I’d practiced fifty times on a piece of dragon scale that had been too badly blasted by three different spells to ever be useful for much. I’d memorized, thought through, and worked out the consequences of every explanation that Hinete and Zichi gave me a hundred times.
Carving the runic power directly into the scales over the dragon’s brows was still tense, nerve wracking, and just a bit unpleasant. The dragon’s magic naturally resisted efforts to carve into her. Hinete, with the help of several purified core cultivators, could successfully carve the runes into her extremities, the closer a section of the body was to the great dragon’s head, the harder it was to drive anything into the scales.
If done badly the carving could itself trigger the other defensive runes.
The scales around her head could only be efficiently worked on by me, since I had the fourth dantian open.
I tried to meditate on the hand, the breeze, the warm air here deep in the valley, and the changing shadows as the sun moved through its arc.
It took hours for me to work through all of the scales that had been selected for this carving. Several senior enchanters watched me the entire time, and occasionally gave advice that occasionally was useful.
Gah. It was awful.
Imagine your boss watching everything you do and knowing that he thought you were messing everything up.
Or maybe what this was like was when I tried to help my technologically incompetent mother try to use her computer. Except that I was the helpless and backwards elderly woman this time.
Yeah, this felt like that.
At last, I finished. I slowly floated away from the big dragon. I was supposed to work on the silver scaled dragon next. I knew that Fitzuki had a belief that she would break with her mother’s decree that none of them would actively fight in a battle.
I flexed my hands to get the tightness out.
That had been easier than expected.
The big dragon pulled her head back and said. “An odd sensation, I understand how this might be dangerous for you humans. A very great flow of power can go through such a carving. I shall be well. Young human, might I speak with you? In your mind, that is easier.”
I nodded in acceptance.
Then the dragon leaned her massive head very close to me, and stared at me with her eyes, and I was somewhere else. “My friend, Sesako says that you and he cannot cooperate. That your deepest values and his are contrary. I have great difficulty in believing this. I brought you to this world, calling you with my cry and my will from across the universes. You would not have come to my call if you were not in a fundamental essence a man of goodness.”
“I am no saint. There are things that I ought to do which I cannot make myself do — even when the stakes are very high, I still am selfish, and I cannot give everything of myself. Especially not to the cause of another. I am… just a human.”
“No human is a perfect creature. No creature is a perfect creature. We all have limits. But that is no basis for you and friend Sesako to be in conflict. He is limited in his own ways. And he is weak in his own ways.”
“He is?”
The dragon was silent for a long time. “Have you not seen how he cannot think with reason or kindness about the one who killed his family? How he closes his eyes and refuses to see the joys in life because of his need for war? Even now I can sense him yearning to break free and throw himself into death. He thinks that he must win impossible victories or die himself to be worthy of those who died before. He cares nothing for himself. He is narrow. He will try things that are dangerous and deadly for little purpose — this is why he could not succeed at his goal to become a celestial.”
“Didn’t he?”
“No! You are both the Celestial. Together. Not him alone. He is a fool if he thinks that he alone can succeed.”
“Isn’t it a strength that he can sacrifice himself? I was not ready to die, not even when there was something more important than my own life at stake. He’ll never forgive me for that.”
“Death is never good.”
“Sometimes it is necessary to die, sometimes it is necessary to give up every part of yourself, to become nothing, to work and work and sacrifice everything in you, because the cause is bigger than you, and you can do more good for others than you can for yourself.”
“Yes. If one's fate is to die, fate cannot be avoided. That is because it is fate. But I cannot comprehend a failure for a sensible creature to love themself. Any goal ought to leave a place in its pursuit for the man to be himself — tell me about this time you refused to die.”
“In the great island. It is powered by a substance that if sufficiently compressed will explode. And Sesako was about to strike it. He would have destroyed the island, and killed the emperor, but I would have died also… I couldn’t. It was an instinct. I was a coward. I took control of our body and negotiated with the emperor so we could flee. This was after Kisiko had already sacrificed himself and died. It is like… it is like I killed Kisiko for no purpose. I took his sacrifice, and I threw it out, like a piece of garbage. I pissed on the sacrifice of a great man who wanted to live. He loved life as much as I do. But he was willing to die to protect you, but I was not.”
“Ah the emperor. He is not wholly bad. I met him once before — long, long before. When he had not yet become celestial. I thought favorably upon him. And I think favorably upon him now. But he is a man who is limited and blinded in his own way. And driven to keep what he thinks he ought to have. A reason for pity.”
“You did? I did not know that — Sesako did not know that?”
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“He was a great traveler then, a seeker after hidden lore, and a man who was driven to experiment and think. But that has no place in discussion here. You valued yourself, and thus your values are incompatible with those of Sesako. If that is true, then the wound in his soul is deeper than I had thought.”
“No! It is that I valued myself above you, and above the island — and above all the good that would have been done if the emperor died.”
“The emperor’s death would not be good.”
I felt a shiver in my soul.
A sense of deep shock, like the smelling of an awful betrayal emanating from Sesako when he heard the dragon simply dislike the idea of the man he hated so much dying.
“Why do you not want to see the emperor dead, when he killed your mate and your son.”
“Death is never good.”
“But…” I had heard of this sort of attitude. But I’d never actually encountered it in someone whose family had been killed by another. I’d never actually expected to hear someone say, ‘No obviously I don’t want the person who killed my family to die.’ “Don’t you resent the emperor?”
“What purpose would that serve? He acts according to his nature and his fate. It would make no more sense to wish that his nature was different than it would to wish that any other part of nature was different. Things are what they are. Such wishes have no influence on the way of reality.”
“But…”
“Your life has been short. Painfully, painfully short. And your mind is smaller than mine. I do not mean only that you can follow one, or perhaps two lines of thought at a time, but… there is less substance in your mind than in mine. You lack a certain sort of perspective. Even my eldest daughter has a greater perspective than you — I know that she will aid Fitzuki in his raid, and that she may die during the raid, or she may succeed, and thus she would ensure the war will last even longer with more death.”
“You know of that plan?” It was half Sesako’s shocked feeling that spoke from my mouth.
“Clear, is it not? The disagreement between the two of us is easy to understand. I cannot forbid her. We have all determined that we shall not kill those of your kind. We determined this a long time ago, when we first met you, and tasted the scent of your minds, and knew that we were no longer alone in this great sea. But her sense of what not killing a human mind involves is narrower than mine.”
“Why do you refuse to fight?”
“Death is never good.”
I shook my head. “No, it is not. But sometimes it is necessary.”
“Ah, young one. You now speak of necessity. But necessity is a matter of fate and not nature. It is not in my nature to kill.”
“It is a simple fact: A system must have the potential for violence in it for it to be stable.”
“And if such a system is not stable, it will eventually cease to exist. That would be its fate.”
“Don’t you wish to continue to exist?”
“Of course.”
“There are seven of you, and there were nine before. That is a tiny number. But in Yatamo there are more than a million humans. In the world I came from there were two nations with more than a billion people. Without magic we’d sent men to the moon, to the bottom of the deepest seas, and we had built dams across the biggest rivers. We had destroyed smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases that afflicted mankind, and we built a building that was three times as tall as you are stretched on end from snout to tail.” I paused. “Though honestly, the emperor’s floating island is somewhat more impressive.”
“The emperor is very impressive. I do hope he does not die in this war he started.”
“But he started it. That means he chose the possibility of death in it. He doesn’t have any defense from being innocent.”
“Death is never good.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It remains true. That shall not change — you should never feel guilty about valuing your own life.”
“Sometimes violence is needed. Even the emperor needed millions of workers to build his giant island. Great things require huge numbers of people to work together. But getting people to work together means that there needs to be some way to punish people who refuse to help. I don’t like that. Death is never good. Suffering is never good. Even punishment is never good as such.”
“Yet you will use that which is not good to create goodness?”
“That isn’t a paradox! It just works.”
“I do not disagree.”
“There are people — people like the emperor who are willing to kill others to get what they want. People who will murder, brutally beat others, and to take what is not theirs. The only way those who want to build beautiful things can be free to build is if they are willing to use violence against the violent — I do not approve of your pacifism.”
“No?”
“You matter as well. This island is a better place than elsewhere in this world — In general the great despise the weak. I despise that. I claim that the world that I came from is better than this world, because in the most powerful countries in the world everyone had a right to participate in the decisions of the government. Everyone agreed that no one should starve, and we tried to make that happen. This is what my entire personal goal was, trying to be an altruist, trying to be effective — I wanted to make sure that the people in countries that had worse economies, and worse governments got the benefits that we got in rich countries. And that was a goal worth dedicating my life to.”
The dragon did not reply.
“The Yatamo are closer to this ideal than elsewhere. You said that they ought to nourish the weak, and that turned into this whole complicated system of education where everyone is taught everything that can help them awaken their spark, and where they are given the resources to have a chance to progress. I want to see that spread. Maybe encouraging these sorts of political changes — peacefully, since imposing regimes by force had a bad record in my world — is what I ought to do.”
“You have many schemes to help others.”
I was not sure if she approved or sneered at me. “So much to do, and to try. I need to pick a direction and start moving. You don’t learn if you never do anything because of analysis paralysis. But I am ready to change my plans as I learn more. Whatever I decide to focus on won’t be the single best thing in the world, but if I’m willing to change my mind later, that doesn’t matter so much.”
“But ought I murder to protect this way of life?” The voice of the dragon’s spirit rumbled through me. “And if I begin to murder, where shall it stop?”
“You eat cows, elephants, and other animals.”
“They do not have the spark of thought — a far more important spark than that of magic.”
“But they can feel and suffer. A great many people in my world thought that it was wrong to kill any animal. Some of them even thought that the suffering of insects, and animals in the wild was a terrible thing, and that we should stop that.”
“You have schemes beyond even mine. You wish to even protect insects from their own nature and the suffering it requires? That is beyond any notion I have.”
“I mean we don’t actually know how morally valuable insects are, how much they can feel — or if there is any way to practically help them. But it should be a consideration.”
“Plans beyond any I can imagine. And you say that it would have been good to throw away your life to kill the emperor? Another great man with great thoughts. The world would be poorer. And Sesako desperately wishes that you had both died, because he hates his survival and his enjoyment of life when his father died. Death is never good.”
“I don’t actually have any plans to help insects or wild animals. It is important to remember that death is bad even when it is an animal, or even if it is a tiny ant, and suffering is always bad.”
“Suffering is bad? Yes, yes, it is. But I do not repent my consumption of animals with no spark. There must be a line somewhere.”
“Then why won’t you fight to survive?”
“There must be a line somewhere.”
I sighed. “Do you know why the emperor wishes to kill you?”
“Ah, that is simple. He fears you, but he does not know that you are already here, and that even if you were killed, it is too late now for his goals to succeed.”
“Me?”
The dragon seemed amused. “Now I beg you — and Sesako, friend. I beg you as well. Speak to each other when next you sleep. Become friends. Aid each other.”