His eyes snapped open, but he wasn’t back. Not yet. He was close. Much closer than he had been when Heishe appeared. She was gone now, but he knew what he had to do.
Reaching out, Kaz took hold of the ki surrounding him. He no longer feared drowning in it. It was him and he was it. But he wasn’t yet ready for this part of him to join the greater whole, and in order to stop that, he needed to rebuild his core and take control of his body.
Quickly, he gathered in ki. Ruby, obsidian, sapphire, moonstone, and topaz swirled close. He tried to remember precisely what his core was supposed to look like, and found that he couldn’t. He knew it had four layers, and now he also understood that it didn’t need to. But those layers were part of him, part of his experience, his growth, and so he rebuilt them from the outside in.
As he brought the outermost layer together, he left in fine strands of silver mana, each one perfectly imperfect, winding through without regard for pattern or beauty. How many times had he been broken and put back together now? Each of those mattered, and should not be forgotten. He was stronger for them, and each one made him less likely to break the next time.
Beneath that he brought together the delicate gray remnants of that shell of mana he’d once forced into being as he lay dying beside the woshi pool. He now suspected that Li’s ki, the connection between their cycles, had kept him alive - or returned him to life - more than her wings beating against his chest. She had filled his failing core with her own life until he was able to do something he never should have. He had created the shell of a human core around his beast core, and the remnants of that impossible feat still lingered there, hidden but not forgotten, still altering the flow of his ki in ways that defined him.
The third layer was probably the closest to what he was meant to be. Whatever Nucai had been trying to create, this was probably it. Ki in its purest form, all five colors working together in harmony. But to Kaz’s eye, there wasn’t enough blue. Whatever the original Kaz’s balance had been, it wasn’t this. The black and gold Nucai had added were part of him now, but they were too strong. Gently, Kaz pushed the other colors down, making room for a greater proportion of Wood ki, and immediately felt more at peace.
But now he remembered what the other link led to. His dragon, his mountain, and there, within him, where only ki should have rested, a seed. It lay dormant, its connection to him the smallest of the three that trailed away into the very full emptiness that surrounded him. What now seemed long ago, when Kaz had allowed himself to be captured by Vega, he had placed the seed into his storage pouch, where he’d all but forgotten about it.
The seed had been draining his golden ki almost since the moment he picked it up, and unlike Li, Kaz had no idea what it was doing with it, if anything. It had seemed bottomless at first, but a few times he’d seen the ki gathered there surge upwards, indicating that it might actually be possible to fill it.
Like everything else in his pouch, however, it was frozen, unable to do whatever it was going to do. Rather than pulling on everything around it, it hung there, taking only the barest hint of earth ki from his cycle, and he was finally able to look at it properly. The space around it was smaller than he’d ever seen it before, and golden ki swirled nearby with relative impunity. Rather than being overwhelmed by the emptiness of it, Kaz could actually examine its wrinkled surface.
By now, he had seen a few kinds of seeds. Raff had given him a wrinkled apple, with its little droplet-shaped seeds, and he’d seen several berries, with seeds so miniscule that if he hadn’t seen the spark of ki in them, he never would have believed they were alive. Each seed was different, depending on the needs of the parent plant, and thanks to Qiangde’s memories, Kaz now knew what this one was.
Qiangde had called the Tree in the Deep a Sacred Plum tree. It grew only one fruit every century, but that fruit contained more ki than most living things could gather in a lifetime. When Qiangde was attacked, he had been eating one of these plums, and its power had allowed him to survive long enough to escape back into the mountain.
The dragon emperor had dropped the seed of that fruit, which must have somehow managed to grow, in spite of the bitter cold and fierce winds that scoured the mountaintop. How long had it taken before it was able to produce its own plum? Was this the first, or were there others that had fallen, unnoticed, only to decay or sprout their own trees?
During the battle between Li’s parent and Jianying, this fruit had rolled away from wherever it had lain, dropping down beside Li’s egg. After Kaz accidentally tasted dragon blood, filling himself with more ki than his body at the time could handle, he had found both Li’s egg and the plum, picking them up only because he could tell that they were both able to hold the power that threatened to explode from him. One of those items had produced the greatest companion he could ever have asked for. What might the other become, if only it was allowed to grow?
Reaching out, he gently grasped the link which now seemed so fragile, especially in comparison to the one binding him to Li. Taking hold of the golden ki nearby, he wound another strand into it. He wouldn’t remove the seed from the pouch right now, even if he could, but once he had a moment to breathe, he would. He wanted to see what the seed would become, and in the meantime, he had more than enough ki to offer it a little more.
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And that was it. His core was restored. It was so simple, and yet it had taken him so long to understand. For that matter, he still wasn’t certain he understood everything about what had just happened, but for now, he was at peace with that.
Which left his body. A body which, in some sense, wasn’t even real. What had it started as? Had Nucai used some other hapless kobold as the foundation of his construct? Or had the body been that of a fuergar or a janjio, only to be entirely altered by the original Kaz’s self-image, becoming a copy so perfect that even Kaz’s parents hadn’t been able to tell? The best option was that Nucai somehow preserved that original body, simply placing the altered core back inside it.
The very idea was nauseating, and if Kaz had had a body at that moment, he would have scratched at it, trying to tear away the unreality of it to reveal the truth. But his body was the truth. He had worn it for more than a decade, and it was him as much as his core. He was a kobold, and he was Kaz.
Bracing himself, Kaz began to gather ki around him again. He used it to paint a picture of himself. It used more blue than any other color, but there was white in his eyes and sharp teeth, black in pupils and gums. White fur covered his chest and muzzle. Red dyed his tongue, shading to pink for the insides of his ears and the pads of his paws.
The only color he didn’t use was gold, and in a moment of perverse humor, he added a subtle shading of golden fur around his throat. Perhaps he would keep it, and perhaps he wouldn’t, but for now, giving himself his own warrior’s necklace amused him. Besides, it was the same shade as Li’s scales.
And then he opened his eyes again and found himself looking into swirling golden orbs.
“What happened?” he asked, trying to sit up, only to find that the body he’d so painstakingly rebuilt wasn’t quite ready to obey him yet.
“That’s what I want to know,” a familiar voice said, and Kaz rolled his head to the side, astonished to find Eve staring back at him. Even more shocking, Bella was sitting next to her, with Harper’s limp form leaning against the shorter female’s broad shoulder. The bard was almost completely drained of mana, and her fingers looked swollen and sore, but otherwise she seemed fine.
“Did I stop the dragon?” he asked, trying to sit up enough to see the spot where the behemoth had perched.
Kaz gave up on sitting and wrapped his arms around his dragon.
Li wriggled in his arms, but she wasn’t trying to get away. Instead, she clung to him as if he was the single largest ki-crystal she’d ever seen, and she didn’t plan to let him go until she was big enough to eat him. He stroked her head and neck, ignoring the pricking of the sharp horns that now crowned her head.
“Are you really Kaz?” Bella asked, and Kaz realized he’d closed his eyes again. Honestly, he thought he could fall asleep right there in the rubble, curled up with his dragon, but that definitely wasn’t a good idea. Perhaps not as bad as his last idea, but definitely not good.
Looking up into the squat female’s suspicious face, Kaz said, “Yes.” Then, just to prove it, and because he could now, he allowed his body to shift into its human form. Understanding that he was really only shaped by his own self-image was both freeing and slightly horrifying. Would he now change shapes if he simply thought about it?
It took a bit more effort than he’d thought, though, and judging by the looks on the female’s faces and the way they scrambled away from him, it was far less pleasant than when he’d changed by merging with an image he’d drawn on the wall. Perhaps it would be best to stick to that technique, if only for his own peace of mind.
“What in all the fourteen forgotten pits?” Eve burst out, lifting her weapon. Beside her, Bella held up her shield, leaving only Harper blissfully unaware of what had just happened.
“Oh. You’re doing that again,” came Kyla’s disapproving voice as she poked her head around a stack of wooden boards. In spite of her words, her tail was wagging so quickly her paws seemed to bounce on the ground, moving her closer to him with each motion. Even Mei looked pleased to see him, her eyes bright as she sat up and began briskly cleaning her whiskers. Kaz felt something in his chest loosen, and smiled at his cousin, giving her a yip of greeting. She yipped back, relief clear in the sound, and for a moment, with his dragon in his arms and his friends safe and close, he almost forgot why he was there.
Then the screams, which had been almost completely absent since he woke up, returned and rose to a new crescendo. Rising above them was another sound he recognized: Jianying was roaring. Again. And this time Kaz could actually see the coalescence of power that rose through the air, gathering into something capable of pushing against everyone nearby.
Kyla’s shield flared out around her, holding the black dragon’s ki at bay, at least for now, but both Bella and Eve fell to their knees. Bella’s face was red and furious as she pushed against it, but Eve just gave in, apparently having decided that it was better not to fight against something that wasn’t actively hurting her.
Kyla panted as she placed her hands on her knees, her core churning out ki that was used almost as quickly as she could produce it. “That’s what…I came to…tell you. The xiyi…called more dragons.”