An Age of Mysterious Memories

Phooph. I’m using up a lot more figurative energy now. Well, no, literal energy, just not my mana pool from Can’Z’aas, that I also call energy. I mean I’m burning more calories as I LBBTKSL down through the tunnels, with Lil glassing the hallway around us as we go. I hear the occasional hiss of pain as melting stone lands on the sore snout of Quicksand as she chases us. Good job Lil buddy.

Lil’s breath wreathing the entire corridor downwards in flames is also setting off some of the spell-sigil traps as we approach them. That’s a mixed bag of good and bad. Most of them are simple explosions. Some are less simple, and quite dangerous to intruders like us. I have to rapidly toggle into and out of my Void Dragon Honoris Causa, trying to keep pace with Lil and Teuila, so that they’re enveloped in my void for the moments they’re passing through the deadlier effects. It’s no easy feat, and I’m getting lightheaded, dizzy as I try to keep up with necessity during the chase.

There’s a lot of petrakinetic and petratransmutative magic along these halls, which makes sense for a sand dragon archmage. It just sucks for us. I’m terrified of seeing Lil or Teuila suddenly turn to stone mid-flight, crashing into the ground and shattering before I have a chance to so much as react. Drawing shuddering breaths, I try to loose them as calmly and smoothly as possible to still my rattled nerves. It’s not helping very much.

Come on, come on, how much further? Hey Reggie. What is it now? What are you going to do if Al’pa’ca is behind some super powerful, magically sealed entrance? Please tell me you’re effing joking. Well, think about it. Sand dragon archmage, deep within the belly of a place whose magical energies, and inner workings are off the charts. Shut up, please. No no, hold on a second, put some thought into it. Now!? You think about this, now!? Of all times!? Better late than never, right? Ugh, screw you, me.

They’re right though. Erm, I mean, I’m right. Could my Honoris Causa tear a hole through some seemingly impenetrable defense? Almost definitely, but, depending on how much magic is flowing in per second, it could cost me dearly, possibly more than I can afford to pay. But… Casting my senses back, Scirocco is following, a few moments behind Quicksand. Enough lag to be out of sight during a critical moment when Quicksand calls for aid. Enough time to give us a chance to finish Quicksand off if we pull out all the stops.

If we can even just convince Scirocco to open the way to Al’pa’ca, even if they intend to betray us with the idea to trap us in with Al’pa’ca, that would be enough. Hell, it would be an optimal situation. Quicksand’s corpse might even be near enough to where I make my stand, that I could siphon some of her dragonforce slowly over the battle.

Crap, either the horde is getting even larger, or it’s picking up speed. We’ve got way less of a lead than I’d hoped for, than I thought we did. We have to wrap up Quicksand quick, or there’s no way Scirocco will talk to us with a horde of thousands strong as witnesses. They definitely seem like a weaselly, survival-of-themselves type. Teuila’s sweating, and I know she hasn’t even started physically exerting herself yet. I’ve never seen her this nervous on Rayileklia. Until we started dealing with dragons, she probably felt invincible, and she seemed to be. Compared to everything else we ran into, humans, kobolds, dwarves, mite-hulk-adjacents, Teuila was— is, unstoppable.

Even once we’d joined the Onyx Dawn’s war against Terrorzin Teuila didn’t seem bothered. She never really seems scared, unless it’s about an emotional issue, but even less does she ever seem nervous. Yet at this moment in time, My-Wings, one of the most powerful people on this planet, is sweating anxiously. Her gorgeous, ruby-red, top-fade undercut, normally falling playfully to one side, is matted about her brow, bangs obscuring her vision. I’d only ever seen it like this once before. At the end of everything. When we were headed to the Temple of Time on Can’Z’aas on our last day alive. That was a mixture of extreme perspiration from exertion, and anxiety, knowing that I believed Luni hinted at something with finality.

Right now? She’s not physically exerted at all. That speaks volumes about how anxious she is. What’s going through your head right now Te? I wish I could risk taking off my circlet to find out, but I’ve already seen psychic energies in some of the traps that we’ve triggered. I can’t risk getting locked down psychically, because you and Lil would be vulnerable. Are you worried about having to rely on me? Or are you worried for me? I know you aren’t worried about the possibility of your own death. I wish I could reassure you, be there in your ocean of emotions, your mindscape, right now. It must be in so much turmoil to have your bangs and sweat stinging your eyes.

My own eyes, now stinging with sweat and tears, I’m forced to clench closed momentarily. Gulping, I try to blink away my emotions. Casting a gaze through the flames, towards Lil. He’s come so far since his spheriform stage, the day I met him in Fire Biome. A little red sphere with a tail is now one of the most powerful red dragons to ever have lived— on a planet he wasn’t even born on. Not that he was ever born at all. Ugh, I’m distracting myself. Still, with everything on the line, I need him to know. I—. My tears flow freely, unbidden, and I can’t stop them. Someone’s waving a note in front of the scrying sensors back at the security center, but I can’t read it through my tears.

This is it, my retrocognition-built map says we’ve just got one giant room before a tremendous vault door, sealed by incredible quantities of magic. If we bust in on Al’pa’ca straight away, we’ll be facing him, Quicksand, and Scirocco, and gambling we can finish three ancient dragons before the horde arrives, or even finish them at all. If we face Quicksand out here, we might at least not have to face Scirocco, depending on how their betrayal plays out.

Lil and Teuila are starting to outpace me, since they’re both generally faster in a straight line, but I’m more maneuverable, I stop them both with TK squares. Of course, this leaves me with an aching cranium, my skull pounding like renovations are going on inside, because my two SAP members easily shatter my TK squares, but the sudden telekinetic resistance ahead of them is enough to give them pause.

Just glancing into the antechamber, it's like walking into a thundercloud's heart – if that heart was made of stone and magic. The air is electric, literally. My skin tingles with the static charge, a sensation that's become all too familiar in this lightning-themed keep. The sharp tang of ozone is there, sure, but there's something else under it, something... herbal? Yeah, notes of sage and something sharper, maybe juniper? It's like walking into an apothecary during a storm.

The room is just stupidly tremendous, with far too much open space. It’s circular, and imposing, an echoing space that feels both empty, organically, spatially, yet filled, charged with danger. The walls, lined with crystalline conduits, pulse with lightning, casting eerie, flickering shadows everywhere. It's like the entire room is alive with the dragon's power, a network of electric veins feeding the heart of the fortress.

I’d half expect the fortress, or entire mountain to get up and start walking around with this much energy buzzing through it. Brr, I shudder at the thought. I convinced myself we wouldn’t be fighting moon-sized monstrosities, or mechas, back before Vorz-whosit’s Keep. Please don’t let my initial joke have been correct.

My eyes are drawn to the vault door. My senses were right about it. Enormous doesn't do it justice; it's colossal, a towering slab of what looks like reinforced obsidian, etched with runes that even from here, I can tell are no joke. I don't need my thermal senses to know there's serious power in, around, and behind that door. Fricklefrack. Yeah, yeah we were right. I cannot afford to spend the amount of runes it’d take to dispel, or unlace even half of the magical wa—. Wards. Hmf, well, whaddaya know? Still, if we can get away without using a limited resource before the big fight even starts, that’d be better. Scirocco might be willing to open the way for us, in order to give us a chance at Al’pa’ca, hoping we finish each other off, intending to take out whoever’s standing in the aftermath.

Yeah, that’s almost absolutely how it’s going to go down. We’ve got to watch out for Scirocco, but we can use every advantage we can get towards building our best staging-grounds. This room would be awful on the merits of just the far-too-open space alone, having to fight completely surrounded by foes. But it's the traps that really catch my attention. Spells woven so intricately they're almost beautiful – if you ignore their deadly purpose. I can see the telltale shimmer of magical wards, glyphs that probably explode if you so much as breathe on them wrong. It's a lethal tapestry, each thread a promise of pain or worse.

The room ahead is lined with so much magic, and so many spells, I can’t make heads or tails of it. I don’t want to give Quicksand the space to move around in, where she’ll have the home-court advantage, and an untold amount of magical backup at her disposal. Nor the horde, when they catch up to us. Plus, despite two of us being nearly immune to lightning, we’re not immune, and if those conduits channeling lightning throughout the mountain were to break, unleashing everything? I’m not sure even I’d survive long. I can hear the overpowering hum of the lightning in the conduits, a constant, thrumming that resonates in my chest, or perhaps in my spiritswarm. It's unsettling, like the keep is talking to us, to me, warning me. And that scent, the blend of magic and nature, it's getting stronger, mingling with the metallic taste the air always has around so much electricity.

I glance back at Teuila and Lil, my eyes saying what we all know: this is it, the final stretch. We're standing on the edge of a knife, in the eye of the storm. We've faced a lot, but this? This is something else. I can feel the weight of the moment settling on us, heavy as the mountain above our heads.

We face her, Quicksand, here, in the tunnel, as she’s bearing down on us, not the room ahead. It takes only a glance, Teuila and Lil both nod, knowing what my signal meant. It’s time. From here on out, we’re fighting. No more running, no more sneaking and hiding. Everything that comes to call, we kill or be killed by. Everything is on the line.

The Valkyrie, My-Wings, Teuila, a pure and powerful battle-maiden whose strength rivals dragons and demigods, dances the motions of a kata to end in her battle-stance. There she stands, poised for combat, with Mirage-Flash prepared as she wields Mjolnir. Lil melts a section of the tunnel around us to buy himself time to take a deep breath, his enormous chest heaving from exertion at having been flaming and flying down this long tunnel. His flames were powerful enough near the end there that even I was roasting, starting to char and sizzle.

I know Lil can get hotter though, more deadly, more powerful. He was holding back, for our sakes. Shaking my head softly towards him, I wear a grim, sad frown, and he blinks in surprise, understanding completely. I nod, and though his lower lip quivers, he nods resolutely in response.

There’s no holding back this time. The odds are stacked against us by the thousandfold, several-thousandfold. If ever there were a time for us to push ourselves to our limits, and go, what was it Teuila called it so long ago now? A hundred plus a hundred, plus a hundred, plus she doesn’t know, ultra percent? Yeah, if ever there was a time to go plus ultra percent, this is it. It’s like she can hear me thinking about her, despite my psychic-blocking aegis being in place, as I see her flash me half of a wry smirk. When I catch the glint of a tear in her eye, she averts her gaze quickly, ready to meet Quicksand head on as the dragon finally reaches us.

If ever there was a time for us to tap deep, deep into the reservoirs of our Latents, those basically superpowered abilities we have – what's the word I'm looking for – our own personal quirks? Yeah, now's that time. It feels like those times of intense training, pushing past limits. Sort of like when I went overboard with infinite mana on Lord Deckard Agni’s back, or Teuila faced off against cragbeasts to find us a suitable staging ground, or when I had to face them alone, for days on end, my mind half-shut-off. In a story, it’d be where the underdogs somehow find a way to overcome the insurmountable. Time for us to have that moment. I hope.

Of course, then again, this isn’t some training montage, this isn’t us facing things that we outclass, that just outnumber us, this is us fighting the most elite, most powerful creatures on this planet, in numbers that are beyond insane. Rather than hoping to decimate our way through them like some spectacle-fighter action RPG, I—. It’d be like, if I had much more powerful versions of those weird little powercells, and I supercharged to overload them in a devastating nuclear sized blast after luring the horde away from innocents and allies, there's that moment of sacrifice, where heroes give their all for something bigger than themselves. Looks like that’s the moment we’re in now, rather than the hopeful one.

"Alright, guys," my voice uneasy, my conflicted shambles of sanity barely holding together, "Let's dance with dragons."

I don’t expect it when Lil, Teuila, and Quicksand all break into laughter. That’s for sure. Quicksand’s still aiming for us, with deadly intent, yet her laughter is full of mirth, not malice. It wasn’t *that* funny, was it? Sighing, I shake my head, but the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Magic. A lot of it. Being set off from a distance. F^&*!