Chapter 63: Bucky… Dragon?

At the sound and the expression of Etherea’s confusion as it lit up her gorgeous elven face in a rather unfamiliar way, I found myself forfeiting to the urge to drift my gaze down toward my own exposed chest. Her befuddlement turned out to be appropriate.

Where the wound had been, now there were only glimmering flakes of red that seemed to be acting as a bandage of their own accord. They held my chest together, and with the wrappings removed I noticed that the pain had somewhat dulled.

“When’s the last time you changed my bandage?” I asked.

“Well, someone definitely changed it this morning, right?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, it wasn’t like this then. Weird little patches of crusty, shiny skin. Never seen anything like that before. You recognize it?”

Her cerulean eyes studied my chest unflinchingly. “From where I’m kneeling, hero, it looks a lot like scales.”

I squinted, furrowing my brow as I adjusted my position to get a better look at my own torso. Now that she mentioned it, she was absolutely correct. A large hand-sized patch of skin where the wound had been was completely replaced with gleaming red reptilian scales.

“Now, that is weird.” I remarked.

I had thoughts. I had some theories already bubbling up about what this could mean—perhaps my Shifter feat and my Dragoner quality were interacting in an unpredictable way. Perhaps there was more to my destiny than I’d realized. The Dragon Empress herself seemed to allude to another title for me, one that bore similarities to my own name. What did she call me?

Ah, the Dragon Buck, with buck here most probably meaning a breeding male.

“You look lost in thought,  hero,” Etherea noted, placing her palm gently on my shoulder.

I shrugged. “I definitely have some ideas about what this could mean,” I confessed. “But to be honest, we don’t have the time to sit on our asses and speculate.”

She nodded, narrowing her eyes as she gazed intently at strange development on my chest. “Does it still hurt?”

“Poke it,” I grinned at her.

Etherea recoiled at the suggestion. “No, I wouldn’t deign to risk harming you.”

“Do it,” I goaded her with a wink, sticking out my tongue playfully at the end.

She smirked and, finally, closed her eyes as she prodded at my chest.

“Feels nice not to be treated like I’m made of porcelain,” I noted.  “Poke it harder.”

She obeyed one more time, this time daring to open her eyes.

“Good,” I nodded. “Now lick it.”

Her eyes went wide with shock. “What?!”

“Just kidding,” I chuckled. Then I waggled my eyebrows. “Unless you want to.”

“I kind of do, but perhaps further experimentation can wait until your quest is done?” she suggested.

We helped each other to our feet, staring at the bandages in her hands. “I guess we don’t need those anymore after all. I feel… fine. It’s still sore, but not fragile. Feels whole.”

I stretched my arms, doing some shoulder rolls and rotating my joints in their sockets.

Etherea looked as though a great burden had been taken away from her. “This is tremendous news.”

“Is it?” I asked with curiosity tinging my voice. “Maybe I’m turning into a dragon. You feel comfortable getting rutted by a dragon?”

She shrugged. “As long as it’s you—”

“Whoa,” I grunted, interrupting her. “I was teasing, but damn, much appreciated. I didn’t expect you to be so ‘ride or die.’”

Etherea smiled, a richer blue appearing against the paleness of her cheeks. “Into the woods, then?” she prodded.

I let out an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose,” I complained. “Let’s go.”

We chose an entrance—as Etherea had previously noted, it didn’t really matter much. As soon as we stepped into the forest I became aware of a sense that it was shifting around me without me being able to really perceive it happening. It was a lot like being caught in a dream, walking from one room to the next, and ending up somewhere different from where you expected.

“This is pretty disorienting,” I grunted. “How do we even get out?”

“By the grace of the Archfey,” Etherea muttered, though she quickly continued when she noticed my adverse reaction to her choice of words. “Worry not, I have faith that we will find our way.”

Before long we’d ended up at the mouth of something like a cave composed up of twisting thorny vines and broken branches. It was huge, like a hollowed out sequoia, and wide enough for us to walk through and still not be able to reach the sides or top of the passage if we walked down the center.

“In here, then,” I guessed, and my moon elf companion nodded.

“Indeed,” she confirmed. “Keep your wits about you. This is the way forward, but I cannot predict what surprises lie in wait for us.”

“If you could, they wouldn’t be surprises,” I pointed out with a chortle.

Etherea sighed, though if she was reacting to my comment, I wasn’t certain, because at the moment her eyes were all about the inside of the Bramblepath as we made our way inside.

“Watch out for signs,” she said.

“Like, ‘Stop’ and ‘Yield?’”

She shook her head, causing her moon-white tresses to whip and bounce with elven grace. “No,” she said, and she paused. “Just—anything out of the ordinary.”

“Stay close,” I replied. “You’ve got me nervous, now.”

The passage had gotten dark after just a couple more steps.

“We should have brought a torch or something,” I noted. “We’ll have to be very cautious here.”

Etherea grinned and extended a palm. A white orb of light extended from her hand, hovering over her head, keeping up with us easily. “You were saying, hero?” she tittered.

I smirked, sticking out my tongue at her again. “Well, now I guess we just have to accept that whatever’s in here with us is going to see us before we see it.”

Her cocky smile faded at that. “An excellent point.”

“That’s why I’m the Apex Hero, and you’re the sexy elven sorceress.”

Etherea scoffed at that in protest, but even as she did, her arm wrapped around mine. It perhaps wasn’t meant to be flirtatious—more likely she was just trying to keep close for safety. Either way, I grinned smugly to myself.

As we trod further into the Bramblepath, I noticed our footsteps had gone oddly silent. Only a faint ringing sound remained, and with a glance at Etherea’s worried face I knew she sensed it, too.

“What’s going on?” I said—or I tried to, but no sound came out that I could hear. The world was mute and suddenly felt very dangerous.

Without the sense of sound, I had to rely on sight and smell. I channeled my Workhorse quality, and tried to recall the energy signature of Sniff, the power that I had, and rarely used, which allowed me to detect any unusual scents.

With a deep inhalation, I picked up many overpowering floral scents, but nestled in the midst of them was the distinct, if faint, odor of blood.

Etherea clutched me tightly, not knowing what was going on at all, and I had no easy way to broadcast my little epiphany to her—nor did I have the time. From ahead of us, and behind, a grand total of five pairs of glowing red eyes stared at us and whoever they belonged to began their quiet approach.

The first thing I noticed about these creatures as they walked into the silvery light of Etherea's spell was that they weren't exactly friendly looking. Their faces were elongated, with a glowing pair of crimson eyes set in a narrow slit between two rows of teeth. They wore simple brown cloaks and hoods, covering everything except their hands, which appeared to be covered in thick leather gloves, though heavy black claws emerged from the tips.

"Fuck," I muttered into the ringing silence as the fiends surrounded us on both sides, front and back.

I stole a glance at Etherea and saw horror reflected on her face. She was terrified, but a look of determination set in all the same, and I saw her raise her hand and begin to cast something.

I wasn’t going to wait and see what she had planned—I pivoted to face the throng coming in from behind us and found them already mid-leap. With them inches from my face, I let loose a hot breath of fire, lighting them up, filling the Bramblepath with the smell of charred, fetid flesh and robes.

But one didn’t go down. That one continued to pound and slashed at me, but my breastplate deflected its blows with ease. Now the thing was in my grasp, so I channeled Workhorse again and activated Titan Strength as I gripped its neck, crushing it in my clutches until the hideous head popped off like a grape from a vine.

Turning to check on Etherea’s situation, I noted a glowing white shield-like barrier pouring out of her palm, taking shape in front of us. The monsters tried and failed to break through, so I took the opportunity to summon my lance. One by one, I picked them off by throwing the lance through our side of the barrier, landing in the creatures’ heads or chests, and then summoning it back into my grip.

Within a few short seconds, it was over, and the passage was calm. Not only that, but sound returned all at once, and we were suddenly flooded with a thousand noises I’d never noticed or appreciated before, from the crackle of a twig underfoot to the chirping of bugs burrowed in the thorny vines and branches along the path.

I looked at Etherea, my eyes wide, and she sighed with relief.

“Those were Dark Fey known as the Soundless,” she said.

“Very apt,” I nodded judiciously. “Now what?”

“We keep going,” she shrugged.

So we did. We walked for another twenty minutes or so until a hint of light appeared ahead of us—the literal light at the end of the tunnel.

“There,” I grunted eagerly, gesturing to the beacon of hope in the distance.

Etherea nodded. “That would be the glade, the lake clearing where one can find all manner of fey.”

I grunted at that with a bit of trepidation. “Like the fey we just fought?”

Etherea shook her head. “No dark fey—the dark fey are the servants of the fey and Archfey. They exist to keep out the unwanted and test the worthy.”

“Suddenly my high school chemistry tests don’t seem so cutthroat by comparison,” I remarked. Etherea didn’t bother to acknowledge the arcane quip. She, more than any other girl, seemed to understand that human men tended to make references that would inevitably go over a monster girl or elf's head. Her solution to ignore them altogether was rather astute.

We continued down the passageway until we exited into the glade, and I was left breathless  at what I beheld. It was a scene of nature unlike anything I’d ever witnessed with my own eyes.

The emerald hue of everything was immediately obvious, from the foliage on the ground to the sparkling leaves in the trees overhead. Myriad birds and beasts—some small, some large—flitted about, calling to each other in spoken words I could understand when I strained to listen. At the center of the glade was a glittering lake, its surface reflecting the sun in such a way as to make it appear as though there were several hundred stars in the sky. And sitting atop this beautiful tableau was a magnificent tree, the largest I'd ever laid eyes upon, one that would make the sequoias of my own world blush.

"Holy fuck," I grunted under my breath.

And then, off in the distance, sitting atop a small flowery island, I noted three women of captivating beauty lounging about, naked as the dawn.

"There," Etherea gasped. "A nymph and two dryads! We are in luck!"

I nodded, fixing my eyes on them. Suddenly I realized just how little of a plan we actually had, though. "Okay," I grunted. "Now what?"

Etherea looked at me with a cockeyed smirk. "Isn't it obvious, hero?" she asked. "Now we make a nymph cry."