15-38. A Question of Scale

After their shared experience at the hatchery, Elijah and Mano went their separate ways. To some degree, Elijah still needed to worry about assassination, but Mano seemed to believe that enough time had passed for it not to make much political sense. Instead, if someone wished revenge upon him, they would likely use other means.

In the grand scheme of things, a mere demigod – even one as accomplished as Elijah – just wasn’t worth the time or effort. Especially considering that if they failed in their initial attack, Elijah was very capable of escape. And Mano’s presence remained a deterrent, largely because he would rain death upon anyone who tried to kill his brother. Things would be worse for them if they succeeded.

So, Elijah was mostly safe, even outside the city, where the Scales of Peace held no sway. Which was why he felt okay to explore She’evoth on his own. However, he had no real interest in that. For all that the city was impressive, it was still an unfamiliar place with alien customs. By comparison, he was far more comfortable in Ashakar.

That was probably the point.

For naturally born dragons, such scale was all they knew, but for someone like Elijah, who was accustomed to much more compact spaces, it was intimidating in a way that only massive size could be. After all, he’d never felt smaller than when he stood in a doorway made to fit a full-grown dragon. It was like he’d been shrunken down to a tenth of his normal stature.

In any case, he was eager to leave the city behind – which he couldn’t, for now. Not until he acquired his treasure in a couple of days and journeyed to the First Fang. Thankfully, She’evoth wasn’t all there was to the dragon capital, and Elijah wanted to finally visit some of the planet’s other locales.

With that in mind, he left Mano at the embassy, where the big dragon would spend some time with his wife. Illska was a big, strong Warrior. Powerful in her own right, and more than capable of holding her own. And yet, she was still a mother, and the beginning of the Culling was a difficult time for any parent. No doubt, her maternal instincts screamed at her to protect her children. It was only through a massive feat of self-discipline that she forced herself to let nature take its course.

The alternative was temporarily appealing. Saving and nurturing one’s children was a short-term answer to the problem at hand. Yet, that would give birth to no new dragons. The struggle was how they developed their cores. Without it, they would all become drakes. And slowly, the draconic race would go extinct, just like so many other races had over the life of the multiverse.

Was it worth it?

Elijah wasn’t sure. His every instinct told him that it was too harsh to allow. But who was he to tell such an ancient race that they were wrong? Especially when they knew the alternative.

No. It was alien. It was cruel. But if they thought it was necessary, then they were likely correct in that assertion. As difficult as that was to accept, Elijah recognized that it wasn’t his place to tell the dragons how to raise their young.

So it was that he found himself heading to one of the city’s teleporters. When he reached the apparatus, he beheld it with no small degree of awe. Like everything else in She’evoth, it was enormous. Gone were the elegant silver rings used in Ashakar, replaced by a big, bulky thing of scalestone.

At first, Elijah thought it was a building. It certainly had the square-ish structure, with straight lines, harsh angles, and enough scalestone to build a skyscraper. Like a rectangular tower reaching for the sky, though a hollow one.

Inside was a stepped platform guarded by two actual dragons. Both sported blue scales and wore elaborate silver headdresses featuring trails of white ribbons that framed their faces. As Elijah drew closer, he could feel the power of the headgear thrumming even more potently than the dragons themselves.

Of course, the steps were sized for dragons, and ones bigger than him. Even in the appropriate form, he was a bit of a runt – a difficult thing to recognize when he was a couple hundred feet long. The scale of dragons was truly intimidating, especially when he considered people like Mano or the Rijh es Gialle. The latter was the size of a literal mountain, while the former could give Luna a run for its money.

Most of the dragons in She’evoth failed to meet that standard, but it wasn’t uncommon to see them stretch to lengths of more than two-hundred yards. One would expect that, with enough familiarity, that Elijah might’ve gotten used to it. But there was no way to grow accustomed to walking a city full of reptiles larger than any animal from Earth’s history.

As intimidating as the experience was, Elijah could still look at it with appropriate awe. After all, most people never got to see such things, and he was determined to appreciate the good fortune that had seen his path lead to the Empire of Scale.

It was with that in mind that he climbed the steps, each one dozens of feet tall, toward the mountainous platform upon which the teleportation apparatus stood. Along the way, a few other dragons stared at him, likely because his emerald scales marked his strong nature attunement. A rarity in the empire, largely because dragons who grew so close to nature tended to step over the line into wyrmhood.

Elijah also secretly believed that their philosophy of control tended to keep them from fully embracing the wilderness and developing a strong nature attunement. True nature simply could not be controlled. Guided, perhaps, but never constrained. If it was, it ceased to be nature.

Like those curated parks Elijah kept seeing in Ashakar. Or the tall mushrooms the Gardeners of She’evoth used to line the streets of the capital. Or a handful of other aspects of draconic culture scattered throughout both worlds he’d visited. Even the surface of Esik bore a guiding hand that made it seem less like true nature and more like a preserve, of sorts. Better, but still not the real thing.

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That tendency constrained the draconic embrace of nature attunements, such that they rarely developed one of any strength. By contrast, Elijah had seen ruby scales. Sapphire. Diamond. And a host of other gem-like consistencies that suggested powerful attunements to various other aspects of the ethereal spectrum.

The dragons didn’t lack power. They were just culturally inappropriate to cultivate true nature attunements.

Still, for all of that, dragons were very good at creating awe, and Elijah was more than happy to lose himself in it. That feeling accompanied him up the steps and to the platform, where he saw the actual teleportation apparatus. It was a diamond disc, etched with gold and ruby, perhaps a thousand feet wide. Large enough to accommodate all the but the most massive of dragons, and floating about ten feet off the ground.

For once, the residents of She’evoth ceded their pride to practicality, approaching the disc in their humanoid forms. The steps leading up to the teleportation circle floated as well, free-standing and supported by nothing but ethera. Each one shimmered with potent air ethera, like they’d been crystallized from that attuned energy.

A handful of dragons dotted the platform, as much guards as guides. They directed the flow of traffic, accepting the nominal fee required to access their teleportation network. Using his folio, Elijah transferred the appropriate funds and joined the queue to wait his turn.

As it turned out, draconic teleportation systems were far more efficient than Earth’s. Elijah couldn’t contain a smirk as he imagined Hu Shui’s expression if he was ever allowed to visit She’evoth. For all that the Space Mage had annoyed Elijah during their last meeting, Hu Shui was still a battle companion. They’d spent quite a long time together in the Labyrinth of Dead Gods, and the kind of bond that fostered wasn’t one easily forgotten.

He knew Hu Shui as well as he knew most other people on Earth, and as a result of that familiarity, he could easily predict the Space Mage’s manic reaction to finding such an advanced piece of technology.

Sighing, he shifted forward.

None of the other dragons paid him any mind, especially now that he’d abandoned his emerald-scaled dragon form. If someone looked closely, they could see evidence of his attunement, but nobody bothered. Like most people, they were too focused on their own lives to care much about some random traveler.

But Elijah noticed them.

Long years living on the edge between life and death had instilled certain instincts. Those told him that no less than three people had been following him through the city. One stood only a few spaces behind him in the queue, though the others showed a bit more restraint.

It was not a new development. Rare was Elijah’s opportunity to travel completely unnoticed. Were they enemies? Or guards? It was difficult to tell, and the only way to lose them was to flee into the wilderness where they could not follow.

New or not, Elijah still kept an eye on them via a combination of Soul of the Wild and his more normal senses.

Slowly, he continued forward until, at last, it was his turn.

“Destination?” asked the bored-looking dragon-in-humanoid-form at the top of the stairs.

“Kytan.”

A small surge of ethera flowed from the dragon and into the disc. The etched runes lit up. Gold shone yellow, while ruby blazed with fiery light.

“Follow the lights.”

Elijah did just that, stepping onto the platform. Claws of ethera dug into him, powerful enough that if he’d encountered such a thing before his acclimation period on Esik, he’d have fallen ill. Now, he just shrugged it off. The runes led him a dozen feet onto the platform, where they ended in a ritual circle.

“Do not stray,” came the voice from behind.

Elijah had no intention of doing so. The familiar flavor of space-attuned ethera swirled around him. And then, in a blink, he was somewhere else.

He looked around in awe.

The platform was very different from the one he’d just left behind, largely because it was much, much smaller. Maybe a hundred feet across, though its general shape remained consistent with Elijah’s point of origin. It wasn’t made of diamond, though. Instead, it was a more mundane marble. Still impressive by just about anyone’s standards, but no comparison to the material used in She’evoth’s teleporter.

“Please step away from the rune,” another voice reached Elijah’s ears. He glanced in that direction, seeing a drake.

He followed the instructions, passing another queue as he made for the exit. The building was much less intimidating than the one in She’evoth, which followed Elijah’s expectations well enough. Soon, he found his way outside, revealing a sight that was somewhat difficult to believe.

Stretched out as far as Elijah could see was a city. There were no draconic spires. No floating structures. No scalestone or diamond. Just what appeared to be a normal city made for normal-sized people.

It was a reminder that She’evoth did not exist in a vacuum. Dragons were the aristocrats of the Empire of Scale, and they were far outnumbered by drakes and serpentors. Elijah had seen few non-dragons in the capital, usually as servants, guards, or other mundane workers.

Because they all lived and worked on She’evoth’s moons. Kytan was just one of a half dozen such satellites revolving around the large dragon planet, and it hosted billions of people who lived and died without ever leaving the massive city. The other moons were less populated, but the total number of drakes and serpentors they hosted was in the tens of billions.

After all, the empire needed its support personnel, even if the dragons of the capital were unwilling to live side-by-side with them. The stratification between the three castes was even more pronounced in the capital than it was in Ashakar – a fact that left Elijah wearing a cloak of annoyance as he stepped out into the city proper.

That soon disappeared.

For all that they were segregated from the dragons, the people of Kytan had built something far more comfortable than She’evoth could ever become. Elijah hesitated to call a city of billions cozy, but that was the feeling he got when he walked away from the teleportation apparatus.

Familiar sights greeted his eyes. People walking here and there in crowds of individuals, each one on their own business but still willing to offer a stranger a smile or a nod. Comforting smells of street food, restaurants, and even body odor drifted into his nose, reminding him of a dozen other cities he’d visited.

Elijah had never felt quite at home in She’evoth. It wasn’t uncomfortable – not precisely – but it wasn’t the opposite, either. But Kytan? He liked Kytan.

With an inadvertent smile spreading across his face, Elijah headed out through the city, following the directions he’d been given until he finally reached his destination. An inn named the Randy Gortan. Why anyone would name an inn after a native, goat-like creature’s amorous tendencies was a mystery to Elijah, but his curiosity faded the second he stepped inside.

He’d been inside a lot of common rooms, and they all followed a similar pattern. The décor might change. The luxury varied. But the general layout was always the same. Tables. A bar. Drinking and commiserating patrons. Some gambling. It felt familiar despite the fact that none of the customers or staff were human.

Except for one.

Imal sat with Okar and Alrhok at a table in the back, and to Elijah’s immense relief, she smiled when she saw him approach. He couldn’t help but smile back.