The Gamer Chapter 1063 – Christmas Friends 2 – An ancient family (Patreon)

There was much confusion on the faces of the guests, but little in the way of panic. Between the hosts and the guests, the Palace was one of the most guarded places on Earth at the moment. Feeling a second tremble, John quickly headed towards the nearest door to investigate. Aclysia came along and Rave made initial motions to come as well, until she realized they were heading outdoors. “…Imma just stay here where it’s warm,” the heat-addict said, stopping a couple of metres away from the door.

“You do that,” John responded. If something bad happened, his girlfriend, among the rest of the capable fighters within the harem, would join in a matter of seconds. Several of them already came close, but John felt several more of the vibrations and they were coming closer. He reached for the door handle, when a series of knocks reverberated from the woods. They were notable only for the softness compared to the tremors that had preceded them.

John opened the door just in time to see a massive claw, the tip was about the size of John’s head, pull backwards. Behind it, a serpentine body came into view. Most of the scales covering it were of an ultramarine colour, sparkling wet in the sunlight, with the underbelly a simple white like that of an orca.

The one hand that had knocked on the Palace came to be placed by three others just like it, each absurdly large and belonging to a creature whose movements would indeed make a building shake. Over fifty metres long and seeming ready to swallow a school bus, the weight of the monstrosity could not be understated. Aside from his arms, the sea-creature only had a pair of wings without membranes in terms of limbs. They stretched and then laid closely to the equally slender and massive body, almost disappearing against it.

The higher dragon’s head took the place of the hand, just as John stepped out. Six horns extended from the back of it, the eyes of the creature glowed blue, turning almost white in their intensity towards the centre. The upper jaw of the dragon was considerably larger, with both parts ending in a pointy, bony covering that gave it a beak-esque look.

“Merry Christmas, John Newman,” Tilgun greeted in his usual, smug and arrogant tone. “You have to widen your rivers. I fit through the Harbour opening, but it was a true pain – not even mentioning scaling the walls of your fortress.”

“You should be happy that I added you to the Sentry Golem exceptions,” the Gamer responded with crossed arms.

“You grow more insolent each time I encounter you,” Tilgun noted with a hint of displeasure.

“You grow less threatening each time I encounter you,” the Gamer retorted. The Maw of Souls was level 450 and seemed to have restored the level of strength he was usually at when maximally satiated in the regards of soul eating. That would still be quite the difficult encounter for John to beat, but between his elementals, Tilgun’s relative physical weakness, and the fact that John had a better Stat scaling per level, he was fairly certain he could do it.

More importantly, he had the backing of someone really important.

“TILGUN!”

Hearing the shout, the Gamer just stepped aside. Stomping towards the open door, Nathalia approached rapidly.

“Ah, my dearest and only sister, I knew I smelt you more intensely than last time I was around here,” the higher dragon said. “It has been six-hundred years… how have… you… been?”

The words turned less certain and arrogant by the second, as the Maw of Souls was forced to pull his head back to not come into contact with the steadily advancing Fire of Destruction. Once his neck was practically folded, Nathalia finally stopped. “I expressly allowed you to help my mate, Tilgun,” she growled at him.

“I provided him a valuable ore from my hoard, how much did you demand?”

“I did not demand anything, I ALLOWED you to help.”

“Sister, you allowing me anything is not a call to action,” Tilgun responded.

Nathalia growled, the snow around her melted, and the grass underneath turned to ash.

“Alright, alright, calm down,” John said, taking hold of Nathalia’s neck and giving her a relaxing massage. “I don’t appreciate his tone, but your brother is right. You allowing him to help me doesn’t mean that he has to.”

“Fire and brimstone,” Nathalia cussed, but lowered the heat until John was no longer losing HP from touching her.

Quickly glancing down to make sure his clothes were still intact, the Gamer then returned to the conversation. “We were going to have our family meetings tomorrow,” he said, “and I would invite you… but you’re a giant serpent dragon and my mundane parents are there, so I guess you’re welcome to stay today.”

Inviting Tilgun at all felt somewhat out of place. Honestly speaking, the Gamer did not particularly fancy the Maw of Souls. He was like Richard, if Richard had traded in the rest of his clarity and sense of humour for the arrogant, permanently frustrated attitude of a higher dragon that needed to get laid but only had a couple dozen possible partners the world over. However, as the saying went: ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.’

Best to get along with the weird uncle, or whatever Tilgun could be best characterized as.

“That’s acceptable,” Tilgun conceded, as if that much was the minimum appropriate respect to be given.

John just sighed, knowing better than to waste time lecturing the dragon. ‘Perhaps after I get powerful enough to slap him about when he annoys me,’ he considered, before speaking up. “Well, did you come here to do anything else besides check if Nathalia was back?”

“It has reached me that you encountered what remains of Mother Chaos?” Tilgun responded with a quizzical bent to his words.

“Yes,” the Gamer responded. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“So I can imagine. I communed with her a couple of times after Babylon. Her descent was interesting to follow,” the Maw of Souls bent his serpentine body to be less folded while he spoke to John and Nathalia.

“You don’t sound bothered by the development at all,” noted the Gamer.

“Why would I?” Tilgun sounded honestly amused at the mere suggestion. “For Mother Chaos to change is in her very nature. For her to become something impossible in order to grow into a new threat is the way things are. Tiamat spawned from your observations of nature, spawned from the dam you erected against the regular floods getting destroyed by the storm of a millennia, from the fields succumbing to a storm of unstoppable locusts, from drought, from the son of the good king becoming a tyrant, from all the inevitabilities you didn’t and couldn’t prepare for.”

“You really are fond of her,” John remarked.

“How could one not be fond of ultimate power,” the Maw of Souls responded. “Mother Chaos’ body degenerated before my eyes as the aeons passed and the less pristine she became, the more she warped what was good and evil around her. My very powers were born from my proximity to her. All becomes changed, around Tiamat.”

“Careful, Brother, with your veneration,” Nathalia growled, igniting a flame in her right hand. “I wouldn’t want to burn your Lorylim-claimed corpse out of this world. I went through great pains raising you.”

“Oh, do not misunderstand, dearest Sister, I have no intention to join Mother Chaos in her current form – I merely observe what becomes of her before her inevitable death and rebirth.” Tilgun tilted his head. “Perhaps I shall become the new god of chaos when that time comes?”

John doubted it. For all of his worship of the concept, Tilgun was far from an actually chaotic individual. Had he been a mundane human, the higher dragon would have likely been the kind of nihilist that meticulously planned each aspect of their day, while wondering where the worth was in any of it. “Speaking of her death – why isn’t she dead?” John inquired. “Attempting to destroy Gaia should lead to a swift end.”

“Knowledge for knowledge,” Tilgun hummed his mantra, only to flinch back when his sister growled at him yet again. “Nathalia, we are from the Faith of the same people. Surely you wouldn’t hurt me because I stay true to what I have always preached?”

“It is fine,” John interrupted before Nathalia could turn this into a sibling feud. “After all, I have something you want to know, right? What happened in the Death Zone in all of its details.”

“Ah, confirmations – that would be worth my theory of what happened to Tiamat.”

“Theory?”

“Truly, she did not know herself then and what little of her sanity was there has since been drowned away. For my part, I could not confirm,” Tilgun gave that much away. “Now, speak first, John Newman.”

The Gamer considered demanding the order be reversed, but that would have just complicated matters. Once he was powerful enough to show Tilgun his place without Nathalia’s help, he would certainly do so. “Alright, listen closely…” the Gamer started.

“…Truly remarkable,” Tilgun said by the end – not in response to John’s achievements. “That Mother Chaos’ first son was still alive. Enki, a gorgeous silver star of unrivalled brilliance, forged out of her pristine scales and flesh. A worthy end for a dragon of such beauty.”

“Eaten away, kept in ignorance, a prisoner in his own body and mind?” John wanted to know.

“Forging the greatest gathering of Astrotium into a hull that even a creature of two divinities could manifest in, killed by the Celestial Devourer, but not before giving the vestiges of his power to someone of worth,” Tilgun let out a longing sigh, “I spent many nights with this brilliant mind. A forging star, no doubt.”

John rolled his eyes. “Your end of the bargain. Tell me what happened to Tiamat.”

“Establishing contact with her after Babylon was, as you may imagine, a difficult task,” Tilgun switched gears immediately, “I stayed clear of the area for the better part of a hundred years or so, to let the purge of the Abyssals run its course. When I returned and found many of the larger or more significant barriers still intact, I was pleasantly surprised. Enki’s barrier anchors, crude as they may be compared to what you create today, still worked and various barriers were even populated by a rare shambling being.”

“Lorylim?” John theorized.

“No, this predates their melding,” Tilgun responded. “They were remains of Tiamat’s body. A rib laid as the fundament of a ziggurat, a scale worked into a breastplate, a heap of raw meat, left to attract inhabitants of Natural Barriers. Such things were usual in the late Akkadian Empire. The people of Mesopotamia knew how to harness chaos, and in their ruins I found the clue that Mother Chaos was still alive.

“It took quite a while to work out a way to communicate with her. Theorizing that she had been transported into a different Kingdom, one shackled to this planet like the elemental planes are, eventually allowed me the breakthrough and to talk to her. She was sweet, sweet as Tiamat could be when her mood manifested that way, and told me that she was trapped in a world without anything but sealed, alien power.”

Tilgun paused and looked expectantly at John, challenging him to present his own theory. It didn’t take long for John to develop one or, rather, pick one among the several he had previously created that worked best with this new set of information. “Rather than kill Tiamat, Gaia opted to seal her away and she chose the same space she used to seal the Lorylim.”

“Such I assume,” Tilgun agreed. “When I talked to her again, ten years later, she had broken out of her seal and started the process of melding with the old god of genocide. All contact afterwards merely confirmed that the old Tiamat was gone and that something new, something exciting, had been born from the in-between. Watching the Lorylim act is remarkable. Almost as remarkable is the question of why Gaia would allow such a thing to happen. Is our supreme deity so incompetent? Did she not think leaving them both in the same place would lead to problems? Perhaps she planned this?”

“But wh- Because that would solve several issues,” John interrupted and answered his own question, rubbing his chin. “Gaia violated her non-involvement policy when she removed the Lorylim. Perhaps she wants humanity to face this threat at a pace we can handle… why then get Tiamat involved when she just as well could send the old god out in chunks?”

“Because of death and rebirth,” Tilgun gave an answer, even if it wasn’t the definitive one. “If Mother Chaos dies, a new god of chaos will rise and the new god of chaos would inevitably seek to shatter the order of the world imposed by Gaia. Remove Mother Chaos, bind her to an entity that will take millennia to annihilate, even with precision action, and interrupt the cycle of rebirth. Otherwise, the supreme deity would have to purge the land in each cycle of chaos’ resurgence.”

“That would be the least interrupting thing in according to her principles,” John mumbled. “It also means that the Lorylim are still being nourished by the Faith of chaos… which isn’t exactly a low amount.”

“Only contributing to the continued diminishing of the ancient’s importance,” Tilgun cackled, slowly making a fist with one of his four hands. “The magical force of an entire ancient civilization, slowly getting more and more diluted by the endless flow of human Faith. Empty a glass of water into a lake every day and eventually you will see it rise. Perhaps one day Tiamat will be overbearing in more than just presence on that shattered hivemind.”

“Perhaps…” John hummed and sniffed, the smell of baked apples reaching his nostrils. “Interesting and horrifying as that is to ponder, I actually should get back inside and have fun. It is Christmas after all.”

“What could be more entertaining than the mounting forces of chaos?” Tilgun wondered, as he was left to catch up with his sister.