As soon as Kaz entered the dim interior of the hut, his shoulders slumped. The last time he slept was before he entered the Copperstriker den, and since then he’d battled a horde of monsters, watched what amounted to an execution, and had a chief declare her intention to take him as mate. It was far too much for a single day to hold comfortably, and it wasn’t over yet.
Kaz saw that Raff’s bedding was laid out in the center of the hut, but that was fine. The human was much larger than any kobold, and the space to either side of him was more than large enough for Kaz and Li. Plus, if anyone tried to enter uninvited, it was Raff they would trip over, not Kaz, which could only be a good thing for Kaz.
He curled up in a ball as far from the human’s bed as he could get, though he didn’t let any part of his body touch the leather walls of the hut. The outline of his body would be far too clear through the stretched hide, and though as far as he knew, no one disliked him enough to stab him in the back, there was no reason to ask for trouble.
Li crawled down his body until she rested in the crook of his arm, using him as insulation from the cold stone floor. Kaz was used to the chill, and his fur was thick enough to protect him from the worst of it anyway, so once the little dragon stopped circling and settled into one spot, he closed his eyes.
Turning his vision inward, he began to examine his core, wincing at what he found. He had been right; at least one of the shards had begun to come loose, and the shell of what he believed to be condensed, undifferentiated mana had fine cracks running through it.
Reaching out with his mind, Kaz prodded at a section of the gray material that surrounded the base of one of the pieces of his core. A particularly wide crack ran around it, almost completely separating it from the rest of the opaque shell. It shifted beneath his touch, and a stab of pain went through him as the fragment it supported moved as well.
Right. Maybe it was better to start with an area that wasn’t as badly damaged, figure out what he was doing, and then come back to this section.
With a thought, he sent his perspective spinning around the floating core until he came to a part that only had a few splinters protruding from the pearlescent gray surface. Focusing on the largest one, he could see how most of his ki was still trapped inside the mana shell, and only what could flow out through the core splinters was actually entering his cycle. That meant that the more damaged sections were actually releasing more ki, especially since the greater surface area of the bits that jutted out further allowed for a much faster flow.
Which meant Kaz needed to make a decision before he went any further. Did he want to make the mana shell thicker, if he even could? Wouldn’t that mean that the greater part of his ki would forever be locked away behind a wall, and he would never be able to become stronger?
This way of thinking still felt foreign to Kaz, but he was becoming more comfortable with it. He had spent most of his life wishing he could find a way to remove his strange, troublesome power. Yet now he found that not only didn’t he want to get rid of it, he actually wanted to know what would happen if he pushed it to its limits. Could he grow to be as strong as Lianhua or Gaoda? Could he learn to disappear into the shadows and slice through stone like Chi Yincang? Could he even surpass them?
And of course there was the most important question of all. If he did become as powerful as the humans, what would that mean for his life? He wouldn’t have to answer to any female unless he wanted to, and though that probably meant he would be shunned by his own people, he found that that didn’t matter to him nearly as much as he thought it would. He had just spent a week lost and alone except for Li, and though he was glad when he found kobolds again, that was as much because numbers equaled safety as anything else.
Something occurred to him when he thought this, and his eyes flashed open as he began to laugh. The laughter became louder, then shifted, transforming into soft sobs.
He had spent a week alone in the tunnels, killing anything that threatened him, and living only on what he could forage. With or without the permission and recognition of a chief, he had completed his spirit hunt. He had no trophies to show his tribe, no necklace to display his new status, but he knew in his heart that he was now an adult. A warrior, at last.
And it didn’t matter. Nothing inside him had changed, except for his shattered core. He wasn’t suddenly more mature, didn’t abruptly feel ready to take a mate and begin his life as an adult. He was the same Kaz he had been eight days ago.
No, the differences inside him had come as a result of his travels with the humans, not because he had passed some arbitrary initiation ritual. Not because some female said he was now grown up. He was more self-confident because he knew he could survive alone, yes, but the curiosity and independence that had always been inside him were finally beginning to flourish because they were no longer being crushed down by fear and obedience.
And he did want to continue growing. He wanted to be more of who he already was, far more than he had ever wanted to be a warrior of the Broken Knives. He wanted to learn everything he could, travel and meet new people, and, most importantly, make his own choices on how and when he did that.
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Which meant he needed to be strong. Strong enough to defeat anyone who tried to tell him what to do. Strong enough to protect himself, and Li.
A warm feeling came over him at this last thought, and Kaz glanced down, seeing the golden dragonling gazing up at him, her eyes filled with equal parts white and gold. She sent him an image of the two of them, flying through the open sky, blue and gold. Sometimes he was a little kobold, mounted atop a great dragon, and sometimes his back sprouted suspiciously furry wings, and they flew side by side. But always, they were together, linked by a dense rope of multi-colored ki.
“Do you want that?” he asked her. “No matter what I said to the others, I don’t think of you as a pet. You’re free to leave me whenever you want. It’s just that I took you into the mountain, so I feel like it’s my responsibility to get you out again.”
She whistled softly, and the vision of the two of them, flying through white clouds limned with golden light, strengthened until he could barely see her whirling eyes.
Kaz nodded. “I’d like that, too. I want to know what the world outside is like. But if you change your mind, I won’t try to keep you.”
Her sinuous neck stretched out, and she bit him on the nose, in the same place she had bitten him shortly after she hatched. He yipped and clapped his hand to the spot, but this time there was no blood. It was just a warning nip, not a real attempt to hurt him.
Li hissed to herself, shifting and circling until she settled in place again. With a final glance at Kaz, she closed her eyes and huffed a deep sigh.
Kaz chuckled, closing his own eyes again. He had almost forgotten that he wasn’t actually alone. Li had been with him while he wandered in the dark. She hadn’t abandoned him when he nearly killed himself, had, in fact, almost died while keeping him alive. And he hadn’t been lying when he told her he felt responsible for her. A dragon didn’t belong inside the mountain, and he would do everything in his power to make sure she saw the sky she dreamed of.
Power. Again, it was all about power. With power, he could be independent. With power, he could travel without fear. With power, he could protect Li until she was able to protect herself.
That was that, then. He needed to find a way to repair his core without sacrificing his ability to grow stronger. Like Lianhua’s cup, he had to embrace everything that had brought him this far, accept the changes, and still make sure he was able to hold tea without leaking.
He chuckled at this thought, and dove into his own inner world once again, staring at his core with a new determination. What had worked so far couldn’t continue. It was a weak patch at best, like sewing closed a hole in a piece of leather. Inevitably, the repair would catch on something, or the cord would give way, and when it did, the hole would open up, probably worse than ever.
No, he had to figure out how to hold his core together without blocking the ki inside, and he had to do it in such a way that, even if it wasn’t returned to its original state, it was at least as strong as it had been before. He couldn’t grow if he was afraid his core would destroy itself if he tried.
He spun around his core, examining it from every angle. The shell was thin, and in some places he could faintly see the constantly spinning colors within. It wouldn’t take much to break it completely, and now that he was aware of what was going on, he and Li might be able to encase the core in a sheath like the one reinforcing his poor, damaged channels, which would allow him to hold it together without constricting it.
The key word there was ‘might’. He wasn’t really using ki to contain ki when it came to his channels. Instead, he was bolstering whatever the channels themselves were made of, and the channels were controlling the movement of the ki. If he broke the shell holding his core together, would he be able to hold it together and direct his ki with nothing but more ki? And even if he could, if both his and Li’s focus slipped, he wouldn’t have time to gather himself and try again. No, a moment of distraction would likely result in his core splintering into a thousand pieces.
He needed the shell, but he needed it to allow more ki through it. That, or he needed the current shards to be able to extend further, creating more routes for the ki to exit as he learned to handle it better. But at what point would one of those shards slip free, and what would the result of that be?
Drawing in a deep breath, he looked at one of the core-pieces sticking out through the shell. Rega used to use a small piece of sharpened bone, split down the middle, to pinch and pull splinters from the pup’s paws, and now he imagined forming one out of ki. Very, very gently, he clamped down on the end of the splinter and pulled.
His world went momentarily white with pain, and he froze, terrified that he’d already managed to go too far. His breath came in harsh pants, and he trembled until his vision finally returned.
When it did, he was surprised by what he saw. He had indeed managed to pull the sliver out through the shell a little further, and ki now flowed out of the newly exposed portion of it, slightly increasing the amount of power available to him. More importantly, however, Li hovered in the space within his mind, her little teeth gripping the end of the piece of his core, even as hers blazed within her, making her glow as if she’d swallowed one of Gaoda’s light orbs.
At first, he thought she was going to eat the piece of core, as he’d once nearly done to hers, but then he realized that she was holding it steady, making sure it didn’t slip out any further while he was recovering from the pain. A thin layer of her ki spread out over the mana shell as well, keeping it from cracking any more.
Once she saw that he was aware again, she carefully let go, and the splinter shifted, but didn’t fall. He flinched against the ache, but that was all it was. Now, if they could just do that with all of the other pieces, and then figure out how to stabilize the shell surrounding the main part of the core, he would at least be on the path to achieving his goals.
It was going to be a long night.