A/N: This is a concept I threw out in a few days, when I was taking a break from everything else. Inspired Inventor in Highschool DxD. I'll be trying a younger, more adventurous protagonist with this.
The story starts in DxD but will include a lot of other stuff I feel could fill out the massive holes in this oddly popular setting, maybe even move on to others later on. The concept might have some HFY vibes (I think?) but without the edgelord nonsense that usually overflows such stories.
A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law
(A DxD X-Over, Inspired Inventor)
Summary
Annoyed that his intended final boss was taken out of play by those meddling side characters, Great Red decided to take it up several notches for the sequel to his vicarious life. Who could ever have seen the outcome coming? A decade and change in the past, this was now my problem. Why? Why me? And why is this the supernatural I have to deal with? This supernatural sucks!
Chapter 1 – The Nightmare of Future Breasts
"-. Sorean Dacian Rares, Godeanu Mountains, Romania .-"
Back in the future the Great Red dreamed himself to death, and he deserved it.
Somehow, that was now my problem.
Unfortunately, because there was no point trying to track down supernatural rumors in summer time – literally all the ones in my country were bloody tourist traps – the freezing mountain winter was now my problem too. March was technically spring, but try explaining that to any place higher than 600 meters above sea level. Don't even bother in the Southern Carpathians, especially the treacherous, snow-crusted ice trails I was walking now amidst literal clouds. Not for nothing were they called the Transylvanian Alps.
It was practically suicide to climb these mountains at this time of year, any mountains. But if I wanted to have any hope for the future again, I needed this. I needed to see if it was real. I needed to see that it was real, that there still existed a mystical locus that was high and mighty and not stolen from man by monsters.
You'd think it would be easy, what with my country having the highest number of mystical energy nexus points ever (allegedly). But the Sphinx was always swarmed with gawkers when the energy pyramid manifested in late November, so was the Ceahlau Massif on August 6, every giant cavern in the Bucegi Mountains was sealed with concrete by the old communist regime, the Witches' Pond was too close to the capital to have possibly escaped hostile takeover, and I'd even tried and failed to find the Scholomance (though that could've been due to me looking in the wrong place).
That left the Hoia-Baciu Forest as the most easily accessible, but with all the spooky stories floating about the place, and with what I knew now from what a part of me still hoped was a psychotic break, that was almost certainly vampire central. No thanks.
With all the options I knew about disqualified, and the gravity hill being just an optical illusion, that left one last folk legend untested. The peak at whose base once dwelt Zalmoxis, the great poet Orpheus who first drew the attention of the zodiac to Earth (at least in this age). The place where the first native gods of mankind were born. The real ones, not the usurpers and charlatans that popped up like weeds after the Bronze Age collapse and plagued mankind all to this day.
I needed it. To find it. I needed it to exist, before I ran out of nerve and spiteful vindictiveness born of existential dread and apoplectic rage.
I needed to find Kogaionon.
Easier said than done when every other step was a near miss into freefall, due to all the ice. Other times like now, I could barely trudge forward with all the snow in my path. There were places where it was taller than a grown man, and others where it was deeper than one. The one time I sank to the bottom of a hidden pit, I almost died from suffocation before I dug myself out. A sane person would've given up, and a slightly less sane person would've switched to known footpaths. But I obviously wasn't the former, and the latter wasn't an option when going off the beaten path was the whole point.
"AWOOOOOOOOO!" I howled into the distance, even as I kept trudging onwards through 'fog' so thick I couldn't see more than two meters in front of me. With my luck I might draw the attention of a ranger and get my quest cut short, but you had to make huge noises in the forest or the bears won't know to run in the opposite direction. "AYEEEEEEEEYA!" I shrieked next, because wolves needed warning away too, especially in winter. I followed up with a loud farmer's whistle just to be sure.
My voice echoed loudly back at me, telling me the path had descended below the next mountaintop ahead.
The air felt cold and wet on my face, and in my nose and down my throat as I breathed. Mist wasn't exactly rare in winter, but the one on mountaintops wasn't mist, it was literal cloud. Thankfully not a snow cloud this time. I didn't have icicles hanging from my eyelids, at least none so thick as to blind me like a few days go. I didn't feel like my cheeks and forehead were made of sheet metal about to fall off. But the fog was cloying, wet and cold like a sauna at sub-zero temperature. I felt almost like I was breathing water, and I could feel the floating ice crystals as they crumbled against what little skin on my face was still exposed, doomed to never come together into rain drops due to my passage.
Or snowflakes.
"Fuck magpies, seriously," I muttered as I wiped the latest hoarfrost off my stubble. And my sideburns. And my eyebrows. My facial hair was growing right fast and thick, even though I was just eighteen. "Make common cause just to steal my only pair of goggles, curse their communal roosting! Their obsession with shiny things was supposed to be a myth."
A sinister hiss stopped me in my tracks.
I stood motionless, still unable to see much in the thick mist, but listening as carefully as I could.
The hissing didn't come again, but only because hadn't stopped. It was there, at the edge of hearing. It had been there for a while, this was only when I'd finally noticed it.
Are those snakes?
At this time of year? In this cold? Slippery as hell too since the weather thawed only around high noon, and even then just enough to melt enough of the snow to form the most treacherous ice on the areas that faced the sun. Didn't snakes still hibernate, so high up? How did they even move in this cold?
And how am I hearing the hissing from… whatever distance? Snakes are dangerous because you don't hear them usually, sometimes until you're already stepping on them.
I slowly resumed my walk down the game trail, carefully keeping the mountain crest to my left and an ear on the noise. The path turned to a fairly sharp descent, something better suited for mountain goat than deer, but I had spikes on my boot soles so I could still proceed despite the ice patches.
That's not just one snake.
The hissing got louder as I continued, and it sounded like it came from countless snakes at once. It mixed horribly with the existential dread I'd been pushing through for the past half hour, during which the sparse woods around me had been completely quiet. The only reason I didn't turn around was because it… wasn't coming from the front. More from ahead and vaguely to the right.
Without any warning, I suddenly descended beneath the cloud. The noise became a complete bedlam of hissing and slithering mixed with the sound of spitting and snarling from… far, far too many different snakes for me to be comfortable trying to count. It was like an orchestra made of rattlesnakes, except we didn't have those in Romania.
No way is this what I think it is, is it?
Weighing caution against the fatalism of a common farm boy that had resisted depression-driven suicide purely because I refused to willingly become devil property, I looked around for a good hiding spot. When I found one, I left my pack concealed under a layer of snow-covered detritus, and proceeded with only my essentials. Thankfully, I was already upwind so I didn't need to worry about my scent giving me away.
Now that I could see more than a few meters around me, I looked for the path that would best conceal my approach from above and carefully snuck towards the source of the racket. There was a lot of deadwood, and a lot of crunchy snow too. But also enough moss to traipse on, so long as I was careful to always dig through the snow with my walking stick to find it first, same as I did to test for sinkholes now. I managed to wander to a spot above the source of the noise without spooking anything.
Lot of hazelnut trees here, I thought quietly, examining the bushes mixed in with the conifers and beech. Must've descended a lot more than I thought.
When I peered over the thick log of deadwood, I instantly pulled back and made myself as small as possible while I waited to hear something other than the blood pounding in my temples.
There's got to be a thousand snakes down there!
With my heart in my throat, I carefully peered over the log again.
More than a thousand, maybe more than several thousands, holy shit.
Thousands of snakes were down there, all sorts, all sizes, all scale patterns, all of them hissing, slithering, tangled up in a gigantic wriggling ball of horror. The squirming mass of crawling hideousness stewed in its own slobber, spume and spit, so completely lost in their orgy of madness that they showed no sign of even having heard me howl and holler all the way over here. Despite the almost frigid chill in the air, there was steam wafting up from the ghastly amalgam. It reached me, all the way up in my hiding place, and it took all my will not to retch after so long breathing just cold, scentless mountain air. It smelled like rotten cucumbers.
They're really doing it, mixing their venom together.
There was a folk tale about this, where snakes would come together once a year to mix their drool together. The spume would crystallize into one single, white bead. If you were lucky, you could stumble over it in the wilderness and get something village hags could use in a host of spells. Or for healing any snake bite, by washing the wound with water the bead is kept in.
Except that legend said this happens once a year in September.
Since it was March, that meant I was bearing witness to the other legend about this, which happened every seven years in spring.
I crouched back down in my hiding place and inspected my surroundings. A ledge of bare rock half-way around the gully drew me in particular. It was probably why the snakes chose this place, assuming there was any reason involved at all – the spur stretched more than half-way over the hollow below, sheltering the unholy slurry from both sight and the elements. I was probably mad for even considering this, but what I saw in that spur of cliff was opportunity.
As quietly as I'd arrived, I returned to where I'd hidden my supplies, and started pulling out the socks and clothes in which I'd wrapped my contraband.
Mad as it was to go looking for the supernatural as a regular nobody with nothing but legends and folk tales to chase after, I didn't exactly embark on this mad quest without extensive preparation. The bulk of my food supplies and spare equipment was back with my car, several days' hike from here. But I did have all the tools needed to get by in the wilderness, and a pack stuffed full of things spawned right out of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Most critically, dynamite.
Illegal as hell in this country that insisted it wasn't a tyrannical hellhole, up until you mentioned presumption of innocence and guns.
I'd had to go on a road trip across half the country last winter just to buy enough fireworks to cannibalize gunpowder from. Hilarious when you can get sulfuric acid from any car battery, and buy nitric acid in bulk with not an eyebrow raised if you just say it's all for fertilizer.
I returned to the scene of horror and walked around to the rock ledge. There, I carefully used my shovel to find the base of the rock through the snow and detritus. When I had the base outlined, I used my climbing pick and jar of salt to thaw the ground, and dig long, narrow holes to put dynamite sticks in. I covered them with the biggest and heaviest rocks I could find nearby too, to channel as much of the blast inwards.
The whole time I was terrified that the noise would give me away, but the slurry of flesh and venom down below remained oblivious to their surroundings, unable to hear or feel anything over each other. Or through.
It was a pain to make the fuse, the sticks had their own but I couldn't just set down a trail of gunpowder on the ground. I didn't have the spare gunpowder, for one, especially to make a trail long enough for me to be at a safe distance from the detonation. There was no cover here, I'd have to find one lower down.
For another, the ground was alternatively snowy or wet, which meant the powder would soak and wouldn't burn. Fortunately, I'd come prepared for this too, having packed a healthy amount of acrylic yarn soaked in motor oil. I had already unrapped it from the tinfoil I had it in, back with my bags.
Lobbing dynamite sticks at angry gribblies was just one of the scenarios that woke me up at night, in the year leading up to this.
It took hours to find and then stretch the cord all around the hollow of horror, and then down below to a different hiding spot that put me both in throwing distance of the snake scramble. I did my best to find dry deadwood to stretch the cord over just to be doubly sure it would burn all the way, since even oil wouldn't ignite if it was completely drenched.
The whole time I was worried the snakes would notice, or finish their spontaneous shoggoth act, but they didn't. More terrifyingly, I felt on and off like I was being watched from directions other than the snake scum below. I was no longer naïve enough to mistrust the feeling, but also too jaded to challenge whatever it was, especially now. It wasn't like I had any hope of fighting off anything but another human.
The feeling of being watched came and went several times while I waited. Waited in my hiding spot for a whole day after I was finished preparing my crazy, probably-would-get-me-killed-anyway plan.
It was when night fell, the clouds cleared and the moon appeared in the sky, that the wriggling horror finally started to change.
At the center of it, a hole formed in the melange of serpents. The conjoinment of snakes continued to hiss and slither and blather like babies trampled by the hosts of hell, but in the shape of a toroid this time. In the newly made gap at the center, a spring was revealed which used to be filled full of fresh water, but was now roiling with the thick, viscous slurry of drool and venom, even blood from all the snakes that had torn each other apart in their frenzy.
As the moonlight touched the thrashing thresher of scale and fang, the wrangle began to twitch in unison, as if a single organism. From the toroidal mass, the oldest survivors among each type of snake stuck out their heads, staring up at the moon while swaying in a bizarre unison, as if enchanted, left and right and hissing, whistling almost. Rhythmic and meaningful, I didn't understand it but I knew with utter certainty that, in that moment and time, those things were speaking.
Their conjoined flesh acted as a single body, the many bodies stuck together by their half-dried spume roiling and wobbling in tune with their chanting. As they did, so did the tainted spring inside their coiling mass move, ripping inwards as the unknown incantations had… whatever effect on the steaming froth. Contrary to what I had expected, it was the venom that was sizzling, boiling and evaporating away, leaving behind a concoction made only of spring water and saliva of serpents and their blood, perfectly mixed and purified.
Spit-sealed handshakes, the trivia came to me. People used to do it because they believed every part of a person had a piece of their soul in it, or spirit. When they spat in their palms before a handshake, they were literally putting their soul into it.
So this was the reason for the ritual, the snakes were aiming to combine their souls!
Fits the legendary purpose of this horror just right, now doesn't it?
I was cold, ached from waiting motionless for so long, I was exhausted from being wound up in tension and fear all this time, but I somehow managed to stay there and wait all the way to the end. Even with the unknown observer lying in wait. Well clear of the blast zone, I realized with conflicted emotions when I managed to trace the feeling's source.
When the full moon was right overhead, there was a massive burst in the shimmering haze that had once been a spring pool. The frothing liquid imploded before exploding back. The tangled mass of serpents was sprayed by the bulk of it, but in that brief time before the pool filled back up from the spring, I saw it.
A glow seeping up from the bottom of the pool, despite the murk.
The snakes descended into a second orgy, This time one of murder.
I huddled in my hiding spot with hands over my ears, shocked by how dreadful and loud the things suddenly became. Despite that, I couldn't afford not to peer out to watch as they proceeded to murder each other with more viciousness than demons, fighting over the magic light. Horrified fascination didn't even begin to describe the sight, or the noises, they just-
My hands itched to light the fuse right now, but I didn't know how long it would take it to reach the explosives, and there were too many snakes for the rock to catch all at once. I stuffed my twitching hands under my armpits and told myself, over and over, wait, wait, wait-
Only when the number of snakes still alive had thinned enough to let the light beneath their brawl seep out, did I finally ignite the fuse.
The wait was somehow more excruciating than the one up to then, until I was worried the fight would end and the winner would leave before – but wouldn't a single snake be safer to try and kill than an army of them? But if it was that easy the legend wouldn't say to-
Above the hollow of horrors, a firecracker suddenly set off.
Already that close?
The mass of serpents snapped as one to stare up at the sound.
Now or never!
I jumped up from my spot, which I'd chosen specifically to be in throwing distance, and tossed out a whole bunch of firecrackers I'd only just lit, and also a hazel stick.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK
"""""""HISSSSSSS!"""""""
The snake amalgam flinched away from the newest onslaught of noise, rising up like a mud geyser over each other, away from me, up the face of the slope and the rock, shocked and murderous and reeling in confusion from the noisy lights.
"Șarpe șerpișor, De rău făcător, Intră-n bortă că iarna vine, Și-i rău pentru tine!"
I didn't think for a second the old nursery rhyme would work, not for me, I was jaded as fuck, but that was why I'd done everything else.
CRACK-CRACK-BOOM
With a triple explosion that still only barely overwhelmed the noise of the snakes, the rock above was blasted loose.
It fell down and crushed the horde like – well, a giant falling boulder.
Even so, 'rocks fall everyone dies' doesn't work near as well in real life, especially on things that can squeeze through gaps smaller than a finger width. I spent who knows how long killing the shellshocked survivors with a shortspear made from my walking cane and two knife blades soldered together on the end.
I was shellshocked too, from a terrible crash of adrenaline. My impossible success was ruined by my failure to kill all the snakes that survived enough to flee, and those were just the ones on my side of the rockslide. When the battle frenzy was over after what felt like much longer than an hour, I realized with dread that at least three bites had made it through my thick winter wear, even with the burlap sacs I'd tied around my limbs for added defense.
If I don't get that thing, I'm dead.
Driven by the dread of one who didn't want to confirm what he knew about life after death, I stripped off my thick outer layers and used my knife to cut all the bites I could reach – fuckmothering agh! – sucking out the venom as best I could. There were too I couldn't, one on the lower back and one on my right shoulder blade, they burned – how the hell did those things get there with everything in the way?!
It was bad to move after a snake bite, venom only spread faster if you got the blood pumping – how did they even have any venom left?! – but I couldn't assume there was help on the way. I quickly looked for the biggest cracks in the boulder I'd used in my trap. I used desperate strikes of my hammer and chisel to widen them enough to stick my remaining dynamite inside, before lighting them and running away to hide from the explosion.
BOOM
I made it to cover just in time, though I was still showered by the flying chunks and dust. Feeling the pain in the bites spread like molten metal and already light-headed, I rushed back to the hollow to dig through the rubble. I had to hastily improvise levers from what wood I had nearby, where's a damned cant hook when you need it?!
When the rocks at the core of the rubble dislodged enough to let a lightbeam through, I almost fainted from relief. And it still took another five minutes of work before I could stick my arm through!
My hand snapped back out right after plunging into the murky water – shit, bitten again, how many were still –?
The light in the pool vanished.
"Oh no you don't!" I plunged my arm down the hole and grabbed at the spot where the gem had been. I was bitten five more times, my hand almost went paralyzed on the spot, but I was able to rip out the thieving snake and stab it in the head with my knife.
I rolled off the pile of rocks and snake sludge, almost unconscious even without the knocks to the head. But I somehow found enough coordination to split the snake length-wise and reveal my prize.
A perfectly round gem, shining faintly like sunlight.
A dragonstone.
Immediately I put it in my mouth and held it pressed to the roof of the palate. I almost didn't feel the rush of warmth, but the pain in my skull faded and my head cleared. I spat the gem out and pressed it against the other places I'd been bitten, one after the other. They venom was neutralized and the cuts and bites healed over in moments. I only expected it to work as anti-venom, but I'll gladly take the rapid healing too, please and thank you.
A dragonstone, I can't believe it!
I'd been skeptical of the folk tale, snakes didn't behave like hives. but I'd seen for myself how they'd blended in a single cohesive mass, big and mad like trying to merge into something else. This stone – the story said the snakes would've fought until there was only one standing, and then the survivor would swallow the stone and turn into a dragon! Maybe after seven years hiding in the forest at the bottom of a pool where no one could interrupt his metamorphosis… But then why didn't the folk tale say to just wait until the last survivor was alone and vulnerable-?
Sharp pain in my calf ripped all the euphoria out of me, then anoth – agh, my hand – more bites! There were still snakes left over – the ones that fled, they were back! Unbelievable!
Clenching the dragonstone tight in my left fist, I used my other to knife all the snakes that wouldn't leave me be. Maybe I was imagining it, but there was a glow in their eyes the same color as the bead, passing from one snake to the next on death, growing brighter and madder until the big one that had been on track to win the brawl dug its way out of the rubble. He was so large and furious that he'd have ripped my throat outright, if he wasn't so uncoordinated that I managed to lurch aside just barely. It was just the head and a stump of body just barely long enough to lurch forward on, the falling rock had crushed it into pieces.
We don't have snakes this big in this country!
To my shock, I managed to stab it through the skull just as it latched on me. I thrust so hard in my desperation that I stabbed myself too, but that was still better than losing my entire trapezius in its last spite. Its fangs were each over ten centimeters long when I pried them out, agh – agony – venom sacs didn't refill this fast – the gem!
The wounds in my neck were so big that the stone sank deep, the flesh might have healed over it if I didn't pull it out. Maybe I should've let it, but then what if I turned into a dragon?
Yeah no, dragons are stupid.
I survived without having to find out if the dragonstone could heal the carotid artery, but just barely. I survived without finding out if the gem could turn humans into dragons too, but I was sure now that something would've happened. Probably stretched over months or years of unrelenting agony, if I survived at all. The moment the last serpent died, the dragonstone's light turned from faint to near blinding.
Pressing the dragonstone to my still aching throat and wary of further horror, I dragged my feet back to my hiding spot.
How big would that snake have been if I'd let the free-for all finish? What else would've happened to it? Would it have transformed instantly? Would it have become sapient? Is this why you shouldn't wait for them to finish?
After stretching and waiting for my body to cool down enough that I wouldn't fatally drench myself in my own sweat – that was how the cold really got you – I put my thicker clothes back on, collected my things and traced my steps back to my supplies, the gem held tight in my fist the whole time.
The unseen observer was still around somewhere, I could feel myself being watched even now.
But my supplies were all where I'd left them, untouched and unspoiled even though I knew that whoever it was – or whatever – had spied me when I was here earlier.
I ate some jerky and gave myself an hour to collect myself. All the while, I pretended not to be waiting to see what the mysterious watcher would do, if anything. Eventually, I stopped feeling eyes on me, though I didn't know where… whoever it was might have gone. If they even had, instead of using some other means to hide better. If they had them.
No point in worrying about it.
I was glad they left before this next part, though.
I wasn't exactly prepared for a shining miracle jewel to join my inventory, but I had a fair kit of tools. I carved a shell from a bit of wood, put the gem in, and covered the top with a flat layer of tinfoil I could easily remove at need. With that to keep the light contained, I improvised a harness frame made of copper wire. I hung the whole thing by a string and put it around my neck, hidden under my clothes with the tinfoil part right on the skin.
I camped right where I was that night, not even trying to secure my spot better than usual (which was already my best). I didn't worry about what would happen while I slept either. Ultimately, even with a stone that healed all poison and traumatic damage – at least from snakes – I was still a normal human. I didn't give myself any odds to win a real fight with the supernatural, if it was true that humans were all so much weaker. For some reason.
Even though we used to have heroes strong enough to challenge the gods themselves, and not all that far back either.
Surviving the modern day was such total bullshit.
Maybe my mysterious watcher doesn't engage me because it thinks it'll lose a fight, I thought vaguely as I huddled in my little tent, in my sleeping bag. A shame it doesn't matter, I can't keep my eyes open anyway. That was exhausting. Wonder how…much… biomass I lost healing – if it works that way…all the blood I lost?
When I woke up the next morning, I was still alive, no worse off than when I'd gone to sleep, and everything was where it was supposed to be. Even the locket with the dragon gem was still around my neck, where I had put it. I sat and listened to my intuition for a while, but it didn't give any warning either. I didn't feel anyone watching.
I had a short breakfast, packed up my camp, and went on my way.
"-. .-"
The rest of my journey proceeded without further madness, and I didn't feel foreign eyes on me again. Well, none besides the regular forest creatures, few and rare as they were when spring still hadn't arrived this far high.
Finally, I reached it. The base of Gugu Peak.
Finding a path to it that wasn't tourist trapped to high hell was a lot more difficult here, but I'd deliberately approached from the opposite end of the Retezat National Park precisely because of this. The authorities loved to butt in where they weren't wanted, but even they didn't have fences everywhere.
It was just as I was entering the last stretch of forest (after which the grassy summit of the mountain would begin) that, to my shock, my circuitous path along yet another game trail – most recently traveled by boars this time, unless my eyes deceived me – opened into a glade.
A glade taken right out of fairy tales.
Large, airy, implausibly flat despite that this was the sharpest, most treacherous slope that still had woods on it. Also, there was a cottage at the center, with a large open garden all around it, and a positively sprawling orchard around that, that's how big this clearing was. And more.
I didn't have a phone or GPS with me, I'd left them in my car because they were just tracking devices with bling. But I was positive this place didn't exist on any maps, and it was way too big for nobody to know about it. Whether from satellite images, search and rescue, or just random tourists stumbling upon it, no way did it escape discovery without something unnatural at play. Just the orchard trees would've been grown over decades, and I had the feeling this was much older than that. But there was not one whiff of this in tourist brochures or urban legends from people who got lost?
I didn't see a fence, so I stopped just short of where the game trail became a proper footpath. Thankfully, the snow had melted enough that I could see where that spot actually was, to avoid accidental trespass. The little lane was paved with river stones, bordered with even bigger stones, and flanked by numerous plots where flowers would be grown later in the year, also bordered by river stones. Some had rose bushes. Some of those rose bushes were freshly trimmed.
I looked beyond. Half-way to the cottage in the distance, on both the left and right of the quaint little path, there were two, big, round, crystal-clear glacial ponds.
I turned around and noped right the fuck out of there.
I may have gone out looking for the supernatural, but I still wanted to meet it on my terms. Those terms did not include becoming the hapless slave of Baba Cloanța.
Figures such a place would be here though, I thought with dismay. There's no more brave Dacians and their glorious capital, to impose rule upon Mainland Europe's greatest nexus of mystical power.
Maybe I was too jaded and that wasn't an illusion disguising some horrifying trap, but even then… Depending on how ancient that place was, or who the owner was, they almost certainly worked by the old ways of doing things.
I was very in favor of the old way of hospitality, but that rite was a two-way street. The host fed, watered, sheltered and even became the legal advocate and protector of the traveler that shared their bread, but the guest was supposed to not be a burden too. Since I didn't have any important news from far off lands, and lacked the charisma or musical talent to provide a commensurate level of entertainment, that left me only with the option to give a parting gift good enough not to see me cursed for the insult, when I left.
Great Red's absurd highlight reel of future events that I only got because his aim sucks was not something I was going to share, never mind with a total stranger that could be anything from a hag to a devil in disguise.
That left one item potentially good enough to satisfy – the dragonstone.
Maybe I was being greedy, but I hadn't possessed the gem long enough to be willing to give it away. Especially after it saved my life.
If a host was good and generous, they might sympathise with how much the thing accounted of my total possessions and give it back. But who's to say it was a good host? For all I knew, whoever lived in that cottage was the same person as my stalker, and they considered me a thief who stole the thing from right under their nose.
I circled far, far around the place even though I had to push through the thickest patches of woods imaginable where no wild animal had ever set foot. It could have been summer and still no sunlight would've made it down to ground level, that's how tangled the trees were there. And the bushes! Fuck briars, seriously, I almost lost an eye!
By the time I finally reached the woods' end, my hair was a mess, my face was full of bloody scratches and my clothes stuffed with leaves and sharp fir needles and all manner of filth.
Interestingly, though, the scratches disappeared in minutes instead of the days and even weeks it used to take me in the past. Seems the dragonstone didn't need to be in direct contact with the flesh to work some of its magic.
I pushed forward for another kilometer never looking back, and passed to the other side of the mountain crest for good measure, before I risked taking a break so out into the open. I cleaned myself up as best I could, ate a boiled egg and side of cheese for lunch, and pushed through the last stretch.
Finally, I was there. Gugu Peak, the vanishing mountain. The place where the real Sarmizegetusa Regia had once been, before Trajan's invasion. To this day, there were legends all over the country that the archeological dig site over in the Orăștie Mountains was just a fake, and the real Sarmizegetusa Regia had vanished from history unconquered. Vanished along with the mountain at its heart.
The holy mount, Kogaionon. The peak at whose base had been a cave where Orpheus Zalmoxis had once dwelt, before leaving to the Mediterranean Lands to bring them his religion. The cave through which he traveled to and fro from Egypt. The cave to which he returned near the end of his life, and from which he descended one last time to martyr himself at the hands of a jealous witch-queen, thus ending the war between the Sun and Moon cults that raged seemingly across all of the lands in those times.
The men of Classical Greece had been just as blind and given to fancy as the people of today, when they were piecing together the myths and legends of the Mycenean Greece of over a millennium earlier. The Myceneans, in turn, had been just as blind and ignorant of the history of their ancestors, the Pelasgians from whom the Greeks, Romans and so many others were descended. The only thing that all of them remembered, that none of them disagreed upon even as they competed and raided and warred against each other, was those people's long-lost place of origin.
The world northmost past Thrace. The home of both their hated rival Ares, and of the most quintessentially Greek of all the Hellenistic gods, Appollo. The home where Appollo went on vacation every year, thus causing winter for his absence. The northmost end of the known world at the time. Hyperborea.
Here.
I beheld the peak and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing I didn't expect.
I looked at my watch. Forty past two.
I wondered if I should wait until tomorrow, to see if the mountaintop really does vanish every day at noon with a great eruption of light into the sky, like the locals said. Maybe it would happen. Maybe it wouldn't because it was just an optical illusion you could only see from far away, when the sunlight landed on clouds just right. Maybe there was nothing special about the mountain, and the uncommon longevity of the people around here was just good nutrition and exercise, instead of mystical energy emanating from the ground towards heaven above.
It wasn't like I had any sensitivity for things like this. I couldn't even tell if my fast healing was because of that or the dragonbead.
Ultimately, the relative proximity of that mysterious forest cottage disabused me of any delays.
Unlike other mountain peaks, Gugu didn't end in an unclimbable or insurmountable cliff. There were plenty of rocks, but no more than the usual. The crest just led higher and higher until it didn't anymore.
There, I sat down and reached inside the inner pocket of my innermost blouse for the one thing among all my non-essential travel supplies that I didn't want to risk losing.
A pack of mushrooms.
They were small, dry, and only thirteen of them. If gunpowder was what I spent last winter collecting, these were what I'd spent all last fall on.
It was ridiculous, it should never have been hard to find them, the woods around my parents' house should've been teeming with these things after the first frost. Even if I believed the humus and detritus wasn't of the right mix there, it didn't explain why I couldn't find them in better spots. Across six different provinces. I should've found whole sacs' worth of these things, like any other shroom.
That I didn't could only mean that someone else got to them first. All the time. All over the country, maybe the whole world.
It wasn't proof of the supernatural, but not much else could explain it. It spoke of organized effort on a scale and speed that few things besides governments could attain, and it couldn't be them because governments couldn't possibly be this fast and efficient. Especially ours. Especially for psychedelic shrooms.
If only I had some acacia, I glumly thought, not for the first time. But even if I got my hands on a strain with enough DMT in the leaves or bark, it would take years to grow them.
I could've ordered some online, but the dealers that weren't scams were almost certainly traps run by whatever creature or organization considered my country their 'territory'. Even the few legitimate ones were probably under surveillance. Or abettors.
Maybe I was paranoid, but if that was the case I'd managed without having to find out the hard way, this time. In the end, I'd managed to find enough through sheer perseverance. For one dose.
Once will just have to be enough.
I opened the pack and ate the little mushrooms. All thirteen of them.
It took almost half an hour for the vision trip to begin, but when it did it went hard. Rather than the slow and steady slide forward through fractal tunnels of light and energy that people talked about, the world changed color all at once into a powerful golden radiance that completely swallowed me and everywhere I looked.
I'm inside, I thought in a daze as I seemed to fall and not fall and fly and not fly forever. Inside – what? Or swallowed – it was already here? All along? I just couldn't see it!
The golden light was brighter than the sun, but whatever I was seeing it with wasn't so weak as to go blind from just that. I moved my arm in a stupor. It felt like I was swimming through wood, but it didn't impede me any. It was wood, or the sublime… thing that wood imitated, the primordial ur-concept of structured life all in one place. Around me and through me, through the golden brilliance shaped like timber cord flowed the rainbow, only it wasn't rainbow. It was light of all colors, flowing like water – like sieve through the veins of a tree – I was inside a tree! Inside the root of the trunk of a tree that grew through everything, was everything, water, star, earth, rock, river, branch, living creature all the way into the horizon and further, past the world to what lay beyond – and before!
Yggdrasil, here? I thought in astonishment, swaying from the revelation. We have legends of trees too, trees of life – but Yggdrasil doesn't mean tree of life, it was a mistranslation, it means tree of knowledge!
I didn't stop when my motion did. Instead, I kept going, sliding, floating forward, then back and up as I mixed with the sieve coming from the yawning gap between cosmos. The tree pulled me up through its crystalline veins, at once sinuous and angular, but at the same time I felt how I didn't move at all. I became the tree's lifeblood and remained me at the same time, and that me seemed to grow even as it stayed in place, bigger and bigger as if to match and overlap the world tree itself.
I felt myself where I sat, bound in human shape. But I felt when I dissipated into the lifeblood of worlds just as keenly. All the while I felt vibrations as the tree trunk grew, in body and in branches, all of them growing, sprouting leaves and losing others, dry branches falling through infinity even as new buds grew where they'd been. New souls, new worlds, new stories. Not mere human fantasies, this, but real. I felt unassailable, I felt the tree's might grow and renew with every synapse that fired in my neurons back down in the world, felt as the tree swayed, as its branches fluttered and creaked through infinite planes.
I felt my flowers, and my leaves, I knew exactly how many there were even though there was no end to their number. I felt each growth like it as my own, new worlds and times born from my fiber. Nourished by sap made in my leaves – each one a world and a universe – from the prima materia pulled by my roots from the entropic soup at the beginning and end of universes. The original matter, and the final matter too, discharged by the wyrm that should be forever gnawing on my roots, where did it go?
I realized, then, that I had grown in size enough to outright overlap and be the tree, and so I was aware now of the beings not me that lived upon me. On me. Through me, even. In my roots and my branches, on and under and in my bark, everywhere throughout every layer save the innermost core of my trunk. There lay the Wellspring of Life hidden at the nexus of my branches, from all things save myself. Even the beasts. The wellspring that was actually a furnace, where the fire that cast the golden light and was the light that I gave off eternally stoked itself.
That was where all the light, even this Light came from!
A massive eagle roosted on my crown, with a much smaller hawk making its nest between its eyes. Four great stags grazed amidst my branches, while endless throngs of lesser dwarves scurried through galleries parallel to my veins, repairing breaks and killing what pests got too full of themselves. And there, running up my trunk as fast as it could, a tricksome squirrel with the teeth of a rat was making haste to tattle to the eagle. The drakk it so despised had disappeared.
The rat-toothed squirrel abruptly stopped, sniffed at the air, looked right at me for a moment, then turned to the right and hopped off the trunk onto one of the thinner but longer branches lowest to the ground – no, there was no ground. The tree was the same yawning gap, above and below. Except in one half I'd grown my crown, and in the other my roots, both perfect mirrors of the other. As above so below, and all around me the ocean.
The squirrell stopped where the branch split into smaller branches, each of them still gargantuan and stretching further into myriads of smaller boughs. Them too into others smaller still, rich with leaves and flowers. Unlike all the other parts of the tree I'd contemplated up to this point, I… didn't like this branch. The bough was fine, its shoots were acceptable individually, the leaves, the flowers, they each alone were – mine. But as a whole they were ugly to behold, and the sap that flowed back from them into me… it was cloying, rancid, threatening to taint the lone bud still unspoiled before I could even decide what it would become.
Maybe a flower, maybe a leaf, maybe a seed, maybe a new branch, maybe nothing at all would be better than… whatever that dragon over there was trying to reshape that entire branch into, the gall! What was it doing up here? This was where it had gone? It got bored chewing my roots so it decided to crawl up and eat some juicy leaves and flowers? And my fruit! What foolishness! Did it think the Light wouldn't find purchase in him, change him like all other things graced by thought and sapience? Was that not why it had wallowed in the dark beneath me this whole time, afraid of changing? Being more?
Except he wasn't more, he was less! Less intelligent than before, definitely, couldn't he see that he was killing that whole branch? Oh, how the great and terrible Nidhogg can fail upwards! A few more rips and yanks and the whole thing would strangle itself to death, and not gently either! Already countless smaller branches were dying, some unable to draw sap, some broken outright, and the dragon didn't care! No, he, used them to tie up and buttress the rest into – what did he think he could accomplish? Tangling those realms and all their iterations up in his own image?
Already there was just that trickle of tainted sap flowing in and out of his would-be nest, that was how much he'd damaged and how tangled the surviving shoots had become – wait! Not just that, he was sucking the sap himself, of course he was, that was how the worm derived his nourishment! What a selfish creature! What an oblivious way to commit suicide! So much blind effort just so Great Red could dream himself to death again. And he deserved it!
But that didn't mean we deserved it, goddammit! How was this my problem?!
Everyone knew Great Red was born outside physical reality from literal make-believe, but nobody actually thought more than one step ahead about what that means, not even the beast himself? See, this was why I was never going to tell anyone that I know the future, never mind how!
The blasted dragon apparently loved time travel plots, and like everything else he figured he would do a better job at it than anyone else!
It wasn't enough that the oh so almighty apocalypse beast may or may not have incarnated himself as a mortal, for the explicit purpose of getting a new lease on existence where everything was big and fresh again. It wasn't enough that he might actually have done one worse, and Hyuudou Issei was actually a real boy which the dragon just randomly decided to put invisible strings on for the express purpose of living his fantasies vicariously.
It wasn't enough that the insane lizard could only make this work by loading his mortal marionette with so much plot armor that it literally warped real reality around him every waking moment. And backwards in time and forward too, look at that mess!
It also wasn't enough that the dragon even dreamed up a throwaway author avatar to groom his impressionable child protagonist stand-in into becoming a pervert. I didn't even know why, maybe because he was a cold-blooded reptile before and he wanted to be as hot-blooded as possible as a human? Even though the least of his powers was breathing fire.
It wasn't even enough that Great Red managed to con the Infinite Dragon, his only rival in power, into adding her power to his own when they remade Hyuudou's body from their ultimate dragon flesh. No, the Dragon of Dreams had to gain a taste for the weak overthrowing the mighty, never mind what that said about how he subconsciously viewed himself, the mightiest of all. He wanted the euphoria of the victorious underdog to never end. Or maybe he wanted to see how far he could take Hyuudou's infinite edging before he finally crashed awake from the wet dream he forced on the rest of the world.
It was my sad lot in life that both possibilities were equally likely.
So what did the Beast of Apocalypse do? What do you do when your story suddenly runs out of credible threats for your self-insert avatar? What do you do when the native denizens of this world, however ignorant of what you've done, jump off the rails anyway and lock away the horror you'd planned to make the final boss?
If your name is Great Red, the answer is 'dream up an entire new reality with enemies of power so far beyond this world that the story of your parallel mortal life can have infinite sequels!'
Ignore the endless stream of philosophers throughout history, whose main preoccupation was to wonder 'what happens when a creation surpasses its creator?'
Turns out that when the creation in question is deliberately made objectively evil, the answer to that question is 'murder'
Unfortunately, Great Red couldn't just die with dignity because he could think ahead, just not about the consequences of ignoring reality. At the time of his unceremonious and humiliating death, he was in the middle of dreaming up a time travel plot. He'd intended to bring Hyuudou's son from the future on a Terminator-style plot to help fend off the new dimensional invaders, but had to hastily revise his plan when he got ganked by the figment of his own imagination.
In a shocked and bewildered attempt to survive his unintentional murder-suicide, Great Red tried to rewind the whole story back to an earlier time.
Like everything else, he overdit it. Only this time, the dragon found out that super-divine luck was an entirely different beast from literal time reversion on a world scale.
Somehow, Great Red still managed to dream up a way for just his memories of the future to jump back in time. Unfortunately, his aim was crap on account of actively being murdered at the time.
Instead of Dream's memories reaching the Dream, they smashed instead into my dream.
I liked to think it was because I'd managed to teach myself how to lucid dream, but it really was just foul luck.
The next-to-worst thing was that I didn't get anything useful out of it! No special power, no world-changing knowledge I had any hope to actually use, no ineffable wisdom, nothing. Just a long reel of events revolving around a boy on the other side of the world from me, all rendered like a Japanese anime because the Apocalypse Beast was a bloody otaku too!
The worst worst thing was that everything I'd learned about the world was, beyond all reason, even more depressing that that.
The god of the bible was real, except he only achieved his ridiculous power level because faith gave real, tangible power, and he somehow got a third of the world to believe he was the prime creator of everything. As if! No way he was anyone with any actual claim to genesis, I'd sooner believe that of Tyr or Ouranos than him. I could only hope he was El, instead of that up-jumped rain god from Canaan. Of course, if he was El and El was another name for Ea – as in Enki – his death was the greatest tragedy to befall mankind since the Great Flood.
That was the other thing, God's been dead for centuries – don't tell the Church! – because of some war that was so destructive entire supernatural races and possibly even pantheons were wiped out as collateral. But no memory of the mess existed in any tradition or folklore, despite it ending just five hundred some years ago. Or pausing, since it had only concluded in an armistice because none of the three factions involved had troops to send out to die anymore.
The Three Factions. Heaven, Hell, and the Grigori. The last of whom were the 'Watchers of the Children of God' from the Book of Enoch, except they couldn't have numbered just 200 if they managed to be a third front all on their own. Meaning that either there were a lot more who fell from the Fifth Heaven leading up to the deluge, or those 200 conceived a lot of Nephilim by the time war broke out.
Meanwhile, Devils existed and inhabited the 'infinite' Underworld, and Great Red was absolutely sure that they didn't originate with the thousands of angels who fell with Lucifer long before the Grigori were a thing. The original devils were supposedly 'created from the body of Lilith' by Lucifer. Never mind that Lilith was Adam's first wife, instead of the ambiguous and never actually seen abomination from Great Red's highlight reel. I'd sooner believe Lilith was Echidna than this ridiculousness!
Obscenely, this rabbit hole was practically inconsequential next to the horrifying fact that the devils were actively working towards humanity's extinction, not the least by stealing all our best, brightest and mightiest through the Devil Piece system. But don't worry, Hell was reformed now! Sure, devils tempted humans to sin by their very nature, but that was just their nature, who were you to judge someone for being born that way? They just wanted to make your wish come true! For some reason. Because it makes them powerful, somehow. Just from nothing.
Don't be silly about any of them demanding your soul in payment for monkey's paw wishes, why, that was totally out of fashion! Only the bad devils did that now! Only the bad devils still preyed on mankind through tricks, abuse, possession, murder and strife, disease and famine and rape and child rape and torture and war and every other horrible thing you can think of. Only the bad devils corrupted humans and whatever else struck their fancy into becoming as evil as them.
Don't even think about wanting retribution for the billions of souls they stole in the past to do unspeakable things with, what kind of monster are you so incapable of forgiveness?
Ignore how the Old Satan faction can do whatever it wants because the 'good' new Satans would rather go down on than stomp on Zekram Bael's meat.
Ignore how the good devils still treat their peerage members as literal commodities to be used and enjoyed and traded however they want, like the chattel slaves that they all are.
Ignore how the Otherworld used to be the sole province of fairies and elves, the dearly departed and venerated ancestors of humanity, who tamed the primordial darkness and ascended as Gods of the Dead so souls could finally have some peace. Ignore how literally all the mythologies and religions from before Christianity said this. Ignore what it means that the Otherworld is almost entirely overrun by devils now! Who cares about the souls of your forebears that are conspicuously nowhere to be found anymore?
Then – then – then… Devilkind has the audacity to be so unsatisfied with their 'rich' and 'proud' and 'infinite' Underworld, that they simply must come up and claim territory here on the surface too. Don't mind how they only ever choose the most affluent places already inhabited and already developed and already owned. By humans. Who put the blood, sweat and tears of countless generations into creating literally everything that devils consider worth having. And everyone other than them too!
It totally isn't theft, it totally isn't usurpation, it totally isn't literal invasion, how could you make such unfounded accusations! You'd think devils were the spawn of Satan!
Genocide? How could it be genocide? It's not like they mean it, it's just something that happens!
Modern devils, everyone! They want the power of gods, the benefits of kings, and the accountability of a child!
Got a problem with that?
Well that's too bad because there's nothing you can do about it. The strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must. All that size and strength and magic and immortality that humanity used to have before the great flood, all those powers that let us rule as god-king for tens of thousands of years at a time, all those realms of might and magic where heroes and kings could defeat demons and gods and provide light to an entire city just by glowing hard enough, that's all gone now. How is it gone? Why?
Because fuck me that's why! And everyone before me and everyone after me too!
Don't even get me started on the angels. Those idiots. Those morons. Those imbeciles.
The Brave Saints system? That's what they went with? The one where they finish what Hell started? The one where they deprive mankind of all its most noble, to go with the best and brilliant that the devils make a point to get to first? Which just dooms us to become even easier pickings for the devils of hell with each subsequent generation? The system that filled Heaven with countless righteous souls that proved completely irrelevant and useless for the entirety of Great Red's fever dream?
Aren't the angels the protectors of the good and just? Where the fuck is the good and the justice?! Why did God even change them from those horrifying flying-saucer-with-a-million-eyes forms that they started with? Why bother stealing Tyr's idea of magic winged people if God will just waste it on the likes of them? Oh, and a big congratulations to Archangel Michael for committing the one act that should've seen him and Gabriel and all the angels of heaven fall en masse, because they went and walked in the footsteps of Satan more than all the Grigori before them!
This is the face of 'peace'? This is how things are supposed to be? This is my future?
How about no? How about fuck you? How about devils and angels and demons and dragons and what the fuck else, how about they don't get away with genocide and abuse and torture and eternal slavery, and millennia upon millennia of treating us like cows in our own house! How about they all instead have this vision of their entire reality's destruction be sewed on the inside of their eyelids! May they never be able to prey upon or infringe upon or change human nature again, for the rest of their miserable lives!
Beyond the flow of time and thought of the gods, the Eternal Fire pulsed out from the Wellspring of Realities. The Light of the World Tree shimmered brilliantly. The branch of the Draconic Deus didn't.
Ratatoskr hopped back all the way to just before the spot where the main branch split.
Then he bit deep into the wood and wrenched.
The branch broke loose.
I felt the pain of infinite endings, but the relief was many times stronger.
As the branch fell, the dragon in the branches flailed in shock, then fear as he began to fall with it. I saw it scramble to free itself from the tangle of its own making, claw and bite at the branches of the surrounding boughs to arrest his fall, stay in the tree at any cost, but I no longer had attention for him.
Back at the fresh stump, the World Tree's sap seeped out, staunching the wound except for one lone spot. The place where the newest and smallest bud was, teetering on the raw, torn edge. Without anyone to share nourishment with, the bud swelled in size, faster and faster, the petals and sepals and leaves sheltering the new growth were a cocoon that looked just fit to burst at any time.
They didn't.
The bud did, and only at the base. It broke loose. I broke loose. After uncountable time since I'd dissolved into the sap of the tree, I was finally coming back together. Coming free. Turned to new growth, straight from the nexus of all things.
I watched it fall down. I watched myself fall down, felt the fall and the Light of everything on me, and every wind in every world and timeline that had ever been. They were muffled and distant, softened and transformed by the sap that fell down alongside it. Like the waters of life, but they weren't water. They were more.
The seed fell back to earth. To me. I was the seed, but I'd never stopped being me either, and now I was my own soil too, where I could sprout anew.
The seed plunged through my spirit and body and further, all the way to my soul where it filled a hollowness I hadn't known was there. The sap followed, not inside but over me, around and through me, kindling the new life I'd become. The life I had been once, that mankind itself was long ago, before those creatures jealous of our blessed nature made common cause to wipe us out. The sap of the World Tree.
It tasted like mead.
It found the embers of my righteous anger and stoked them to heights I thought I didn't have it in me to feel anymore.
"-. .-"
When I awoke down on the mountain, my mind was full of notions, my body brimmed with the unrealized strength of a sapling of the World Tree, my soul was a gateway to the Eternal Fire beyond time, and my head was in the lap of the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.
"Evohe," I said without having to think, my mind swirling with all new trivia. "Could it be that yon mysterious lurker was such a pretty thing?"
"Well, I never," scoffed the pretty witch, because she had to be one, or maybe a fairy-? "Don't expect me to believe you knew I was there when you can't tell that someone isn't merely pretty."
"Oh what world is this, where the prettiest of maidens is my own, dread stalker?"
"Not merely pretty am I, and not a maiden either." With a white cloth soaked in water from a basin I only just noticed next to us, she began to clean my face with gentle hands. "Claim you to know the whole time I was there, watching? Such a grand boast!"
"I notice you still didn't deny the third accusation."
"If beauty and purity qualify as accusations in today's world, I might as well reconsider rejoining it."
"Careful now." I reached up to turn some of her hair around my fingers, long and colored like golden strawberries. It was like touching a soft, silken a cascade. "Any more boasting and I might suspect you're something different than you seem. At that point I'd have to bravely screaming run away, and then where would we be?"
"We'd be nice and comfortable in the mistress' hut if you weren't so skittish."
"Is she a hag?"
"Surely not! My word, what are the elders even teaching these days?"
"Farming, soldering, tractor driving," I listed absently, pretending not to be fascinated by the presence of her most perfect bosom right next to my face. The World Tree hadn't fulfilled my lofty wish, more's the pity, but it did give me the beginnings of the means to fulfil it on my own. Turns out that 'how to survive the supernatural' starts with a whole lot of wordplay and iron self-control. "The old stories have been mostly forgotten I'm afraid, and the evil hag of the woods features heavily in those left."
"You have achieved a miracle thrice over then."
Did I really? "What were the first two?"
"Aborting a dragon's birth is one," the lady said mildly. Her blue eyes seemed almost purple next to the grey sky. "Surviving was the second, never mind without aid."
"Thanks for not adding mischief on top of it."
"Do not give thanks for common courtesy."
"It's a great litmus test though."
"Pardon?"
"If I get punished for being polite, that just means I'll know immediately that you're trouble."
"And then you'll bravely screaming run away?"
"Probably." I shrugged. Her thighs felt very fine under my head and shoulders. "I prefer not to hit a lady unless I'm sure she's not really one."
"I invite you to take advantage of my hospitality a while and verify for yourself."
"Tempting." It really was. "Did your mistress put you up to this?"
"She is the mistress of the Garden, not mine. I merely enjoy her hospitality, and in exchange I watch over her home away from home while she's away."
"Is she evil?"
She swatted my shoulder with her wash cloth. "Stop that!"
That's not a no. I turned my nose. "I don't take orders from strangers."
"You may call me Ileana."
Of course it would be that. And she said 'you may call me' not 'my name is,' so I couldn't even be sure if she really was or wasn't Ileana Cosanzeana. The fairy queen. "Then you may call me Sorin."
"Child of the Sun? A name like that could draw attention."
"There's thousands with that name nowadays." Though reluctant to part with her lap, I pushed myself up to a sitting position. "Might I prevail on your person to wait here a minute or three?"
"My curiosity is stoked."
Not as much as I am.
Rising, I went to my bag and pulled out my tentpoles, and my length of rope. I used them to demarcate a perimeter, a triangle inside circle precisely three meters in diameter right next to where Ileana sat watching.
"I claim this land in the name of Dacia." Thus declared, I sat down the closest I could to her while still being inside the circle, and held out a piece of bread and salt. "Will you accept my hospitality, oh Queen of Nymphs?"
Ileana laughed heartily, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. "How could I say no to such earnest entreat?"
I grinned, relishing my victory over her wit and the butterflies in my stomach.
In my deep trance, I'd wished for what it took to survive this world, for what it took for mankind to survive this world, and more. To live, to be, to thrive in spite of everything arrayed against us.
The solution given to me?
A whole lot of fast talking. But in those cases where a clever tongue was not enough, the only thing sufficient to defy any danger was the fundamental power at the heart of all things itself. The Eternal Fire beyond the edge of time and thought of the gods, manifested as the Sacred Light of Creation.
I was a young, fresh shoot of the world tree. My soul had been one with the Wellspring and it was so even now, but my spirit and my body were too fresh, yet to be honed. I could barely channel the faintest warmth, though even a spark felt like a lot to someone who'd had no spec of paranormal ability before now. Even if I grew enough to call on the Eternal Fire's highest manifestations, that still wouldn't do much for everyone else.
As always when it came to humanity, the one and only path that carried true promise of success were tools. Tools to be forewarned, tools to be forearmed, and tools to make more tools and better tools until we had the right one for everything, be it to change our very nature or overturn the apocalypse itself.
Compared to the power of the highest forms of existence, inventiveness turned out to be quite easy to inspire.
"-. .-"
Exalted Human Nature Achieved: Inspired Inventor
As with Celestial Forge in Bylaws of Babel, I probably went way overboard to give in-universe justification for the Inspired Inventor method. I regret nothing.
Inspiration (nous) can be bought with charges as normal for stories like this (at my discretion, i.e. it might take more than one charge to learn the entire tech base of Mass Effect). Discounts may occur depending on whether Dacian has a good enough grounding in a topic already. Conversely, reaching max rank in something doesn't necessarily mean he's the best in the universe at it, it just means he's the best he can be within his means.
Example: Diplomacy has a hard cap of 5/5, but if Dacian wants to be the best diplomat relative to, say, vampires, he'll be getting some mixed results unless he spends a charge in 'Vampire Society and Customs' (or otherwise learns all there is to know about that).
Powers can be unlocked directly or indirectly (via practical applications of knowledge according to what makes the most sense) but will typically not be possible to grow just via charges. Same for adding completely new ones.
Dacian can, say, spend inspiration points to learn how to use ki (what it is, how it's produced, how it works, applications, techniques, etc.), but from there will need to develop it organically (training, nutrition, ascension, rituals, spiritual alchemy, etc.) and might have to spend added charges if he wants methods from different worlds (i.e. cultivation). Similarly, he can learn everything about how Chakra or the Type-Moon magecraft works. But if he wants a chakra circulatory system or magic circuits, he'll have to devise a way to make or grow some. Even then, systems of magic from one branch might not (entirely) function in branches with different metaphysics (without shenanigans).
He can get pretty passionate about things, incidentally, like his personal vendetta against all the infringements on human nature that DxD operates on, so his decision-making will be heavily shaped by things like that.
Inspired Investments
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome (the Conventional): 3/3 (1 discounted)
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome (the Unconventional): 2/?
Diplomacy: 5/5
Powers
Holy Light of Creation (1/?)
The Flame Imperishable (0/?)
Notable Possessions
Dragonstone – Also known as the serpent stone, it is a gem crystallized from the combined soul emanations of 6666 snakes. Instantly neutralizes all venom on contact. Rapid healing of any wounds on contact, speed of regeneration directly proportional to how close in nature the cause of the injury was to dragons (or snakes). Further properties and uses to be determined.
Next chapter is available on P treon (karmicacumen),Ko-fi (karmicacumen) and Subscribestar (karmic-acumen), along with advance chapters for Bylaws of Babel(Warhammer Fantasy/40K), The Unified Theorem (Warcraft), and Everything, Everywhere, one Thing at a Time (Harry Potter / Stargate multicrossover). This story will be replacing that last one in my monthly rotation, starting next month.