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Chapter 14 Face the Facts
🕑 Added 2024-06-15 08:05:44 +0000 UTCKhall panicked as the birds began to pick her up once again. No! She wouldn’t let them kill her! In her terror, she opened her mouth wide and sprayed out a jet of flames that immediately seared the bird. It tumbled to the ground, and she fled as the creature began to rise up, to chase her! As she began to run, to protect herself, a bunch of familiar words appeared in her mind.
[Lesser Crow, 3 slain. You have gained experience. Current Racial Designation: Juvenile Moltenscaled Drake. Current Occupation: Fell Miner. Total level: 8.]
Ha! Of course she was stronger than that worthless bird! A mere lesser crow thought that it could defeat her? She didn’t even need to try to fight it to kill it, it was so weak! She trotted back to the body, where the feathers continued smoldering. Khall was convinced she could hear laughter from somewhere above her, and looked. Initially, she saw nothing, but then there was a brief break in the swirling smoke, just barely enough for her to see a couple other crows circling around in the air. Their caws must have sounded like laughter, she supposed.
Even if they wanted to laugh at her, though, she had killed one of their fellow crows! Loser birds! Drakes were better than birds, and they couldn’t do anything to her. She turned around and shook her tail at the feathered abominations in the air. Just because they were a little higher, they thought they could look down on her? See what had happened to the other one! Khall continued mocking the birds however she thought possible as she stood over the body of the crow she’d slain. Eventually, though, she got bored of mocking the birds and instead bent down to begin devouring the carcass.
The crow, when cooked, was somewhat tasty, actually. Where she had spat out the original flames had burned the feathers to the flesh, and that was disgusting, but the rest of the body had been smoked in the flames of the worthless feathers. Why a creature would have feathers instead of scales was completely beyond Khall, but she supposed there needed to be imperfect things so that true majesty could be appreciated.
As her jaws crunched through bone and flesh alike, Khall was struck by how easily she had killed this crow. Though she postured and pretended, the other birds had terrified her, and she’d worried about ever returning to the Second Step. Things like the faster fish and the bigger birds were something she simply wasn’t equipped to face, at least not yet. She needed to get stronger, or something. With how easily she had killed this crow, she wondered if it wasn’t a problem of her strength but instead something else. Was it… her bravery? No, she would have died if she’d stupidly tried to keep fighting the two birds after she was so severely wounded. Could it be her occupation? She didn’t think so, since that helped her when she fought in her tunnels and burrows but wouldn’t help her much outside of them.
She was thinking these things as she ate, and Khall forced herself to admit it. She might, and this was just a maybe, because she could be wrong sometimes, but it might just be that she was, after all… a bit stupid. The thought was stupid, of course. She wasn’t dumb, she was so smart! So smart… that after being ambushed from above multiple times she didn’t keep an eye out for birds in the tree. So smart that after she was nearly killed by birds, she was blindsided by one again the moment she was healthy enough to walk. So smart that she was nearly killed in the magma river by one or two fish, fish that, if she was honest with herself, were probably very weak. So smart that she nearly died to a lavaline that evolved using her own arcanite.
There was no debating it. Khall… was very dumb. She’d been blessed with beauty and courage and power, but at last she was smart enough to realize how weak her thought process had always been. But, now that she realized it, she could get better! She realized there was no reason to be so down on herself, since all that she needed to do was just keep getting better, to keep learning! After all, she’d taught herself how to blow a little fire, and how to hunt an antlion, hadn’t she? And she had been smart enough to trap a lavaline in her burrow back before she’d evolved, and she’d been truly stupid back then.
Yeah, she wasn’t dumb, everything else was just too clever. But that meant that she was stupid in comparison, so she needed to learn. Dammit! The Void just kept circling back on her, and telling her that she was dumb! But now that she knew it, she would keep an eye out on birds, and never trust a lavaline, and kill all fish, and then she would get smarter!
The first step, she decided, was to find more things to hunt, more things that would make her work hard and think and plan in order to be successful. And, weak and ugly they may be, but lavalines would provide a perfect test subject. After all, because of their weakness, they were forced to be clever. That was how they’d stolen her meal on the very first day of her hatching. She still remembered the pain of the cut on her back and the ache of her empty stomach as she’d tried to sleep afterwards. The lavalines, scaleless, furry Voidspawn they may be, but they were too clever for their own good, and Khall would learn from them!
With that, though, came the question: where were all the lavalines? Though she’d fought with and hunted them a couple of times, she’d never really found where they came from, and where they stayed. They just… turned up sometimes. There had been one in the bush she’d found the arcanite in, but there hadn’t been any in the couple of other bushes she’d found, the smoldering heap in front of her a testament to that. So, Khall decided to put what little thought she could into finding the lavalines.
They were fast, so they could move farther than other creatures could. Their paws were built for climbing, different from her own that were obviously made for the superior calling of digging. Their fur was flammable, so they wouldn’t be in or too close to the magma rivers. They.. were cowards. There wasn’t anything else Khall could think of, but she figured she could look for something far from the magma that required climbing. And so, off she strode, her confidence never flagging. After all, even if she didn’t find any lavalines, she was sure to find something.
As she made a concerted effort to not simply lose herself in her stupid thoughts, Khall realized she could see and notice much more than she’d thought before. Though the smoke continuously swirled around her and limited visibility, it didn’t keep her from seeing anything. When she paid attention, bushes, hills, and even other creatures were obvious through the ebb and flow of the surrounding smog. Whenever she approached them, though, they could see or hear her coming, and fled before she could lay an eye on them. For the first time, Khall regretted her beautiful, glowing scales along her sides and down her tail. Though she enjoyed how eye-catching and luminescent they were, she now realized how they made her a glistening target for anything with eyes. She was a glowing beacon in the darkness, and anything that was looking would easily find her.
There was nothing she could do about it, though. After all, that was just a part of her body, and… maybe she could do something about it? She’d never tried it, but Khall could feel her core essence responding to her thoughts, so why couldn’t she make her skin not glow quite so much?
Having made her decision, Khall quickly dug out a small burrow, just deep, long, and wide enough for her to fit inside of it. There, she thought of her core essence and calming the molten lava that filled her, cooling it, allowing the volatility to wait. Volatility meant change, that she could change how she wanted, so if she wanted to be calm, she could. She could change from calm, to excited, to sleepy, to angry, and that was all a part of herself. A part of her volatility.
As that understanding settled into Khall’s center, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the feeling of her core essence relaxing and settling. Though she couldn’t understand why, she knew that this glimpse into what her core could be and therefore could become was important. As she opened her eyes and grinned, she saw that while the burrow was still lit by the soft glow from behind her translucent scales, the light had been reduced by a large amount, enough that she wouldn’t be eye-catching through the smoke.
While the light had dimmed, Khall also felt that she was… weaker. After making herself glow less, she wasn’t anywhere near as energetic or excited as before, though she still felt the need to find and learn from and learn about the lavalines. As such, she slowly stepped out of her little hole and continued stepping onward, though only for a short time. Then, after she thought about it for a moment, Khall drew in a faint insight from the ground.
The First Step was a place bereft of arcanite, and was a generally hateful and unwelcoming prison, but even so, it was the first Step that most took on their Divine Path to the Summit. There was a record of what passed, the influence of the Stines that had learned and grown from the beginning of their ascent to the Ninth. That record was what Khall somehow drew on, and she could feel where the lavalines hid. With a grin cracking her face, Khall trotted off, following the impression that the Step itself gave her on where to find lavalines.
It wasn’t long before craggy hills began to appear through the smoke, and Khall was sure that these hills were what made up the hiding place of all the cowardly, speedy lavalines. After all, there were innumerable locations where they could hide from their betters. As the thought crossed her mind, Khall found herself beginning to glow, and the manic energy began to return to her while the slow contemplation that had taken residence in her mind was quickly thrown out for the more practical and enjoyable work of immediate and relentless violence.
Then, before she could roar the challenge she so desperately wanted to issue to the surrounding hills, a hissing lavaline leapt from his cave higher up in one of the nearest hills. Looking at it, it was at least as large as the big, evolved one that had used her arcanite to evolve. And it was time to begin her lesson, whether or not her teacher knew his role.
