Dragon Seed: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (The Archemi Online Chronicles Book 1)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “It’s…” I wracked my brains for what I was supposed to tell him. I knew there was something, but when I tried to think of what had happened in the last day, all I saw was fog. I rubbed my face, wincing. “Damn. I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.”

  “Amnesia is a common side effect. Don’t be alarmed if you’re foggy for a few days. The Trial is immensely stressful on the body.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Four days,” he replied breezily. “A little longer than is typical. We were getting worried.”

  “I remember leaving the fort, and crashing off Cutthroat in the forest.” I frowned, rubbing my hands over my face. I remember…”

  Matir. I remembered Matir, and his warnings to me. Alarmed, I checked my quests. By passing the Trial, I’d earned enough EXP to hit Level 7, giving me skill points to spend. The ‘Restore the Spear of Nine Spheres’ quest was still there. The revelation was accompanied by a strong sense of dread. I was supposed to tell Tymos about something that happened, but it was all a bright, painful blur. “What about the others? Did they make it?”

  Tymos sighed heavily. “We lost one: the large boy, the dark-haired one.”

  “Pravoslav.” I nodded. I hadn’t gotten to know him at all, but he’d seemed like a cool guy. “But the others-”

  “-Need only concern you when you take your vows,” Tymos replied. He got to his feet. “It is time for you to visit the Matriarch. Can you walk?”

  I didn’t feel like I could, but the only way to find out was to try. Slowly, I pushed aside the covers and shuffled around until I could stand. There was a mirror on the other side of the room. I made that my goal and embraced the suck by tottering over. The first steps were wobbly, but by the time I reached the dresser and peered at my face, I was steadier.

  The trial had changed me. The most alarming change was my eyes. I now had the same large, eagle-like pupils as Tymos and the commander, and the iris of my eyes had bleached. They were no longer dark blue, but an eerie pale blue-violet threaded with silver. Looking straight ahead at my reflection, I could see Skyr Tymos almost directly behind me without using the mirror. That felt like it would be a huge advantage in my everyday gaming. Good luck backstabbing me now, assholes…

  Wait… What?

  “Come with me,” Tymos said. “And when you meet the Matriarch… please recall our conversation in the garden.”

  Chapter 40

  The human-occupied halls of the Eyrie were smooth and well-made, with tile floors and elegant, austere ceilings, like something out of an Elvish castle. At the core of the tower was something much older and more primeval… and heavily locked down.

  The Matriarch’s chambers and the hatching sands were at the heart of the Eyrie. There was no way to tell which way was up or down in here. It was very warm, and smelled faintly of sulphur and more strongly of mana. Tymos led me through a gauntlet of doors that burned with wards and magical protections, past a heavily-guarded golden antechamber, and through a grand entry that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank vault, complete with industrial-sized bolts and a great big spoked wheel. We opened that wheel together, and when the door clunked, he pushed it open a crack.

  “She is expecting you,” he whispered, with a meaningful look at my covered hand. “Be polite… and be careful. The walls here most definitely have ears.”

  I nodded and slipped inside, entering a huge domed chamber. The ten-foot vault door shut behind me with a boom that echoed through the enormous cave. The air pressed in on me with tropical heat and humidity. Water gathered and trickled down the walls, which glowed with flickering whorls and seams of magical script. At the very end of the cave was an amphitheater of stone surrounding the world’s largest sand pit. And there, curled in a tight ball, was the singly most miserable dragon I had ever seen.

  The Matriarch should have been beautiful. She was huge – half again the size of Talenth - with a backswept crown of long, slender horns. Her pale scales were like pearls or opals, shifting from opalescent cream to ripples of bright blue, green, violet, and even pink. She was adorned with jewelry. Woven chains, rings, and jewels hung from her horns, nostrils, around her neck, around her wrists and ankles, her claws and the tip of her tail. But when I zoomed in on her – I could do that now - I saw that her neck was swollen, her opalescent hide was grayish and dirty, and she was more than a little overweight. The jewelry, which looked delicate on a creature as large as she was, was made of the same near-impervious bluesteel material as my spear. The links crawled with magical energy, and all I could think of was one of those choke collars some people used on their dogs. Or a shock collar.

  Something is not right here. The voice of my intuition screamed.

  The dragon’s wings sagged as she pulled herself upright, watching my approach with weary suspicion. Her eyes were a brilliant pale violet, dark at the edges and as bright as a lightning strike in the center. Each eyeball was larger than my torso.

  There had been no instruction on how to approach her, and I had a feeling someone was watching – and assessing – how I handled the encounter. So when I reached the edge of the sand arena, I bowed from the waist to her in the Korean style, hands by my sides. “Honored Matriarch, I am Dragozin Hector of Tungaant. I’m sorry to have interrupted your sleep this evening. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me at this late hour.”

  The dragon suddenly seemed more alert. She cocked her head slightly, her winglet crests briefly lifting, then relaxing, and I saw her gaze drop to a level just to my right. My hand. Like Talenth, she could sense the Mark.

  “You are different.” Her telepathic voice was like rolling thunder… but she sounded old. Sad. Resigned.

  “I travelled a long way to be here,” I replied, drawing myself up. At my full heroic height of five feet and eleven inches, the top of my head was level with the upper arch of the Matriarch’s claws. She could have crushed the life out of me with a single toe.

  Her manner shifted toward suspicion. She dropped her wings, shuffling around to reveal what lay just under her chest: the eggs. Three perfect dragon eggs, each one large enough to contain a small terrier-sized dog. My heart skipped. The largest of them was a pure reflective silver. The next largest was a clear azure blue, and the smallest was white. I saw the Matriarch swallow around the lump in her throat. It was off to the side, and looked kind of like an Adam’s apple… or a tumor.

  “I must get a better look at you. Orius.” The Matriarch’s booming voice slithered through the air. She could speak aloud.

  The blue crystal seams in the walls brightened, and as they did, lights appeared in the air: round lamps of pure energy that blazed to life with pure white light. They sparked and spat, humming like a horde of insects.

  “How terribly noisy these baubles of mine are,” the dragon spoke in my mind again. “Noisy enough to obscure eavesdropping, including telepathic eavesdropping… so very inconvenient to those trying to listen in. Such a thing is one of the few freedoms I possess.”

  “What is… what is going on here?” I was aghast to hear her breathing rasping in her chest. She had barely moved, but she sounded like a pack-a-day smoker. Now that I had time to look… the muscles around her wings were atrophied and soft. There was no way she could fly. This beautiful, regal creature was a prisoner in her own nest. “What have they done to you?”

  “You are not the first to ask,” she replied bitterly. “But like all of the rest, you come to make your curtsies and beg my permission to touch my eggs, do you not?”

  “No, that’s…” I said aloud, before snapping my jaws shut. “I thought that’s why I was here, but… this isn’t what I wanted. Are you a prisoner?”

  She bowed her head down toward me, nostrils flaring. I wasn’t exactly a coward, but watching the great queen’s muzzle looming down over my head was an unnerving experience. “I cannot tell you.”

  Something clicked.

  It was almost the same thing Tymos had said to me over and over
again. I’d encountered this puzzle in tabletop role-playing games before, though not in videogames. My eyes narrowed. “Wait… You’re bound by one of those magic compulsion things, aren’t you? A geas? Is that what they’re called?”

  “I cannot tell you. But I can affirm that the… compulsion you describe is called a geas.” The Matriarch sniffed delicately over me, blowing my hair back with each snort. She moved with grace that was surprising in such an enormous creature. “But you are too late, Herald.”

  “Too late?”

  “You have passed their ritual. Once, long ago, they used to send candidates to me before the Trial of Marantha, but I suppose they learned that lesson. The Trial is the first step to ensuring your ‘loyal service’.” The dragon reared up, the joints in her neck popping stiffly. She was not that old – I could sense that, somehow – but she was fat and sick from being trapped indoors, her muscles unexercised. “Listen to me, Herald: if you truly do not wish to join in what is being done here, pack your satchel and leave. Tonight. Before you take your ‘vows’.”

  What the fuck was going on here? I was starting to feel queasy as I looked around the room. “You’re trapped. They don’t let you leave. But… don’t the young dragons bond with humans? They seemed happy. Why aren’t you…?”

  “They bond, yes. But they are kept ignorant of what cannot be said.” The dragon’s expression shut down. It was… unnatural. Creatures like her weren’t supposed to have a poker face, a game face… but there it was. “Listen to me. I am supposed to let you touch my eggs, so that your lust for them reaches a fever pitch, and I am supposed to tell you the history of this place: the Skyrdon’s version of it. I am to motivate you to swear allegiance to Ilia, to preserve and expand the nation’s borders. I shall do so, and you must live up to your mantle and the Dark God’s trust in you, Herald of the Hidden Seed. We will see if Matir has chosen well. He has not done so in the past.”

  I nodded, waiting.

  “Long ago, the Drachan – the Void Dragons – invaded this world.” The Matriarch dropped her wings down around us, and darkness swallowed the circle of sand where I stood: a tent of living leather. “They came in the age when all of the elder races of Archemi had their nations. The nation of the Solonkratsu was in the south of this continent, a region now known as the Shalid. It was a green place: a fertile, beautiful land abundant with prey, ruled by queens and their mates: the great generals, hunting masters, and artificers of dragonkind. And when the Drachan came, they swept through the Aesari and the Catfolk like claws through the hide of a soft-skinned doe… it was we who drove them back. It was we, the dragons, who created the Dragon Gates… and we who sacrificed the old gods to the Caul of Souls, so that the Void’s blight would never touch our beautiful lands and our precious eggs.”

  I listened in the warm darkness, stunned. With her wings covering us and the eggs, I could smell her. She smelled like warm baked bread and hot stone, with an undertone of something sharper. Like orange peel.

  “But with our gods gone, we were weakened.” The Matriarch bowed her head down toward me, ducking them under the great canopy she had made. “And the Aesari, who had fled the Drachan like twittering cowards, saw their chance to subjugate those around them and take our learning and our magic. They enslaved us, and they enslaved the humans that the Drachan had bought with them to this world, and they enslaved the Catfolk, and bent us all to their purposes… by warping the same magic we had used to create the Dragon Gates. By taking the life of our gods, and subverting part of their energy away from the Caul so that they could bind us into their service.”

  “Are you saying…?”

  The Matriarch hissed through her teeth. I shut up.

  “It was the humans who discovered the means of subverting this control,” she continued calmly. “You will have heard part of this story already, the tale of Grigori and Sachara. Such clever things, humans are… they found loopholes in the geas the Aesari used to bind all other sentient beings here, and they ‘destroyed’ them so that we dragons might be ‘free’. They freed the Catfolk and themselves. They ‘partnered’ with us.”

  I was now sick to my stomach. “They enslaved you.”

  “I cannot say,” the Matriarch replied.

  “For how long?”

  The dragon’s expression was pained. “I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of Lirenian, the Diamond Queen. She was the daughter of the goddess Solnetsi, whose great spirit powers the Gate of Glorious Dawn. It lies beneath this monument.”

  Solnetsi. Why was that name familiar? My eyes were magnetically drawn to the three eggs resting between her forearms. “And ‘the desert lands to the south’…”

  “Our homeland,” the Matriarch replied plaintively. “Before it was drained dry by the terrible artifacts of the Aesari. They fielded titans of metal made for war… magical machines that sucked the life from the earth, that plow through battlefields and shred flesh-and-blood creatures as if they were drinking water. These are the dim memories passed down to me through my blood, like shadows.”

  I was definitely starting to feel sick. “But… do the Skyrdon… take care of you here?”

  “They ensure that I am fed, and always with egg.” The great dragon turned her head away from me, as if ashamed. “For the good of Ilia, and humanity.”

  It took a moment for the implication to set in, and when it did, I ground my jaws so hard I thought my teeth would crack. My wavering desire to join the Skyrdon evaporated in a flash. My hands clenched by my sides, and I dropped my voice to a guttural growl. “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all. If you can tell the other dragons to not retaliate, I’ll find the commander and-”

  “I cannot, and you cannot. I am myself struggling not to react to your threat against the commander… a compulsion I can neither help nor describe.” The Matriarch lowered her head until the tip of her nose was barely a foot away from my head. “Herald… you are a creature of shadow. Be subtle and be clever. There are no breeding females in the Eyrie other than me, and not for lack of the commander’s efforts. And if I am the last Queen born here-”

  Before she could continue, the collar around her neck began to glow blue. She snarled, and her breath knocked me out of my crouch and threw me to the sand, coughing.

  The huge dragon snapped her jaws and reared up, pulling her wings back as blue light shot over and through her scales. The big, tumor-like bulge in her neck was very visible as she clawed at the sand with her hind feet, rattling the floor with her weight. I backpedaled as some primal fear overtook me… the fear of a very small mammal in the presence of a reptile the size of a large building.

  “That’s quite enough.” A stern man’s voice pierced the air from… somewhere. Like a stadium announcement. “Leave the chamber, novice. The Matriarch must rest.”

  As fearful as I was of how easily the Matriarch could crush me, I didn’t want to leave her. But I saw the desperation in the dragon’s huge eyes as she looked down at me, and I understood.

  I put my own game face on. And I marched back to the large bank vault doors, where Tymos was waiting for me. The old man looked very tired.

  “Come,” he said.

  He led me out, back through the way we’d come. I waited until we were walking together down an empty, featureless hall before grabbing the old man, spinning him, and slamming him against the nearest wall.

  I squeezed the leather straps of his armor until they creaked. “You knew. You knew, and you went along with it anyway. Why is it that you ‘cannot speak’, but I can?”

  “You haven’t taken your vows yet.” The Novice Master regarded me calmly. Then I realized. He was able to see behind himself, like I now could. He could have dodged… but he hadn’t. He hung without resistance.

  “But you took your vows,” I hissed. “Even though you knew.”

  Tymos swallowed, and then did something with his hands: a yank on my little fingers, and suddenly, I couldn’t keep my grip on his breastplate straps. He shoved me back, and before I h
ad my guard up, pulled his right glove off.

  There, like an old scar, was the faint outline of a Mark of Matir.

  Chapter 41

  “I knew,” he said heavily, pulling the glove back on. “And I listened. Believe me, I listened. You’re not that special, boy. The Black God has sent more than one emissary to help his daughter. And we went like flies to honey.”

  “But… you…” I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “You know what happens to insects when they land in honey.” Tymos swallowed. He was sweating like he’d just run a mile in his armor.

  ‘Be subtle, and think.’ I frowned. “They drown. It’s not just the dragons who are bound under this geas… It’s the knights, too.”

  “I cannot say.”

  “And this… this geas comes into effect when you take the vows?”

  He didn’t nod, but he didn’t shake his head, either.

  I swallowed, looking down at the ground, and only then did I notice my quest journal icon flashing. “Hang on a second.”

  Tymos crossed his arms, watching with some confusion as I brought up my HUD, which he couldn’t see, and checked the notification:

  New Main Quest: Darkness Shines on Light Places (1/4)

  You have learned that there is a dark secret at the heart of the Order of Saint Grigori: the dragons and many of the knights in the order are bound by some kind of magical enslavement. There is a geas on the Order stretching back hundreds, or maybe thousands of years. Find a way to break the cycle, starting with yourself, and uncover the secrets of Cham Garai.

  This is a special quest (Mark of Matir).

  This is a sequential quest (1 of 4)

  Difficulty: Level 10 (Part 1); Level 50+ (Parts 2 to 4)

  Reward: EXP, Fame/Infamy, the Pearl of Glorious Dawn.

  I had an option to refuse the quest, but I didn’t. I accepted without hesitation, and read over the rewards with a growing sense of certainty. Even if the Spear’s quest had been a trap, even if there was no actual reward for completing that quest, this Ororgael guy had somehow screwed the pooch. The Spear was still broken and the Dragon Gates still needed to be fixed. I was the one who’d been handed the bucket of shit, and I’d be the one to pour it out. Whatever had happened in Cham Garai hadn’t fixed the Spear, or the Dragon Gates or the Caul they supported. If only I could remember what had happened.