Music for today:
THE RUMBLING by Rok Nardin & @samuelkimmusic
https://youtu.be/PYFr0T8w_EQ
Chapter 496: A Sunken Veil
Mid Afternoon - Late Summer : Year 39 : Poseidon, Draconic Continent
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Reon paused with a stutter of his breath. "It's more of a hunch than anything, but... I think.. it could have been caused by a dragon sleep."
Hera and I instantly jolted with all reserved theory and thought scattering like a flock of birds hearing a gunshot.
"E..Excuse me?!" It was a theory so far out of left field it hit my brain like a cattle prod—shifting my gaze from relaxed to strained in an instant.
It was such an insane suggestion I'd have normally just shrugged it off as an immature rambling.. but with Reon.. I wasn't so quick to brush it off...
"P-Please understand it is quite a grand assumption off of anecdotal evidence." He was clearly trying to be reserved.. but had already cemented belief in his theory.
-What did he find to even come up with that theory..?- Looking around, my expression puzzled. -For a dragon sleep to collapse these caverns...- It would have had to be bigger than anything I could imagine.
"The only being I could reason it to be is Bahamut."
But I shook my head instantly—looking at Hera with a tensioned stare as the sway in my tail stilled. "It couldn't have been him." I was absolutely certain. "Even if the timelines lined up with Bahamut's prime, it wouldn't be possible..." At the time of the collapse, Bahamut would have still been quite young. -And a sleep on the scale to tear mana strengthening out of rock kilometers away is.. well beyond him...-
However, while that made the possibility of it being a dragon sleep significantly less likely... -I don't recall any anomalies, activity, or awakenings around the time this would have happened...- It didn't make those non-zero odds any less troubling.
-To have a dragon sleep that strong, the surge of divinity would have made a planet-quivering echo.- And the mana storm would have been noticeable halfway around the world.
That was at least... -Unless...- The being didn't have any more divinity to make.
-If all their liquid divinity was used to reinforce their body or mind, and their soul was already as clean as it could be, then it wouldn't make an echo...- And given how deep into the mountain they would have been, the mana storm could have been 'muffled', in a way.
There was just no telling... "What makes you think it was Bahamut? The scale that'd be required to rip mana out of rock?"
Reon was quick to nod, but not as confidently as he had been. "It's still something I'm investigating, but with how mana is distributed through the rubble in the ruins, it looks like the dragon sleep happened beneath the main cavern, and there are some shifts in the mana-density of the rubble over it that look like there was a major secondary collapse."
My brows twitched with the implication of his words sinking into my skull.
"It could most certainly be a natural collapse—the rubble isn't that stable to begin with—but I had the idea that something alive could have caused it as well."
-Something crawling out...- Feeling the wires of divinity in my head twitching.. almost vibrating with the movement of mana-logged thought.. my inner voice faded to make room for subconscious calculation.
There was no one.. not one dragon—no—being, I could reason it to be.
And there wasn't even a chance that a being of that class could have escaped my radar back then. -Right...- I was in my prime. Even Jormungandr had to be cautious with me...
So, I made the only reasonable conclusion. -Either Reon is mistaken, or.. the dragon died in its sleep.- And the secondary rubble collapse was natural.
Understanding the dragon would have had to be at the limits of its soul and divinity to escape my eyes during the sleep, it wasn't a crazy explanation. -At that level, not being able to produce more divinity is a death sentence...-
However, if that were the case... -Then the skeleton will still be below the city...-
And, while I really wanted to try and reason some other explanation for the initial collapse, the longer we walked and discussed what Reon had found, the more I found it difficult to oppose his conclusion.
Despite not seeing much with my own eyes yet, with a mix of drawings, descriptions, and lengthy explanations of what he had found, Reon's prediction seemed nothing short of on the mark.
The patterns were simply too consistent.
With the main collapses essentially a straight shot from, or at least facing the central city, sharing the same patterns of wear on the walls and appearing to collapse in the same ways, while caverns without a direct passage to the city remained essentially untouched, it was quite damning.
"At first I thought these marks on the walls were from the original carving of the passages," Lifting his wing to the walls, my attention turned to the thin, spiraled marks encircling us. "But the walls in caverns not really facing the main city have completely different markings that line up better with known mining techniques from the time."
"So you're thinking these spiraled markings are..."
"Carved by a flow of mana." Coming from an unfathomable vortex in the central cavern.
-Fuck...- With every passing moment, other possibilities faded.
*Crackle* Even pulling a cylindrical sample out of the wall to look at the distribution of mana in the rock, it clearly showed that a huge amount of mana moved through the passage at some point. -Though.. that could just be from traffic through here...-
However, in that final, futile attempt to explain away the evidence, we arrived.
*Woom* Feeling the air ripple with scents and moisture carried by a steady breeze, we made the final trek down the passage.. and into the central cavern.
The ruins of the first draconic city...
"W..Woah..." My breath hitched as it came into view—the bioluminescent glow of algae and coral decorating the shallow lake below illuminating the array of tear-drop-shaped pillars, raised roads, and bridges with a web of caustics.
It was incredibly beautiful.. but...
"It's.. not quite like the legends told..." Hera spoke slowly—drawing careful breaths as she looked up the colossal, smoothly molded columns, and across the sparkling water's surface. "Growing up, I was given quite a different idea of this place... Greenery.. gold.. gems... My mother had a painting that was supposedly of this place and it.. didn't look anything like this..."
Pausing as we stopped at the edge of a collapsed bridge, seemingly sanded smooth as the rest of the cavern was, the air hung in silence.
It.. didn't really feel like we were looking at a city that belonged to dragons...
It felt like a hive... Animalistic and built purely for function rather than the aesthetic or display we thought dragons were known for.
However, looking into the water.. more of the story came to light. -Holy...-
Scattered along the bottom, glittering between the coral and submerged grasses around the base of each column, mounds of gold and gems alike stood embedded into piles of hardened sediment and rubble.
And seeing us notice it, Reon finally broke the silence. "This.. is the main reason I believe the collapse was from a dragon sleep..."
Unlike the passages that had an unassuming amount of wear or the collapses that potentially had other explanations.. the patterns in the scars along each and every pillar in there painted a far clearer image. -Everything in here was.. sanded down...-
Those tear-drop looking columns that stood from the lake were once carved like castles connecting the ground to the sky.. and yet, something had sanded them smooth like erosion from an inconceivable wind...
But it wasn't from the slow winds or weather systems that likely moved through the cavern...
*Woom-Woosh* Carefully taking to the air ahead of Reon and Hera, I flew with caution, my wingtips easily clearing the structures as if the colossal space was built for monsters my size.. taking careful note of the markings on each structure before finally.. the angles of the erosion tilted downward...
And I came up on the central collapse...
The cavern was absolutely gargantuan—the size of, or even bigger than the larger chamber of the thunderbird nest—but at its center, a column of rubble nearly a hundred kilometers wide stood like the inner wall of a hurricane...
A.. not so metaphorical one...
*Wo-Woooom—Woooosh* Landing on a boulder larger than me that had partially toppled one of the columns, I looked out into the cavern again, comparing the steadily steepening angles of erosion on the old structures to those near the center.. and... -Can I even call this a mana vortex..?-
Everything pointed toward a place below the central collapse...
Eventually catching up to me, Reon was quick to try and continue his explanation.. but it wasn't any different from what it looked like. "It's like a mana storm eroded the entire city, and even more damning.. if you dig into the rubble, you can find the obsidian that used to line the original channel to the surface, and even what looks like scars from the same erosion..."
-Meaning...- For the erosion to be visible on both the inside, and outside of the rubble... -Unless vortexes like that somehow formed naturally.. and regularly...- It was the cause of the collapse.
An unfathomable.. unnatural storm that eluded me in my prime...
However... -Something still.. feels off about it...-
Based on the size of the collapse, the channel to the sky would have been gargantuan... Too big even for a mana vortex at this scale to collapse naturally. -Things.. aren't adding up...- With a channel that big, it would have shifted the mana all across the Draconic Continent.
*WOOM* Grabbing hold of my aura, the air stiffened before I plunged it into the rubble—the array of collapsed rock, ore, and ruins mapping themselves in my mind before reaching a thick wall of obsidian. -That must be the channel's inner wall...-
It was thick and dense, strengthened with so much mana it rivaled high-density mythril... A material that shouldn't collapse that easily.
But, "In the obsidian, there are these huge fractures. It really just looks like the outer shell cracked, and like a glass vase, it all crumbled with it." Reon explained.
And seeing what he was talking about, I nodded. -But this obsidian wouldn't fracture like that...- It wasn't like a solid chunk of glass, it was layered... -It would shatter, but only one layer at a time.- And with how thick each one was, the channel wouldn't have collapsed from a vortex alone. -Someone had to have caved it in...-
But then I could only ask... -Why..?-
My head spun with the proposition of that question...
Was it an accident? -Maybe when the storm started, the city was evacuated...- And in the chaos, it collapsed...
Or maybe it was on purpose. -It could have been an attempt to suffocate the storm...-
But those explanations just.. didn't sit right...
Because in the end.. one other proposal sank into me like an infected splinter.
-What if.. it was to hide it from me..?-
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