Chapter 10: DD2 Chapter 004 – Hangover

Typhoeus awoke and instinctively knew that despite the ache in his muscles, earned from sleeping sprawled out on the cold floor, he was finally home. His months of hard work were being rewarded with those few moments of bliss as he stretched himself awake on Arilla’s floorboards. He slowly pulled himself up to his feet, his mouth trailing a long line of stale spittle between his lips and the floor as [Sovereign’s Perception] unfurled around him like a blossoming flower. The sights, scents, sounds and motions of a quiet Rhelean street suddenly filled his awareness in vivid clarity as the harsh reality of his hangover firmly asserted itself. 

Swallowing his vomit, he realised then that he was about to be faced with the unpalatable consequences of his actions. He had fucked up, and like usual, he hadn’t done anything by halves as he found himself in the living room of the one person he had been too goblinshit to confront sober. He winced, first at recalling his dumb, drunken words and then because the pain throbbing behind his eyes had decided to magnify itself by at least an order of magnitude from his sudden upright motion.

“So you’re awake," Arilla said, her tone frustratingly ambiguous. He couldn’t even smell the emotions wafting off of her, not with all the old whisky enshrouding him like a cloud.

“Or something like it,” he groaned. “Do you have anything to drink?” he asked, hoping for the tried and true hair of the dog to take the edge off of his rough awakening.

“I do, but not for you. You can have some water," she said cooly, crossing the room to pour him a cup from a large jug left on her living room table which she then promptly handed to him.

“Pewter,” he said, turning the metal container over in his hands. A stylised mountain range engraved along the sides doing a good job of drawing his eye even if its resemblance to the Dragonspines was lacking. “You must be doing well for yourself.”  

“There was a lot of gold in that vault," she said curtly.

“And this is what you did with it?” he asked, gesturing to the large room and its opulent furnishings.

Arilla’s home was a respectably luxurious dwelling. Seven large, high-ceilinged rooms with enameled mouldings throughout took up the entire top floor of the apartment building that Typhoeus found himself in. The furniture was all tastefully elegant, well-made and if anything quite understated. Each piece gave off the illusion that it hadn’t cost a literal fortune, but he could tell from the mana saturating the wood and the subtle carvings decorating the larger items, that the contents of every room were probably worth a hefty price in silver if not gold. 

He already loved it. It was a fine lair fit for a dragon, or a home, if you wanted to be human about it.

“Partially, I gave most of it away," she said, her contempt of him weakening to embarrassment as she blushed slightly while he very obviously drank in the details of the room, humming all the while with approval.

“You did what?!” he said, feeling a momentary spike of outrage. His draconic instincts kicking into overdrive at the mere thought of willingly giving gold away, but from the look that then appeared on her face, he knew that he had overstepped. “Sorry,” he muttered quietly, deciding to take a sip of water as he stared deeply into the bottom of his cup.

“What are you even doing here, Typhoeus?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest as she awaited his response.

“Call me Typh, please.”

“It’s not your name.”

“I know, but I like it when you call me Typh. It reminds me of better times,” he admitted.

“Fine,” she said sternly, not even a hint of a smile on her face to show that she was glad to see him. “What are you doing here, Typh?”

“I came back to see you.”

“Well you shouldn’t have bothered. And ‘showing up’ usually involves finding me, not starting a fight and needing me to save you from the guard.”

“The guard was there?”

“They arrived after you passed out in your own vomit. And don’t thank me; I was saving their lives. If I thought for a moment that you’d react peacefully to waking up in a cell, then I would have left you to sleep off your hangover in the Traylan jail.”

“It’s a Traylan jail now? So I take it the king approved the petition then?”

“He pretty much had to after what we did. There was no way that the Merchant Council could claim to have things under control after we razed the Traylan’s keep down to the ground," she said scornfully. “How do you not know this? Have you been living under a rock all this time?”

“I’ve been travelling; I only got back into town about a week ago. I meant to come see you straight away, but one drink to steady my nerves kinda spiralled out of hand.”

“Evidently.”

“Is that it? You're not glad to see me? Not even a little bit?” he asked, hoping more than anything to keep the desperation out of his voice. The thought of seeing her again, of making amends, had kept him going when things had gotten increasingly difficult.

“I’d be more inclined to hearing you out if I didn’t just spend a purseful of drachma bribing the guard to look the other way, or paying your tab at the bar, or for the cost of a new door,” she commented. “The fact that you’re standing in my living room reeking of cheap whisky and not out in the wilds where you belong should be sign enough of how I feel about you."

“So what you’re saying is that maybe you’re a little happy to see me after all,” he grinned, unable to help himself. 

“Typh…”

“Arilla, we—”

“No. I know what you are and we are not getting back together. You’d have to be delusional to think that anything has changed between us," she said. “I’ve had time to think and while I may not be as angry or as emotional as when I found out about you, at the end of the day you’re not human, you’re a monster and I—”

As soon as the word ‘monster’ escaped her lips Typhoeus startled. The all too vivid memory of what they had both seen in the Traylan family vault and what he had then done as a direct result of that hitting him like a physical blow.

“Please don’t say that word,” he asked quickly.

“What? Mons—”

“Yes. That. Don’t say it. Please.”

Arilla gave him a long hard stare. Her hazel eyes framed by the freckles on her cheeks gave her an intense sunkissed look even at the beginning of the long winter. The intervening months had been kind to Arilla, her body finally filling out as wealth and relaxation had enabled her to almost fully recover from her years on the streets. Her increased muscle definition and shoulder length red hair combined to give her a wild ferocious look that only softened after she stopped glaring at him and let out a long tired sigh. Arilla didn’t seem to be quite so angry with him anymore which was admittedly a marked improvement, but it was still such a far cry from the looks of longing and affection that he had gotten used to so easily. 

“What’s going on Typh? I’ve been learning the sword like you told me to, but something is going on, isn’t it?”

“Are you sure about that drink?” he asked, quickly gulping down the rest of his water and grimacing as it failed to do anything whatsoever to alleviate his hangover. The potent effects of skill-produced liquor were hard to shake off even with his high vitality score.

“Typh..." she warned.

“Fine," he sighed, taking a deep breath. “It looks like it’s the end of the world.”  

She was silent at that, which was unsurprising. There were only so many different ways to react to the news that everything was ending. Denial was the most obvious and Typhoeus had wasted enough time with that. Refusing to listen when every dungeon core screamed out in terror, it had taken a near-miss with a Monster spawning for him to finally come to terms with the truth. Even then, he had still spent months travelling up and down the Dragonspines searching for—amongst other things—any Core that would give him a different answer. 

“Goblinshit," she said.

“Let me explain.”

So he did. 

As far as the eye could see there was nothing, until suddenly there was. Earth, water, air and fire swirled and morphed from one the other, seemingly without reason in an unpredictable dance of destructive change. Life was created and annihilated out of the raw mana that suffused Creation, with rainbow cracks of light birthing new creatures that lasted as long as the ground beneath their feet, which was to say, not very long.

Arilla jerked her hand away from his and the memory shattered. 

“What the fuck was that?” she asked.

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“A memory, I thought you wanted me to explain.”

“I did, I just—” she sighed. “I just wasn’t quite expecting it to be so vivid.”

“Well, you know the truth about me now, I might as well show off my party tricks. Now are you ready, or would you rather I do this the boring old-fashioned way?” he asked, extending his palm out across the table.

“Show me, just—” she said, hesitantly taking his hand.

“Yeah I know, be careful with manaburn, don’t let you seize or explode…” Typhoeus mocked, enjoying the feel of her calloused hand squeezing against his. “Don’t fight the magic and you’ll be fine …probably.” 

He slowly pushed mana through the tether that connected their classes. The link that tied them both together on such a fundamental level made his spell all the easier, so much so that with the addition of physical contact, maintaining the spell felt almost as easy as breathing. He delved deep into his inherited memories, centuries pouring past them both, and he could hear Arilla’s breath hitch and her pulse quicken as she experienced flashes of what his ancestors had once chosen to pass on down the generations.

"In the beginning when Creation was young, there was just Chaos and the System. The System was a cold thing then, all rules and order but without the ability to create anything to impose those rules and that order upon. And then there was chaos, a churning mass of mana that spat out and destroyed life with the regularity of the turning of a wheel. However long Creation existed in this state I do not know, I don't even know if time was a thing back then, but eventually, something changed," Typhoeus began, his words and his will causing his story to unfold in both of their minds.

An amorphous blob crawled out of the chaotic energies, slowly growing more defined with each lurching movement. The world around it followed suit until soon there was recognisable terrain around it, static and unchanging, the whirling mass of ever-changing mana falling into the background. 

"Accident or not, the System eventually imposed itself on the life borne out of the Chaos and so, the first Classer stepped forth onto Creation. With the rules of the System in place, this primordial species was able to grow, spreading certainty and direction with every one of its steps. As certainty spread, the laws of Creation soon followed; up and down, land and sea, alive and dead. Increasingly, things became distinct and set, unchanging no matter how much Chaos protested. Seeing its success, the System sought to replicate this process, saving new species every time they crawled out of the ever-changing energies that was Chaos.”

“Chaos would birth life and before it could destroy it, the System gave it order. Over time, Creation became increasingly populated with diverse beings that carved out a life for themselves here on Astresia and presumably on the other continents. I imagine that they warred, built and loved just as we do, but that's just a guess because of what came next.”

“You see, in all this, with every new System-bound life, the balance that existed between Chaos and the System skewed ever more slightly towards order, something made only worse by how all the different species climbed to ever higher ranks without any apparent limit. Each new level empowered them and the System as a whole with mana that was sequestered away from the cycle of Chaos. Whether Chaos had any agency in what came next, or if it was just inevitability and chance again I do not know, but the results are the same regardless.”

“The first Monsters were born.”

They tore their way into Creation much in the same way that one tried to enter reality in the vault. Spiralling cracks of rainbow light birthed creatures that looked much the same as those that surrounded them at the moment of their birth. Except where the creatures had classes, the Monsters did not. Countless times they saw Monsters step out into Creation surrounded by golden dragons high in rank and countless times they watched as the Monsters ripped the dragons apart, killing them by the score before they were stopped.

Typhoeus felt Arilla’s hand tighten around his as they watched generations worth of carnage, ancient dragons dying screaming to Monstrous creatures only minutes old.

“Most of the time they were stopped straight away before they could grow, but every once in a while one would either escape, or kill all of those that surrounded them at their birth,” Typhoeus continued, feeling nauseous from all the killing as he dredged up the memories he would rather pretend didn’t exist. “When that happened ...things quickly escalated.”

As far as the eye could see, an endless horde of horrors tore into an equally large horde of highly regimented classers composed of more different species than either of them could count. Weapons of steel, alchemy and magic wielded by hands foreign and familiar used them with brutal efficacy in a battle the size of which defied comprehension. He could feel the fear of his distant ancestor, the wind beneath his wings, the blood in the air, the mana that was so much richer then, than it was now.

The fighting was as horrific as it was endless, and Typhoeus had so many memories of the conflict to draw upon, so for both of their sakes he decided to keep it brief. Images of dragons tearing into flesh, practically drowning in black ichor as they fought and killed, each one of them so very desperate to live. The intensity of the emotions intertwined with the memories were the worst part of it by far. Ever since he had taken a human form, Typhoeus had been conspicuously aware of how cold he felt in the body of a dragon, but in his memories of the Everwar his ancestors’ minds varied starkly from being either completely numb to the constant violence or so lost in their terror and rage that they didn’t even feel like dragons anymore.

“The Everwar was eternal and terrible, scouring countless species from Creation in the opening centuries alone. The war ensured that only the most combative and adaptable of us survived. Even with every species and civilisation united against the Monster threat after thousands of years of conflict, we were still losing, and so in our desperation we tried something new.”

“We listened to you,” he said, staring intently at Arilla.

“Humans, who lacked the claws, scales or any other kind of natural advantage, had been crying  out for aeons that they had an alternative to the endless losing battle. And lacking any other options bar extinction, we listened. Everyone knew that Humanity’s true talents had always been in their creative uses of spellcraft and the runic script, but it wasn’t until we poured all our efforts into fulfilling their twisted visions, that we finally understood how deep that talent ran.” 

“Horrible sacrifices were made, but they were worth it,” he explained. Flashes of creatures offering up their flesh to human mages and alchemists appeared before their eyes in one moment and then similar creatures bearing weapons powered by bone, sinew and blood in the next, each one devastating in their power.

“With them, your ancestors were able to make runic weapons and artefacts that killed more Monsters than the best classers could ever dream of, and to keep them out, to stop them from simply spawning anew from the abundant mana in the air, the humans carved the wards.” 

“The first wards were temporary things that did much of what a dungeon does. They stabilized the chaotic mana in the air and dispersed it safely without allowing it to gather in any one place, which would allow for a Monster to spawn. But over time, building on their inherited memories, the humans were able to improve the design, eventually creating what we call the Great Wards. A set of runic enchantments that still span the entire continent and prevent Monsters from spawning anywhere on the surface. The Great Wards have lasted for countless ages, and while humanity may have forgotten about them after the Sundering, when they stripped away the human class and lost their inherited memories, the species that survived the age caps imposed on them by that folly did not.”

“Every few thousand years or so, the Elder Council gathers and the most powerful amongst them refresh the mana that powers those wards and so ensures that the frontlines of the Everwar stay far below the surface, at the very deepest depths of Creation.” 

“Why the wards have been allowed to come so close to failure, I do not know. To my knowledge they have never once failed since their inception, and what we saw in the Traylan vault should never have happened. Which is why I have to leave again. I need to find out why the Great  Wards are being allowed to fail. As an adult of a council species, I have a right to know what is going on, but as an exile I cannot just return to the Dragonspines without being killed. So I need to ask someone who may be more inclined to help me, but it will still be extremely dangerous and there is a fair chance that I won't come back.”

Typhoeus paused, having said his piece as he watched Arilla carefully. While the spell had been easy to cast and maintain, drawing on such deep and unpleasant memories was more than a little draining, and, while unlikely, it was always possible that her human mind might react poorly to having the perspectives of so many dragons shoved into her skull.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Arilla said, before she hurried out of the room and very noisily was. 

When she returned a few minutes later, a little paler but otherwise unharmed, she rinsed her mouth out with water before sitting down again. 

“There's a bath you can use in the other room. It isn’t quite as fancy as the one in The Huntsmans Rest, but you are certainly capable of condensing your own water. Once you don’t stink like a brewery we can talk some more over breakfast. I have a few important errands to run today, but we can leave Rhelea tomorrow.”

“What do you mean, we? You can’t come with me, it's too dangerous.”

“Typh, you just painted a pretty compelling picture to me that the world is ending. I’m not going to sit on my hands waiting for you to come back or not with news. I’m going to help.”

“You really don’t have to.”

“Don’t read into this, Typh, this is not us getting back together. This is me wanting to do my part to ensure that those memories of yours stay just as that. Memories of the past,” she said firmly. Although from the look on her face he could have sworn that she wanted to say something else.

“What?” he asked, taking the risk as he tried to be proactive with her feelings for the first time in his life.

“…That was really vivid, far more so than I thought it would be. You once told me that there were human cities that made Rhelea look like a pigsty. Do you have memories of that, or is your head just full of traumatic visions of war?”

Typhoeus smiled; he’d missed how blunt she could be when she wanted to.

“I can’t imagine that I’d be particularly sane if I didn’t have a healthy amount of the good to balance out all the bad. Collectively, my ancestors have seen a lot of beauty that they decided to pass on to me, which I am eternally grateful for. Thanks to them I’ve seen the greatest metropolises ever built by mortal hands; I’ve felt the Fire Sands of Elysium between my toes, walked across the Empire of Man at its zenith, danced beneath the Crystal Waterfalls of Babilla. I remember when the moon was silver and the oceans were safe to travel on in great ships made of spun glass. I remember it all and I can show you if you’d like.”

Arilla looked hesitant if more than a little eager, as if she desperately wanted to say yes but was afraid of something. Was it disappointment? Did she not trust him?

“Please,” she asked, sounding almost shy.

“Okay then,” he said, smiling as he extended his arm. “Hold tight, it’s a bit of a rush, and remember, don’t fight the magic.”

She slowly took his hand in hers, and as he delved deep into his inherited memories for the second time that day he couldn’t help but delight in the feel of her rough skin on his soft palms.

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