in the sky, chasing and diving, flaming when the opportunity called for it. He always enjoyed the look of it when his flame and hers entwined, his flickering gold-red meeting her petite stream of blue in a rage of colour and power. Each deadly, each beautiful, but more than doubly so when combined.
But now the drakaia had left, back to her own hunt, and he returned to his with renewed vigor.
This prey, this particular one, he wanted very much. She was young, tender, plump with youth and not yet toughened with sun and age. Not like the second, who stalked about waving her stick and shouting threats when she sensed his presence. That one would not be good eating, for all that she was as soaked in power as her young charge.
The elder left each day, roaming the lands to do whatever it was the humans did, while the young one stood alone in the fields and called upon her power. He found it tedious to watch, as he counted the hours between departure and return. At least each day she spent at such work, painting fragile shields in the air before her or her weak imitation of dragonfire, saturated her tender meat more fully with the power she wielded so inexpertly.
With such a meal he might sleep for months without his heartfire so much as flickering, and rise to hunt again still strong from it.
Valthurian would not be letting this one escape him.
The routine varied only in the hours of the elder’s departure and which spell the young prey chose to fumble through. He spent several days following the elder, to see whether she was setting a trap for him, but she seemed oblivious except when his shadow passed over her or he flew low enough for her to feel his own power resonating off her own. Then she would fire her own spells, rave at the sky, and hurry home to her hatchling.
He let her see him fly away, past and into the hills beyond their valley, and then did not return at once. When he did return, he flew high on a cloudy night and settled back into his perch atop the cliffs.
He lay quiet and waited; he watched as the elder departed; he waited as his meal began her useless rituals. Human power could only rarely stand up to draconic fire, and nothing he’d seen from her gave the slightest indication that hers would be the exception.
He glided down from the clifftop, circling behind her as the sun shone from above. His wings shook the air as he turned his glide into a dive, his breath waited hot in his chest, and yet she carried on oblivious to his swift flight. He snatched her up in both foreclaws, slicing through her scream before it could begin, fire blazing ahead of him in exultant victory. His prey convulsed briefly before falling still.
Valthurian Goldenflame was an expert hunter, and for all their innovations and pretense at civilization, humans were still soft and unscaled. If they did not breed so quickly, they might have been hunted to extinction, being both so delicious and such easy hunting. But, then, some of them did sting.
This meal was not quite four bites worth, but he took his time, flying lazy circles above the empty and scorched dwelling as he ate. He’d been right, it was worth the long wait and the careful hunt. So young and suculent, so dense with power, the ideal prey.
He was so lost in the bliss of a perfect meal that he did not notice the elder approaching until her power-fed flame bounced off his underbelly.
“Curse you!” she screeched, pointing her stick at him again. “Curse, twice curse, thrice curse! You vile beast, you have taken from me everything I love!”
Valthurian roared in return, bellowing forth a gout of flame which washed over her power-bubble shield without harming her, and tossed the last bite into his maw as he flew away.
“I curse you, dragon!” she shrieked, though her voice grew faint with distance. “As you have killed what I love, so may you be killed by yours! When next you touch that which you love most, may that touch be your death!”
He shivered from neck-spine to tailtip, the curse washing over him in a wave of power he could not dissipate. For all his strength, that gift had never been his. This human had a sting after all.
He thought longingly for a moment of his lovely green, she whose name he could never recall, but whose scales and fire he would never forget. But human curses could only last a few centuries past their death, perhaps make it twenty for good measure. He could abstain that long.
Besides, he had his treasure and his lair. With the fortification of his current power-drenched meal, he could probably sleep longer than the human’s remaining lifespan even if she did supplement it with power.
Yes. He could wait. He didn’t need another’s touch, not like humans did. Foolish creature, thinking him anything like itself.
He was still laughing as he dove from his high window, tucking his wings against his sides as he splashed into his immense hoard grinning as he felt the warm brush of gold against his scales.
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Who needed the touch of even the most beautiful drakaia when one had such treasure?
He lay beneath his pile, sleep suddenly an undeniable imperative. He must have flown harder than he realized, to be so tired so soon. He felt about for the goldforged crystal buried deep within his hoard and curled one clawed hand about it. Truly, what dragon could love anything so much as he loved gold?
He drifted into sleep, breath slowing. The clatter of coins gradually ceased. And then, all was still.
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497 AU
(1093 years later.)
Valthurian Goldenflame snapped awake, vision expanding to fill his dust-filled lair. He saw his empty trove, his dry skeleton lying strewn across his cavern, every tunnel in all its twists and turns, the footprints in the dirt, the warning carved upon his lintel.
He saw everything and understood it intimately, down to the cracks in the rock and the quiet vibration which had awoken him.
Tink tink, tink, tink tink tink.
A human stood by his claw, trying to chip away his finger-bones to get at his crystal. The last treasure remaining to him.
Valthurian roared, soundlessly, and the mountain trembled. The human fled, echoes of his footsteps fading quickly amid the dust and ruin.
The crystal flared up with heat and light, then subsided as his rage fled.
Confusion followed on its heels. He could not look, could not move. He saw, and understood, but nothing more. He roared once more, experimentally, watching closely as the crystal glowed and the cavern trembled. Rocks from the ceiling in one of the further tunnels dislodged, collapsing in a rain of dust and tumbled stone.
He was dead? He spent a long time contemplating what remained of his body, which had been picked-over so thoroughly that only the barest skeleton remained. His scales were gone, his spines and horns taken, his tail missing entirely. His other claws were missing, only the one hand clasped around the crystal remained untouched. In fact, it looked almost as though his bones and claws had fused onto the crystal, making the whole thing too heavy and unwieldy for humans to remove.
Well, that he could be thankful for at least.
But what was he? He couldn’t be a ghost. Dragon spirits did not linger on, however vengeful they may feel. That was the privilege of lesser beings.
Valthurian Goldenflame
Alphit: 0 [OVAN'RT]
Batyu: 0 [OVAN'RT]
Ho'warab: 0 [OVAN'RT]
Odet'iyea: 3
Elakkahp: 1
Ho'urek: 1
Gomeekae: 3
Sevaho: 5
Jasisev: 4
Azripo'ah: 5
Deerenn: 2
Zeyovf: 1
Enteta: 1
The sheet appeared in his mind, along with a certainty that this represented himself. But though he understood at once that the system message (system message?) was a perfect representation of his own stats (stats?!), he did not understand the words. Whatever concepts they represented, he could not translate.
Except the last. He knew that meant he could increase one of the unknown words. Make himself stronger, more. . . whatever the words represented.
Valthurian's confusion only increased. This was like nothing he’d ever seen, nothing he’d ever experienced, nothing he’d ever heard of or imagined.
He dismissed the message without quite knowing how. He needed at least a little more time to consider before he started assigning finite levelup points (levelup? What?) to unknown attributes.
He closed his mind, though he could not close his vision, and meditated. It was the closest he could come now to sleep.
Hunger tickled at his soul. He needed. He was without. He lacked.
Exactly what he lacked, he could not quite bring to mind, but he felt that yearning emptiness within himself, the absence of something he knew meant as much to him as life.
Gradually, he began to recall that feeling. From his birth. As a hatchling. Before he had his own hoard.
He needed gold. He needed gold, and there was gold to be found. He felt it, saw it, understood it. Beneath his cavern, buried too deep for any dragon claws to reach, the reason he’d first felt so comfortable here though he never knew it until now.
He reached for it, and he found it, and he consumed it. Two hundred and seventy of it. (??) He felt it within himself, and relaxed from the tension that had run through him since awakening.
More would be better, but this would last him for now.
The stone beneath him shifted slightly, and he encouraged it to press together and fill in the spaces left by his removal. This was his mountain, and he didn’t want it to fall apart. While he was at it, he shored up the collapsed tunnel section, smoothing its ceiling and compressing its floor.
Valthurian spent several weeks in quiet meditation, slowly reinforcing and repairing his tunnels, trying to come to an understanding about his current state. But it made no sense, however he considered it, so eventually he gave up on comprehension and instead accepted it as fact.
He was not alive, but he was also not dead.
He could see his mountain - or most of it, at least. Its peak lay beyond his reach.
He could not move. He could move stone, with increasing precision.
He could consume gold, and would slowly burn through his stored hoard at a rate of 1 per day. (What these arbitrary units of measure were, he couldn’t guess.) He could survive without it for at least a few hours, but he didn’t want to test what happened if he let it run out and stay out for long.
He needed to find more gold, but he could not do so without moving. He’d claimed everything within his reach. He could not move. Therefore, he needed someone else to bring gold to him.
He smoothed out the lintel’s warning, erasing it from the stone, and wrote something new there. Slowly, painstakingly, he scrawled a brief fable after the human fashion in the language of their scribes.
Bring gold as an offering to the glowing gem, and your wishes will be granted.
It took him nearly three days, but he managed it. Then he smoothed out the sunward-facing mountainside and wrote in giant skyletters for any dragon who might fly nearby.
Trapped. Need gold. Bring news. Urgent.
That went much faster, as skyletters were large and required far less precision.
Done, he settled back to wait and contemplate. He fixed up his window, widening it, decorating its edges. He smoothed out the hollow where his bones rested, and in so doing discovered that he could consume his bones as well as gold. He did so, one at first, carefully. It didn’t go to the same place within him, material in a separate place which he could not use to live on, but could use to. . . something else.
He watched the glow pulse in the gem with each bone he absorbed, saw how it pulsed with ivory light, and varied his consumption. The gem always matched him. He flared his inner fire to rage, and the gem glowed violent orange, flames licking from its surface. It stilled when he calmed.
The gem was him. His soul lay within it. He made a hollow in the center of the cavern, then absorbed the last bones clutching his soul core. It fell to the stone with a clink, then rolled gently down the slope.
His view shifted, just a little, the edges of his understanding sliding a few feet to the west.
The gem pulsed with rapid flame as brief panic ignited his soul. Then he pushed the gem into the stone, moved the mountain to cover it, and lay quiet and still.
The cavern lay empty, and that meant no one could offer him gold. He needed some sort of idol, or statue, or fountain. Humans loved decorations.
He laughed at the realization that his survival would rely on trading with humans, unless one of his kin should happen to fly overhead and see his message.
But he was safe, now. He had time.
He shaped his bones into one form after another, never quite satisfied. He needed something grand, but not too intimidating. It needed to look like something the humans would sacrifice gold to - and who knew what that would be like?
But finally he settled on his own face, as it once had been. He shaped the bone-material into a statue of his majestic head, then mounted it on a stone pillar directly atop where his soul-core lay hidden.
He changed the message, replacing ‘glowing gem’ with ‘dragon’s head’, and settled in to wait.
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