It wasn’t easy opening and going through his pack without disturbing Li, but Kaz managed, at least well enough to be certain that nothing was missing. Even the beautiful knife was still there, though Kaz nearly sliced himself when he reached in and found that it wasn’t wrapped as well as it had been before. The scent of blood wafted up from the depths of the bag, and Kaz smiled humorlessly. It seemed that whoever had gone through it hadn’t been so lucky.
Pushing power into his nose, Kaz brought the opening of the pack up and gave a deep sniff. He almost gagged at the scent of the monster’s fluids that still saturated the leather, but he forced himself to continue. Beyond the fetid, acidic scent was… Kaz himself, of course, and Ilto, but that scent came from a spot on the top where the other kobold had probably picked it up to move it out of the way. Inside, the only unexpected smell was Zyle.
Kaz pulled back, letting his sense of smell return to its already-heightened baseline. He didn’t understand. If Zyle wanted to check Kaz’s pack, he had had the perfect opportunity to do so before Kaz woke after the battle. But Kaz was certain that he had looked at the pack when he woke, and the knot had been intact. Hadn’t it? Everything from that time was a little fuzzy, but he was almost sure.
He closed his eyes, trying to picture the scene. Yes. he had picked up his pack and the bone, and he distinctly remembered checking the knot at that time. He had been woozy from his injury, but the habit was so ingrained that he did it without thinking.
So what had changed? Zyle had been content to leave Kaz’s things alone then, but not today? And he hadn’t taken anything, just looked at it, cut his hand, and put it all back. The only thing Kaz could think of that might even possibly have triggered the change was his fight with Litz. Unless the old male had decided that if he was entrusting his kobolds to Kaz and the humans, it would be a good idea to look for… what? What could he possibly have thought he might find in the bag of a pup from the upper levels?
Kaz’s fingers touched each of the items in the bag, once again confirming that they were all there. Knife, hilt, fire-striker, and seed moved beneath his touch, each present and accounted for.
Sighing softly, Kaz pulled the rough, scratched little seed out into the dim light filtering in around the door. This was what he had been after in the first place, and there was no point in fretting over the rest. Everything was there, and Kaz was leaving in the morning, so whatever Zyle’s motivations had been, it seemed that the other male didn’t intend to do anything else about it.
Kaz absently rolled the seed in his hand as he thought, and it was only when the fur around his wrist got caught in the grooves on its surface that he finally pulled his attention back enough to look at it properly.
There was nothing remarkable about it, and it looked just as it had the last time he took the time to examine it. The seed was brown, with a slightly wrinkled surface that still had the faintest traces of the fibrous material that had clung to it the first time he saw it. They were thoroughly dry by now, rather than sticky and gummy, but they remained stubbornly attached unless he picked at them with a claw.
The marks where Li’s teeth had scraped at it were visible; slightly lighter than the rest of the surface. One mark was thicker, and Kaz remembered scratching it just to see if he could. All in all, it was thoroughly underwhelming until Kaz used his ki vision to look at it. Then, its dull and unassuming appearance fell away, leaving the remarkable thing that had attracted him to it in the first place.
Kaz couldn’t help but laugh a bit as he remembered scooping up Li’s egg and the squishy golden orb out of sheer desperation. He had been filled with the ki from the dragon’s blood at the time, and all he knew was that he had to get rid of it, and quickly. He had seen both the light and the emptiness in them, and known that he could dump far more of his unwanted power into them than he could into the mosses and lichens that he usually used.
Though he hadn’t understood at the time, he now suspected that Li had been about to die in her shell, and the infusion of dragon-ki he had given her was the only reason she had survived. Their first fragile bond had formed at that time, and the constant trickle of ki she had taken from him thereafter had allowed her to hatch.
The sweet-smelling thing, on the other hand, had been shoved into his pack along with Li’s egg when his sister Katri had arrived. He hadn’t even looked at it properly, and Li had eaten the best part of it when she hatched, along with almost everything else in the pack. Since then, the seed had come with him primarily because it, too, had formed a link to his core, allowing it to take some part of his ki. At first, he had thought this was a good thing, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Kaz pinched the brown nugget between his fingers, feeling the rough points on each end digging into his skin. He held it up, though he was sure by now that there were no surprises waiting for him in its rough, scratched veneer.
Beneath and beyond that innocuous appearance, he could see the spark of power that lay deep inside it, along with the golden stream that still linked it to his own core. He was so used to the sight by now that he barely even noticed it any more, but as he squinted at it, he thought that it might have grown again, widening along with his increased capacity for ki. He could still only see gold ki flowing away down it, vanishing into the eternal depths of the seed’s intangible volume.
Kaz released all but the last vestiges of his physical sight, not quite dropping back into the image of his core. He could see the core, hanging in the distance, but he could also see the dazzling spark in the very center of the seed. His vision crossed, the seed shifting to overlap his core, and Kaz became even more certain that he was right. Somehow, the seed was both inside and outside his core, draining his ki even as its inescapable spin kept his cycle moving in spite of the obstructions left over from when he’d nearly shattered his core.
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Which meant what, exactly? He knew that the seed took more ki as he grew stronger and the light in its depths slowly grew larger. But how were those things linked? Would the bond between them keep growing, even if Kaz’s growth stopped? Or would the seed eventually take more than he had to give? Was his growth the cause of the seed’s growth, and they would remain in perfect balance? Could he, should he, try to restrict the amount of ki the seed took in? It lay at the very heart of his core, but was it a parasite, or was it like jiyun and bloodmoss, each benefiting themselves as well as the other?
Kaz shook his head, sighing softly as he pushed the seed back into his pack. He couldn’t make a decision with so little information. He would have to keep a close eye on the balance of ki between himself and the seed, and also watch to be sure the empty area within his core wasn’t expanding. If it did, or if the seed began to take more than he could afford to give, then he would have to try to sever the link between them. He wondered what would happen if he just left it somewhere, like he had when he entered the Copperstriker den. Could he simply move far enough away that the cord that bound them together would fade or break entirely? That might be worth a try, and was far less drastic than anything else he could think of.
As he pulled back his hand, the bright sound of the morning bell rang out over the den. Li twitched, hissed, and reluctantly uncurled, staring around the hut with a sleepy, unfocused gaze. Kaz realized that he had spent the entire night either in cultivation or examining his image, but he still didn’t feel particularly tired.
Cradling the little dragon in his arms, Kaz sat up. He stroked Li’s neck and back until she stopped muttering cranky dragon sounds, then settled her on his shoulder.
“Are you ready for breakfast?” he asked. The mention of food was usually enough to brighten her mood, and it worked this time, too. Li’s eyes brightened from sleepy yellow to lambent gold, and she whistled commandingly.
Kaz chuckled and went to pick up his pack. The top was still open, so he gave it a shake, settling the contents before he tied it closed. The reminder of Zyle’s invasion of his privacy wiped the amusement from his face, but he just slung the pack around his back and buckled it in place. Getting angry or confronting the old kobold would do nothing but rile everyone up, so it was best if he just ignored it and left the Sharpjaw den far behind him.
A knock sounded at the door at the same time Kaz’s belly gave a loud grumble. He rubbed it, glancing at Li out of the corner of his eye. “I thought cultivation would reduce the amount I need to eat, but I’m starving.” And indeed he was, his stomach rumbling again as he opened the door, revealing Ilto’s puppyish face. The young male’s tail was wagging, and he smiled when he saw that Kaz had left the bone support behind.
“You really are feeling better,” he said cheerfully. “Come on. Your humans are already up and insisting it’s time to go, so Zyle had us pack up already. Breakfast is ready, so we just have to grab it and we can go.”
Kaz shook his head, the other male’s enthusiasm lightening his own heart. “Aren’t you worried about leaving?”
Ilto shrugged, and for the first time, he looked solemn. “You know how it is. We don’t have females, but Zyle was our old chief’s mate, and Tekdu’s father. He’s been the leader of our males for longer than I’ve been alive. He says to go, so I’ll go.”
The round ears drooped slightly. “Though I don’t know what I did wrong that he ordered me to leave. The others all volunteered, but I told him I wanted to stay and help.”
Kaz was fairly certain he knew exactly why Ilto was being sent away, but he couldn’t say that Zyle expected that everyone who stayed would die. If Ilto hadn’t already figured that out, it wasn’t Kaz’s place to tell him.
He shrugged. “No female ever bothers to explain their reasons to us, and I guess Zyle’s the same.” This wasn’t entirely true, and he sent a silent apology to his aunt Rega, who had often spoken to Kaz as she would another female, though not when his mother, Oda, could hear.
Ilto sighed, but his ears soon perked back up as they headed toward the delicious scent of food. Beasts might be more dangerous on the mid-levels, but they were also more plentiful, as were the plants, at least when there wasn’t an outbreak of fulan. That meant that everyone always had enough to eat, and both Kaz and Li had been enjoying being able to stuff themselves until their stomachs hurt. Kaz was fairly certain that Li had even grown a bit, for the first time since she had hatched.
Pils, Regz, and Civ were all waiting when Kaz and Ilto arrived at the long, low cavern where the Sharpjaws stored and prepared their food. There was an actual stream running through the far end of it, and Kaz suspected that if necessary, all the kobolds stationed at this den could hide in here for at least two weeks before they had to venture forth in search of fresh food.
Civ’s green eyes flickered over Kaz and Ilto before he gave them a small nod of acknowledgement. He was almost as talkative as Chi Yincang, and Kaz would have suspected that their shared fur color was a sign of a speech impediment if most of the rest of the Sharpjaws weren’t just as dark.
Pils offered Kaz a handful of skewers holding perfectly cooked meat and several kinds of fungus. When Kaz immediately passed one up to Li, Pils cocked his head to the side and handed him a replacement.
“Ilto said that fuergar was friendly, but I’m still surprised every time I see it. The pup,” he stopped, shaking his head, and corrected himself, “Ilto tried to tame a janjio once. Found an injured one while he was out gathering, shoved it in his pack, and it started screaming as soon as it recovered enough. He was deaf for a week.”
Ilto’s ears flattened. “I was a lot younger then.”
Pils chuckled and covered his mouth with his hand as he pretended to whisper. “It was last year.”
“Which was a long time ago!” Ilto yipped, and even Civ smiled a little at the interplay.
Kaz caught Zyle’s scent before he heard the distinctive limping clicks of the old male’s claws on stone, and he had already turned away from the rest of the group by the time Zyle emerged from the short tunnel between the den and the food cavern. Without meaning to, he looked straight into the rheumy brown eyes, and the fur on the back of his neck raised.