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Hoard of Hoarders
by anguiscantus1
Creacher Enjoyer
5 months ago
Raimen scales the mountain peak, honor-bound to retrieve his prince from the kidnapping dragon. Only, when he gets there, the beast doesn't seem keen on fighting to the death. Instead he wants to... brag about his collection?
Aaaand that's the final submission for Hypnovember! Five stories in four weeks. Whew. And would you believe that this took less time to write than the 4k-word one? The process was simple. First, listen to this song seven hundred thousand times. Step two get in a hypno mood. Step three slap those keys like they owe me money.
This is actualy my frist SFW story submission, heheh. So feel free to... read it at work? OSHA might give you a funny look, but they legally can't take this hypnosmut-adjacent story away without your consent. I am not a lawyer.
The text below contains everything except, like, the last 4 paragraphs of the story. Screen readers beware.
Raimen’s legs burned, throat stung, and back ached under the weight of his armor. On top of that, his eyes didn’t quite know what they were looking at.
He put both hands on the wooden bridge’s railing, leaning down to get a better look. Within the vast ravine below him a great Eastern dragon laid supine, wedged into the bottom of the valley by the sheer enormity of his form. Raimen wished he could parse the great beast’s expression, but the bronze-scaled dragon was as blissful as could be. It looked up towards the clouds, not so much watching them as resting its eyes atop them.
Raimen followed its gaze, watching the clouds swirl about the mountain’s peak. They were arranged unnaturally, as though the sky had been whipped into a whirlpool by something above the clouds.
Every so often, the beast below would writhe, and the land around them would burst with life.
Trees would grow. Grass would sprout. Roots would peek out from the mountain-top plateau into the ravine, living life-cycles in seconds as they grew and withered on the spot.
It would have been a closed system, a rotating wheel of life and death as plants died, withered, and sprouted offspring in the short span of minutes. Except for the monks.
Scattered all around the valley they made themselves busy with simple farming tools – hatchets for felling wood, sleds for carting logs, yokes to bear and pull the harvest. Once at the precipice, they handed off their haul to sorcerers at the ravine-side, who made the rapidly-aging wood into paper, then rectangles, then talismans. After painting crests of binding on the final product, they released each slip gingerly into the ravine, letting it flutter down until it touched the dragon’s body. There, they ignited, mystic energy funneled into whatever was driving the dragon to its laid-back stupor and spasms of mystic power.
Raimen wanted to linger. To take in this odd, transfixing sight.
But this was not the dragon the tiger had come to hunt.
He removed himself from his viewing at the bridge’s edge. The brief pause had let his body chase away the strain and sting of climbing up the mountainside. He continued along the path, crossing through the mountaintop forest, and every so often was surrounded by rapidly-aging branches littering the path. They touched down, they withered, and they returned to the soil.
The tiger had never known that there was a second dragon in the world.
Diligently, his legs carried him to the mountaintop palace’s entrance . Two gargantuan doors towered above him, metal knockers wrapped in knotted ropes that dangled down to the tiger’s height. Other than these metal doors, it seemed that the palace was internal to the stone of the peak. Balconies above him looked over the entranceway, and when looking left and right he could see others dotting the mountain’s circumference.
Why in the world did a dragon’s den need defenses sized for men?
As Raimen approached, he could no longer crane his head to view the doors in their entirety. The metal plates on the back of his helmet simply didn’t collapse far enough.
Undeterred, he walked forward until he could grab the dangling cord in his mighty bare-clawed grip. Dust fell from the rope’s length as it was disturbed for the first time in ages. Digging his feet into the ground, Raimen took step, after step, after step backwards. When the rope finally snapped taut it nearly slipped out of his claws, the sudden addition of the knocker’s weight like a violent tug in the door’s direction. But the tiger persisted. Step by step. Degree by degree, the knockers rose. And when his muscles screamed and the path faded and there was no more height he could pull from the rope, he released the both of them, letting them fall with a
that reverberated outwards like a shockwave. Leaves rustled in the forest behind him, falling from the trees and withering the moment they touched earth.
Raimen waited, hand on the base of his sword. He’d never trained to be a dragonslayer, but he feared his honor would try to make him one, right here and right now.
He waited.
He waited.
He–
“Are you with the jade delivery?”
Raimen hopped back, drawing and leveling his sword at the source of the baritone voice. It certainly sounded deep enough to belong to a dragon. But there was no rush of wind, no grand announcement, no procession of wyrmlings bowing their heads in reverence as a heavenly beast made itself known.
No. Instead, there was a single creature, Raimen’s height, who’d walked out of a servant door built into the bottom of the castle’s entrance. The tiger couldn’t tell what species it was – it had been bound, head to toe, in tightly-wound black fabric, and its head was covered in a featureless enclosure of flawless jade.
In its hands, it held a polished rendition of the dragon’s visage. No, wait. That wasn’t a rendition – it was moving. It was a mirror. A polished mirror that, instead of a reflection, showed the living face of the dragon lord somewhere deep within the palace. Behind his green-scaled head, Raimen could glimpse ornate tapestries and trimmings of gold lining whatever stone-hewed chamber he’d nestled himself in.
“Hmm. By the look on your face, you're obviously not,” continued the dragon. His deep, majestic voice sent shivers down Raimen’s spine. “Which is a shame. Clearly you’re the barbaric type, and quite evidently you’re here to subtract from my horde, rather than add to it.”
Raimen raised his hands and leveled his sword, stanced as though he could lunge forward and stab the dragon through the reflection. The sight tugged a smile at the corner of the dragon’s lips.
“Lord dragon,” began Raimen, treating the mirror as though it were as dangerous and holy as the beast itself. “Return Prince Hiyowa from imprisonment. As his preeminent knight, I am honor-bound to see his safe return.”
The dragon lifted his massive palm into view of the mirror, pressing it against his jaw. Strength enough to uproot mountaintops, claws sharp enough to score rivers into hardened stone.
“And which one is that?”
Raimen tightened his grip. This uninterested attitude was surely a trap to dull his instincts. “The rabbit prince, fur as white as fallen snow. Graceful of stature, pure of heart. Adorned in brilliant gold, his crown inset with rubies for wisdom.”
The dragon in the mirror looked about, as though he were taking stock of some storeroom around him. Out of the edges of the mirror, Raimen saw them. Dozens – no, hundreds of black-wrapped servants, similar to the one in front of him, lavishing the dragon lord in praise and care.
“Do forgive me. I always forget what my little jewels look like before I add them to the hoard. Although I do feel an echo of the taste of rubies bouncing around my tongue. When was it I would have eaten them? Within the year? The–”
“Ranryu!” Raimen thundered, stepping forward with the sound. Neither the creature holding the mirror nor the dragon within it flinched. “Under the new moon, you destroyed the imperial palace and snatched Prince Hiyowa from its chambers! Either return him unharmed, or I will cut my way to the heart of your den and carve my revenge from your beating heart!”
“Ah!” The dragon snapped his fingers, and Raimen swore he heard an echo of the sound thundering somewhere beyond the castle’s door. “There’s your problem. I am Gyakuo, not Ranryu.”
The statement was so absurd that it shocked Raimen into lowering his sword. “What?”
“You see, I recently–”
“Do not try to trick me, Flame Steward!” Raimen’s pounding heart so desperately wished he was facing down the real dragon, not this disarming screen. “There has not been a dragon in these lands besides Ranryu since the earliest records of our kingdom!”
“Then what do you call that squirming drake in the valley beneath the bridge?”
“I–!” Raimen’s fury thundered forth, but there were no words to uphold it. “That must have… You–”
“Like Torionji back there, Ranryu has recently been added to my collection. Along with all his holdings, territories, and gold.”
Raimen’s mouth fell agape. He couldn’t even find the words to begin asking questions.
“If your prince were among those holdings, then yes, he’s transferred up here to the peak with me. The half of my servants who aren’t dancing are kept with me here. To deal with my whims.” The dragon smirked, picking up one such black-clad jade-masked figure from outside the mirror’s view. The little thing dangled between his fingertips, and the dragon shook him left and right like he was showing off a figurine.
“Otherwise, though, I’m afraid you’ve climbed the wrong mountaintop. Perhaps you can go reproduce and task your heir with climbing the right one. You mortals love to do that kind of thing.”
No, he couldn’t be in the wrong place. He kept his brow furrowed and his senses sharp. “Our scryers, diviners, and occultists all conducted independent rituals. The results align – the prince is on this peak.”
“Then now, he’s a part of my hoard.” The dragon’s expression shifted, his tone and face letting creep a hint of hardened edge. “And the conversation ends there.”
Grunting, Raimen pushed his way past the servant and made for the little door. “If words will not sway you, then I will cut my way to the mountain’s peak and smash your minions’ masks. I will not stop until I find him”
The servant followed behind him, still carrying the dragon’s face and voice in the mirror. “You mortals love retribution, I know, I know. But still, I wouldn’t be so hasty in making such a vow.”
Raimen pushed open the servants’ entrance and stepped inside. Almost immediately, he had to raise a hand to his face to block the shine.
Marble, obsidian, silver, and gold. The interior of the palace was composed of hallways big enough to fit a massive dragon’s body, all hewn perfectly from repeating slabs of pricey minerals and accented with bands of polished metal. Fire danced in sconces placed evenly across the supporting pillars, their reflections in the accents glinting with perfect imitation. Streams of water flowed down the walls, down the halls, down the center gap of the central stone spiral that seemed to form the spine of the construction. More wealth than Raimen’s bloodline would see in three generations, all on display in a single glimpse.
And then there were the servants. Whereas the palace itself was brilliant, the servants were throngs of identical of matte black bodies and blank jade faces that walked in reverent silence along the corners of the halls. A hundred-dozen of them dotted the vista before Raimen, not a single one out of step or making so much as a rustle.
“If I give the word, the lot of them will try to stop you. I know full well you could best any single one of them in combat. They’re royalty, most of them. Gathered the world over for a place in my hoard. Artisans and laborers, now, to the last, but terrible in a brawl.”
The servant carrying the mirror walked around Raimen, letting the dragon look him in the eye. “On one hand, they might succeed through numbers alone. On the other, you might succeed – by striking down hundreds of innocent souls, any one of which could be your prince. Are you a gambling man, little one? Or was that the barest trace of discipline I detected at the gates?”
Raimen took shaky breath after shaky breath, analyzing the situation as impartially as he could. He wanted to fight. Every muscle in his body knew that tense situations like this called for an opening stroke of the sword, and a quick reaction to whatever came next.
But, begrudgingly, his head prevailed. He sheathed his sword, turning to the dragon’s mirror as he tried to keep the frustration from his face. “Why are you doing this? Why does a dragon need hostages?”
The dragon smiled, wide and eager. “Efficiency, little one. Allow me to explain. And servant? Walk our guest into the foyer.”
The servant did as it was told, turning and walking backwards so that Gyakuo could keep the tiger in his sights. Something tickled the edge of Raimen’s hearing. Some sort of low roar. A waterfall? No, it was more orderly than that. A… song? He pushed it out of his mind.
“At the core of every dragon is a hole they nurture in their heart. A little pit of misery that might be sated for a day, a month, a century, but never goes away for good. The more it eats, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more it wants to eat.”
Raimen let his gaze wander. What was this jade that all the servants were wearing on their heads? If he tore it off, could it break the dragon’s hold?
“For me? That thirst can no longer be slaked by things alone. No, no. Even if I move my palace to the center of the earth, letting all the world’s riches rain down upon me, I simply don’t have enough scales on my body to feel an inrush that would satisfy my soul.”
He was sure he could identify the prince if he could just lay eyes on him. His ears would give him away, or the lankiness of his body. The tiger could call his prince’s name, hoping for a response, but he doubted the dragon’s hold would be so weak.
“But lo, I came to a revelation. Does a king not own his knight’s land? Does an emperor not own the clothes on his servant’s back? Why should I try to satisfy myself with hoards, when I could satisfy myself with hoarders?”
Raimen blinked, then turned to the mirror. “Then you’re sating yourself… by proxy?”
“Absolutely! You’re quite attentive for someone who’s spending his time scheming to thieve.”
The tiger’s jaw set, and he tried to keep the red out of the tips of his ears.
“Should I steal a king, I steal his kingdom. Should I steal an artist, I steal his works, past and future. Should I steal a prince? Well. Someone important is bound to come looking for him. The potential is enough to tide me over.”
Gyakuo moved closer to his end of the connection, filling the mirror with his slitted eye.
“So tell me, little one. Take my craving to the extreme, just as time and instinct has done. Who is the richest of the rich? Who has the longevity to amass a hoard beyond measure? Who has the drive to add to it incessantly? Who would be the most efficient use of my time to take?”
Raimen stopped. He spoke, and the implications ran wild in the back of his mind. “Another dragon.”
“That’s it!” laughed Gyakuo, a hint of madness in his eye. “But you’re thinking too small, little one. Why just one? Why not other dragons, plural? Why not every dragon that your ilk has figured disappeared from history, plucked right from your folk tales and now lining my coffers with all of their riches in tow?”
The tiger’s head started spinning. No, surely that couldn’t be true. Not only did it mean the dragon in the castle’s heart was avaricious beyond conception, but it meant that the prince to which he’d pleaded his life was now some secondhand property, lost in the shuffle as this dragon pulled a new pile into his hoard. The thought would have been absurd were it not so alarming.
“Oh, dear. You look despondent. Here, raise your gaze. Let me raise your spirits with a proposition.”
Raimen’s attention snapped up.
The dragon continued. “I’ve been absolutely dying to show off my collection. Such a trip would lead you all over my territory, ending of course with the most brilliant treasure of all – me. Here with my glittering scales, staggering intellect, and beautiful voice, nestled warmly in the bosom of the mountain’s peak. I’m sure a strapping little thing like you could stage some daring rescue from there, yes? Surely you’d recognize your prince among my servants, and beat a hasty retreat with his scrambled little head in tow. As you travel my realm, I’ll make sure you encounter each and every one of my servants. All seven thousand, nine hundred, sixty-three of them.”
The tiger’s hands tightened. His righteous mission was not a coin to earn and spend.
“What if instead,” he said through teeth just shy of gritted, “I send for a poet? Or a scribe? Or, even, an accountant? Someone who could properly record the splendor of your hoard? Surely seeing your beauty through an appropriate lens would up the audience’s price? To, say, the prince himself?”
The dragon tapped his scaly chin. “Bargaining! How brave. I suppose I could wait, and let you fetch a soul suitable for describing my splendor. But who knows? It’s a long trek up the mountain. Last I checked, your kind hasn’t invented flying machines. And even then, my purse might not be so loose by the time you return. Or even beyond that, perhaps the morsel I plan to spend will be displaced. After all, if a servant falls into the aqueduct or gets crushed beneath my dragon’s coils, it can take decades for me to notice. You understand, right? Surely mortals find loose change in the furniture all the time.”
Raimen huffed. It had been a long shot.
“I think we both know by now that you aren’t a gambling man. So what do you say, little one? I know a tour over a week or so is a long stretch for a mortal, but surely listening to my captivating tales and charming voice would make the time fly by?”
The tiger balked. “A week? I’d starve! Well- wait. What do you feed the servants?”
“Draconic essence, converted into nourishment through their beautiful little masks. Do you like them? One of the little geniuses I earned a century ago came up with them. Quite comprehensive. Exceptionally pleasing to see en masse. Very difficult to remove, without either a lot of luck or a spare few months of time to burn.”
Raimen crossed his arms. “I will neither wear an ensorcelling mask nor allow myself to starve.”
The dragon laid his head down on the ground, and it was immediately swarmed by attentive servants polishing and brushing his scales.
“Fine. If we only hit the highlights, it would take, at most, a day. Do mortals starve in that timespan?”
Breath in, breath out. Raimen tried to steady himself. He had no idea how to gauge what he was getting into. “A day is… agreeable.”
“Oh, excellent!” The dragon quickly raised his head, flinging away the servants cleaning him. “I shall fetch my maps at once. If I only have a single day, I’ll need aides to plan your way~”
Raimen idly thumbed the hilt of his sword. “Will you be… giving the tour in person?”
“What? No.” The dragon was on the move, but the view in the mirror stayed a fixed distance from his face. “It is the month of polishing, and barely a fortnight in! Were I to meet you as I am right now, I’d be mortified. The servants will need to work triple-time to make me presentable by tomorrow.”
Using names the tiger didn’t recognize, the dragon gave quick, curt instructions to bring him to where the tour would start. Sighing, Raimen followed along.
Why, gods above, wasn’t this a problem he could face with a blade?For the first few hours of the tour, Raimen had started suspecting that instead of hoarding wealthy creatures, Gyakuo hoarded outrageous lies. Such-and-such engineer had invented a balloon that could let people soar through the air. Such-and-such king was actually the sire of the first of the land’s dynasties, his lifespan preserved by the elixir-nourishment of his mask. Such-and-such jester had made the God of Death Herself double over laughing. Gyakuo was incensed that he’d missed the moment, and vowed none would ever hear the jester’s jokes again. He wouldn’t even let the man reincarnate, on the off-chance he might miss yet another gut-busting witticism.
Seeing another dragon disabused him of the notion Gyakuo was lying.
If the wood-bearing dragon on the mountain pass had been a gem, this beast was an entire vein. Sapphire scales glittered in the pinprick lights that dotted the cavern in a descending spiral, the crystal-clear water giving clear passage to their light. Raimen had seen the empire’s warpships, bow to stern. Seen gorges in the earth, end to end, from on mountaintops. The creature below dwarfed their length by leaps and bounds,
The viewing platform the servant led Raimen to was Gods-knew-how-high above the massive pool beneath them. The water-filled inverted dome, like the rest of the palace, had been carved straight out of the bowels of the mountain, flawless in its construction. The only signs the sight below was flesh and blood and stone and water, rather than a massive painting, were the occasional stirring of the beast in its stupor and the scent of wet stone that permeated the air.
“Your face,” spoke the dragon, “is almost priceless.”
Raimen was too awestruck to worry about his dignity.
“Suisen, here, was the first of the elemental dragon lords I added to my collection. It’s quite the funny story – it all started when I decided, on a whim, to sink a fleet of marauders. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a chest of gold spill off the sinking ships and filter down into the sea. I was very fond of gold at the time, you see, and knew that I absolutely had to have it.”
The beast’s face was calm, jaw agape and eyes lidded. Unlike the wood-bearing drake, her movements were soft and subtle, like they’d been muffled by eons upon eons of fine-tuned subdual. A scale shifted here or there, changing the way the light reflected. A slow breath exited her mouth, painting distortions on the water’s surface.
“She stopped me. She was so adamant that all the sea’s treasures were hers to keep. Awed me with tales of deep-sea trenches filled to the brim with glittering gold. Said that if sunlight were allowed to penetrate the deep reaches of the sea, the gleam of her hoard could set a fleet ablaze. I asked her, then, if I could just have the gold that had fallen from the ship. I told her it was such a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things that surely it wouldn’t cause her any heartache.”
That rumble, the one from the foyer, was easier to hear here. It was definitely a song. Something upbeat like a festival tune, and the percussion was so strong that it was surely the sound of a hundred wood-sandalled feet stomping in unison. It was constantly distracting him. As though the dragon’s rambling wasn’t already hard to endure.
“But that line never works on dragons. Let that be a lesson to you. Because it certainly was to me. Up until around five hundred years ago, I still had faint traces of the scar she tore into my face for daring to say it to her. Oh, I was incensed. But like you, little one, I had the presence of mind to not pick a fight I couldn’t win. I backed off. But the desire for those few hundred pieces of gold never left my mind.”
Rocks tumbled from under Raimen’s foot into the pool below. By the time the pebbles hit the surface, they’d grown so small in the tiger’s sight that the waves they made were completely imperceptible.
“Don’t fall in, little one.”
Raimen started, realizing his weight was dangerously close to passing over his leading foot. He’d almost stepped right off the edge!
He stumbled backwards onto the viewing platform, falling on his side with the force of his movement. The servant diligently walked Gyakuo’s face over so that it could loom over him.
“What,” the tiger asked, propping up on one elbow before moving to stand, “is that song?”
The dragon in the mirror beamed. “Ah, do you like it? Sadly, there’s no vein of jade the world over to fit across a dragon’s muzzle. I’d know – I’ve looked. So, instead, to keep them docile, something else is needed. Something high, high up on the pyramid of desires, something abstract and ever-shifting. Something impossible to become bored with.”
Returning to his feet, Raimen very, very cautiously returned to looking down at the water dragon. “A song…?”
“Not just a song. An alluring song. An obliviating song. A performance derived from the churning sounds of sea sirens and the memory-eating dances of playful spirits. A rhythm that insists upon itself, endlessly. Tripartite words, rhythm, and dance that each individually ensnare the senses, together forging a collar that weighs down even the highest-held heads.”
The dragon pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. “It never affects my servants. The mask blocks it out. To you, though? I’m not quite sure what it’ll do. Surely, though, if you love your prince as much as you claim, it won’t be an issue.”
Taking a deep breath, Raimen centered himself. A little bit of sensation elsewhere, like curling his toes or thumbing along the hilt of his sword, was enough to keep the enchantment at bay. Or at least, it felt like that.
“Don’t worry about me. I merely didn’t know to be vigilant for that.”
“Oh, don’t think you’ve won just because you’re fine up here.” The dragon glanced back down to his captured kin. “This chamber only conducts the music, not the rhythm or the dance. On top of that, sound travels much better in water than air. Down in her little bowl, our dear friend is receiving tenfold the sounds of plucking strings and twirling lyrics that you and I receive up here.”
Raimen huffed, once again stroking the patterned hilt of his sword. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
After a long, long time letting Gyakuo bask in his victory over the Ocean Keeper, they made for the next area.
The worst part about Gyakuo’s domain was that it was intended for dragons in flight – a singular dragon – and nobody else. Raimen wasn’t being led down maintained walkways to get from one point to another. He was crawling through gaps between stones, walking along buttresses that spanned chamber ceilings, and even swimming through the decorative aqueducts that spanned over some otherwise-uncrossable chasms. Even Gyakuo was surprised at some of the routes the servant led them down, and bid his other servants to fix the various gaps in the masonry that their trek pointed out to him.
“But won’t that make it more cumbersome for the servants to move around?”
“If it’s that much of a bother, they can raise a complaint to me.”
“Do you allow them to complain?”
“No.”
All along the path, Raimen kept a watchful eye on the servants they passed. He kept himself always at the ready, one step away from knocking out the servant carrying Gyakuo’s mirror, grabbing the veiled form of the prince, and making a desperate escape. His mind mapped every nook and cranny they crossed, and at every possible point he tried to evaluate and re-evaluate the quickest possible route out.
No such opportunity presented itself. And not every species was easy to tell at a glance. For some, it was trivial. Elephants and rhinoceros and eels and fish. But for other species, rabbits and cats and dogs and raccoons and foxes, they’d all been squished into similar shapes. It was only once he’d gotten exceedingly close, or caught them moving in front of a light that pierced their fabric cocoon, that Raimen could even start to guess what species some of them were.
“Keep those wandering eyes to yourself, little one. You promised me a full tour, and I’m being very generous with what I consider your full attention.”
“Surely you can’t be treasuring our conversation that much. I’m a man of few words.”
“I know! Isn’t it grand? It gives mine more room to breathe.”
Every time Gyakuo came upon a servant of some renown, he’d stop the lot of them and Raimen would be regaled with that servant’s holdings and accomplishments. Raimen found himself surprised – he figured that Gyakuo would zero in on figures with material wealth and royal status. But there were artists, philosophers, performers, and even skilled game-players within his hoard.
“And has this cook that you’ve captured ever actually made you a meal?”
“No. But I’ll be damned if the world will be made richer at my expense by his expertise.”
It remained that way until they came upon the vault of the Earth Keeper.
While most of the palace was clean-hewn from the mountain’s interior, this place was much rawer and rough. Juts of ore veins rich in minerals and gems shot out of the ground like spears piercing the mountain from outside. The usually-level floor was marred by peaks and valleys, and sometimes crags large enough for men of Raimen’s size to fall into. The lack of perfection was perplexing. Perhaps, like the dragon out front, the Keeper caused earth to grow whenever he spasmed in his stupor?
And what a stupor it was. Similar to the Water Keeper, he was laid out on his back, sat in the center of a great hollow chamber with lights surrounding his supine form. Unlike the wall-mounted lanterns of Suisen’s chamber, though, this was lit by dangling prisms of opaque, mirror-shine metals. Raimen was no geologist, but he knew silver, gold, and bronze when he saw them. He didn’t know, though, were the strange, ocean-blue metal or the chalk-white metal or the pearlescent metal that formed in fractal squares.
The song didn’t permeate here. Not like it did in the castle’s main throughways, and certainly not like in the previous chamber. No, here it was the rhythm.
Loud. Pounding. Incessant. Syncopated. Raimen’s head felt like a vault, and someone was trying to break into it from above. Within a few minutes, he had to force himself to be irritated by the song, or else–
“What’s the matter, little one? You’re tapping along on the hilt of your sword.”
Raimen slid his hand down onto the scabbard, keeping his grip firm and his fingers still. “I’m not.”
“Hah! For what it’s worth, I think you’d make a very diligent dancer. Even wrapped in cloth, I bet I could spot those muscles from the other side of the palace.”
Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap–
Raimen shook his head, releasing his scabbard from his grip. “You’re using the same performance on both of these dragons, yes?”
“More than them. We’ll be visiting the main chamber next. I’m eager to hear Ranryu’s review.”
“And you seem to enjoy it when things are… meticulous. Parallel. Alike in as many ways as you can manage.”
“What gives you that impression?”
Raimen swept his hand across the passage they’d just come from. “The perfectly-flush stonework in the main hall. The symmetry of the palace’s overall construction. The way you render your servants as anonymous and identical as fabric can achieve.”
Gyakuo smiled wryly. “I’m constantly impressed by how many details you manage to catch between frisking my servants.”
“So why,” Raimen asked, ignoring that, “is the wooden dragon at the base of the plateau not entranced in a similar way?”
“Ah! My greatest failure as an aesthetician. I hate to say it, little one, but there wasn’t always a unifying vision for my hoard. I had to overcome a great deal of draconic instinct. The natural form of a hoard is a pile – a disorganized heap of bits and bobs whose job is to impress through volume alone.”
At the urging of the servants at his side, Gyakuo rolled on his side and let himself be propped up on a massive wooden support, into which the servants entered and extended their brushes and polish through gaps like arrow slits.
“But any idiot can make a pile. A pile of sunken gold, a pile of mined gems, a pile of metal, a pile of clouds. After seeing the state of my catch out front, and imagining a half-dozen dragons all sharing that fate, I was mortified. I was no better at hoarding than the hoarders I’d hoarded! And that simply wouldn’t do. An under-appreciated facet of envy, little one, is that it feels better to surpass than just to take.”
Raimen frowned. He’d hoped the dragon would have let something slip about the structure of his palace, the mechanism of the performance, or a neurosis of his hoarding that the tiger could have used to make a distraction while he escaped.
“Do you have the Keepers of all five elements in your thrall?”
“I do indeed. The crown jewels of my collection.” He smiled at that, beaming with self-satisfaction. “You’ll meet them all before the day is through.”
The mortal world, to Raimen’s knowledge, only knew of the one keeper. The flame keeper. The one he’d mistaken this new dragon for. After seeing the drowned dragon called the Water Keeper, he’d figured the pattern would hold.
“So what will you do now, once the hunger to hoard dragons returns again?”
“A very important question, and one that I need to answer very quickly. I only have about a century or two before I’m too hungry to come home empty-handed. Why do you ask? Are you suggesting a solution?”
“I’m suggesting,” Raimen said, once again stopping his foot from tapping to the beat, “that perhaps you ought to get used to the feeling of letting treasure go, so that you can feel the excitement of capturing it once again. Start small, perhaps? Maybe a prince?”
The dragon laughed, and for a moment Raimen swore his cadence overlapped with the even measures of the stomping rhythm.
“I should kill you! Kill you right where you stand for daring to suggest such a thing to me!” His laugh petered out, and he blinked a tear out of his eye. “Oh… heh, oh little one. I ought to kidnap a prince or two more if they keep such hilarious knights on retainer.”
Raimen grunted, instinctively pulling the hilt of his sword until the base of the blade cleared the sheath.
“Oh! The tiger bares his fang.”
“Every time I learn about how your mind works, I find myself concluding that slaying you would be nothing but a boon to the world.”
“As you should! I feel the same towards all the creatures I envy.”
Taking a deep breath, Raimen sheathed his sword with a click.
“I have no envy for you. Only pity, and disdain."
“Hmm. I see, I see. Servant?” The dragon looked up, addressing the creature carrying his mirror. “Change of plans. Instead of the air pen, show our friend the showroom next.” His gaze returned to Raimen.
“As much as I enjoy your adorable belligerence, little one, there’s only so much I allow before I need to shut your mouth for you.”
“Do your worst.”
Raimen stomped out of the room, step by step by step-step-step.
He, the servant, and the image of Gyakuo waited before the entrance to the lower reaches of the performance hall. From the shape of the exterior, Raimen guessed it was a massive, hollow cylinder. The audience sat in the middle, he presumed.
He knew why they were waiting. He knew the structure of the song by now. The lead singer inside was on the second chorus, after which the music would drop out for a vocal solo. Then the dancers would join their voices in for a chorus, and finally the whole band would put forth their final, bombastic measures. Then it would all repeat.
“Whatever’s inside there,” mused Raimen, “is proof-positive that mankind can subdue dragons.”
“Oh, please.” Gyakuo rolled his eyes, where a trio of servants were scrubbing the scales of his brow. “The complexities involved in crafting it would snap your mortal mind in two. Every seeming flaw is a solved problem in disguise. It is a work of world-class sensory engineering. Comparatively, mankind is adding tally marks together in the mud.”
The servant opened the door, and stepped inside with Raimen. The tiger took in as much as he could before the music began again.
He was right – Ranryu, Keeper of Fire, was laid out on a massive earthen outcropping, held upright by the strength of the stone as he stared, dumbfounded, upwards. Around him in an ascending spiral, dancers waited as one performance ended and the other waited to begin. On a circular outcropping circling his head, the musicians waited for their prescribed twenty-four rest beats. Koto, biwa, ceremonial drums. The singer was a songbird, wearing a headdress that dangled down to her waist and that guided Raimen’s eyes along her exposed shoulders, loose sleeves, and golden obi.
Pink petals began drifting from on high, and the first note accompanied them. Already, he was out of time.
Hardwood clappers led in the start of the next performance, gaps between the clacking growing shorter and shorter beat by beat. Lights from up above were filtered through colored lenses, bathing the lead singer in colors specifically crafted to accent the servant-black and cherry-red in her clothes. She, and only she, wore no jade.
“Where rosy petals fall
I’ll be dancing through them all
Eat your care and drink your fill
Not asleep, but lying still
Where rosy petals lie
I’ll be dancing until you die
Stomach filled and worries drowned
As you sink down to the ground-”
One-two-three-four. One lit the lower rings of dancers. Two toggled the colored beams, making the lead vocalist momentarily disappear. Three lit the upper reaches, showing a spiral of diligent dancers that stretched beyond sight. Four sent spotlights down on the drummers, showing their power and control as percussion led into the instrumental measures before the first verse.
Raimen grunted, and began to climb.
He had strict instructions not to disturb the performance. Deathly strict. The look in Gyakuo’s eye felt like it would have killed a lesser man. Still, the desire lingered in the tiger’s mind. Walk a half-story up, dive from the height of the dragon’s chest, and plunge his sword into its scales. Wake it from its stupor through pain. Run back down the main hall as the chaos unfolded from there.
But, no. He had to check every dancer here. To make sure this wasn’t where the prince had ended up. The rabbit had never been a dancer, but… Raimen doubted Gyakuo cared about that.
Step by step, he ascended. His path was the corridor that they used to place dancers along the upward-winding spiral. It passed behind each slot, allowing the dancers’ fallible mortal bodies to be yanked from sight and replaced before Ranryu even noticed something had happened.
Winding, he climbed, ever-onwards. The singer’s voice slowly rotated beneath him, staying stationary while he corkscrewed up. Conversely, the dancers were startlingly uniform. Even though they were arranged into a spiral, they were stratified in their performance by their elevation in Ranryu’s sight. While one strata flourished, the other stayed steady. Their fabric veils had been allowed to droop, now flicking this way and that to accentuate the movement of their bodies. The lighting in the chamber had somehow been rigged to hide the fur on their bodies and instead accentuate the bright colors of their custom veils.
Good. That would make it easier to spot the prince. Ears. Ears. He was looking for the rabbit’s ears.
Raimen hated this part. It followed every chorus except the very first.
The rabbit’s head was spinning. His hands were… on the ground. Dammit. He’d fallen to a knee.
He pushed off the wooden floor, relying on pure bodily instinct to keep himself moving. He had to move. He couldn’t stop here. He couldn’t look away; he had to find the prince. He couldn’t stuff his ears; he had to know when the next onslaught of words would assail him. Right now, the song was transitioning from the first chorus to the second verse. He had some time.
This spiral ramp was a mountain, and the words were the bitter wind.
“Heavenly soul, delight! Dancing ever-feeds the eyes
Salty, sour, sweet, and hearty - there’s no taste it cannot be
Candied colors drip to your tongue from on your lips
For your body is a temple, and we’re each a devotee-”
His eyes watered. He blinked the tears away. Even the spaces between measures and the breaths between words were valuable time he had to take advantage of. Step by step. Floorboard by floorboard. Every step he took, the servant followed close behind. For once in his life, Gyakuo remained completely silent.
Raimen braced for the chorus.
Raimen braced for the worst part of the chorus.
The song was like tinnitus, ringing loudly in his head as he lifted his torso from the ground. He wiped his face with the back of his armored hand, drool having run down his mouth while he was laid out.
He looked out across the dancers. No prince. Ears, but no frame. Frame, but no ears. Had to keep moving. Had to check the next dancer. Then the next. Then the next. Then the next.
Just as he recovered, the bridge hit him like a bursting dam.
Manageable. This part was manageable, barely manageable. Slower-paced and focused on the singer’s vocal performance. If Raimen were a dragon, he supposed the lyrics would be tempting. But a dalliance was the last thing he wanted right now. He hoped to high Heaven it would stay that way until he reached the chamber’s peak.
Raimen flinched as the dancer in front of him broke out singing, along with all the others who filled the seemingly-endless cylinder with song.
“Where rosy petals fall
We’ll be dancing through them all
Eat your care and drink your fill
Not asleep, but lying still
Where rosy petals lie
We’ll be dancing until you die
Stomach filled and worries drowned
As you sink down to the ground-”
Ears. Find ears. His own ears. Traitorous ears. He covered them with his paws, pressed himself as far away from the band as he could, ripped bits of his undershirt and stuffed them inside. Nothing helped.
He began losing bits of himself. Like tossing coins from his wallet to distract a thief. He started stepping in time. It was easier. He started stomping when the dancers stopped, using the firm footing and powerful motion to travel up in leaps and bounds. It was easier.
Raimen blinked himself awake, pink petals resting on his cheek. Awake? Had he fallen asleep? He looked down at himself. His torso was bare, stripped of armor. His arms and legs ached in unfamiliar ways. His breath was haggard, and he could practically see the steam in it.
Oh, Gods, had he been dancing?
He could no longer trust his body to–
Darkness. Flashing lights. Dizzy head. Feeling of wooden floorboards on his cheek. Biwa going wild down below, dancers giving their all. The smell of sweat. No ears in sight.
That was it. That was the end of the song.
In twenty-four rests, it would all begin again. Every few minutes. One after another. Pounding against his head, his heart, and his soul.
Forever.Gasping, panting, soaked in sweat, breath haggard, limbs shaking, body begging for relief, Raimen dragged himself out of the top of the performance chamber.
When the door behind him closed, he practically lost consciousness. He’d given up so much of himself to the song to retain the ability to move. Now, without it, it was like his strings had been cut. He was limp. Weak. Breathing hurt. Thinking hurt. Just the thought of the chamber interior was enough to spike his heartrate and make him sweat.
The tiger felt himself rattle, barely-conscious and completely helpless. Was he on a cart, all of the sudden? It didn’t matter. He wanted to rest so badly. But he couldn’t. He had to do… something. Something in the central chamber. Not the performance chamber! No, no, no. He never had to go back in there again.
He let the whatever-it-was beneath him ferry him along. It barely ever clattered, given how flawlessly Lord Gyakuo’s floors were. He liked that. He respected that.
Raimen bit his tongue. No! That thought was… bad, somehow. But… he thought that Lord Gyakuo might like it, regardless.
“Little one, you made it!”
The cheerful, booming voice got Raimen to raise his head. He was… here. There. In the room he’d glimpsed in the mirror. The greatest sports arenas and councils of government he’d ever seen may as well have been broom closets compared to it. Its floor was inset by a concentric, lowering set of octagons, crossed at the cardinals by smooth ramps. He was on such a ramp, slowly being carried Lord Gyakuo’s way.
Somewhat ceremoniously, he was deposited on the lowest level of the area, propped up against the stone-hewn shelf behind him to give him a modicum of dignity. In his posture, at least. His body was a mess. The tiger’s sweat-mated fur was whipped into all sorts of unkempt shapes, his spent muscles left his limbs to dangle limply from his joints, and he couldn’t even find the strength of will to shut his mouth.
“Sooo, how do I look~?”
Gliding through the air like an eel through water, only infinitely more majestic, Gyakuo began to spin around in the air. In the shape of a circle. An oval. An infinity.
“The servants cleaned me up quite well, don’t you think? For a rush job, the results are absolutely splendid, wouldn’t you agree?”
The words left his mouth as easily as his heart beat. “Yes, Lord Gyakuo. Your innate magnificence is magnified tenfold by the work of your diligent servants.”
Servants. Right. That’s why he was here. He had to find… rabbit. Ears. Prince. His prince. The prince to which he’d devoted his knighthood. Prince… Hiyo… something.
“And you’ve finally learned to speak properly! I’m so glad we changed the route. Oh, and by the way, just to seal my end of the deal…”
Lord Gyakuo reached forward, pinching his clawtips together and lifting Raimen by the scruff of the neck. He held him upwards, letting him look up through the room’s glass ceiling.
Up above, a teal dragon endlessly chased its tail. Its motion was perfectly circular, whipping the clouds brought along by its motion into a whirlpool that rippled out to span the sky. The pattern looked familiar to Raimen, but accessing the memory was beyond him at the moment.
“Do try and pull your brains back together. Hazard a guess at who that is, up there?”
“The… the Sky Keeper.”
“Well done! Perhaps I ought to have been a bit playful in the performance chamber. Instructed my servant ahead-of-time to drag you down a few stories whenever you blacked out. It seems like you could have handled the extra time just fine.”
He wasn’t fully parsing the words, but the shadow of the concept summoned by them was terrifying.
“I know you can’t see it with your tiny little eyes, but I’ve affixed a scrying screen to the back of his body. Very similar to the little trinket I’ve been using to talk to you, as a matter of fact. Once proud, once majestic, he now chases his tail like a common dog, perpetually moving and unable to close the gap. Here’s another question. Do your best to answer correctly – this is a warmup for what’s to come. What do you think I’m showing on that screen?”
The answer jumped to the forefront of Raimen’s mushed-up mind. “The dancers.”
“Correct again! As a reward, have some good news.”
Lord Gyakuo returned to where he’d lifted him. The dragon loomed overtop him, shadowing the natural light from the noon sky above.
Wait. It had been afternoon when Raimen had knocked on the door at the front of the palace. Was it… tomorrow?
“I found your bunny prince among my collection. In fact, I’ve already called him to this room!”
Raimen lifted his head from the stone, weakly casting his gaze about. Black cloth. Black cloth. Black cloth. Black cloth. These figures, the servants, all the servants who had been dutifully polishing Lord Gyakuo’s scales for the last day. Prince Hi… Hiyo… wa! Hiyowa! He was here!
“Usually, pride demands that I demand you fight me, fang and claw, to take him from my hoard. But I don’t think that’d be much sport, given your current state…”
The very tip of Lord Gyakuo’s claw came and tapped the side of the tiger’s head, nearly sending him tumbling.
“And we’re such good friends, now. You deserve a fairer deal. So! How about this?”
Lord Gyakuo raised his hand and snapped, the sound making Raimen jump. The servants, meanwhile, abandoned their current tasks and formed into neat rows surrounding Lord Gyakuo and Raimen. Everywhere he looked, black and jade. Black and jade. Black and…
“You dedicated your life and honor to your prince, if I recall correctly. So it should be easy for you to pick him out of a crowd. Don’t you agree?”
Raimen nodded, weakly. The motion made his head spin, and he went to fall, but he was caught by the servant still carrying Lord Gyakuo’s mirror.
“Good, good. Here’s the deal. If you can pick your prince out of this crowd, you’re free to go with him. There’s no guarantee I won’t come and snatch him again once the two of you return to whatever earthly kingdom you crawled out of, but I’ll at least wait until the two of you get home. After all – we’ve had such fun together! Wouldn’t you want to see me again?”
Raimen didn’t answer that. He was scared of what he might reply.
“I’ll even be exceedingly generous.” He unfurled his four-fingered claw, raising three. “Three tries. You get three tries to pick your prince out of the servants assembled here. Win, and walk out. As I’ve so generously described. Lose? Well. I think we both know the perfect place to send you.”
Raimen shivered, and fresh sweat beaded on his forehead.
“Do you accept?”
What choice did he have? What was he going to do, slay the dragon in his state? Did he even have his sword? He didn’t even bother glancing down to check.
“Deal.”
“Excellent! Oh, what fun. The suspense. The drama. The weighing of your honor on my finely-crafted scale. Go on, pick, pick! We’re all dying to know your choices.”
Three choices. He had three chances to get this right. He, with great difficulty, staggered to his feet.
“I can pick you up by the scruff again, if you can’t find it in yourself to stand.”
Raimen ignored that. And he was happy that he could. Some amount of yesterday’s belligerent tiger was still holding the line.
He cast his eyes over the jade masks, which all looked blankly ahead and reflected the room around them. Try as he might, he couldn’t discern anything from them. Not one servant deviated so much as a hair’s breadth from gazing straight ahead. He forced himself to imagine it – his prince, the snow-white rabbit. Trapped in that thing, probably being made to suckle at some perverse tap of mutative elixir. What would that look like?
He walked the room. Slowly, tediously, laboriously, he walked it. He kept a running tally of the most likely candidates. It seemed his initial plan – the one that felt like a lifetime ago, wouldn’t have worked. Not a single servant in the room had a rabbit’s ears sticking out from their black fabric wrap. It was good that he’d examined everyone in the performance chamber, though. Even though he hadn’t found the prince in there.
“You,” he said, laying a hand on a servant’s cloth-wrapped shoulder from behind. “Stand in the middle.”
Lord Gyakuo turned to him, brow furrowed. “Do you dare think that you can order my hoard around?”
Raimen raised his gaze. Weak, but defiant. “Do you think you can only win if I can’t?”
The dragon took a moment to ponder, then gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “Fine. All of you, stand where he tells you to. For now.”
Raimen nodded, and returned to his work.
“But no more touching. That’s cheating.”
Raimen nodded, again. From now on, he walked in front of the servants, rather than behind.
“You, stand in the middle.”
“You, stand in the middle.”
“You, stand in the middle.”
“And you, stand in the middle.”
Four candidates. Raimen reached the final servant, and he’d picked out four candidates.
He returned to the middle. Reviewing his choices, he looked them up and down, trying his damndest to hold his prince’s body in his mind’s eye.
He pointed to the servant on his right.
“You, at the end. Go back to where you were.”
The servant returned. Raimen lifted his gaze to the dragon.
“These three.”
“Oooh, so exciting~!” The dragon trilled, lowering his hover as close as he could to the ground. “I’ve never had birthday presents to open, so this is the closest I think I’ll ever get. May I do the honors, little one?”
Raimen didn’t even know what he was asking, specifically, but he nodded in agreement.
Like an excited child, Lord Gyakuo reached down and tapped the jade of the first servant with the tip of his claw. The verdant stone lost its luster, and its verdant glow transferred upwards into the great dragon’s scales.
The first helmet fell, and it was immediately obvious it wasn’t Prince Hiyowa. For one, his fur was the wrong shade. For two, he had a spot on his shoulder. For three, he was a dog.
“Oh! So close. Servant, stand aside, if you please.”
After reaching down to fetch his mask, the servant obeyed. Once back in position, he manually held the jade to his face, awaiting further orders.
Lord Gyakuo tapped again, wriggling his fingers beforehand to add a little pizazz to the proceedings.
The second helmet fell. This one was, at least, a rabbit. A harlequin, his black and white fur divided right down his center-line.
“Getting closer, little one, getting warmer. That’s half of a white rabbit, at least. You’re on pace to get it by number three. Now, for the grand finale!”
Lord Gyakuo tossed the servant aside with a flick of his wrist. He was caught by the innermost line of assembled servants, and returned to his post like nothing had happened.
Drawing it out, reeeally drawing it out, Lord Gyakuo tapped the third and final mask.
It fell. Rabbit ears rose from the loosened veils’ interior. A snow-white pelt shimmered in the midday sun, and the servant raised his head to reveal…
A mole on his neck. One that Prince Hiyowa didn’t have.
Raimen immediately set the last of his energy to panicking. Should he… should he lie? Just say that this was his prince? He’d be abducting a stranger and leaving his prince to eternal servitude… but that was better than walking away with nothing right?
“Would Prince Hiyowa,” Lord Gyakuo boomed, raising his voice and putting a hand to his chest, “please step forward?”
Nothing. Nobody in the room moved. Not that Raimen could see. But then…
No.
He heard a shuffling beside him. The servant holding the mirror stepped forward, putting his heels together with an unmistakable
on the stone floor.
Lord Gyakuo’s face bloomed in delight to an extent that Raimen had never seen before. “Oh, Fate is such a capricious god, isn’t She?”
The dragon reached down, disengaging the jade mask. The servant pulled it off. Rabbit ears rose from the loosened veils’ interior. A snow-white pelt shimmered in the midday sun, and the servant raised his head to reveal…
Prince Hiyowa. Eyes lidded, expression blank, attention on his dragon lord.
“What a shame! For all your talk of dedicating your heart and soul, you couldn’t see that your liege was right beside you form the moment you arrived! Oh, how embarrassing. You, disgraced knight, are our unlucky contestant for the day. But don’t fret. The consolation prize is fantastic! If I do say so myself.”
Reaching down with two fingers, Lord Gyakuo spun the prince around. With a little flick, he brought the rabbit’s mask up, and he dutifully held it in place.
“A lifetime of fulfilling work.”
No. No, he had to grab the prince and run, now.
“Physical fitness. Extended lifespan. Never suffering hunger or thirst.”
Lord Gyakuo pushed the prince forward. He strode. His steps were... Familiar. Not familiar to the life Raimen had lived before. It was… a step. A step. A step-step-step.
Fear and fatigue made it impossible to move.
“And nothing but quality time, together with your prince, at the endless performance. Why, you ought to be thanking me!”
The mask pressed forward, and Raimen didn’t have the strength to turn his head. His world went dull green. His mind went blank. A jut of the stone pressed itself into his mouth, and as the color bloomed in the mask around him, he felt a trickle of elixir trickle into his mouth.
“Stand.”
He stood. His body wouldn’t dare disobey Lord Gyakuo.
“Turn.”
He turned. His mind was nowhere near as strong, or wise, or powerful as a dragon’s. How could he have ever hoped to compete?
“And march yourself back into the performance chamber. Once inside… do as you will. I have faith you’ll make yourself useful.”
The tiger felt a great rush of wind. Lord Gyakuo was positioning around him. Coiling. Letting the universe know that this one was now his property.
“And Prince? Fetch yourself new mask. Join this little one in dance. He seems quite fond of you, after all.”
He didn’t need to turn his head to know that the rabbit would obey. The tiger simply walked. Stepped. Stepped. Step-step-stepped.
Green enclosed his vision, but he knew where to go. His naked torso begged for the touch of a colored veil, and legs were already thrumming with energy. ...
Aaaand that's the final submission for Hypnovember! Five stories in four weeks. Whew. And would you believe that this took less time to write than the 4k-word one? The process was simple. First, listen to this song seven hundred thousand times. Step two get in a hypno mood. Step three slap those keys like they owe me money.
This is actualy my frist SFW story submission, heheh. So feel free to... read it at work? OSHA might give you a funny look, but they legally can't take this hypnosmut-adjacent story away without your consent. I am not a lawyer.
The text below contains everything except, like, the last 4 paragraphs of the story. Screen readers beware.
Hoard of Hoarders
Raimen’s legs burned, throat stung, and back ached under the weight of his armor. On top of that, his eyes didn’t quite know what they were looking at.
He put both hands on the wooden bridge’s railing, leaning down to get a better look. Within the vast ravine below him a great Eastern dragon laid supine, wedged into the bottom of the valley by the sheer enormity of his form. Raimen wished he could parse the great beast’s expression, but the bronze-scaled dragon was as blissful as could be. It looked up towards the clouds, not so much watching them as resting its eyes atop them.
Raimen followed its gaze, watching the clouds swirl about the mountain’s peak. They were arranged unnaturally, as though the sky had been whipped into a whirlpool by something above the clouds.
Every so often, the beast below would writhe, and the land around them would burst with life.
Trees would grow. Grass would sprout. Roots would peek out from the mountain-top plateau into the ravine, living life-cycles in seconds as they grew and withered on the spot.
It would have been a closed system, a rotating wheel of life and death as plants died, withered, and sprouted offspring in the short span of minutes. Except for the monks.
Scattered all around the valley they made themselves busy with simple farming tools – hatchets for felling wood, sleds for carting logs, yokes to bear and pull the harvest. Once at the precipice, they handed off their haul to sorcerers at the ravine-side, who made the rapidly-aging wood into paper, then rectangles, then talismans. After painting crests of binding on the final product, they released each slip gingerly into the ravine, letting it flutter down until it touched the dragon’s body. There, they ignited, mystic energy funneled into whatever was driving the dragon to its laid-back stupor and spasms of mystic power.
Raimen wanted to linger. To take in this odd, transfixing sight.
But this was not the dragon the tiger had come to hunt.
He removed himself from his viewing at the bridge’s edge. The brief pause had let his body chase away the strain and sting of climbing up the mountainside. He continued along the path, crossing through the mountaintop forest, and every so often was surrounded by rapidly-aging branches littering the path. They touched down, they withered, and they returned to the soil.
The tiger had never known that there was a second dragon in the world.
Diligently, his legs carried him to the mountaintop palace’s entrance . Two gargantuan doors towered above him, metal knockers wrapped in knotted ropes that dangled down to the tiger’s height. Other than these metal doors, it seemed that the palace was internal to the stone of the peak. Balconies above him looked over the entranceway, and when looking left and right he could see others dotting the mountain’s circumference.
Why in the world did a dragon’s den need defenses sized for men?
As Raimen approached, he could no longer crane his head to view the doors in their entirety. The metal plates on the back of his helmet simply didn’t collapse far enough.
Undeterred, he walked forward until he could grab the dangling cord in his mighty bare-clawed grip. Dust fell from the rope’s length as it was disturbed for the first time in ages. Digging his feet into the ground, Raimen took step, after step, after step backwards. When the rope finally snapped taut it nearly slipped out of his claws, the sudden addition of the knocker’s weight like a violent tug in the door’s direction. But the tiger persisted. Step by step. Degree by degree, the knockers rose. And when his muscles screamed and the path faded and there was no more height he could pull from the rope, he released the both of them, letting them fall with a
THUDthat reverberated outwards like a shockwave. Leaves rustled in the forest behind him, falling from the trees and withering the moment they touched earth.
Raimen waited, hand on the base of his sword. He’d never trained to be a dragonslayer, but he feared his honor would try to make him one, right here and right now.
He waited.
He waited.
He–
“Are you with the jade delivery?”
Raimen hopped back, drawing and leveling his sword at the source of the baritone voice. It certainly sounded deep enough to belong to a dragon. But there was no rush of wind, no grand announcement, no procession of wyrmlings bowing their heads in reverence as a heavenly beast made itself known.
No. Instead, there was a single creature, Raimen’s height, who’d walked out of a servant door built into the bottom of the castle’s entrance. The tiger couldn’t tell what species it was – it had been bound, head to toe, in tightly-wound black fabric, and its head was covered in a featureless enclosure of flawless jade.
In its hands, it held a polished rendition of the dragon’s visage. No, wait. That wasn’t a rendition – it was moving. It was a mirror. A polished mirror that, instead of a reflection, showed the living face of the dragon lord somewhere deep within the palace. Behind his green-scaled head, Raimen could glimpse ornate tapestries and trimmings of gold lining whatever stone-hewed chamber he’d nestled himself in.
“Hmm. By the look on your face, you're obviously not,” continued the dragon. His deep, majestic voice sent shivers down Raimen’s spine. “Which is a shame. Clearly you’re the barbaric type, and quite evidently you’re here to subtract from my horde, rather than add to it.”
Raimen raised his hands and leveled his sword, stanced as though he could lunge forward and stab the dragon through the reflection. The sight tugged a smile at the corner of the dragon’s lips.
“Lord dragon,” began Raimen, treating the mirror as though it were as dangerous and holy as the beast itself. “Return Prince Hiyowa from imprisonment. As his preeminent knight, I am honor-bound to see his safe return.”
The dragon lifted his massive palm into view of the mirror, pressing it against his jaw. Strength enough to uproot mountaintops, claws sharp enough to score rivers into hardened stone.
“And which one is that?”
Raimen tightened his grip. This uninterested attitude was surely a trap to dull his instincts. “The rabbit prince, fur as white as fallen snow. Graceful of stature, pure of heart. Adorned in brilliant gold, his crown inset with rubies for wisdom.”
The dragon in the mirror looked about, as though he were taking stock of some storeroom around him. Out of the edges of the mirror, Raimen saw them. Dozens – no, hundreds of black-wrapped servants, similar to the one in front of him, lavishing the dragon lord in praise and care.
“Do forgive me. I always forget what my little jewels look like before I add them to the hoard. Although I do feel an echo of the taste of rubies bouncing around my tongue. When was it I would have eaten them? Within the year? The–”
“Ranryu!” Raimen thundered, stepping forward with the sound. Neither the creature holding the mirror nor the dragon within it flinched. “Under the new moon, you destroyed the imperial palace and snatched Prince Hiyowa from its chambers! Either return him unharmed, or I will cut my way to the heart of your den and carve my revenge from your beating heart!”
“Ah!” The dragon snapped his fingers, and Raimen swore he heard an echo of the sound thundering somewhere beyond the castle’s door. “There’s your problem. I am Gyakuo, not Ranryu.”
The statement was so absurd that it shocked Raimen into lowering his sword. “What?”
“You see, I recently–”
“Do not try to trick me, Flame Steward!” Raimen’s pounding heart so desperately wished he was facing down the real dragon, not this disarming screen. “There has not been a dragon in these lands besides Ranryu since the earliest records of our kingdom!”
“Then what do you call that squirming drake in the valley beneath the bridge?”
“I–!” Raimen’s fury thundered forth, but there were no words to uphold it. “That must have… You–”
“Like Torionji back there, Ranryu has recently been added to my collection. Along with all his holdings, territories, and gold.”
Raimen’s mouth fell agape. He couldn’t even find the words to begin asking questions.
“If your prince were among those holdings, then yes, he’s transferred up here to the peak with me. The half of my servants who aren’t dancing are kept with me here. To deal with my whims.” The dragon smirked, picking up one such black-clad jade-masked figure from outside the mirror’s view. The little thing dangled between his fingertips, and the dragon shook him left and right like he was showing off a figurine.
“Otherwise, though, I’m afraid you’ve climbed the wrong mountaintop. Perhaps you can go reproduce and task your heir with climbing the right one. You mortals love to do that kind of thing.”
No, he couldn’t be in the wrong place. He kept his brow furrowed and his senses sharp. “Our scryers, diviners, and occultists all conducted independent rituals. The results align – the prince is on this peak.”
“Then now, he’s a part of my hoard.” The dragon’s expression shifted, his tone and face letting creep a hint of hardened edge. “And the conversation ends there.”
Grunting, Raimen pushed his way past the servant and made for the little door. “If words will not sway you, then I will cut my way to the mountain’s peak and smash your minions’ masks. I will not stop until I find him”
The servant followed behind him, still carrying the dragon’s face and voice in the mirror. “You mortals love retribution, I know, I know. But still, I wouldn’t be so hasty in making such a vow.”
Raimen pushed open the servants’ entrance and stepped inside. Almost immediately, he had to raise a hand to his face to block the shine.
Marble, obsidian, silver, and gold. The interior of the palace was composed of hallways big enough to fit a massive dragon’s body, all hewn perfectly from repeating slabs of pricey minerals and accented with bands of polished metal. Fire danced in sconces placed evenly across the supporting pillars, their reflections in the accents glinting with perfect imitation. Streams of water flowed down the walls, down the halls, down the center gap of the central stone spiral that seemed to form the spine of the construction. More wealth than Raimen’s bloodline would see in three generations, all on display in a single glimpse.
And then there were the servants. Whereas the palace itself was brilliant, the servants were throngs of identical of matte black bodies and blank jade faces that walked in reverent silence along the corners of the halls. A hundred-dozen of them dotted the vista before Raimen, not a single one out of step or making so much as a rustle.
“If I give the word, the lot of them will try to stop you. I know full well you could best any single one of them in combat. They’re royalty, most of them. Gathered the world over for a place in my hoard. Artisans and laborers, now, to the last, but terrible in a brawl.”
The servant carrying the mirror walked around Raimen, letting the dragon look him in the eye. “On one hand, they might succeed through numbers alone. On the other, you might succeed – by striking down hundreds of innocent souls, any one of which could be your prince. Are you a gambling man, little one? Or was that the barest trace of discipline I detected at the gates?”
Raimen took shaky breath after shaky breath, analyzing the situation as impartially as he could. He wanted to fight. Every muscle in his body knew that tense situations like this called for an opening stroke of the sword, and a quick reaction to whatever came next.
But, begrudgingly, his head prevailed. He sheathed his sword, turning to the dragon’s mirror as he tried to keep the frustration from his face. “Why are you doing this? Why does a dragon need hostages?”
The dragon smiled, wide and eager. “Efficiency, little one. Allow me to explain. And servant? Walk our guest into the foyer.”
The servant did as it was told, turning and walking backwards so that Gyakuo could keep the tiger in his sights. Something tickled the edge of Raimen’s hearing. Some sort of low roar. A waterfall? No, it was more orderly than that. A… song? He pushed it out of his mind.
“At the core of every dragon is a hole they nurture in their heart. A little pit of misery that might be sated for a day, a month, a century, but never goes away for good. The more it eats, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more it wants to eat.”
Raimen let his gaze wander. What was this jade that all the servants were wearing on their heads? If he tore it off, could it break the dragon’s hold?
“For me? That thirst can no longer be slaked by things alone. No, no. Even if I move my palace to the center of the earth, letting all the world’s riches rain down upon me, I simply don’t have enough scales on my body to feel an inrush that would satisfy my soul.”
He was sure he could identify the prince if he could just lay eyes on him. His ears would give him away, or the lankiness of his body. The tiger could call his prince’s name, hoping for a response, but he doubted the dragon’s hold would be so weak.
“But lo, I came to a revelation. Does a king not own his knight’s land? Does an emperor not own the clothes on his servant’s back? Why should I try to satisfy myself with hoards, when I could satisfy myself with hoarders?”
Raimen blinked, then turned to the mirror. “Then you’re sating yourself… by proxy?”
“Absolutely! You’re quite attentive for someone who’s spending his time scheming to thieve.”
The tiger’s jaw set, and he tried to keep the red out of the tips of his ears.
“Should I steal a king, I steal his kingdom. Should I steal an artist, I steal his works, past and future. Should I steal a prince? Well. Someone important is bound to come looking for him. The potential is enough to tide me over.”
Gyakuo moved closer to his end of the connection, filling the mirror with his slitted eye.
“So tell me, little one. Take my craving to the extreme, just as time and instinct has done. Who is the richest of the rich? Who has the longevity to amass a hoard beyond measure? Who has the drive to add to it incessantly? Who would be the most efficient use of my time to take?”
Raimen stopped. He spoke, and the implications ran wild in the back of his mind. “Another dragon.”
“That’s it!” laughed Gyakuo, a hint of madness in his eye. “But you’re thinking too small, little one. Why just one? Why not other dragons, plural? Why not every dragon that your ilk has figured disappeared from history, plucked right from your folk tales and now lining my coffers with all of their riches in tow?”
The tiger’s head started spinning. No, surely that couldn’t be true. Not only did it mean the dragon in the castle’s heart was avaricious beyond conception, but it meant that the prince to which he’d pleaded his life was now some secondhand property, lost in the shuffle as this dragon pulled a new pile into his hoard. The thought would have been absurd were it not so alarming.
“Oh, dear. You look despondent. Here, raise your gaze. Let me raise your spirits with a proposition.”
Raimen’s attention snapped up.
The dragon continued. “I’ve been absolutely dying to show off my collection. Such a trip would lead you all over my territory, ending of course with the most brilliant treasure of all – me. Here with my glittering scales, staggering intellect, and beautiful voice, nestled warmly in the bosom of the mountain’s peak. I’m sure a strapping little thing like you could stage some daring rescue from there, yes? Surely you’d recognize your prince among my servants, and beat a hasty retreat with his scrambled little head in tow. As you travel my realm, I’ll make sure you encounter each and every one of my servants. All seven thousand, nine hundred, sixty-three of them.”
The tiger’s hands tightened. His righteous mission was not a coin to earn and spend.
“What if instead,” he said through teeth just shy of gritted, “I send for a poet? Or a scribe? Or, even, an accountant? Someone who could properly record the splendor of your hoard? Surely seeing your beauty through an appropriate lens would up the audience’s price? To, say, the prince himself?”
The dragon tapped his scaly chin. “Bargaining! How brave. I suppose I could wait, and let you fetch a soul suitable for describing my splendor. But who knows? It’s a long trek up the mountain. Last I checked, your kind hasn’t invented flying machines. And even then, my purse might not be so loose by the time you return. Or even beyond that, perhaps the morsel I plan to spend will be displaced. After all, if a servant falls into the aqueduct or gets crushed beneath my dragon’s coils, it can take decades for me to notice. You understand, right? Surely mortals find loose change in the furniture all the time.”
Raimen huffed. It had been a long shot.
“I think we both know by now that you aren’t a gambling man. So what do you say, little one? I know a tour over a week or so is a long stretch for a mortal, but surely listening to my captivating tales and charming voice would make the time fly by?”
The tiger balked. “A week? I’d starve! Well- wait. What do you feed the servants?”
“Draconic essence, converted into nourishment through their beautiful little masks. Do you like them? One of the little geniuses I earned a century ago came up with them. Quite comprehensive. Exceptionally pleasing to see en masse. Very difficult to remove, without either a lot of luck or a spare few months of time to burn.”
Raimen crossed his arms. “I will neither wear an ensorcelling mask nor allow myself to starve.”
The dragon laid his head down on the ground, and it was immediately swarmed by attentive servants polishing and brushing his scales.
“Fine. If we only hit the highlights, it would take, at most, a day. Do mortals starve in that timespan?”
Breath in, breath out. Raimen tried to steady himself. He had no idea how to gauge what he was getting into. “A day is… agreeable.”
“Oh, excellent!” The dragon quickly raised his head, flinging away the servants cleaning him. “I shall fetch my maps at once. If I only have a single day, I’ll need aides to plan your way~”
Raimen idly thumbed the hilt of his sword. “Will you be… giving the tour in person?”
“What? No.” The dragon was on the move, but the view in the mirror stayed a fixed distance from his face. “It is the month of polishing, and barely a fortnight in! Were I to meet you as I am right now, I’d be mortified. The servants will need to work triple-time to make me presentable by tomorrow.”
Using names the tiger didn’t recognize, the dragon gave quick, curt instructions to bring him to where the tour would start. Sighing, Raimen followed along.
Why, gods above, wasn’t this a problem he could face with a blade?For the first few hours of the tour, Raimen had started suspecting that instead of hoarding wealthy creatures, Gyakuo hoarded outrageous lies. Such-and-such engineer had invented a balloon that could let people soar through the air. Such-and-such king was actually the sire of the first of the land’s dynasties, his lifespan preserved by the elixir-nourishment of his mask. Such-and-such jester had made the God of Death Herself double over laughing. Gyakuo was incensed that he’d missed the moment, and vowed none would ever hear the jester’s jokes again. He wouldn’t even let the man reincarnate, on the off-chance he might miss yet another gut-busting witticism.
Seeing another dragon disabused him of the notion Gyakuo was lying.
If the wood-bearing dragon on the mountain pass had been a gem, this beast was an entire vein. Sapphire scales glittered in the pinprick lights that dotted the cavern in a descending spiral, the crystal-clear water giving clear passage to their light. Raimen had seen the empire’s warpships, bow to stern. Seen gorges in the earth, end to end, from on mountaintops. The creature below dwarfed their length by leaps and bounds,
The viewing platform the servant led Raimen to was Gods-knew-how-high above the massive pool beneath them. The water-filled inverted dome, like the rest of the palace, had been carved straight out of the bowels of the mountain, flawless in its construction. The only signs the sight below was flesh and blood and stone and water, rather than a massive painting, were the occasional stirring of the beast in its stupor and the scent of wet stone that permeated the air.
“Your face,” spoke the dragon, “is almost priceless.”
Raimen was too awestruck to worry about his dignity.
“Suisen, here, was the first of the elemental dragon lords I added to my collection. It’s quite the funny story – it all started when I decided, on a whim, to sink a fleet of marauders. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a chest of gold spill off the sinking ships and filter down into the sea. I was very fond of gold at the time, you see, and knew that I absolutely had to have it.”
The beast’s face was calm, jaw agape and eyes lidded. Unlike the wood-bearing drake, her movements were soft and subtle, like they’d been muffled by eons upon eons of fine-tuned subdual. A scale shifted here or there, changing the way the light reflected. A slow breath exited her mouth, painting distortions on the water’s surface.
“She stopped me. She was so adamant that all the sea’s treasures were hers to keep. Awed me with tales of deep-sea trenches filled to the brim with glittering gold. Said that if sunlight were allowed to penetrate the deep reaches of the sea, the gleam of her hoard could set a fleet ablaze. I asked her, then, if I could just have the gold that had fallen from the ship. I told her it was such a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things that surely it wouldn’t cause her any heartache.”
That rumble, the one from the foyer, was easier to hear here. It was definitely a song. Something upbeat like a festival tune, and the percussion was so strong that it was surely the sound of a hundred wood-sandalled feet stomping in unison. It was constantly distracting him. As though the dragon’s rambling wasn’t already hard to endure.
“But that line never works on dragons. Let that be a lesson to you. Because it certainly was to me. Up until around five hundred years ago, I still had faint traces of the scar she tore into my face for daring to say it to her. Oh, I was incensed. But like you, little one, I had the presence of mind to not pick a fight I couldn’t win. I backed off. But the desire for those few hundred pieces of gold never left my mind.”
Rocks tumbled from under Raimen’s foot into the pool below. By the time the pebbles hit the surface, they’d grown so small in the tiger’s sight that the waves they made were completely imperceptible.
“Don’t fall in, little one.”
Raimen started, realizing his weight was dangerously close to passing over his leading foot. He’d almost stepped right off the edge!
He stumbled backwards onto the viewing platform, falling on his side with the force of his movement. The servant diligently walked Gyakuo’s face over so that it could loom over him.
“What,” the tiger asked, propping up on one elbow before moving to stand, “is that song?”
The dragon in the mirror beamed. “Ah, do you like it? Sadly, there’s no vein of jade the world over to fit across a dragon’s muzzle. I’d know – I’ve looked. So, instead, to keep them docile, something else is needed. Something high, high up on the pyramid of desires, something abstract and ever-shifting. Something impossible to become bored with.”
Returning to his feet, Raimen very, very cautiously returned to looking down at the water dragon. “A song…?”
“Not just a song. An alluring song. An obliviating song. A performance derived from the churning sounds of sea sirens and the memory-eating dances of playful spirits. A rhythm that insists upon itself, endlessly. Tripartite words, rhythm, and dance that each individually ensnare the senses, together forging a collar that weighs down even the highest-held heads.”
The dragon pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. “It never affects my servants. The mask blocks it out. To you, though? I’m not quite sure what it’ll do. Surely, though, if you love your prince as much as you claim, it won’t be an issue.”
Taking a deep breath, Raimen centered himself. A little bit of sensation elsewhere, like curling his toes or thumbing along the hilt of his sword, was enough to keep the enchantment at bay. Or at least, it felt like that.
“Don’t worry about me. I merely didn’t know to be vigilant for that.”
“Oh, don’t think you’ve won just because you’re fine up here.” The dragon glanced back down to his captured kin. “This chamber only conducts the music, not the rhythm or the dance. On top of that, sound travels much better in water than air. Down in her little bowl, our dear friend is receiving tenfold the sounds of plucking strings and twirling lyrics that you and I receive up here.”
Raimen huffed, once again stroking the patterned hilt of his sword. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
After a long, long time letting Gyakuo bask in his victory over the Ocean Keeper, they made for the next area.
The worst part about Gyakuo’s domain was that it was intended for dragons in flight – a singular dragon – and nobody else. Raimen wasn’t being led down maintained walkways to get from one point to another. He was crawling through gaps between stones, walking along buttresses that spanned chamber ceilings, and even swimming through the decorative aqueducts that spanned over some otherwise-uncrossable chasms. Even Gyakuo was surprised at some of the routes the servant led them down, and bid his other servants to fix the various gaps in the masonry that their trek pointed out to him.
“But won’t that make it more cumbersome for the servants to move around?”
“If it’s that much of a bother, they can raise a complaint to me.”
“Do you allow them to complain?”
“No.”
All along the path, Raimen kept a watchful eye on the servants they passed. He kept himself always at the ready, one step away from knocking out the servant carrying Gyakuo’s mirror, grabbing the veiled form of the prince, and making a desperate escape. His mind mapped every nook and cranny they crossed, and at every possible point he tried to evaluate and re-evaluate the quickest possible route out.
No such opportunity presented itself. And not every species was easy to tell at a glance. For some, it was trivial. Elephants and rhinoceros and eels and fish. But for other species, rabbits and cats and dogs and raccoons and foxes, they’d all been squished into similar shapes. It was only once he’d gotten exceedingly close, or caught them moving in front of a light that pierced their fabric cocoon, that Raimen could even start to guess what species some of them were.
“Keep those wandering eyes to yourself, little one. You promised me a full tour, and I’m being very generous with what I consider your full attention.”
“Surely you can’t be treasuring our conversation that much. I’m a man of few words.”
“I know! Isn’t it grand? It gives mine more room to breathe.”
Every time Gyakuo came upon a servant of some renown, he’d stop the lot of them and Raimen would be regaled with that servant’s holdings and accomplishments. Raimen found himself surprised – he figured that Gyakuo would zero in on figures with material wealth and royal status. But there were artists, philosophers, performers, and even skilled game-players within his hoard.
“And has this cook that you’ve captured ever actually made you a meal?”
“No. But I’ll be damned if the world will be made richer at my expense by his expertise.”
It remained that way until they came upon the vault of the Earth Keeper.
While most of the palace was clean-hewn from the mountain’s interior, this place was much rawer and rough. Juts of ore veins rich in minerals and gems shot out of the ground like spears piercing the mountain from outside. The usually-level floor was marred by peaks and valleys, and sometimes crags large enough for men of Raimen’s size to fall into. The lack of perfection was perplexing. Perhaps, like the dragon out front, the Keeper caused earth to grow whenever he spasmed in his stupor?
And what a stupor it was. Similar to the Water Keeper, he was laid out on his back, sat in the center of a great hollow chamber with lights surrounding his supine form. Unlike the wall-mounted lanterns of Suisen’s chamber, though, this was lit by dangling prisms of opaque, mirror-shine metals. Raimen was no geologist, but he knew silver, gold, and bronze when he saw them. He didn’t know, though, were the strange, ocean-blue metal or the chalk-white metal or the pearlescent metal that formed in fractal squares.
The song didn’t permeate here. Not like it did in the castle’s main throughways, and certainly not like in the previous chamber. No, here it was the rhythm.
Stomp, Stomp, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp.Stomp-Stomp, Rest, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp.Stomp, Stomp, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp.Stomp-Stomp, Rest, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp.Loud. Pounding. Incessant. Syncopated. Raimen’s head felt like a vault, and someone was trying to break into it from above. Within a few minutes, he had to force himself to be irritated by the song, or else–
“What’s the matter, little one? You’re tapping along on the hilt of your sword.”
Raimen slid his hand down onto the scabbard, keeping his grip firm and his fingers still. “I’m not.”
“Hah! For what it’s worth, I think you’d make a very diligent dancer. Even wrapped in cloth, I bet I could spot those muscles from the other side of the palace.”
Tap, tap, tap-tap-tap–
Raimen shook his head, releasing his scabbard from his grip. “You’re using the same performance on both of these dragons, yes?”
“More than them. We’ll be visiting the main chamber next. I’m eager to hear Ranryu’s review.”
“And you seem to enjoy it when things are… meticulous. Parallel. Alike in as many ways as you can manage.”
“What gives you that impression?”
Raimen swept his hand across the passage they’d just come from. “The perfectly-flush stonework in the main hall. The symmetry of the palace’s overall construction. The way you render your servants as anonymous and identical as fabric can achieve.”
Gyakuo smiled wryly. “I’m constantly impressed by how many details you manage to catch between frisking my servants.”
“So why,” Raimen asked, ignoring that, “is the wooden dragon at the base of the plateau not entranced in a similar way?”
“Ah! My greatest failure as an aesthetician. I hate to say it, little one, but there wasn’t always a unifying vision for my hoard. I had to overcome a great deal of draconic instinct. The natural form of a hoard is a pile – a disorganized heap of bits and bobs whose job is to impress through volume alone.”
At the urging of the servants at his side, Gyakuo rolled on his side and let himself be propped up on a massive wooden support, into which the servants entered and extended their brushes and polish through gaps like arrow slits.
“But any idiot can make a pile. A pile of sunken gold, a pile of mined gems, a pile of metal, a pile of clouds. After seeing the state of my catch out front, and imagining a half-dozen dragons all sharing that fate, I was mortified. I was no better at hoarding than the hoarders I’d hoarded! And that simply wouldn’t do. An under-appreciated facet of envy, little one, is that it feels better to surpass than just to take.”
Raimen frowned. He’d hoped the dragon would have let something slip about the structure of his palace, the mechanism of the performance, or a neurosis of his hoarding that the tiger could have used to make a distraction while he escaped.
“Do you have the Keepers of all five elements in your thrall?”
“I do indeed. The crown jewels of my collection.” He smiled at that, beaming with self-satisfaction. “You’ll meet them all before the day is through.”
The mortal world, to Raimen’s knowledge, only knew of the one keeper. The flame keeper. The one he’d mistaken this new dragon for. After seeing the drowned dragon called the Water Keeper, he’d figured the pattern would hold.
“So what will you do now, once the hunger to hoard dragons returns again?”
“A very important question, and one that I need to answer very quickly. I only have about a century or two before I’m too hungry to come home empty-handed. Why do you ask? Are you suggesting a solution?”
“I’m suggesting,” Raimen said, once again stopping his foot from tapping to the beat, “that perhaps you ought to get used to the feeling of letting treasure go, so that you can feel the excitement of capturing it once again. Start small, perhaps? Maybe a prince?”
The dragon laughed, and for a moment Raimen swore his cadence overlapped with the even measures of the stomping rhythm.
“I should kill you! Kill you right where you stand for daring to suggest such a thing to me!” His laugh petered out, and he blinked a tear out of his eye. “Oh… heh, oh little one. I ought to kidnap a prince or two more if they keep such hilarious knights on retainer.”
Raimen grunted, instinctively pulling the hilt of his sword until the base of the blade cleared the sheath.
“Oh! The tiger bares his fang.”
“Every time I learn about how your mind works, I find myself concluding that slaying you would be nothing but a boon to the world.”
“As you should! I feel the same towards all the creatures I envy.”
Taking a deep breath, Raimen sheathed his sword with a click.
“I have no envy for you. Only pity, and disdain."
“Hmm. I see, I see. Servant?” The dragon looked up, addressing the creature carrying his mirror. “Change of plans. Instead of the air pen, show our friend the showroom next.” His gaze returned to Raimen.
“As much as I enjoy your adorable belligerence, little one, there’s only so much I allow before I need to shut your mouth for you.”
“Do your worst.”
Raimen stomped out of the room, step by step by step-step-step.
He, the servant, and the image of Gyakuo waited before the entrance to the lower reaches of the performance hall. From the shape of the exterior, Raimen guessed it was a massive, hollow cylinder. The audience sat in the middle, he presumed.
He knew why they were waiting. He knew the structure of the song by now. The lead singer inside was on the second chorus, after which the music would drop out for a vocal solo. Then the dancers would join their voices in for a chorus, and finally the whole band would put forth their final, bombastic measures. Then it would all repeat.
“Whatever’s inside there,” mused Raimen, “is proof-positive that mankind can subdue dragons.”
“Oh, please.” Gyakuo rolled his eyes, where a trio of servants were scrubbing the scales of his brow. “The complexities involved in crafting it would snap your mortal mind in two. Every seeming flaw is a solved problem in disguise. It is a work of world-class sensory engineering. Comparatively, mankind is adding tally marks together in the mud.”
The servant opened the door, and stepped inside with Raimen. The tiger took in as much as he could before the music began again.
He was right – Ranryu, Keeper of Fire, was laid out on a massive earthen outcropping, held upright by the strength of the stone as he stared, dumbfounded, upwards. Around him in an ascending spiral, dancers waited as one performance ended and the other waited to begin. On a circular outcropping circling his head, the musicians waited for their prescribed twenty-four rest beats. Koto, biwa, ceremonial drums. The singer was a songbird, wearing a headdress that dangled down to her waist and that guided Raimen’s eyes along her exposed shoulders, loose sleeves, and golden obi.
Pink petals began drifting from on high, and the first note accompanied them. Already, he was out of time.
Hardwood clappers led in the start of the next performance, gaps between the clacking growing shorter and shorter beat by beat. Lights from up above were filtered through colored lenses, bathing the lead singer in colors specifically crafted to accent the servant-black and cherry-red in her clothes. She, and only she, wore no jade.
“Where rosy petals fall
I’ll be dancing through them all
Eat your care and drink your fill
Not asleep, but lying still
Where rosy petals lie
I’ll be dancing until you die
Stomach filled and worries drowned
As you sink down to the ground-”
One-two-three-four. One lit the lower rings of dancers. Two toggled the colored beams, making the lead vocalist momentarily disappear. Three lit the upper reaches, showing a spiral of diligent dancers that stretched beyond sight. Four sent spotlights down on the drummers, showing their power and control as percussion led into the instrumental measures before the first verse.
Raimen grunted, and began to climb.
He had strict instructions not to disturb the performance. Deathly strict. The look in Gyakuo’s eye felt like it would have killed a lesser man. Still, the desire lingered in the tiger’s mind. Walk a half-story up, dive from the height of the dragon’s chest, and plunge his sword into its scales. Wake it from its stupor through pain. Run back down the main hall as the chaos unfolded from there.
But, no. He had to check every dancer here. To make sure this wasn’t where the prince had ended up. The rabbit had never been a dancer, but… Raimen doubted Gyakuo cared about that.
“Light, 1-2-3-4-5, lie in bliss upon the pedestal, you’reSticky-sweet and sinking in the hourglass with meBurdensome binds of fate, weighing heavy on your mindFleeting-fast like bolts of lightning is the way your thoughts should be-”Step by step, he ascended. His path was the corridor that they used to place dancers along the upward-winding spiral. It passed behind each slot, allowing the dancers’ fallible mortal bodies to be yanked from sight and replaced before Ranryu even noticed something had happened.
Winding, he climbed, ever-onwards. The singer’s voice slowly rotated beneath him, staying stationary while he corkscrewed up. Conversely, the dancers were startlingly uniform. Even though they were arranged into a spiral, they were stratified in their performance by their elevation in Ranryu’s sight. While one strata flourished, the other stayed steady. Their fabric veils had been allowed to droop, now flicking this way and that to accentuate the movement of their bodies. The lighting in the chamber had somehow been rigged to hide the fur on their bodies and instead accentuate the bright colors of their custom veils.
Good. That would make it easier to spot the prince. Ears. Ears. He was looking for the rabbit’s ears.
“The shortest route, the fastest fall is candy-poison toAn aged soul, so bite the leaf that God demands you chewWhere rosy petals fallI’ll be dancing through them allEat your care and drink your fillNot asleep, but lying still Where rosy petals lieI’ll be dancing until you dieStomach filled and worries drownedAs you sink down to the ground-”Raimen hated this part. It followed every chorus except the very first.
“Whirl, whirl aroundDrifting free like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThough you swear you don’t moveWhirl, whirl aroundBurning pink like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThoughts replaced by a tune-”The rabbit’s head was spinning. His hands were… on the ground. Dammit. He’d fallen to a knee.
He pushed off the wooden floor, relying on pure bodily instinct to keep himself moving. He had to move. He couldn’t stop here. He couldn’t look away; he had to find the prince. He couldn’t stuff his ears; he had to know when the next onslaught of words would assail him. Right now, the song was transitioning from the first chorus to the second verse. He had some time.
This spiral ramp was a mountain, and the words were the bitter wind.
“Heavenly soul, delight! Dancing ever-feeds the eyes
Salty, sour, sweet, and hearty - there’s no taste it cannot be
Candied colors drip to your tongue from on your lips
For your body is a temple, and we’re each a devotee-”
His eyes watered. He blinked the tears away. Even the spaces between measures and the breaths between words were valuable time he had to take advantage of. Step by step. Floorboard by floorboard. Every step he took, the servant followed close behind. For once in his life, Gyakuo remained completely silent.
“Time is nothing to a soul imbued with godly causeLinger still in candied thoughts and boundless dance-applause-”Raimen braced for the chorus.
“Where rosy petals fallI’ll be dancing through them allEat your care and drink your fillNot asleep, but lying still Where rosy petals lieI’ll be dancing until you dieStomach filled and worries drownedAs you sink down to the ground-”Raimen braced for the worst part of the chorus.
“Whirl, whirl aroundDrifting free like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThough you swear you don’t moveWhirl, whirl aroundBurning pink like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThoughts replaced by a tune-”The song was like tinnitus, ringing loudly in his head as he lifted his torso from the ground. He wiped his face with the back of his armored hand, drool having run down his mouth while he was laid out.
He looked out across the dancers. No prince. Ears, but no frame. Frame, but no ears. Had to keep moving. Had to check the next dancer. Then the next. Then the next. Then the next.
Just as he recovered, the bridge hit him like a bursting dam.
“Treasure, O Treasure, your presence makes us gleamSo, we beg, accept from us a dalliance in the dream-”Manageable. This part was manageable, barely manageable. Slower-paced and focused on the singer’s vocal performance. If Raimen were a dragon, he supposed the lyrics would be tempting. But a dalliance was the last thing he wanted right now. He hoped to high Heaven it would stay that way until he reached the chamber’s peak.
“One day your soul will rouse and you will soar againBut that day is not today, so stay with us till then-”Raimen flinched as the dancer in front of him broke out singing, along with all the others who filled the seemingly-endless cylinder with song.
“Where rosy petals fall
We’ll be dancing through them all
Eat your care and drink your fill
Not asleep, but lying still
Where rosy petals lie
We’ll be dancing until you die
Stomach filled and worries drowned
As you sink down to the ground-”
Ears. Find ears. His own ears. Traitorous ears. He covered them with his paws, pressed himself as far away from the band as he could, ripped bits of his undershirt and stuffed them inside. Nothing helped.
He began losing bits of himself. Like tossing coins from his wallet to distract a thief. He started stepping in time. It was easier. He started stomping when the dancers stopped, using the firm footing and powerful motion to travel up in leaps and bounds. It was easier.
“Where rosy petals fallI’ll be dancing through them allEat your care and drink your fillNot asleep, but lying still Where rosy petals lieI’ll be dancing until you dieStomach filled and worries drownedAs you sink down to the ground-”Raimen blinked himself awake, pink petals resting on his cheek. Awake? Had he fallen asleep? He looked down at himself. His torso was bare, stripped of armor. His arms and legs ached in unfamiliar ways. His breath was haggard, and he could practically see the steam in it.
Oh, Gods, had he been dancing?
He could no longer trust his body to–
“Whirl, whirl aroundDrifting free like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThough you swear you don’t moveWhirl, whirl aroundBurning pink like a blossomWhirl, whirl aroundThoughts replaced by a tune-”Darkness. Flashing lights. Dizzy head. Feeling of wooden floorboards on his cheek. Biwa going wild down below, dancers giving their all. The smell of sweat. No ears in sight.
That was it. That was the end of the song.
In twenty-four rests, it would all begin again. Every few minutes. One after another. Pounding against his head, his heart, and his soul.
Forever.Gasping, panting, soaked in sweat, breath haggard, limbs shaking, body begging for relief, Raimen dragged himself out of the top of the performance chamber.
When the door behind him closed, he practically lost consciousness. He’d given up so much of himself to the song to retain the ability to move. Now, without it, it was like his strings had been cut. He was limp. Weak. Breathing hurt. Thinking hurt. Just the thought of the chamber interior was enough to spike his heartrate and make him sweat.
The tiger felt himself rattle, barely-conscious and completely helpless. Was he on a cart, all of the sudden? It didn’t matter. He wanted to rest so badly. But he couldn’t. He had to do… something. Something in the central chamber. Not the performance chamber! No, no, no. He never had to go back in there again.
He let the whatever-it-was beneath him ferry him along. It barely ever clattered, given how flawlessly Lord Gyakuo’s floors were. He liked that. He respected that.
Raimen bit his tongue. No! That thought was… bad, somehow. But… he thought that Lord Gyakuo might like it, regardless.
“Little one, you made it!”
The cheerful, booming voice got Raimen to raise his head. He was… here. There. In the room he’d glimpsed in the mirror. The greatest sports arenas and councils of government he’d ever seen may as well have been broom closets compared to it. Its floor was inset by a concentric, lowering set of octagons, crossed at the cardinals by smooth ramps. He was on such a ramp, slowly being carried Lord Gyakuo’s way.
Somewhat ceremoniously, he was deposited on the lowest level of the area, propped up against the stone-hewn shelf behind him to give him a modicum of dignity. In his posture, at least. His body was a mess. The tiger’s sweat-mated fur was whipped into all sorts of unkempt shapes, his spent muscles left his limbs to dangle limply from his joints, and he couldn’t even find the strength of will to shut his mouth.
“Sooo, how do I look~?”
Gliding through the air like an eel through water, only infinitely more majestic, Gyakuo began to spin around in the air. In the shape of a circle. An oval. An infinity.
“The servants cleaned me up quite well, don’t you think? For a rush job, the results are absolutely splendid, wouldn’t you agree?”
The words left his mouth as easily as his heart beat. “Yes, Lord Gyakuo. Your innate magnificence is magnified tenfold by the work of your diligent servants.”
Servants. Right. That’s why he was here. He had to find… rabbit. Ears. Prince. His prince. The prince to which he’d devoted his knighthood. Prince… Hiyo… something.
“And you’ve finally learned to speak properly! I’m so glad we changed the route. Oh, and by the way, just to seal my end of the deal…”
Lord Gyakuo reached forward, pinching his clawtips together and lifting Raimen by the scruff of the neck. He held him upwards, letting him look up through the room’s glass ceiling.
Up above, a teal dragon endlessly chased its tail. Its motion was perfectly circular, whipping the clouds brought along by its motion into a whirlpool that rippled out to span the sky. The pattern looked familiar to Raimen, but accessing the memory was beyond him at the moment.
“Do try and pull your brains back together. Hazard a guess at who that is, up there?”
“The… the Sky Keeper.”
“Well done! Perhaps I ought to have been a bit playful in the performance chamber. Instructed my servant ahead-of-time to drag you down a few stories whenever you blacked out. It seems like you could have handled the extra time just fine.”
He wasn’t fully parsing the words, but the shadow of the concept summoned by them was terrifying.
“I know you can’t see it with your tiny little eyes, but I’ve affixed a scrying screen to the back of his body. Very similar to the little trinket I’ve been using to talk to you, as a matter of fact. Once proud, once majestic, he now chases his tail like a common dog, perpetually moving and unable to close the gap. Here’s another question. Do your best to answer correctly – this is a warmup for what’s to come. What do you think I’m showing on that screen?”
The answer jumped to the forefront of Raimen’s mushed-up mind. “The dancers.”
“Correct again! As a reward, have some good news.”
Lord Gyakuo returned to where he’d lifted him. The dragon loomed overtop him, shadowing the natural light from the noon sky above.
Wait. It had been afternoon when Raimen had knocked on the door at the front of the palace. Was it… tomorrow?
“I found your bunny prince among my collection. In fact, I’ve already called him to this room!”
Raimen lifted his head from the stone, weakly casting his gaze about. Black cloth. Black cloth. Black cloth. Black cloth. These figures, the servants, all the servants who had been dutifully polishing Lord Gyakuo’s scales for the last day. Prince Hi… Hiyo… wa! Hiyowa! He was here!
“Usually, pride demands that I demand you fight me, fang and claw, to take him from my hoard. But I don’t think that’d be much sport, given your current state…”
The very tip of Lord Gyakuo’s claw came and tapped the side of the tiger’s head, nearly sending him tumbling.
“And we’re such good friends, now. You deserve a fairer deal. So! How about this?”
Lord Gyakuo raised his hand and snapped, the sound making Raimen jump. The servants, meanwhile, abandoned their current tasks and formed into neat rows surrounding Lord Gyakuo and Raimen. Everywhere he looked, black and jade. Black and jade. Black and…
“You dedicated your life and honor to your prince, if I recall correctly. So it should be easy for you to pick him out of a crowd. Don’t you agree?”
Raimen nodded, weakly. The motion made his head spin, and he went to fall, but he was caught by the servant still carrying Lord Gyakuo’s mirror.
“Good, good. Here’s the deal. If you can pick your prince out of this crowd, you’re free to go with him. There’s no guarantee I won’t come and snatch him again once the two of you return to whatever earthly kingdom you crawled out of, but I’ll at least wait until the two of you get home. After all – we’ve had such fun together! Wouldn’t you want to see me again?”
Raimen didn’t answer that. He was scared of what he might reply.
“I’ll even be exceedingly generous.” He unfurled his four-fingered claw, raising three. “Three tries. You get three tries to pick your prince out of the servants assembled here. Win, and walk out. As I’ve so generously described. Lose? Well. I think we both know the perfect place to send you.”
Raimen shivered, and fresh sweat beaded on his forehead.
“Do you accept?”
What choice did he have? What was he going to do, slay the dragon in his state? Did he even have his sword? He didn’t even bother glancing down to check.
“Deal.”
“Excellent! Oh, what fun. The suspense. The drama. The weighing of your honor on my finely-crafted scale. Go on, pick, pick! We’re all dying to know your choices.”
Three choices. He had three chances to get this right. He, with great difficulty, staggered to his feet.
“I can pick you up by the scruff again, if you can’t find it in yourself to stand.”
Raimen ignored that. And he was happy that he could. Some amount of yesterday’s belligerent tiger was still holding the line.
He cast his eyes over the jade masks, which all looked blankly ahead and reflected the room around them. Try as he might, he couldn’t discern anything from them. Not one servant deviated so much as a hair’s breadth from gazing straight ahead. He forced himself to imagine it – his prince, the snow-white rabbit. Trapped in that thing, probably being made to suckle at some perverse tap of mutative elixir. What would that look like?
He walked the room. Slowly, tediously, laboriously, he walked it. He kept a running tally of the most likely candidates. It seemed his initial plan – the one that felt like a lifetime ago, wouldn’t have worked. Not a single servant in the room had a rabbit’s ears sticking out from their black fabric wrap. It was good that he’d examined everyone in the performance chamber, though. Even though he hadn’t found the prince in there.
“You,” he said, laying a hand on a servant’s cloth-wrapped shoulder from behind. “Stand in the middle.”
Lord Gyakuo turned to him, brow furrowed. “Do you dare think that you can order my hoard around?”
Raimen raised his gaze. Weak, but defiant. “Do you think you can only win if I can’t?”
The dragon took a moment to ponder, then gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “Fine. All of you, stand where he tells you to. For now.”
Raimen nodded, and returned to his work.
“But no more touching. That’s cheating.”
Raimen nodded, again. From now on, he walked in front of the servants, rather than behind.
“You, stand in the middle.”
“You, stand in the middle.”
“You, stand in the middle.”
“And you, stand in the middle.”
Four candidates. Raimen reached the final servant, and he’d picked out four candidates.
He returned to the middle. Reviewing his choices, he looked them up and down, trying his damndest to hold his prince’s body in his mind’s eye.
He pointed to the servant on his right.
“You, at the end. Go back to where you were.”
The servant returned. Raimen lifted his gaze to the dragon.
“These three.”
“Oooh, so exciting~!” The dragon trilled, lowering his hover as close as he could to the ground. “I’ve never had birthday presents to open, so this is the closest I think I’ll ever get. May I do the honors, little one?”
Raimen didn’t even know what he was asking, specifically, but he nodded in agreement.
Like an excited child, Lord Gyakuo reached down and tapped the jade of the first servant with the tip of his claw. The verdant stone lost its luster, and its verdant glow transferred upwards into the great dragon’s scales.
The first helmet fell, and it was immediately obvious it wasn’t Prince Hiyowa. For one, his fur was the wrong shade. For two, he had a spot on his shoulder. For three, he was a dog.
“Oh! So close. Servant, stand aside, if you please.”
After reaching down to fetch his mask, the servant obeyed. Once back in position, he manually held the jade to his face, awaiting further orders.
Lord Gyakuo tapped again, wriggling his fingers beforehand to add a little pizazz to the proceedings.
The second helmet fell. This one was, at least, a rabbit. A harlequin, his black and white fur divided right down his center-line.
“Getting closer, little one, getting warmer. That’s half of a white rabbit, at least. You’re on pace to get it by number three. Now, for the grand finale!”
Lord Gyakuo tossed the servant aside with a flick of his wrist. He was caught by the innermost line of assembled servants, and returned to his post like nothing had happened.
Drawing it out, reeeally drawing it out, Lord Gyakuo tapped the third and final mask.
It fell. Rabbit ears rose from the loosened veils’ interior. A snow-white pelt shimmered in the midday sun, and the servant raised his head to reveal…
A mole on his neck. One that Prince Hiyowa didn’t have.
Raimen immediately set the last of his energy to panicking. Should he… should he lie? Just say that this was his prince? He’d be abducting a stranger and leaving his prince to eternal servitude… but that was better than walking away with nothing right?
“Would Prince Hiyowa,” Lord Gyakuo boomed, raising his voice and putting a hand to his chest, “please step forward?”
Nothing. Nobody in the room moved. Not that Raimen could see. But then…
No.
He heard a shuffling beside him. The servant holding the mirror stepped forward, putting his heels together with an unmistakable
clack on the stone floor.
Lord Gyakuo’s face bloomed in delight to an extent that Raimen had never seen before. “Oh, Fate is such a capricious god, isn’t She?”
The dragon reached down, disengaging the jade mask. The servant pulled it off. Rabbit ears rose from the loosened veils’ interior. A snow-white pelt shimmered in the midday sun, and the servant raised his head to reveal…
Prince Hiyowa. Eyes lidded, expression blank, attention on his dragon lord.
“What a shame! For all your talk of dedicating your heart and soul, you couldn’t see that your liege was right beside you form the moment you arrived! Oh, how embarrassing. You, disgraced knight, are our unlucky contestant for the day. But don’t fret. The consolation prize is fantastic! If I do say so myself.”
Reaching down with two fingers, Lord Gyakuo spun the prince around. With a little flick, he brought the rabbit’s mask up, and he dutifully held it in place.
“A lifetime of fulfilling work.”
No. No, he had to grab the prince and run, now.
“Physical fitness. Extended lifespan. Never suffering hunger or thirst.”
Lord Gyakuo pushed the prince forward. He strode. His steps were... Familiar. Not familiar to the life Raimen had lived before. It was… a step. A step. A step-step-step.
Fear and fatigue made it impossible to move.
“And nothing but quality time, together with your prince, at the endless performance. Why, you ought to be thanking me!”
The mask pressed forward, and Raimen didn’t have the strength to turn his head. His world went dull green. His mind went blank. A jut of the stone pressed itself into his mouth, and as the color bloomed in the mask around him, he felt a trickle of elixir trickle into his mouth.
“Stand.”
He stood. His body wouldn’t dare disobey Lord Gyakuo.
“Turn.”
He turned. His mind was nowhere near as strong, or wise, or powerful as a dragon’s. How could he have ever hoped to compete?
“And march yourself back into the performance chamber. Once inside… do as you will. I have faith you’ll make yourself useful.”
The tiger felt a great rush of wind. Lord Gyakuo was positioning around him. Coiling. Letting the universe know that this one was now his property.
“And Prince? Fetch yourself new mask. Join this little one in dance. He seems quite fond of you, after all.”
He didn’t need to turn his head to know that the rabbit would obey. The tiger simply walked. Stepped. Stepped. Step-step-stepped.
Green enclosed his vision, but he knew where to go. His naked torso begged for the touch of a colored veil, and legs were already thrumming with energy. ...
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Hypnosis
Dragon (Other)
120 x 120
3.24 MB
Galaze
~galaze
Lord Gyakuo is very relatable because I need much much more of this. Very fun setting.
anguiscantus1
~anguiscantus1
OP
Thank you so much!
