Something hard and dark wraps around me, stopping my fall and obscuring my vision. I tumble over myself like a bean in a shaken can, but at least I’m no longer falling to my death. Given my surroundings are white and scaly, it’s clear enough what’s caught me—the dragon’s claws.
He releases me, and I go spilling out onto the icy floor of the cave. I start to slide down the gentle incline until I dig my talons into the ice, likewise grabbing hold of the ground with the sharpened nails on my hands. I breathe out a shaky sigh of relief, then look up.
The dragon is craning his head down toward me. His lips peel back in what I hope is a smile, revealing dozens of pointed, sword-like teeth.
I have to remind myself that there’s a person in there, someone sapient and empathic, just like me.
I hope they’re empathic, anyway.
“Uh, hello!” I call. “Thank you for catching me.” Assuming he had knocked me down by accident in the first place.
The dragon puffs another breath of frost at me, and I shiver.
“Ollie, right?” I ask.
And the dragon nods. He nods!
I tentatively smile. “I take it you can’t speak?”
Ollie growls, makes some strange huffing sounds, then roars.
“Right,” I say. Carefully, I climb to my feet. “Your mouth isn’t really designed for that. Well, I think I have a workaround.” I hold up a hand. “I’ll need to touch you, if that’s okay.”
Ollie grumbles, head tilted to the side, then leans his head down toward me. Carefully, gently, his nose bumps into my hand. It’s cold and pebbly. It feels like I’m touching a glacier.
Okay, I think to myself. Let’s activate Psionic Touch.
Echo says, [Spell activated.]
“—SO SMALL, LIKE A BIRD!” The words burst into my mind, painfully loud and clear. “IT’S A GOOD THING I DIDN’T SQUISH HER IN MY CLAWS! THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN BAD. I WONDER IF SHE HAS FOOD? I BET SHE TASTES LIKE CHICKEN NUGGETS. I WANT CHICKEN NUGGETS! NO, I SHOULDN’T EAT THE BIRD PERSON, THAT WOULD BE MEAN. UGH, I’M SOOOOOOO HUNGRY!”
I open and close my mouth in surprise. It’s a boy’s voice—not just male, but young. Just a little kid. Echo, can you Check his age? I ask.
[Age: 7]
“Oh my god,” I murmur. He is just a little kid.
“Ollie?” I think, mentally pressing my thoughts toward his mind. “Can you hear me?”
“WHAAAA—” The voice is cut off as Ollie flinches his head back, blinking in surprise.
I wave my hand. “You have to be touching me, or I can’t hear you!”
Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Ollie leans back in and bumps his nose against my hand.
“—MY GOSH I HOPE SHE DIDN’T HEAR ME THINKING ABOUT EATING HER EARLIER.”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” I think.
Ollie’s eyes go wide. “OH NO SHE HEARD THAT TOO!”
I chuckle. “Yes, I can hear anything you think while we’re touching. And you can hear me. Nice to meet you, Ollie.”
“NICE TO MEET YOU, TOO!” the boy cries. Even though it’s all in my head, his voice is so loud, it’s almost painful. “I’M A DRAGON! ISN’T THAT COOL?”
“Very cool.” I smile. “So tell me about yourself, Ollie. How did you end up here?” I glance around the cave. “I don’t see a way out. Or in, more specifically.”
Ollie flares his wings up behind him. “I HAVE NO IDEA! I WAS PLAYING BASHERS WITH JESSICA AND THEN MOM YELLED SOMETHING AND THEN I WOKE UP HERE AND EVERYTHING WAS COLD, BUT IT DIDN’T BOTHER ME THAT MUCH BECAUSE I’M A DRAGON. RAWRRRR! HOW COOL IS THAT!”
I wince at the mental volume. “Bashers?” I ask.
“IT’S MY FAVORITE GAME,” he explains, his tail whipping back and forth excitedly like a puppy. “JESSICA—THAT’S MY COUSIN, BUT SHE’S BASICALLY LIKE A SISTER—JESSICA AND I GOT THESE REMOTE CONTROL CARS FOR CHRISTMAS, WHICH WAS FUN FOR A WHILE, BUT THEN IT GOT BORING, AND THEN WE FIGURED WE COULD MAKE LEGO CARS AND TIE THEM ON A STRING TO THE BACK OF THE REMOTE CONTROL CARS, AND THEN WE’D EACH TRY TO RUN OVER EACH OTHER’S LEGO CAR WITH OUR OWN REMOTE CONTROL CAR BUT MAKE SURE OUR OWN LEGO CAR DIDN’T GET HIT AND WE CALLED IT BASHERS. BECAUSE OF TRYING TO BASH UP THE LEGO CAR.”
“I gathered,” I say, frowning slightly. “And that was the last thing you remember?”
Ollie grumbles, heaving an enormous shrug. “I GUESS SO. JESSICA JUST BASHED MY CAR SO I WAS GOING OUT TO PICK UP THE PIECES.”
A chill goes through me. “Out where?”
“IN THE STREET IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE,” he says. “THAT’S THE ONLY PLACE WITH ENOUGH ROOM TO PLAY.”
I decide to stop my current line of questioning. I can infer how this story ends.
“You’re from Earth, right Ollie?” I ask, turning to a slightly safer topic.
“OF COURSE!” he cries. He tilts his head. “ISN’T EVERYONE?”
“Well, you and me, at least,” I say. “But we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“NO, I WAS IN TEXAS,” he tells me.
“Well, welcome to Lusio,” I tell him. “I’m not sure how we got here, exactly…” Apart from dying being involved. “...but we’re on a very different world, now.”
Ollie rumbles, which briefly alarms me until I realize it’s a laugh. “AND I’M A DRAGON NOW!”
He tips his head back with a roar, and the chamber shakes from the sound. I clap my hands over my ears until he’s done.
“Yes!” I shout up to him. “Yes, I can see that!” But a pang of sympathy hits me. He’s just a kid—too young to understand the implications of his situation. But like me, this is probably the body he is stuck with, now. And while my own adaptation has been… confusing to navigate, to say the least, at least it’s a body I now feel comfortable with. A body that will allow me to live a normal life—well, normal given the circumstance. But living as a dragon is something else entirely. He can’t communicate with others. Will he ever find companionship? Fulfillment? What will he eat?
That thought gives me pause. I wave my hand at Ollie, and eventually he calms down enough to nudge up against my hand once more.
“I CAN SHOOT ICE OUT OF MY MOUTH!” he excitedly tells me. “AND I HAVE WINGS! BUT IT’S TOO SMALL TO FLY IN HERE.”
“Yes, I was going to ask about that,” I say. “Have you been stuck in this room ever since you woke up here?”
“YES,” Ollie says, the thought accompanied by the impression of a dramatic sob. “IT’S SO BORING! THERE’S NOTHING TO PLAY WITH, AND I CAN’T EVEN FLY, AND I’M SOOOOOOO HUNGRY.”
It’s been nearly two weeks since I reincarnated. Days that I’ve been having warm meals with Mirzayael and the people of Fyreneth’s Keep. Days that Ollie has been slowly starving down here—although, given his mass, I suspect starving to death would take some time.
But there’s other things to worry about, like water and air.
“We need to find you a way out of here,” I say, glancing around the chamber. Honestly it’s a miracle he appeared in a place that had enough room for him. Could he have appeared inside of a wall instead? Could I have?
I try to push that disturbing thought out of my mind.
Echo, can you tell me anything about the air composition of this chamber? I ask.
[Negative,] Echo says.
I figured as much, but it was worth a shot.
[However, the chemical composition of the user’s surroundings could be accessed through the Dungeon Core.]
Oh? I knew it could do that with earth, but I hadn’t realized the same capability applied to the surrounding atmosphere. It makes sense, I suppose; it’s just been so obsessed with eating every rock and stone in sight that I hadn’t thought its abilities extended to other elements and states of matter.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
I turn my attention toward the Dungeon Core. Have you been holding out on me? Can you analyze the composition of things besides stone?
The Dungeon Core perks up. I’ve been ignoring it all day and it’s sad. It’s also hungry. It hasn’t gotten to eat anything in forever!
I shake my head. You literally just ate some stone and ice a few minutes ago. Which also means I haven’t been ignoring you all day.
It’s so hungry. Soooooo hungry!
Good lord. That’s two terrifyingly powerful and hungry children I have to take care of now. Core, focus. Can you analyze the chemical composition of things beside stone?
The Core pouts. Of course it can. It can analyze whatever it eats.
Finally, progress. And what can you eat?
The Dungeon Core smiles in my mind. Everything.
The thought is accompanied by an impression of a bottomless hole: an endless hunger. An event horizon.
I try not to shudder. As disturbing as the implications are, the Dungeon Core’s ability is an incredibly useful asset.
Well, then, eat some of the air in this room, I tell it. But only a little bit! One cubic meter or less.
The Dungeon Core regards this command unenthusiastically. It doesn’t like to eat gas. It’s not crunchy like rocks. Gas makes it feel bloated.
I resist the urge to not drag my hand down my face. Just a little! Please. We need to see how long the air in here will last. Especially with a giant dragon taking up all the oxygen. I’ll give you some more mana if you do.
The Dungeon Core snaps to attention. Mana! It loves mana. Okay, well, maybe just a little bit of air is fine.
I let out a relieved breath, turning back to Ollie. “Okay. I’m working on something. In the meantime, I need to go speak with my friends.”
Having to be touching Ollie to speak with him is inconvenient—not to mention it’s draining my mana. It occurs to me I could use Psionic Link to form a remote mind-to-mind bridge with Ollie like I did with the Dungeon Core. But do I want to do that? The spell would be permanent, and I’ve only just met the boy.
And I’m also the only one who can talk to him. Ollie needs me. That outweighs any long-term repercussions.
“Ollie,” I say, gesturing him forward so he can touch my hand once more. “I want to try something that should make it easier for us to talk.”
He bumps his nose against my hand again. “OKAY! WHAT IS IT?”
“I can establish a mental link that will let us speak like this without having to be touching,” I say to him. “However, it would be permanent. Is that okay with you?”
“UH, SURE, I GUESS.” I get the mental impression of a shrug. “IT’S NICE TO HAVE ANOTHER PERSON TO TALK TO. ECHO CAN BE SO BORING!”
I tip my head. “Echo? You also have an Echo?” Not that I should be surprised, given both of our ties to this System.
“YOU KNOW ECHO, TOO?” he asks. “COOL!”
We’re getting off track. “Are you sure you’re alright with establishing the mental link?” I ask him again. I don’t think he fully understands the implications of its permanence, but that might be irrelevant anyway, given our need to communicate.
“YEAH THAT’S FINE,” he says. His tail starts to wag again. “WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?”
[Psionic Link activated.]
I can feel the barrier between our minds vanish. I extend my mind toward him. “Here. Can you feel this?”
“OOOOOOH.” Ollie huffs. “THAT’S SO WEIRD.”
“You’ll need to reach out toward me, too,” I tell him. “Like a hand shake.”
Ollie’s mind surges toward me, bowling through my consciousness and scattering my thoughts. I fall back to the floor, dazed.
[Psionic Link established.]
[Mana: 38/200]
“OOPS! ARE YOU OKAY?” Ollie asks.
I sit up, dizzy. I guess I should have specified for him to be gentle—then again, that might be difficult enough as it is for a child, let alone a child dragon.
“It’s okay, I’m fine,” I mentally tell him as I stand up and dust myself off.
“OH!” he cries. “I CAN STILL HEAR YOU!”
“Great.” I smile up at him. “Now we can keep in contact even while I leave the room.” I gesture up toward the hole I’d carved into the cavern, which now seems so far above me. “Can you give me a lift?”
“OKAY!” Ollie leans toward me, opening his mouth.
“Ah, wait a second!” I say, alarmed. I’m not sure if he intends to pick me up with his mouth, but I don’t exactly trust him to have complete control and awareness of his own strength.
Ollie pauses, tipping his head to the side.
“I’ll climb up on your neck if that’s alright,” I tell him. “Will that work?”
“MMMM, OKAY.” Ollie leans his head down and turns it to the side.
The Dungeon Core begins pestering me. It ate that little bit of air I asked it to, and now it doesn’t feel good, but it did it anyway, so now I have to give it mana. With a mental sigh, I relinquish a few points of mana to the Dungeon Core; the chemical composition of the air it consumed is already in our database, I just need a moment to go through it. In the meantime, I have a dragon to climb.
Exceptionally aware of my talons, I gingerly place my hands on Ollie’s neck and push myself up, attempting to throw a leg over the other side and straddle him.
Ollie giggles. “THAT TICKLES!”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll try to be careful.”
I manage to climb up somewhat less fluidly and with significantly more flailing than I would have liked, but I eventually settle behind Ollie’s head. There’s a row of spines that fan out and frame his head, so I grab two of these for purchase. I also needn't have worried about nicking him with my talons: his glossy white scales are far tougher than I’d have thought.
“READY?” Ollie thinks, already straightening up.
I throw myself forward, tightening my grip around the spines. “I suppose I have to be!”
Ollie rears up on his hind legs and stretches toward the hole in the cavern wall. We still come up short, but now I’m at least close enough I can make out the others clustered in the gap.
Nek is watching me with an awed expression, while Mirzayael’s face is creased in a frown.
“Are you alright?” she calls down.
“Yes,” I say, clutching Ollie’s spines in a deathgrip. I try not to think about our height and the fact that there’s nothing at my back to prevent me from slipping and falling all the way to the cavern floor. “We’ve just been getting to know each other. Everyone, meet Ollie. He’s seven.”
Nek splutters. “Seven centuries?!”
“Seven years,” I say. “He’s just a kid. So I expect you all to treat him nicely.”
Mirzayael eyes the dragon dubiously. “If you say so.”
“OH MY GOSH,” Ollie says. “THAT ONE LOOKS LIKE A KITTY!”
“Yes, his name is Nek,” I tell Ollie.
“AND THAT OTHER ONE LOOKS LIKE A SPIDER,” Ollie says. “THAT’S CREEPY!”
“Don’t be rude,” I tell him. “Her name’s Mirzayael, and she’s just a different species, no different from you and me.”
I can feel his mind wilt. “OH, SORRY.”
“It’s okay, Ollie.”
“We have a bit of an issue,” I press on, trying to juggle the two conversations. “Ollie here ended up in this cave the same way I ended up in mine. Which is to say, neither of us are exactly sure how we got in it. One thing is clear however; this little hole I carved is the only way out.”
“What are you suggesting?” Nek asks, shaking himself out of his shock. “Dig a way out?”
“The Dungeon Core should be able to help me do something like that, yes.” I bring up the Map Interface and try zooming out. The lines of explored cave swirl through the 3D interface like tunnels in an ant farm. There’s one windy path that leads up to where I had woken up, and dozens of crisscrossing paths which indicate my exploration of the Catacombs with Mirzayael. Apart from that, the only area that’s really been fully revealed is Fyreneth’s Keep. Where we’re currently located is partially between the Catacombs and the Keep, but the entire rest of the map is still obscured by darkness.
“Do you know anything about the cave systems above us?” I ask. “I could begin to tunnel a way out for Ollie, but I don’t want to compromise stone that might affect the city.”
“This area is outside the known cave systems,” Mirzayael says. “There could be anything above us. Beryl might have an old map or two, from explorers before my time, but we’d have to return to the Keep to check.”
“Let’s do that,” I say, nodding to the young guards who have hung back behind Nek and Mirzayael, regarding this entire event with wide eyes. “Do you three think you could find your way to the Keep and back?”
Zakaiya, Rei, and Opal exchange a look, then give me a nod. “I can use my silk to create markers,” Zakaiya says. “We should be back in a few hours.”
“Good,” I say. “Thank you. Please go.” Then I hesitate, looking to Mirzayael. “If that’s okay?”
She snorts. “Yes, it’s fine.” She flicks a hand to the guards. “Go!”
“THIS IS BORING,” Ollie says. “AND MY LEGS ARE GETTING TIRED!”
“Sorry,” I tell him. “We’ll hurry it along.” I look to the others. “Would you all come down into the chamber? It would make speaking together easier.”
The look on Nek’s face tells me exactly how little he likes that idea, but Mirzayael nods curtly. “I will work on creating a line for the others to rappel. Unless you’re capable of forming a staircase to help.”
I take a look at my mana reserves and then dip into the Core’s inventory. It’s eaten plenty of stone I could now bring back out into the world, placing it anywhere and in any form I like. However, the mana cost makes more than a bit of rearranging prohibitively expensive.
“I can try, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do very much right now,” I say. “I can at least shape an easier platform and hole for you all to use to rappel from. That will have to be sufficient for now.”
After some brief back and forth and Nek’s clear reluctance to rappel down the sheer cliff of ice, I hand over most of my mana to the Dungeon Core and it excitedly gets to work on widening the hole and forming it into a more stable platform. Under my guidance, the Core reaches into the nearby wall and pulls the crystalline stone outward, shattering the ice. The resulting terrace is blocky, but functional.
“THAT’S SO COOL!” Ollie cries, once again practically yelling into my head and causing me to wince. “LIKE MINECRAFT. CAN I DO THAT?”
“Not right now,” I say, although given Ollie’s high mana levels, that does pose a terrifying possibility. “Right now we need to focus on getting you out of here.”
As Nek and Mirzayael make their way down and Ollie lands back on the floor, I slip off his neck in relief, and prompt the Core to do another air sample. It’s extremely reluctant to get the taste of fresh mana out of its mouth, but eventually gives in. I bring up the two breakdowns of atmospheric compositions and begin to sift through the results.
“What now?” Mirzayael asks as I’m pouring over the numbers. “Can it understand us?”
“He most certainly can,” I say, distracted by the chemical combinations. They’re not exactly the ratios I’m used to from Earth, but I suppose it makes sense the atmosphere and biology here would be slightly different. I need to focus on any variances in the two samples. “Why don’t you go introduce yourself?”
Mirzayael must be able to catch the distant tone in my voice, as she steps away so as not to bother me any further.
Echo, can you calculate the percent CO2 in these two samples? I ask, desperately missing my graphing calculator. Rounded to the first significant decimal place that is different between the two numbers.
[Calculated,] Echo says. [Sample 1: 3.88% CO2. Sample 2: 3.89%.]
Hardly a difference, it appears. Although that number already feels high for my liking.
Calculate the rate at which CO2 has increased, I say.
[CO2 increased at a rate of 0.02% per hour.]
I frown, counting back how many days I’ve been here. Throwing some basic math into the mix…
“Damn,” I say, getting Echo to double check my work. The numbers come out the same. “Damn!”
At the exclamation, Mirzayael wanders back over to me. Nek is monologuing to Ollie, who’s tilting his head curiously, his tail whipping back and forth in amusement. I step away from them, lowering my voice.
“We have a problem,” I say to her. “Ollie’s been stuck down here for as long as I’ve been in this world. The air in this cave is growing toxic.”
Mirzayael wrinkles her nose. “How bad?”
“Unclear,” I say, glancing at Ollie. Would CO2 rates affect a body like that the same way it would affect someone like Mirzayael or I?
“But within a day or two, it might be too toxic for us to come back. And that means if we don’t find a way out for him soon, this cave will become his tomb.”