The swamp was dark, moist, and hot, with the sound of a thousand thousand insects and frogs and other creatures peeping out their cries in the distance.

It was familiar. Rich found Rotgoriel's memories filling in the gaps as he peered around, the dragon's above-average intelligence providing a picture perfect recollection of the place.

Too picture-perfect.

“This is an exact match,” Rich said, muttering to himself.

“Is it?” Midian said, startling him out of the reverie.

“Yeah. This is weird. It's supposed to be different every time someone comes down here. But this is identical, down to the skyline over there, and that hillock off to the left. And I'd swear those are the same stars,” he pointed skyward.

Thunder rumbled. “And here comes the storm,” Rich said, as the clouds rolled in. “We're going to get jumped by giant frog things here shortly. I hope you came ready for a fight.

“About seven millennia,” Midian said, peering up at the stars. “Maybe eight.”

“What's that?”

“I'm looking at the stellar drift, compared to present-day Generica. These are the stars as they'd look about eight thousand years ago.”

“Eight thousand... you're sure?”

She gave him a flat look, as the storm broke and the rain started to pour down, then pulled out and assembled a set of thin metal rods. “Wall of Force. Oh, and Flight,” while I'm at it.”

“Right, forgot who I was talking too,” Rich said, glancing away. “Come on. I think the path's this way.”

Midian followed him into the darkness, gliding above the water, her force umbrella keeping her relatively dry.

For his part, Rich extended a wing to provide more coverage, and she didn't object. Though it was a bit of a losing proposition, even the air here was choking and damp, primal and thick and raw.

It was almost a relief when the giant frogs and the Frogzilla launched out of the darkness. This time Rich knew what to expect, and they perished quickly beneath his claws and under a barrage of force spells from Midian. They never laid a webbed hand on her, as she used a skill called “Timeslip,” whenever they got too close.

It was honestly a bit humbling. He thought that she could possibly take him on one-on-one if it came down to it. He wasn't used to that from people who didn't have ten or twenty levels on him.

I wonder if this is what I make other players feel like, Rich thought with a chuckle.

The way cleared out after the frog-things were dead, and again they were in empty stone tunnels. A few minutes of walking later, the scenery shifted abruptly to a cave filled with blood and corpses.

“Eugh,” Midian said, raising a hand to her nose. “This is something.”

“Exactly as I remember it,” Rich said, murmuring. “The core chamber shouldn't be far.”

It wasn't. Rich lifted up the corpses covering it, and gestured to the black-and-green hole in the world. “After you.”

She didn't move.

“This is the only way in.”

“Then we've got a problem, because I'm not seeing anything other than warped dead dragons,” Midian folded her arms. “This is maybe something only dragons can see.”

“No. The masked ones have been in core chambers before, so they have a way of getting in. And there are other players who have gotten in before, so there has to be a way.”

“There probably is.” Midian tilted her head, considering him. “How many of those players were Cultists?”

Rich considered the question. Rotgoriel's memories remained as good as they had been, and after a second he nodded. “There weren't any names visible over their heads, but I'm pretty sure some of them had a few visible pieces of Cultist gear. Actually that makes it obvious, now that I think about it. The masked ones count as dark creatures, so they'd have access to Cultist-style tricks.”

“Which is why I don't think I can get in there,” Midian spread her hands. “I'm not a Cultist.”

“Are you sure? You don't have any skills that could bypass this gate? Maybe something to teleport to me after I get through there?”

“Normally I'd suggest finding a Merchant to make a pack of holding and smuggling me in, but a lot of tricks like that got nurphed over the last few years. Players were getting too many exploits out of it. Doing stuff like tricking people into bags and dumping the bags into lava for easy PVP experience.”

“Now who'd do a thing like that?” Rich murmured, remembering happier times.

“You'd look a lot more innocent without that shit-eating grin,” Midian poked him.

“Sorry. Ah, sorry not sorry.” Rich looked around. “So we can't get you in there. This is disappointing. I was sure that showing you Geebo's dream was the right move.”

“It might not be for nothing.” Midian said, turning and surveying the area. “I can take us back.”

“You think that would do any good?”

“I think something killed these dragons not too long ago. Probably won't have to go farther than a century or two.”

Rich let the bodies fall back into place. “Can you take me along with you?”

“Invite Rutger to party,” Midian said, smiling. “Take my hand and let's get this show started.”

“Yes. What kind of time travel rules are we dealing with? No dead butterflies? Don't touch any previous versions of yourself? Ignore the guy in the blue telephone box?”

Midian took his hand. “It's fairly simple. We won't be able to affect anything, or be detected, unless we run into another time traveler or a god or something like that. Oh, and if we stray too far from the area of effect then we instantly age to the present day and die.”

“That's a pretty big issue.”

“Less than you'd think. We have about half a mile to roam around in. Ready?”

“Close enough.”

“Rewind.”

The caves flickered.

The bodies disappeared.

Rich turned, looking at the room that now stood revealed. The bodies were gone, and now he could see small niches in the walls, down where they met the ground. Mud oozed from them, and as he watched, a misshapen dragon woman with a hunch to her back and a too-small pair of wings moved among them, probing in the mud with a stick. She crooned as she worked, and his Draconic Tongue skill translated it without trouble.

“That's pretty,” Midian remarked. “Soothing.”

“It should be. That's a lullaby. This is a nursery.”

As they watched, the nursemaid stopped poking the mud, and went silent. She reached into the goo, and pulled forth a fleshy mass.

A familiar looking fleshy mass.

“That's a drakkit egg,” Rich murmured. “Looks similar to Geebo's.”

With a satisfied chirp, the nursemaid turned and shuffled down the corridor, back toward the entrance, cleaning the mud from the egg as she went.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Follow?”

“I think we should,” Midian sounded uncertain.

The nursemaid led the way to a round chamber, where more misshapen forms, much larger forms sat crouched on slabs of stone. The ceiling was high, rising out of sight in the darkness, and he caught the gleam of more scales up in niches in the walls.

“Some kind of council chamber,” Rich speculated.

“Or a temple,” Midian pointed where the nursemaid was depositing the egg on what looked like an altar.

Rich spared it a glance, but the figures around him caught more of his attention. They resembled the corpses that filled the halls in Geebo's dream, like dragons seen through a warped mirror.

And all bore the same title above their heads, with varying levels following a single word.

DRAKE.

They were flawed.

Imperfect.

And moreover, surprisingly, these all had signs of what had to be age.

Wrinkles. Scales that sagged loosely from bony frames. Rheumy eyes. And in a few specimens, white curly manes or even straggly beards.

And what's more, some of them were cuddling. A few were talking animatedly, in the back rows. One was slapping its leg, laughing at a joke or something similar.

It was all very undragon-like. Rich knew that Rotgoriel would have been shocked. He felt a little bit of a shock by proxy, and forced himself to focus.

And then the ones nearest the altar lifted their heads and crooned.

The air itself shivered.

“Detect Magic,” he heard Midian murmur, and realized that wasn't a bad idea.

“Occult Eye,” he added, and the world swam into focus... and then out of focus.

He saw, from each of the dragon-things, tendrils of magic tease themselves out of their bodies. They rippled, flickering towards the rest of the room, as more and more voices joined in the rising hum of voices. It was like throatsinging, like a gregorian chant without words, like a wave of sound, and as the last of the voices joined in, the magic pouring out of them stabilized, joining together with the others until it was one large mass centered over the altar.

Over the egg.

Over it and surrounding it, and as Rich and Midian watched, flowing into it like water into a sponge. The egg seemed to swell, seemed to bulge.

Then with a spurt of slime and a wail of a newborn, it broke, and new life clawed itself into the world, breathing in air and magic in the same breath until the crooning faded, and the baby stretched its wings as it considered its elders with new eyes.

And to his surprise, Richard watched as a name formed over its head.

LOW DRAGON HATCHLING – 1

The low dragon wailed, and the nursemaid gather it up in her arms, and pulled meat and entrails from a pouch at her side, fed it as the croon fell silent, row by row, until the room was quiet again.

“They're older,” Midian said quietly, and Rich looked at her in confusion for a second, until he followed her gaze back to the nearest dragon-thing.

Its beard was longer. Its scales were looser. But it had a smile on its face, and it clapped its neighbor on her shoulder in glee, a shoulder that seemed more worn and shaky than it had been a few minutes ago.

Rich watched with his occult senses, studied them until he could see the magic that was left in the room withdrawing and returning back to its originators.

“They gave the child some of their own lives to hatch it. But why? That shouldn't be necessary,” Rich mused.

“How do dragons hatch normally?” Midian asked.

“They dream, and their dreams are dungeons. Foolish people bring treasure in, and their deaths and magic and treasure feed the dungeons, cause them to grow and develop... this is before dungeons were a thing. This is before dungeons were possible,” Rich said, in a rush, as several connections finally snapped into place. “This is helpful. But I'm not sure how this helps us.”

“Me neither,” Midian admitted. “My skill should have taken us to the last major significant event in the area,” Midian said. “I was expecting to see a massacre, not a birth.”

“Did you see its name?” Rich asked.

“No. I haven't seen a name since I got here,” Midian muttered. “That's not uncommon for far dives into the past, though. I have a suspicion that displayed titles are a recent development.”

“They were all drakes. But the thing they hatched, it was a low dragon hatchling.”

“Oh. Oh...” Midian's eyes went wide. “Oh that explains so much.”

Rotgoriel watched the nursemaid shuffle down a different hall, muttering sweet nothings to the hatchling. He prodded Midian, then followed after. “Does it?”

“It does. You know that I'm a high elf, right?”

“Yes...”

“Well there used to be low elves. Most elves don't speak of them much. They were something like cavemen.”

“Ah! So these are ancestors of mine.” Again, there was that feeling of wrongness. “Or something of the sort. What happened to the low elves?”

“You know, nobody talks about that. It's like they just disappeared off the face of the world. But now I can't get my mind off that cave full of corpses, and I have a sneaking suspicion about a few things.”

The nursemaid found her way to a smaller chamber, with a spring bubbling up in the center of it, fuming and steaming. Small forms played and swam through the water, and a number of them surged out, cheeping and peeping as she entered. Shooing them away gently, the hunched nursemaid kissed the low dragon hatchling's head, and let him down to play with his brothers and sisters.

Rich felt a pain in his heart, and looked away. Was it his? Was it Rotgoriel's? He couldn't say. At this point the boundary between them was blurred and pointless. His fate was the dragon's, and the dragon's was his own. “I need to see this through,” he whispered.

“Agreed,” Midian spoke. She took gentle hold of his wingtip. “Let's try another Rewind.”

The caves flickered, and they were in a different part of them now. The miasma of the swamp was close here, the air hot and filled with the scent of rotting vegetation. A fire burned in the center of an oblong chamber, and the ceiling was hung with fleshy pods, each the size of a melon. They were green and slick and slimy, and an elongated figure moved among them, crest tilting as it poked and prodded the growths.

One was twitching madly, and the figure moved into the firelight, and snipped the pod neatly free from the ceiling with long-practiced slashes.

“That's a drakkit,” Rich muttered, even before he saw the title over the creature's head. Geebo had spent almost a year like this, before entering his present state.

The drakkit carried the bulging, thrashing pod off down a corridor, and Rich and Midian followed. It led them to a familiar-looking chamber, though obviously an earlier version of the birthing cave. The altar was uncarved, a simple and comfortable looking stone. There were slabs of stone around too, but as Rich's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that the things sitting on them were very definitely not dragons.

They were giant frogs, and birds, and a few very hairy apes, snakes and crocodiles and even a few giant bugs, and each of them was being held tight by a hunched over drakkit. Some were bloody, others looked like they were barely breathing. All of them looked like they had lost a fight.

They probably had, to end up here.

And as the drakkit laid the pod in the center of the table and stepped back, the closest drakkit crooned a signal.

“Occult Eye,” Rich said, as the others started crooning, but this time there were no energies surging forth from them. He frowned, trying to figure out what was going on...

Then, with a flurry of violence that was over in less with a second, each drakkit tore their captive animal apart.

This was ritual slaughter. And Rich watched as their life force exploded out from them, and into the pod, which bulged and exploded.

And there in the center, mewling and squealing, lay a small hatchling. Its title formed, and Rich whispered it out loud. “Drake.”

“This is a chain of evolution,” Midian said. “Do we want to go back further?”

“I know what we'll see,” Rich said. “But let's play this out anyway.”

“Rewind.”

A flicker, a flash, and they were out of the caves.

This was the swamp again, the edge of it. A light drizzle fell, and the bugs hummed, and frogs and larger things slithered and hunted in the marsh beyond.

And there was a village. If you could call it that. It was more a loose assemblage of tree trunks and limbs and twisted vines that had been formed into a somewhat-defensible stockade.

All around it, through the meager mud huts and wooden shacks, were draggits.

Their small forms pattered around in an ever-busy stream, tending the fitfully burning fire, bringing in strings of fish, skinning rabbits, or weaving more vine-rope. Naked and thin and quiet, they worked ceaselessly, casting nervous looks at the large, unfriendly world just outside their walls.

And then, from one of the huts, a draggit woman emerged with an egg in her hands. It was oversized, perhaps somewhere around a softball, and looked almost like a pearl, as it shone iridescent in the dim light.

The reaction was not what Rich thought it would be.

The crowd around her stared, and their neck frills flared in what had to be agitation. They were not happy.

The woman carrying the egg glared at them.

And with a sigh, draggits left off what they were doing, and ran into the huts, returning with smaller eggs. They were about golf-ball sized on average, and dirty-white, not unlike hen's eggs.

Moving quickly, the draggits dug a small pit. The big egg went in the center, covered with a layer of mud. The other eggs went on top.

“I don't like where this is going,” Midian whispered.

“Me neither,” Rich said, as he saw one of the larger draggits approach, and raise a rock over his head.

CRUNCH.

His Occult sight was still up, as the rock fell.

Hatchlings died.

And what magic they had, flowed downward.

The mud exploded, as a thin, sleek form clawed its way out, hissing and shrieking.

DRAKKIT – 1

The draggits backed away from it, all save for the woman who had brought it. Its mother? Perhaps.

She picked the thing up, held it at arm's length, and marched toward a stew pot. Halfway through it squirmed away from her, leaped toward the pot and ate, shoveling mouthful after mouthful into its crooked jaws.

“Is this what you expected to see?” Midian asked him.

“Close enough,” Rich whispered. “But I don't know how this helps us.”

“Rewind,” Midian said again...

...and they were back in the room full of corpses.

“It doesn't show this. Why doesn't it show us what happened here? You'd think it would be a significant event,” Midian mused.

Rich considered the corpses. Then he closed his eyes. “It doesn't need to show us. I know what happened here. This was the next step. They needed to go from low dragons to high dragons.”

“So this is the history of your species?”

“Part of it,” Rich said, closing his eyes. “I need to talk to someone who was there for the next part. And I know where to find them. I'll be back as soon as I can.”

And before he could lose his nerve, he lifted up the pile of corpses and slunk into the core chamber.

It was exactly as Rotgoriel's borrowed memories recalled. Green and black and full of void. And noisy, as distant voices called threats and taunts to an unseen target.

Rich followed them, as Rotgoriel had before. And in time he came to that green runic circle enscribed on a black, unseen ground. And just as before, there were small, miniature versions of the ancestors gathered around it. Shrunken, yes, but clearly high dragons, flawless and threatening and fierce.

And all of them startled and looked around guiltily, as he cleared his throat. “Good evening,” he said into the sudden violence. “I think it's past time we had a talk.”