I pawed around for a moment, still unsettled by how easily I held my new draconic form.

How do you deal with the pressure? I dent to Raven.

She shrugged I've always been used to it. According to Tala, I used to get grumpy as a baby, but that stopped at some point after Mom took me to Azeroth.

I paused Tala knew you as a baby?

She lead the cult that my Mother joined. Led the ritual that made me, actually.

Interesting discovery?

I always knew it, really. Mom told me a little about her time in the cult, mainly to try and keep me away from that kind of stuff, but I think she legitimately had friends there. Honestly, if Trigon wasn't going to lay waste to Earth after conquering it, she probably wouldn't have left.

Why did he do that, anyways?

Raven stared for a moment out at the burning orb that was the Heart of Darkness. Despite the flames remaining lit for months now, she'd still made fairly little progress. She had managed to chip off a few millimeters from the radius of the super-earth, but it would take centuries for the process to complete.

I don't think he was capable of emotion beyond those that beget Wrath, Hate, Jealousy, Pride, Lust, Envy or Sloth. His soul was made of nothing but those urges, and the Heart of Darkness only made it worse. His memories are telling. I wouldn't call him a victim. But he wasn't truly to blame for what he did. It would be like blaming a earthquake for knocking over a building.

Didn't you inherit some of his power?

Raven smiled, I made sure to rebalance my powers. Inspiration allowed me to transmute the underpinnings of the Spiritual Energy that Trigon passed on, and dissolve the urges that came along with it. I did have to pay a tithe to the Life Entity, but I remain my own person.

That's good

You need to stop projecting your emotions so much, by the way.

What do you mean?

Your messages carry a tint of emotion with them. As much as your worry is appreciated, learning how to control that will allow you to avoid giving people more information than needed.

Well, that's awkward. I'll have to did around and see how my thought-projection is set up. I think that I'm not filtering emotional context from ideological tagging.

Ideological tagging?

Eh, I'm trying to imbue words with meaning, so that people don't need to know english to understand what I'm saying. Should have the side effect of teaching them english as I speak to them.

It figures that you would try to jump straight to the most advanced form of telepathy immediately.

I've never been a fan of teaching incomplete information. I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I'm going to try and answer every question they have as completely and as accurately as is relevant.

Raven blinked.

What does high-school chemistry have to do with that.

I chuffed. Stupid Bhor Model. There's no reason beyond the historical to teach that, but schools still perpetuate that nonsense. Until I was able to do some housekeeping up here, I kept defaulting to that bullshit even when I knew that those events are better described by wave-functions and energy distributions.

Raven laughed, I suppose it does make sense when you put it that way. I'm going to have to do some cleaning up on my end too. It is still impressive though. It takes some effort for me to do that.

Then she pecked me on my head. That said, don't be an idiot. Habits last for us only as long as we want them to, and you can afford to learn things piecemeal.

I rolled my eyes, I made sure I showed you first, didn't I? Plus, I don't have anything major for a while so I can debug it without too much of an issue.

I curled around her as the doors to her castle opened.

Well I hope you don't expect me to help with that one too much. It looks like I'm going to start dealing with petitioners.

The petitioners were of all shapes and sizes. Some even larger than I was in this form.

A lot of it mainly ended up being creatures asking Raven what she wanted, or just clarification on her previous orders. Quite a few of them had been incredibly overwhelmed by the advances that she had been making across her realm. A lot of them had been shocked by the sweeping reforms and the sudden spike in their standard of living following them, so they didn't really know what they wanted.

There were a few stand-out troublemakers, but that mainly ended up being the remains of Trigon's ruling class. Various 'Lords of Hell' and so on that didn't want to get with the program.

They were promptly fed to the fires below, followed by their courts as we searched for someone to take over their holdings.

Still, things were progressing quickly, and while there were a lot of people turning up, putting up a few constructs to handle FAQs ended up trimming away almost ninety percent of the dross. A good portion of the rst were actually just coronation gifts.

Or, as raven described them, bribes to let them stay in power.

For the moment, Raven wasn't too worried about that. As long as they complied with her eidicts, she was willing to let things slide until she had a better idea of how her people were responding to her rule.

Things seem to be going well, overall. If the lords weren't attempting to defy her, they usually came with evidence that they had been carrying out her will and were greeted with a reward for a job well done.

Raven mucking about in their souls so that they could draw from a much more balanced power pool like she could.

Admittedly she could only do that because they were already emotivores, so it wasn't as dangerous as it seemed, but they were as impressed as I was terrified at that point. Raven ended up giving me a crash course on the subject, teaching me a bit about how she was adapting what she had learned from Trigon's various empowerments to her own purposes, effectively grafting new bits of soul onto the various demons so that they were incentivised to keep doing a good job.

Still, over the next couple of days, I observed over a ten thousand such empowerments and even got to participate in a few, though it was mostly on the spiritual side of things as my experience with the Emotional spectrum was still quite limited.

But by the end of it, I was able to emplace the permanent spiritual components of the augmentation, not only speeding up the process of working through her ridiculously large court, but also learning enough about the process that I could start working on a few things myself.

For the moment I mainly limited myself to studying the spiritual structures of Raven's various subjects, picking up ideas of things that I might want to play with myself.

Interestingly enough, it seemed that this might actually lay the foundation for instant and widespread physical changes. Augmenting the soul somewhat before using biotic chambers in conjunction with genetic therapies should prevent the cancerous breakouts that I had been seeing earlier.

I'd even managed to augment my magical reserves in the process, finally freeing myself from my dependence on necromancy to achieve even basic magical effects, but I was particularly interested in the possibility of granting spiritual augments that would help overcome some of the issues that still persisted among our number, like integrating the capabilities of Lena's chronal accelerator into her fundamental makeup and granting Angela's proposed wings the ability to alter in size and support her in the air regardless of physical capability.

Also, magic for the four of us. With the Chakra fruit nearly ready for harvest in another week, we were planning to have a full round of augmentations to mark the occasion. I'd learned enough from augmenting myself with the Dragon that I could now grant - or more accurately, awaken - psionic talent so we were planning on making sure that, in addition to the genetic augments Angela was planning, we would all be experiencing a full overhaul.

I'd even managed to finally get an introduction to Master Weaver - through Access, of all people - and confirmed that my planned augments wouldn't disrupt her connection to the Web of Life and Destiny.

On a similar note, I'd also managed to extract the Power Stone from Gwen's world. Access had checked a couple of things, and the Stones could be safely stored in our little outpost, with the added benefit of being largely useless while they were here.

As I finished the thought, the doors to Raven's court closed for a final time.

Well that was quick.

I stared at Raven, It's been almost a week.

As I said, quick.

I stared for a moment longer before shaking my head, collapsing back into human form as I did, I'm not even going to ask.

Raven chuckled, Let's head back home, I want to see if Angela's finalized her mods.

I might actually be able to help with that if she hasn't come to a decision.

She hadn't, it turned out.

NOTE: This post does not have the colour modifications in the original text, please check QQ for the full version.