Knives in the Night

by Nathan A. Thompson

  The orbs of Lightning and Blood hovered right next to each other, and I could tell that they were having their own interaction as well. Little bolts of electricity were arcing into the Blood orb, and in return, small red tendrils drifted into the Lightning orb.

  That last phenomenon somehow reminded me of electrolytes in the human body, specifically that blood often had a small electrical charge to itself.

  They all mix together, I realized, even when they don’t get along, they can all mix together, with the help of a third party…and be stronger for it.

  “Hey, watch your step,” Teeth said, using his mouth to talk inside this place. “There’s blood and fire and lightning and a giant mass of venom floating around here. Sorry I haven’t had a chance to clean.”

  I snorted, then floated over next to him.

  “How are we doing?” I asked as I watched the pool of glowing vitality battle the inky mass of venom. “And if we’re not doing well, what can we do about it?”

  “Hell, we’re doing awesome.” My dragon persona snorted confidently. “It would have maybe been a close thing if we didn’t know the poison was coming, but now it doesn’t have a chance. Not with our protection spells active and our body subconsciously ready for it. The only thing we’re really doing now is gleaning everything we can from it.”

  As I watched, the steam created by the toxin encountering the vital guard drifted toward the matrix of Ideal magics. Each orb sent a trickle of its element into the steam as it drew nearby.

  Then the vaporized mixture drew in front of the Blood orb, where a familiar, pale, feminine hand reached out of the orb. It gestured tenderly and invitingly to the mist, and in response the vapor rested on its palm.

  Upon contact, the feminine hand pulled at the vapor, causing the orb of Blood to emit a healthy white glow for a moment, before turning red again.

  The whole process baffled me initially, but then I figured out.

  “Prodontis?” I asked, remembering the name of the Keeper queen who had tried to drain me dry, because she thought doing so would provide her children with nobler DNA.

  Teeth nodded.

  “What’s left of her,” he confirmed, “or rather, what’s left of her that remains with us. I have no idea how the whole Passing On works, beyond what the Pendragon shared with us. There’s nothing in my memories from either Aegrim or Vinclum regarding it, except that Vinclum mourned the fact that he wasn’t allowed to Pass On himself. But anyway, a small vestige of Prodontis integrated into our Ideal of Blood, and just sort of sat there, helping us filter the occasional poison that we didn’t even notice.”

  That was right. Before she had decided to abandon negotiations and try to drink the perceived virtue straight out of my body, the spider queen had explained that her body was a treasure trove for apothecaries and chemists. In fact, I think she mentioned that it could serve as a lab itself, letting her experiment with poisons using nothing more than her blood.

  Like I was sort of doing right now.

  And thanks to my winning our DNA-slurpee-death match, my ability to do so had become enhanced.

  It did remind me of her babies, though.

  And technically, since they had a tiny bit of my DNA through a blood donation, they were my babies too.

  “Hey,” Teeth spoke up, and somehow I knew he had been thinking the same thing, “does Stell know that we sort of have kids already?”

  “Um,” I began uncomfortably, watching the battle between my vitality and the invading poison. “Yes? Breena was there when that all went down.”

  “No, not Breena,” the FNG corrected as another vapor was caught by the spider woman’s vestige. “I mean Stell herself. Her main body. Whatever.”

  “Oh. Right,” I said, thinking to myself. “It’s never come up in our conversations. Not that I can remember, at least. But Breena may have told her. Or she may have noticed in her last visit, so…maybe?”

  “Huh.” Teeth grunted, as the cross of orbs crackled loudly over our heads, apparently digesting a large piece of power from one of the poison’s vapors. “Say she doesn’t know…do you think she’ll be pissed when she finds out? Especially since we haven’t said anything?”

  I blinked.

  “Oh, shit,” I decided. “Probably. Maybe? I have no idea. Do they even count as our kids? We didn’t exactly sign any adoption papers when we took them in. We just stuck them on a tree, bled on them, and promised to try and keep them alive.”

  “Yeah, but more importantly,” Teeth corrected as he turned to look at me, “do you think she will count them as our kids?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  “Wait,” Teeth speculated, looking extremely uncomfortable, “what if she does know, and that’s why Anahita poisoned us?”

  “Can I go now?” I asked. “This is an extremely disturbing chain of possibilities.”

  “Sorry,” Teeth mumbled, looking away. “Been a crazy week.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him, as magical energy rumbled all around us.

  “Why are you so distracted?” I asked.

  “I’m not distracted,” the New Guy said defensively, as his head snapped around.

  “Yes you are,” I responded, not backing down. “First, you miss important information. Then you ogle Anahita on purpose, so that you have an excuse.”

  “I didn’t ogle her for an excuse!” the dragon snapped. “I would have stared at her anyway! I mean,” he said, “shit. I promised I’d work on that.”

  “And now you’re getting philosophical,” I continued, “when normally, you’d tell me to go drift over there and see if I could just eat the venom myself.”

  “Okay, okay,” Teeth gave in as he raised his taloned hands in surrender. “Fine. You got me. I’ve been distracted by the Fiend.”

  “The one you talked to out in the desert?” I asked, just to be sure. It had been a little tricky to follow the exchange once words like Breathborn and Fellspawn and Stellar Imperator started flying around.

  “Yeah,” Teeth admitted uncomfortably. “That Steel-Condom guy.”

  “Steel-Armor,” I corrected, “he said his name was Steel-Armor Zereh. Are you trying to tell me you gave a nickname like that to a guy you’re really worried about?”

  “No,” my inner dragon said as he shook his head. Far above us, the matrix of Ideal orbs continued to filter the poison mists into themselves. “I mean, I’m not scared. I’m just… having trouble figuring him out.”

  I gave him an annoyed look.

  “When have we ever figured our enemies out?” I asked, before my memory finally clicked. “Okay, we sort of figured out the Flood before we killed it, but still. We’ve always run into surprises. And we’re going to keep running into surprises because the entire Expanse is full of things we’ve never encountered before. This feels like something you should be saying instead of me. You’re the overly cocky part of me, remember?”

  “Yeah, and you’re the overly cautious part of me,” the dragon-man snapped back. “But the problem isn’t one I don’t know. It’s what I remember that bothers me.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. Teeth continued speaking.

  “In the war of the Breath and Fell—the two old names for our races, in case you hadn’t figured it out—titles worked differently. You could still gain authority over planets, but Planetary Lords were rare. Most leaders were Planetary Tyrants—meaning they had gained authority by taking the world by force, and then imposing enough of their will on the resisting inhabitants to Descend in a special way. Planetary Tyrants have powers that we won’t have as a Planetary Lord, and they figure them out almost immediately. Unlike us, who haven’t figured out anything other than how to delegate lethal missions to a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  He looked up impatiently at our poison-eating Ideal matrix.

  “And though they were a lot more common, not just anyone could become a Planetary Tyrant,” he continued. “You still had to conquer a planet, and that meant that you had to conquer no
t just its vulnerable inhabitants, but all the other beings that are currently trying to take over that world. Only then, when you’ve caused the inhabitants to fail at finding freedom and the other monsters to fail in taking the world for themselves, do you get the massive boost in power. So you have to be pretty competent and powerful in the first place, and then you get a big boost of power, and a special skill you didn’t have before.”

  “What kind of skill?” I asked, still not impressed yet.

  Maybe it was sheer arrogance, but I suspected that it was much, much harder to save a world’s people from multiple disasters than to bend them and any assholes near them to my will via brute force.

  “It can be any kind of skill,” Teeth grumbled, “literally any kind. But it’s usually tied to something they took from the world itself. So, probably those sand powers we saw him use.”

  “Alright,” I said, nodding to myself. “So what about his other title, the Steel-Armor-Tin-Condom one.”

  “That’s the one I’ve being thinking about,” Teeth said, as we both looked up to see the Keeper queen’s vestige catch a large cloud of mist, before pulling it back into the Blood orb. Further out, I could see that my vital sea was finally making it clear that it was going to overwhelm the poison attacking it. The shifting chimera had shrunk drastically, and was now surrounded on all sides by the vast pool of vitality, though it desperately continued to bleed black poison into my life pool. But it was clearly dissolving at a much, much faster rate than my own vitality was.

  “You know,” I mused, “it kind of sucks that Anahita did this to us.”

  “Meh,” my dragon counterpart shrugged. “From what I can tell, she intentionally made it painless for us, and Breena’s carefully monitoring us. I think they’ve just got us lying on the bed nearby.”

  “Really?” I asked, “because I could have sworn that I was sitting on a swing set in the middle of a—nevermind. We were talking about that guy’s metal-armor title.”

  “Right. That. Here was the thing about the last war.” The dragon man blew a long breath out of his nostrils. “As you’ve already noticed, Expanse-wide Wars tend to leave their mark. They leave changes the same way Trials and Tumults do, both the good and the bad. But unlike a Challenge, a war can be revived, as long as there are enough parties with either enough hate or enough conflicting goals.

  That's how the second Stellar War began, I think. At some point in time, Earthborn were given projected bodies to fight an opposing force. I'm not sure which opposing force, because I wasn't there either, but it was probably a rift in the Stellar Council. Anyway, since some of the opposing force involved other Earthborn, and the two had begun killing each other again with the same established sides, the Expanse recognized that the war had reached its second chapter, even though only a few planets are involved this time—so far, anyway."

  Teeth blew out another breath.

  "But that's not what I'm wanting to talk about right now. The dragons and fiends, or those beings belonging to the races of the Breath and the Fell, had our own massive war, one back when the Stellar Council was either just beginning or not even around. And in that war, another form of titles was given."

  "Still following so far," I said with a nod. "And I'm guessing these titles are different than my ranks as High Captain or whatever."

  "Yeah," Teeth agreed. "That's a rank-based title, one that the Stellar Council organized and that the Expanse recognized. But we dragons didn't do the same. Our mindsets are usually different. Usually, we don't form armies. We are armies, each unto ourselves. Even if we're originally something like a human by birth, instead of something like a drake or other dragonkin. Our mindsets change to make better use of the massive amount of individual power we wield. Sure, there are some exceptions—hell, we're an exception, given our other nature as an Earthborn, and a Challenger, and Planetary Lord, and guy with a multi-bodied girlfriend who is finally almost ready to move things forward, praise whoever reigns in whatever heaven there is-but we didn't see any point in having privates, corporals, sergeants, master sergeants, chief master sergeants, second lieutenants, and all those other ranks. You were either strong enough to exert your influence and be recognized, or you weren't. So our titles worked differently."

  "You're taking an awful long time to explain why Tin-Condom Zereh's title is so important."

  "Yeah, and that's the second time you've used my own joke," the Freaking New Guy snickered. "My point is, we dragons assigned titles to people not based on how many troops they were qualified to lead, but by any notable powers they wielded, and just how notable they were. And the more we seemed to notice, the stronger that power seemed to become."

  "Sooooo why'd you keep noticing it?" I asked. Just to be that guy for a change of pace.

  "We don't know if our noticing the title made it worse," Teeth retorted crankily. "Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe we noticed only as the powers got stronger. That actually makes more sense, when you think about it. Otherwise, we could keep all our enemies weak by just never paying any attention to them at all. But either way, we've tried to keep the respectful nicknames for our enemies to an absolute minimum. Just to be safe."

  "Fair enough," I replied, nodding. "Is that why you're distracted right now? Because you're trying to figure out whether or not to notice this guy?"

  "Yeah, exactly," Teeth mumbled, as another large batch of poison-vital guard steam drifted away from the battle and into my Blood orb. "I can't decide whether I'm making his power stronger by trying to figure it out, or making us more vulnerable by refusing to contemplate it."

  I thought it had to be the second one, because the Expanse just didn't seem like a place where willful ignorance was rewarded. After all, I had died about a hundred times all because of enemies I didn't know I had, with capabilities that had taken me completely by surprise.

  And, since they had never bothered to learn what I was capable of, I had broken free of that prison and was now paying them back in full, one liberated planet at a time.

  "Let me ask you this," I said deliberately, making sure I had Teeth's attention. "During that last war, from what you can remember of it: did the Fiends ever try to use the element of surprise?"

  "Everyone tried to use the element of surprise," my inner dragon said, blinking at me in confusion. "I mean, duh. It's surprise. Same with stealth and what not. If we couldn't just roll over an enemy, and fiends were one of the few we couldn't just roll over, you snuck up on the guy. Tried to hide your...capabilities. Oh." The red and gold dragon man looked away in embarrassment. "That kind of makes it all ridiculously obvious. I guess our side should have talked to each other more."

  I was about to ask how the hell our side had won the last war if they never bothered to talk to each other, but when I thought about it, dragons didn't seem to have a whole lot of social skills. They could fight, they could do magic, they could create, they could raise armies and kingdoms of their own.

  But they weren't about having equals.

  Their entire side in that war had probably been little more than a loose alliance of powerful figures, all of whom probably went back to leaving as many of each other alone as possible.

  Unless they were a Pendragon, I realized, unsure of where that knowledge had come from. Then they could negotiate with other members of their race. Work out some careful agreements.

  There had probably been a Pendragon in that last war, who was responsible for whatever coordination the dragon side had possessed.

  And that Avalonian king in my mind might know a thing or two about it as well.

  "Okay, here's the thing," Teeth announced, looking back up. "We're not changing our nickname for him, but Steel-Armor Zereh's title implies invulnerability."

  "Most dragons don't seem like they're stopped by something like steel," I mentioned dryly.

  "You'd be surprised," Teeth countered. "There's a reason steel is still one of the best metals used in war, even for today. And it depends on how the steel is made or a
lloyed. That 'tempered gold' we wear for our sabatons and bazubands? That's not exactly gold. It's an alloy that was also called sandsteel. And it was an effective form of armor even during the time of our war. Both fiends and dragons used it whenever they could collect enough of it. At any rate, steel is recognized as a durable metal among dragons, so if we assigned a title like 'steel armor' to a guy, it's going to mean that he was extremely hard to hurt."

  "How hard are we talking about here," I asked, before realizing I had just pulled a Breena, and winced. Teeth snickered.

  "For him to have also reached the rank of general—the Fiends actually did bother with those sort of ranks, by the way—and therefore be responsible for leading creatures against the strongest of dragons, his armor would have to have been nigh-impenetrable. Or he would have lost the title in our minds. So, we're talking about a guy who could possibly go up against anything short of a Wyrm and trade punches without getting hurt. More than that, even, since we all have magic and breath weapons and other tools. So he's going to be nigh-invulnerable in other ways, to a group of beings that could probably take on creatures like the Nuckelavee or possibly even Cavus."