A dragon's roar tore through the entire territory.
My eardrums burst before I finished processing the sound — not gradually, not with the progression that would have given time to prepare, but all at once, as though the sound had decided it didn't need intermediaries between itself and the inside of the skull. It wasn't volume I had experienced before — it was something beyond volume, it was air pressure organized into a frequency the human body hadn't been built to receive in concentrated doses. I closed the box and dropped to the ground rolling, the pain moving through my head with the quality of something that had entered there specifically to cause maximum damage before leaving, and that was still leaving while I rolled.
I felt someone approaching with the footsteps I had learned to recognize even without hearing correctly. Morgana, who seemed as disoriented as I was, arrived and sat beside me with the care of someone using every available ounce of attention to reach the right destination. Her magic reached my ears before she said anything — I could feel the eardrums reconstructing while the world still spun, the strange sensation of structure being rebuilt in real time, and when I was healed I did the same for Morgana because it was the least I could do.
When we finally managed to get up, the entire territory was in chaos. The roar had reached everything beyond the trees — further than any sound I could intentionally produce, as though it had used the structures of my territory as resonance chambers and multiplied itself on every surface it had found. Livina was on the ground in a state equal to mine despite being from a physically stronger race than mine and Morgana — she hadn't escaped unscathed either, and only when Morgana and I used healing magic did she begin to recover with the slowness of something that had received more than it had expected. The stable was chaos — the Urskra panicking and running back and forth, hitting the constructions with the force of animals that had lost their sense of where it was safe to be. The workers, archers, soldiers and even the knights were frozen in place as though something was directly interfering with their nervous systems, preventing them from moving, their processing interrupted by the intensity of what had arrived.
Only the Cockatrice seemed indifferent — it had bolted from the stable and stayed at my side throughout the entire healing process, both mine and Livina's, with the specific familiarity of something that had grown large enough to be physically inconvenient but still insisted on acting with the instinct of the fledgling it had been when it first arrived. It stayed there, as though protecting me from anything that might appear — with the complete seriousness of something that hadn't calculated whether it was capable but had decided it was what needed to be done.
"Hey, little one. You can relax, I think." I stroked its head while it seemed pleased to feel useful.
It took hours. Healing the creatures, calming them, returning the stable to something resembling order and the territory to the normalcy that had existed before the roar. When the silence finally returned, Morgana touched on the problem.
"Lord. How is it possible to open that box?"
It was my question too — and it was a question that had been on the edge since the moment I had closed the box back up, the kind you don't ask out loud because asking out loud is admitting you have no answer.
I knew the chest was a gift — and gifts didn't hurt their recipient. Or at least they shouldn't, and the Oasis had taught me that the shouldn'ts had exceptions, but in this specific case there was something communicating that the problem wasn't the item but was me. That there was a condition I still hadn't identified. A key that wasn't physical and that I couldn't access by the path I had tried.
"I'm missing something."
Dragons were creatures that, despite all their strength and dominance, were extraordinarily reclusive — rarely leaving their territory, rarely seeking contact with other races except under specific conditions the Codex described insufficiently. Which drastically limited the available information about them — not because they were unknown, but because those who had encountered them had rarely survived to document the encounter usefully, and those who had survived had rarely understood enough for the account to be worth more than curiosity.
"For now the box will have to stay closed until we figure out what can be done."
✦
Of course the damage from the roar had reached beyond my territory — and I wasn't surprised to learn the market was already in an uproar, after all it was part of its essence to always be in an uproar about anything that communicated power or danger, and a dragon's roar communicated both simultaneously.
Reports of a possible dragon in human territory began to circulate with the specific speed of information that people didn't want to believe but were afraid to confirm — the kind of rumor that grew not because someone was deliberately spreading it but because each person who had heard the sound added a detail they had imagined and passed it on as what they had received. Fortunately, without anyone having seen any flying creature, the subject gradually died out — and within half a day it had already been replaced by other news, other rumors, the market's routine consuming the extraordinary until it became ordinary with the efficiency of a system that had learned that extraordinary was temporary and ordinary was the default state.
I had taken advantage of the chaos of possible dragons to begin discreet searches — discreet because any overt search about dragons in that context would immediately be connected to the roar, and connections were things I preferred to control before others made them.
"I'd like to request information about dragons. Any scroll — I'm willing to pay an attractive amount."
"Understood, sir. What reward?"
"Medium Stones, one for one."
"Understood."
Fortunately the subject of dragons wasn't popular in the market sense — there was no constant demand, no established network of collectors and intermediaries, which meant the cost of information, although scarce in quantity, wasn't expensive. But even after three days almost nothing relevant had arrived. The accounts about dragons were sparse and, in the vast majority, theoretical — written by people who had read about them rather than encountered them, the chain of references leading back to a handful of original sources that said essentially the same thing in different words.
The copies of scrolls and books I managed to acquire focused on categorization with the precision of someone who had decided that categorizing was understanding: fire dragons lived in volcanoes, water dragons in the sea, earth dragons in great mountains, each type shaped by the environment it inhabited over generations until the environment and the creature became the same thing. Distinct body structures according to type, with the functional logic of adaptation taken to extremes. Inherent characteristics like greed and strength consistently present across varieties, as though there were a core that the environment could shape but not replace.
But nothing that told me how to open that damned little red box without destroying my own hearing and half the territory in the process.
While I was immersed in a new scroll about stone dragons — the most detailed of those I had managed to acquire, and still insufficient in exactly what I needed — new information reached my ears from a nearby conversation.
"Hey, it seems the Colosseum conjunction event is going to happen earlier this year."
I raised my eyes from the research.
The conjunction event happened every five years — a tournament where the various races fought each other in pursuit of prizes and access to constructions and items that were normally not available through conventional channels or in the hands of any race. For humans, it was the moment of greatest visibility: the fights were broadcast to all of humanity outside the Oasis, and the prizes were above average in every aspect, the kind of reward that justified the risk for those willing to calculate that risk.
The problem was that I was very far, in strength, from the oldest humans in the Oasis — they had accumulated Nectar for decades, had integrated heroes through processes I was still at the beginning of, had refined strategies whose very existence I was still learning about. For other humans, these were considered gods — not through exaggeration but through scale, the difference in power that made direct comparison not just naive but dangerous.
Another detail that caught my attention was that the transmitted fights were always between humans, never against other races — which made it all more marketing than real demonstration. After all, the theory I had was that, despite being a greatly beloved event for humanity as spectacle, it was something that deep down nobody had the courage to use to demonstrate what humanity was really capable of against what existed out there. It was easier and safer to be great within a comparison you controlled.
But it was an opportunity to observe. And observing was information, and information was what I was seeking above all else at that moment.
"At least I'll be able to see how humans are doing."
"Any news, master?"
Morgana seemed excited when I left the market — with the kind of expectation of someone who had followed every day of the search and still believed the next day could be different. As on previous days, the answer was the same.
"Still nothing."
"Don't worry, Lord." — she said, with the specific firmness of someone who believes what they're saying and isn't just being reassuring — there was a difference between the two, and she had learned not to confuse them. — "No matter how long it takes — when you find out, I'm certain a great power is waiting inside that box."
"Thank you."
I wasn't sad. Frustrated with the gap I felt but couldn't identify — the specific sensation of being close to something without knowing which direction it was coming from. But the Purge had taught me that there were things that couldn't be resolved with haste. Some needed time. Or information that hadn't arrived yet. And there was a difference between waiting passively and waiting while searching — I was doing the latter, which was the most I could do.
"Materials calculated and itemized. Do you wish to review them?"
After days, Zeus had finally managed to map what I needed — the calculation process had taken longer than I had expected, which was in itself information about the complexity of what was being built.
"Yes, Zeus. List the items."
[ 1 — 2 Level 5 Workers ]
[ 2 — Griffin Feathers ]
[ 3 — Griffin Scales ]
[ 4 — 2 Unfertilized Eggs ]
[ 5 — 10 Exceptional quality Stones ]
[ 6 — Freshly extracted Griffin Blood ]
I nearly fell backward. The items were far more than I had calculated — and not just in quantity, but in difficulty of acquisition. Every item on the list was, in itself, a separate expedition, a separate negotiation, a separate risk. Apart from the workers, I had absolutely nothing of what was needed, and what was needed I wasn't certain would be available in conventional markets.
"Damn. We're going to need to go to the Colosseum. The materials are much harder to acquire than I expected."
"Lord… And what about Zaridan?"
Morgana finally addressed the elephant in the room — with the tone of someone who had waited for the right moment to do so and had decided the moment was now, because continuing to wait would be continuing to avoid.
After returning from the Purge, I had pushed that problem under the rug with the deliberation of someone who knew they were pushing but had calculated that the other priorities were more urgent. That was true — and it was also true that pushing had a limit, and the limit was approaching.
"He's still imprisoned in the temple." — Morgana said, before I could ask — she had been monitoring without me asking, the kind of initiative I had stopped requesting because I had learned she took it before I needed to. — "And honestly I don't think he has the capacity to escape. But I didn't want him in your territory, my Lord."
It was good to see that Morgana had started offering opinions even when I didn't ask for them — there was something that had changed in her in the previous months, a confidence that had grown slowly and that I saw in small moments like this one. It was something that pleased me, however inconvenient it could be at times. It was someone who could illuminate situations with a perspective different from mine, and different perspectives were exactly what I couldn't generate on my own by definition.
"Does Livina think the same?"
"Yes."
Problems wouldn't disappear just because I preferred they would — that was one of the lessons the Oasis had taught me in varied and repeated ways, as though it needed to be certain the message had arrived.
"Let's head to the temple." — I said, with the calm of a made decision that didn't need enthusiasm to be firm. — "The time has come to have a conversation."