book 5: hatching ground

    for a moment, arthur could do nothing but stare. the room he found himself in made the nest fissures within new houston look like a half-hearted attempt at a nest.

    not only was the entire room bathed in bioluminescent light, lines of brighter pulsing blue crisscrossed the wall and ended in dozens of soft ovoid clusters. the eggs all pulsed in time with one another, and when they lit up, he could see shapes briefly visible in the soft shells.

    there was a cluster stuck to the wall not even an arm’s length away.

    cautiously, arthur reached out to poke at an ovoid. something slick moved against his finger and he recoiled.

    then, he heard the tick-tick-tick of hard, sharp feet skittering across the floor.

    arthur backed up, putting his shoulders to a bare spot in the wall and stood completely still. he activated his stealth skills and did everything he could to blend into the shadows.

    a few seconds later, a scourgling came into the room. but it was unlike any scourgling he’d seen before. it was small, standing only as high as his shin, but with a long, hard body of black chitin with no open sores. its feet made the ticking sounds as they hit the rock floor, and the ends looked as sharp as knives.

    as arthur watched, breath held, it moved to a bunch of ovoids that were nearby. it lifted half of its segmented body to stand on its hind legs and carefully poked at the ovoid shells with knife-like feet, antennae carefully touching all over the eggs.

    it’s tending to the eggs, arthur thought, fascinated and a little horrified at the same time.no?v(el)b\\jnn

    it wasn’t just the lack of sores—this scourgling was complete in a way that others weren’t. like this was an actual animal whereas every other he had seen was only a half-baked attempt at one.

    new types of scourglings appeared all the time, but . . . it looked like it belonged here as surely as the ovoids did.

    maybe this was a scourgling shape that had proven to be successful for one reason or another, and then had been further refined through years and generations.

    just as he was puzzling that out, another movement caught his eye. arthur turned to see part of a nearby shadow detached from the wall. it formed into a snakelike figure which slithered straight up to him.

    this was one of cressida’s slithering shadow senders.

    oh no, not now . . .

    the snake opened its mouth and in cressida’s voice yelled, “arthur! tell me you’re okay! where are you?”

    the nest tender twisted its upper body his way, and he saw that there was a tiny head at the front with two unblinking blue eyes, the same bioluminescent color as the pulsing veins above.

    a half dozen other nest tenders twisted to do the same.

    arthur had a moment to send a pulse of mana to cressida’s shadow snake to return it back to her with a message, “send brixaby.”

    then the closest nest tender jumped at him, all of its knife limbs bared.

    arthur tried to twist away, but he was a beat too slow. it landed on his shoulder, and it was only luck that the knife-like feet were stopped by his chainmail shirt.

    with a moment of thought, he detached a piece of shrapnel that was linked to his chainmail and, charging it with mana, shot it right at the creature.

    the impact flipped it away, but it ended up landing uncannily on its feet again.

    he fired another shrapnel piece, and the metal tinked right off of its hard shell.

    they were armored.

    at that moment, arthur realized that he was mostly unarmed. he’d had his knives out and circling around him idly when he was harvesting, just in case he came across another live scourgling. in the panic of being buried alive, he’d left most of his butcher knives behind.

    checking his personal space, he found two left—one with a warped blade, and one that was dull from overuse.

    arthur grabbed them anyway and used them as shields, knocking another nest tender away as it leapt at him again. but then two leapt at once.

    “where are the others?” arthur asked. “are they safe?”

    “i left them behind for expedience’s sake,” he said, “and yes, everyone escaped the cave-in except for you.” he gave arthur a baleful glare. “that was most concerning. don’t do it again.”

    arthur’s reply was interrupted when a second shadow snake slithered into being. it rose up, its tail curled behind it, and arthur could swear there was a bit of rebuke in its reptilian eyes.

    “arthur, what’s going on? please send a message back telling me you’re okay.”

    arthur winced. feeding the snake a bit of mana, he started to say that he was fine and to wait for them to return . . . but then realized that would be unfair. he had no right to expect her to sit there twiddling her thumbs. it was unproductive for her.

    “brixaby and i are fine, but we found a new area of the eruption site that we want to explore. i want you, horatio, and griff to keep harvesting in the main cavern. tell squish to collect sunny and fly you out when you’re done.” he grinned, hoping that she could hear it in his voice. “i don’t want you to leave a single shard behind.”

    he was certain the cave-in would ensure the scourglings would not come for them, but he wanted a second dragon on hand to get horatio and cressida out just in case.

    the snake slithered off into the shadows.

    meanwhile, he and brixaby started harvesting what they had left in the hatching cavern. and from the nest tenders.

    there were fewer clusters of ovoids here than there were dead scourglings in the main cavern, but the ovoid shards were of higher quality—at least the ones that were developed enough to create shards. all yielded uncommons. no rares, sadly. or cards.

    arthur looked around, taking in the still-pulsing veins and the remaining clusters.

    “i think this area hadn’t developed enough before the actual eruption started. it makes sense. scourglings have to come from somewhere. maybe . . .”

    he trailed off and looked around. there was no entrance or exit, though he noted the pulsing veins seemed to disappear upward and downward into the rocky soil.

    “scourglings might brew in caverns like this for months, even years before an eruption. i always thought they just spontaneously happened, but maybe that’s not the case.”

    he was half talking to himself, unsure that brixaby was listening to him. his dragon tended to get extremely single-minded when he was harvesting. but to his surprise, his brixaby grunted.

    “then there would have to be more nests. also, brewing nests like this would be an indication of an upcoming eruption. anyone with the proper seeking card would be able to search for one.”

    “and if we found them, maybe we could stop an eruption before it started!” arthur said excitedly.

    brixaby lifted his head and looked at him like he was missing the entire point.

    “or you can simply gather a wing of brown, earth-type dragons. order them to dig for them, and then harvest them before anybody else could realize there were riches below ground.”

    “that too,” arthur said with a laugh. then he sobered up. “but finding them in the first place would be a challenge. you’d need a powerful seeking card.”

    “such as call of the heart,” brixaby said smugly.

    he was right, of course. it seemed like that card’s limits only stopped at his imagination. then again, it was a legendary card.

    “i don’t think that we need brown dragons,” arthur said slowly. “or any card that moved earth. i just got here using my phase in, phase out. in fact, forget looking at nests elsewhere. i want to know if there are other nests near here.”

    he glanced again at the pulsing lines. the more he looked at them, the more they resembled veins, and quite a few seemed to disappear in and out of the walls. what if they provided a connection point between the nests? maybe they gave nutrients . . . or whatever it was that scourglings needed to grow.

    “more nests here?” brixaby’s head swiveled as he took a renewed look around. the blue light glinted in his eyes. “yes, search for it immediately. i will finish the harvesting—i believe it is the last cluster.”

    arthur grinned, closed his eyes, and sent out a query to call of the heart. sure enough, a map popped up and he saw separate nests scattered all over the immediate area underneath the eruption cone.

    there were a lot of them.