What are you thinking? You are a true child of Sun and Earth, a Draak, the greatest beings in the world. That thing is a Digger, a Tailless. It is evil and should be Destroyed. There is nothing redeeming about it, it knows only Destruction. It will Destroy you without hesitation if it has a chance to. It cannot be trusted.
That cannot be true. You have seen how it Creates. It tends to plants. It put Love into that chamber of bones. It knows more than Destruction.
Love? You are admiring Love? That emotion is a source of weakness. You would tear out a chunk of your own flesh to feed those who would consume you! If its Love makes it vulnerable, you should take advantage. It will only lead to you exposing yourself to danger for no reason, to you giving up some of what is rightfully yours to others who has done nothing to earn it. A Draak does not Love: That emotion is for lesser animals, for the furred things that scurry about and are your prey, cowering before your might!
That is also wrong. You know your Creator loved you. You felt it. Perhaps that Love ended when she left your egg buried in the dirt, but Love is for Draak to feel, at least sometimes.
There is no reason to give up something that is yours. You deserve to keep the shining Treasure gained by daring to explore the hidden places of Earth. Such intricate metal surely shows your Greatness and daring, and will be a worthy thing to admire in your hoard for years and decades to come. You must keep it, for you must seek Treasure!
Not all Treasure can be touched, or smelled, or tasted. You think you will find a Treasure of another kind here. You are going to do it.
The warring voices inside of you grow ever more agitated as they shout that your Birther's wisdom was thus:
The No-Tails are not Great. They pervert the ways of marsh and forest and coast. While no piece of Nature is stagnant and unchanging, the No-Tails burn and Destroy everything that was to place their own slave-beasts on the land, caring not that this drives out all others. They are the seed of the Other, and were the heralds of the Great Destruction centuries ago. The full tale of the Other and the No-Tails is long and nuanced. Know this for now: They are to be feared and hated and avoided.
You must fear and hate this smelly creature no matter how it cries and wails. The wisdom of one older than you who has seen more of the world says so! It is too late to properly avoid it but perhaps you can make amends by leaving now, or by Destroying some of its stupid plants and things. Certainly you should not give it any of your Treasure, gained by your own two claws!
You refuse. You are not your Creator and you do not need to do as she once said. You are free to make your own choices, for you are a Draak. You have the power to determine your own path, you are not a slave to your now-missing mother's words!
Even as a hatchling you are Greater than this sobbing thing, reduced to frailty and inaction by its loss. Here it lives in the ruins of its kin, who were properly Destroyed by a great Draak. It is too weak to make anything of itself after suffering the wrath of one of your Kin. It grows frailer with each passing year, and you have not even yet seen the end of your first. You will grow infinitely greater and brighter than this pathetic being. Would you stain your infancy by bending your neck to it? YOU ARE DRAAK! The power and majesty of your form will be far Greater than any stinking No-Tail ever could! Your wisdom will be greater than anything it could muster, your knowledge of the world broader and deeper as the ocean is to a river! You will grow so far beyond this thing that it will be as an ant is to you now one day! But this incorrect path, this foolish Sympathy, leads to weakness and ruin. Leave now, or you will be forever stained by this decision.
Have you not learned to watch the world around you and uncover its secrets by taking the place of other beings? Is there no wisdom in thinking as they do? If you see the world only as a Draak, consumer of beasts and prideful master of shiny rocks, you would miss out on so much beauty! You would be blind to alternate paths and the true nature of the world! Impossible. You refuse to be that narrow-minded creature.
You will let Sympathy inside you, at least for this one moment. For all that it is awful and painful, for all that it feels like weakness and vulnerability, you taste the Truth that it might make you Great.
And with that, the dissenting voice is silenced. Your mind roils with emotion and your head hurts slightly. But your decision has been made and there is no going back.
+2 Lessons in Earth for going against your instincts.
You make your way from the roofs to the walkways of this place and pick a spot on the path the Digger would take back to its plants. You grab the loops of metal around your neck with a claw, and feel a knot of tension leave you as the metal brushes over the top of your head and settles on the floor with a soft clink. You pick a blank section of wall and use your claw to carve the signs burned into your memory into the waiting stone, taking exquisite care to match the original patterns as closely as you can.
You walk a ways down the hall and sit in the open, feeling terribly exposed. You raise your head and close your eyes and sing. A Draak's voice is not all harsh hisses and roars. You can make soft purring sounds and beautiful crooning that can be heard for miles. You let your thoughts wander as you sing, relishing the sense of discovery and lingering over a feeling of loss, over how grand this place must once have been.
You are surprised when you hear another voice join your own. The Digger stands before the markings you made in the wall, holding that small Treasure you willingly gave up. Crying. Singing.
...You decide to try to communicate. You Sing directly at the No-Tail, as if you were speaking to a Beast of the land. It seems confused, but eventually manages some kind of connection and you hear-
Pain. Pain and loss. You try to show it where you found that necklace, crawling through the vents, but he doesn't understand the basic ideas you transmit, patterns you thought imprinted onto everything that lives. Any communication of complex ideas is hopeless. He replies, but the only thing you can comprehend is emotion and sensory detail. Its mind is confusing and sharp, full of twisted anxieties and searingly detailed images you can't make sense of and crystal-like ideas you cannot follow.
He lingers over images of a Birther who was obviously very important to him. Such immense Love is almost painful, even secondhand. His mate, or possibly a hatchling...? At one point the Digger walks towards you, hand outstretched and murmuring quietly, but you back away, alarmed. He's still scary and smelly and you don't want to be touched, no mater what kind of strange connection you now share with him.
You keep trying to understand, but the things he shows you make no sense. They seem like a random mess of images and sounds, though he lingers both on the sight of a Draak fighting Diggers and two bands of Diggers fighting each other. Love mixed with shame swirls in his mind along with the sadness. An emotion you have felt before but did not understand until now. You name it Guilt.
The experience is confusing and exhausting for both of you and eventually you break off the connection with a headache, not having gotten across much more than that. You did, at least, make it clear you were interested in the flasks of Acid on his belt and he seemed willing enough to leave two of them on the ground and back away. For all that you feel triumphant in this moment, you also feel like you've seen and learned too much in too short a period of time. You need to retreat and make sense of it all.
The Digger has taken the necklace reverently and returned to that chamber of bones, presumably to add another altar of remembrance to it. As you left he seemed... Not happy, not calm, but - centered. You wonder what he will do now, but you think you have to leave. You feel... Happy to have done this. It's very strange and you get the feeling other Draak would make fun of you for it, but... You think you like it.
+3 Lessons in Water from seeing, and accepting, a new perspective. Learned more about the No-Tails. Learned Compassion, a rare trait for a Draak-Kin.
You're done here, at least for now. You have Acid, you forged some kind of tentative connection with a strange Tailless being, and you have gained Treasure as well. It was an excellent expedition, though it did not go at all how you imagined it would.
You gather up your Treasures from this dive in one of the large vessels. They are good for holding liquids, but also other things, and with metallic clanks you stack everything you have found into two of them before beginning to slowly drag them up and up the shafts, before returning and doing the same thing with the other. Your collected goods are very heavy compared to your size, and while they're quite a rich haul that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, you are working harder than you have in a long while to drag them up the long path and over and through the narrow gaps of collapsed stone that lead back towards Volt. It takes several days, and by the time you get there your missing scales are almost done growing back, as is the chunk of your tail, and you even feel a new tooth starting to poke its way out where you lost your old one.
+1 Lesson in Fire from your exertions. Your wounds have mostly healed.
And there you find Volt. The lightning-spirit is excited at your return, ranting and raging about the evils of the Diggers and its desire to finally escape their final act of spite, the prison that keeps him here. You decide not to tell it that you found a Digger alive down there, feeling sure that it would descend and kill him. Instead, you simply state that you have Acid and let the spirit vibrate in anticipation, guiding you to carefully drip some of the evil-smelling liquid on particular spots in the complexus of silver wire that surrounds the glass sphere imprisoning it. It pains you a bit to destroy something so artful and wickedly beautiful, but freeing a caged spirit of the world and restoring things to how they should be is much more important than preserving some pretty metal.
Soon a critical point is reached. Sparks fly and several important-looking pieces glow with heat, then melt, as Volt writhes in pain. The storm-bird spirit warns you to retreat to the vents before it frees itself, and you wisely and quickly obey, seeing its energy build in the Song. The spirit ruins far more than you did as it lashes out in pure, righous, beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring fury and reduces all the machines in the area to molten scraps and ruined shards in a conflagration of electrical energy, singing jubilant Destruction into the air all the while.
Once Volt has let off some of its pent-up emotion, it keeps the promise to teach you the magic of lightning and sparks, but instead of lingering and slowly explaining, showing you examples... The spirit simply BURNS the knowledge into your mind, striking you with a bolt of spirit-lightning that replaces all your senses with pain and noise. Oh! Oh! Now you see it. The Truth of electricity! The song of lightning! It's beautiful. You see how it flows through metal and air and flesh. How flowing lightning sings a field into Reality that acts back upon it and thus force can become lightning and lightning can become force again. That's how the air-moving blades work!
There's too much. You see it all. It hurts to realize how every tiny particle has a direction associated with electricity and certain stones are like knots of order in the random arrangement of these things, and the many useful things those anomalous Treasures are good for. Your mind strains at the realization that the whole of Earth has an invisible breath spanning everything in this song of magnetism which shields the Air from the worst of Sun's wrath, which while it gives warmth and sustenance would be too harsh and Destroy everything if not for the greatest Birther's breath shielding it. You feel as though you will vanish into nothingness as you comprehend how storms strike with lightning not out of meaningless noise or random fury, but the way tall or metal things provide an easier path for the separated energies to flow back together, forming a yet-easier path for a great flood of power like a stream carving a path for a mighty river.
It's too much to think about all at once. But you really do understand. Whenever you think about it, you realize a little bit more about the beautiful music of Magnetism and Electricity. The possibilities this magic opens up in your mind are many. You could make all sorts of Treasures. Imitating the Tailless's magic is a worthy task indeed, and you may well surpass it with Volt's insight and your own Draak-Kin heritage granting you brilliant intelligence! You could capture lightning and use it for your own purposes, make moving things or lodestones or other clever devices... Well, all that can wait until you've returned to the surface, at least.
You fall unconscious. You dream about storms.
+3 Lessons in Air from understanding of one of the great secrets the world. Air affinity has increased to 3. Lifesense improves slightly. Learned about electromagnetism.
...Of course, you have to wait until the pain recedes and you can feel your own scales again before doing anything about it. Ow.
You lie there for a few hours until your senses fully return to you, gather up the treasures hauled up from deep below (and a fused lump of gold that was once powder, melted into a misshapen mass by Volt's rampage), and then you continue the long trek back to the surface.
The rough and irregular stone of those caves is welcome after spending so long surrounded by eerie, boxy metal. Dragging your finds all the way back to the surface promises to be an annoying task, so once you reach the exit of the grate and are back in larger chambers you decide to leave it all there for now and rush to the surface to hunt and fill your belly. You are getting extremely hungry by now! It's been sixteen days since you've eaten anything more substantial than a few bones!
You see the light of the surface again, and the refreshing smell of surface plants fills your nose. Your mood lifts as you emerge back into sunlight, blinking from the over-brightness. It's almost like hatching again. While you were perfectly comfortable in the cool darkness below, the sun shining warmly on your red scales is refreshing. You stretch languidly and go have a drink of water, keeping an eye out for any easy prey.
You have returned from your first true test. You explored a deep place, pushed yourself harder and used many of the lessons you have learned on the surface, and brought back both Treasure and Knowledge. It's good to return. You feel triumphant.
But as you approach your Den you smell...
...You smell... Something strange...
Something... Familiar, yet not. Something that reminds you of awe and tension.
You smell... Another Draak.
And then you see the tracks. Another Hatchling, the same size as you. They are living in your territory, living in your Den, no doubt sitting on YOUR TREASURE.
You're going to have to do something about that.
End Part 1
I'm enjoying writing this story. I didn't expect the cave exploration to turn into as long an arc as it did, but upon reflection I think less episodic stories organized into arcs similar to the one that I am concluding here will be more creatively satisfying than each update bringing something entirely new.
In any case, I'm happy and I would love to hear any feedback you all have on the story thus far. I am going to take a break from this tale for now to ensure I don't get burnt out on it.
I'll be writing something new in the next few days but probably not anything very serious or long, I'm planning on something designed to end relatively quickly, at which point I'll return to this story.
