SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

He stepped through the mouth of the chamber, and the mountain opened its heart to him.

The core of the place was a cavern that swallowed his grey-sight whole, vaulting up past where even his eyes could follow, and it had no need of them to light itself. The crystal did that.

Where the veins above had run in fat threads, here the mana crystal grew in pillars and sheets and hanging blades taller than houses, the richest seam on the mountain laid bare at once, throwing a cold blue-violet blaze across the dark that pulsed like something with a heartbeat of its own. A whole town had died for a rumor of this. Standing in front of it, he understood the rumor had undersold it.

And the brood was eating it. They clung to the great pillars and gnawed at the raw faces of the stone, cracking chunks loose and grinding them between frozen jaws. He watched one of the tall grey ones tear a fist of crystal from a vein and crush it in its mouth, and watched the glow of it sink into the thing and spread, threads of pale blue running up under its hide while the creature swelled half a head taller where it stood.

There was the answer to a question he had not thought to ask. They had not simply come here to nest. They had come to feed, on the purest mana in Morgain land, and every one of them was stronger for it than a brood this young had any right to be.

’So that’s how you all grew up so fast,’ he thought, and there was nothing like admiration in it. ’Someone parked you on a mountain of mana and let you gorge.’

He drew back into the shadow of a pillar and made himself small, and went looking for the rest of the picture, because a feeding ground was not yet a nest, and the word nest had been riding him since the city.

He found it at the center. The floor there fell away into a broad crystal-lined hollow, and the hollow was packed with clutches of pale ovoid things the size of ale barrels, translucent and lit from within by that same cold glow, hundreds of them cradled in drifts of frost and gnawed shards. Soft-shelled young crawled among them, already chewing at the scraps their elders let fall. A nest. He had carried the word down every mile of that descent and hoped, in some worn corner of himself, to be wrong. He was not wrong.

The thing at the middle of it shifted, and he stopped breathing on purpose.

She was vast. She crouched over the clutches like a mountain that had grown limbs, twice the height of the largest brute he had cut apart on the way in and many times its bulk, her hide gone half to living crystal where the mana had grown into her across a long feeding, so that she glowed from the inside like a lantern the size of a house. Frost smoked off her in slow sheets. When she moved her weight the whole hollow moved with her, and the eyes she swept across her cavern burned brighter and colder than any of her children’s. The mother of all of it. The reason the mountain had a heartbeat.

He held where he was and did the arithmetic, and for the second time that day it came out against him. He could take her. On a fresh morning, rested, with room to move, he had no doubt of it.

This was not that morning. His arm hung dead-heavy from the throat above, his well was down to the dregs, and she held court at the bottom of her own nest with a thousand crystal handholds to fight from and every last one of her brood between him and the way out.

A man who opened that fight tonight, tired and alone, was a man wagering his life on his own pride. And under that lay the heavier thing. Kill her now, in a blind rush, and he buried every question he had come down carrying. Who fed them. Who built this. Who wanted the richest vein in Morgain land turned into a hatchery and two thousand men spent as an excuse. Dead matriarchs answered nothing.

’Not like this,’ he decided, and the certainty of it steadied his hand off the grip. ’You’re not going anywhere, and neither is your mountain. I’ll come back for you when I’m not running on fumes and guesses.’

So he did the hardest thing a man with a drawn sword can do in front of the thing he came to kill. He turned his back on it and walked away.

He climbed out the way he had come, past the wrecked throat and the torn floor and the grey shards cooling in the dark, and the mountain let him go without an argument, as if it had shown him everything it meant to and had no further use for him tonight. The blue glow thinned behind him. The cold at his back turned ordinary. The long grey miles unwound in reverse until the tunnel finally paled with real light, thin and raw off the snow, and he walked up out of the deep into it.

The wind found him first, then the open sky washed pale toward evening. Moses stood where he had left him at the mouth of the mine, arms folded, weight easy, watching the black behind Trafalgar every bit as closely as the man himself. He had not moved in hours and did not look as though the thought had crossed his mind.

His gaze went over Trafalgar once, unhurried, reading the frost and the dried blood and whatever had stayed on his face that he hadn’t managed to put away in time. He tipped his head toward the dark still breathing cold at Trafalgar’s back.

”Well, young master.” A pause, weighed and patient. ”What’s down there?”