Path of Dragons 4 - Chapter 80 - The Path Less Traveled (Patreon)

Elijah couldn’t speak.

Instead, his breath caught in his chest as he stared at the woman in front of him.  She was gorgeous, though that was the least impactful characteristic on display.  Power, closely controlled, swirled around her, nearly overwhelming Elijah, body, mind, and soul.  Even his core went quiet, almost as if it sensed a much greater power and was trying to make itself smaller so it could avoid notice. 

Golden hair – and he was close enough to recognize that it was actual gold, and not just gold-colored hair – fell upon her slim shoulders.  Tiny, gold, and glittering scales surrounded her eyes like makeup, and slightly larger scales patterned her neck, disappearing beneath the white, toga-like garment she wore. 

Finally, Elijah regained his voice and asked, “Who are you?”

She smiled slightly.  “Your patron,” she answered, reaching down to stroke his cheek.  “You have done well since being granted the dragon core, but it is time for you to take your first step on the path.  Until now, you have been aimless.  A hatchling without purpose living a life without meaning.  That must change, and the first step is one every dragon must take.  You will live the tale of the first dragon.  If you survive, your core will evolve to the next stage.”

“If I survive?” he asked.  Until that moment, he’d expected the evolution of his core to work similarly to the other aspects of his cultivation.  Indeed, everything he’d read suggested as much.  Clearly, the reality of his situation was quite different, though.  Was it because he had the core of an elder race?

“A small detail,” she said.  “We do not have much time.  Remember, the dragon endures.”

“I don’t under-”

Before Elijah could get the rest of his sentence out, his mind once again went black.  This time, it lasted much longer than an instant, but he had difficulty marking time.  It might’ve been a minute, but it could have been hours.  Regardless, he eventually became aware of his changed surroundings.

And his changed body.

At first, he thought he’d had one of his forms forced upon him, but it only took a few moments to recognize that he was in a completely different body.  He lacked the strength of his guardian form, and he certainly didn’t feel the unmatched coordination of his draconid shape. 

Then, there was the size to consider.

Looking around at his surroundings, Elijah couldn’t avoid the notion that either he was inside a cavern whose size dwarfed any other he’d ever experienced or heard about – not impossible, but unlikely – or he was much smaller than he’d been before.  In addition, his mind felt strangely limited, and it only took him a few more seconds to recognize that he lacked cultivation.  He only had one strain of thought instead of nine distinct facets. 

Casting his perception inward, he was distraught to find that his ethereal channels were much thinner and far less extensive than they had been before.  And finally, his core was tiny.  It was little more than a spark of ethera, barely even noticeable within his torso. 

A nearby sound jerked his attention to his left, and he saw a skittering bug.  Before he could even process what was happening, he pounced, snapping his jaws around the insect and swallowing it whole. 

In his shock, Elijah took a moment to truly take stock of his changed form.  He was small.  Very, very small.  Maybe a foot long at most, and that was including his tail.  Looking down at his forelegs, he saw pebbled red scales and a set of wicked claws.  So, at least he wasn’t completely defenseless, though he knew that if he was forced to fight anything truly strong, he’d be better off fleeing than engaging. 

More, a sense of being exposed gripped his mind, and he followed his instincts that pushed him to find shelter.  When he slipped into a crack between a pair of black rocks, the panic in his mind subsided – only a little, but enough to give him leave to investigate his surroundings. 

The cave was enormous, and his small size made it seem like a world unto itself.  Moreover, it wasn’t unpopulated.  As Elijah stuck his serpentine head out of the crevice, he saw dozens of other beasts.  Some were large – like the turtle-like creature sitting next to a lava flow – while others were even smaller than him.  Trees unlike anything he’d ever seen sprouted here and there, alien in their form as well as their coloring.  Distressingly, Elijah also lacked One with Nature, and judging by the fact that he felt no connection to the wildlife, his attunement had disappeared as well, replaced by animalistic instinct. 

Panic once again suffused Elijah’s being until he forced himself to remember his patron’s description, that he would live the tale of the first dragon.  Was that what had happened?  Was that whose body he inhabited?  It wasn’t what he might have expected from his impression of dragons.  Every story he’d ever heard – both before and after the World Tree had touched Earth – painted dragons as immensely powerful entities. 

Clearly, that wasn’t always the case. 

Humble origins aside, he couldn’t just hide between rocks.  His patron – who was obviously a dragon, though in a humanoid form – had said that he needed to live the life of the first dragon.  So, he suspected that he would fail this…test if he didn’t do something. 

With that in mind, he crouched low to the ground, then slithered out of the crevice.  Almost immediately, a sense of alarm suffused his mind, and he dashed to the side.  Something crashed into the rocky ground beside him, and following instincts whose origin he didn’t question, Elijah pounced on his would-be attacker, using his wickedly sharp claws and teeth to rip it to shreds like he was the reptilian equivalent of a honey badger. 

As it turned out, the beast that had attacked him was some sort of odd bird, though not of a sort that Elijah had ever seen.  Its wings were too large, its body too sleek.  And its beak was far too sharp.

Sensing that it wouldn’t be smart to stick around the kill site, Elijah took a few bites of the beast’s flesh, then raced away.  Dodging from one rock to the next, he blended into the landscape, while behind him, more beasts descended upon the slain bird.  A fight broke out between two heavily armored creatures, but by that point, Elijah was already gone.  Still, the sound of their clash – which was characterized by smashing bodies and deafening growls – followed him as he skated along. 

As he did, he examined the feelings in his body.  He didn’t have spells.  Nor did he have skills.  There was no spellbook, and he didn’t have a status.  However, he had enough experience with using ethera that he could recognize the framework of a skill within him.  It was unlike anything he’d ever used, though, so he had no idea how it worked. 

There was something else inside of him, too.  A spark of energy he couldn’t identify.  It was weak, but it was still there, just powerful to taunt him with his ignorance.  Elijah tried to ignore it as he moved on.

Soon enough, he reached one of the lava flows.  It cut through the underground forest of odd trees like it was a river, but as he approached the flow of molten rock, he felt oddly comforted.  Following his instincts – they were so powerful that he could scarcely resist them – he dove into the fiery flow. 

It was only when he was burrowing through the thick and superheated substance that he realized what he’d done.  He’d just dove headfirst into a river of lava.  If he’d been back on Earth, perhaps he could have survived by virtue of his high Constitution, but this body didn’t have the benefit of enhanced durability.  By all rights, he should have melted the moment he got close.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he felt empowered, as if the lava was his natural habitat.  It was only in retrospect that he realized that, before, he’d been like a fish out of water.  Now, he was in his element. 

Yet, he couldn’t let his guard down, as he discovered when what looked like a giant alligator gar with flames for fins tried to eat him.  He dated out of the way just in time to avoid its enormous jaws – or more appropriately, its mouth full of jagged teeth – then burrowed through the lava to hide in the rocks on the riverbed until the thing lost interest.  As it happened, a much larger creature that looked like a bulky hybrid between a crocodile and a manatee bit the gar in half. 

Despite the heat permeating his body, Elijah felt a chill race up his spine. 

The environment reminded him a little of the Sea of Sorrows or the Primordial Jungle, both of which were floors in the Keledge Tower.  They weren’t really all that similar to his current location, but the primordial, survival-of-the-fittest aura was close enough to bring those two to mind.  It gave Elijah some more insight into the constant conflict that pervaded any natural environment.  Every organism had a drive to survive, and that took precedence over everything else.  They didn’t care about morality.  They didn’t feel empathy or hate.  They battled one another because that was the only way they could meet the conditions of their primary mandate. 

Survival was the name of the game, and everything else was irrelevant. 

Elijah remained nestled in the rocks at the bottom of the lava flow until the current took the remains of the gar away.  The other beast went with it, swimming away without even realizing – or perhaps caring – that he was there.  Finally, Elijah slipped from his hiding spot, then burrowed his way through the flow until he reached the other side.  It wasn’t swimming – not really.  The substance was far too dense for that, and the ease with which he moved in the substance defied physics in a way Elijah didn’t really want to think about.  Either way, he reached the other side easily enough, then climbed free.  A few bits of magma clung to his red scales, but they fell away after they cooled.

Creeping through the brush – which, to his eyes, was a mixture of purples, blues, and oranges – Elijah kept moving.  He ate a few insects here and there, but he’d been moving for more than an hour before he recognized what drove him. 

The ambient ethera in the cavern was already dense, but with every step he took, that density rose.  And his instincts pushed him toward the increasingly thick ethera.  Was there a source?  Maybe. 

Elijah needed to find out. 

Days passed as he continued to live the life of the small lizard whose body he’d come to inhabit, and in that time, a few things became abundantly clear.  First, he was far from weak, and he’d often found that he could stand up to creatures much larger than himself.  It was never easy, and there had been more than a few close calls, but he’d even managed to take out beasts three times his size. 

The only issue with that was the fact that, aside from the insects, he was just about the smallest creature in the cavern.  From his perspective, it felt as if he’d stepped foot into a world of giants.  Everything towered over him, dwarfing his tiny size.  That brought with it both advantages and disadvantages.  The former, in that he often escaped notice from the much larger beasts.  The latter, because if they knew he was there, he had very little defense except running and hiding. 

It was a valuable learning experience.  Of late, Elijah had adopted some bad habits, most stemming from the fact that he was the highest-leveled person in the world.  That had led him to believe he was more powerful than anything he encountered.  It wasn’t true, as he’d discovered with his recent encounter with the boar, but habits weren’t easy to discard. 

He’d been in need of a reality check, and his time as a lizard was perfect for that, even if he felt like he was balanced on the edge of a cliff, just waiting for something to splatter him like a bug. 

Regardless, as he crossed the subterranean jungle, Elijah’s own experiences from his first couple of years after Earth’s transformation combined with the lizard’s natural instincts to keep him out of harm’s way.  More than once, he was forced to traverse more lava flows, but those instances were more comforting than not, even if those rivers of molten rock were home to some of the most powerful creatures. 

Finally, though, Elijah reached his destination when he arrived at the edge of an enormous crater.  For the first time, he could look up and see the sky through the huge mouth of the cave.  Predictably, it was not a sky he recognized.  Instead of seeing a starry expanse populated by a single moon, Elijah saw colorful bands that it took him a moment to recognize as planetary rings. 

More concerningly, he also saw huge shapes flitting about the sky.  Some dwarfed even the massive cave, casting everything in shadow for a few seconds before they flew away. 

But Elijah was more interested in what lay at the center of the crater.  It was a flower the size of a cottage.  A lotus, if he wasn’t mistaken, and it was wreathed in orange flame.   Clearly, he’d found the source of the increased ethera.

Unfortunately, Elijah wasn’t the only one, because the entire surface of the crater was packed full of every sort of beast he’d seen since beginning his trek across the large cavern. 

He hissed in annoyance as he began to ponder just how he was going to get closer to that flower.