- Job Details:
The common belief with dragons was that they were obsessed with treasure, piling it up into large hoardes which they then slept upon and guarded with more ferocity than a mother protecting her young. Steal even one piece, no matter how small or insignificant, and the dragon would immediately notice and chase you to the next world if that was what it took to take back what it saw as its property and exact revenge on those who thought they could steal from a dragon and get away with it.
This wasn't entirely wrong, but it wasn't entirely correct either. There were actually a lot of dragons who had a strange interest in baubles. Of course the why was something one could debate about, because as most individuals with adequate amounts of gray matter could figure out gold and the like were mostly valuable in a culture where they had an assigned value, and dragons weren't known for either mingling with others or willingly parting with anything they'd added to their hoard. Their piles of treasure often included magic items but there were too many mundane objects for magic to be the main motivator either.
And as the rich could attest, there might be some novelty in sleeping on filthy lucre but it couldn't exactly be called comfortable. Just because a dragon was covered in tough scales didn't mean they suddenly were completely immune to having sharp and hard objects constantly poking their stomach while they slept.
Akeya's personal guess would be that, rather than monetary value or aesthetics, it was more a combination of status and sheer boredom. Dragons often spent years on end doing very little since there weren't many things they had to fear and also not a lot of things for them to desire. Collecting shiny stuff might be nothing more than a way to pass the time, and beyond that a dragon with a large hoard filled with rare objects could boast about it.
But there were also a lot of dragons who couldn't care less about hoards. Akeya considered herself one of those. She had an eye for beauty and a thirst for knowledge, but neither of those drove her to throw it all onto a pile. Partially because objects carrying either beauty or knowledge tended to react poorly to that kind of treatment. Scrolls and paintings would tear, statues and tablets would become covered in scars and people needed space to breathe.
So far as Akeya was concerned the best equivalent of her hoard was a library, a much more practical method for collecting as much knowledge as possible in one location without making disorganized heaps where you'd have to dig for days to find that one book you were looking for. Which is why she was most often found in the library.
Today was such a day, although this time she had some deeper motivation.
As usual nearly all the lights were turned off, only a few light lachrima orbs glowing faintly so they cast more shadows than actual illumination. Akeya was pacing back and forth, a habit she usually frowned upon for being distracting but unable to stop her clawed feet from moving in a pattern. Before her several tables had been moved to form a semi-circle, and each table had several scrolls and books placed upon them, some of them open/unrolled while others had been closed again. On a nearby wall a large map was covered in many lines and other symbols, forming a maze which would leave any other person confused as there was no clear indicator what the purpose was.
Other than Akeya there was nobody else in the area. Nobody except for three tiny dragons, one of them sitting on top of the assassin's head while two others were flying around, enjoying the fact that the library had some nice high ceilings allowing for plenty of aerial maneuvering for such small creatures. Their iridescent scales glimmered in the faint light of the lachrimas, their direct surroundings obscured by an otherworldly dance of light and darkness.
The twilight dragoness wasn't one to outwardly show when she was disturbed, other than annoyance and some level of concern or startlement. But this time around there was nobody to watch and she had much to think about, so a frown adorned her olive-skinned face and her claws clacked against the hard floor in a regular pattern as she moved with more briskness than was normal for her. The library was well away from the outside and while there was adequate ventilation that those inside wouldn't end up feeling like they were breathing dust the air was still a lot less energetic than most other locations, so the sound of her footsteps carried far.
Akeya's concerns could be summed up with one word, a word which had haunted Fiore and the entirety of Earthland many times in the past and which for some reason kept coming back time and time again:
Acnologia.
The supposed king of dragons (a derisive snort escaped the dragoness's nasal cavities), a calamity in his own right who appeared to have no purpose other than to appear, wreak havoc and disappear once more. He had existed for so long that almost nobody even questioned why any longer: he was as natural for most as erupting volcanoes or hurricanes. Rather than complain why he destroyed things and where he came from it was better to prepare yourself for the possibility that he'd visit your home next. At least that way your energy would be poured into something useful rather than whining.
But in recent years Akeya had picked up on a strange pattern. Strange and very disturbing, because while she was not sure what the exact explanation was the first theory she came up with would have some dire implications for both the present and the future. She stepped forward and lifted a book she'd already read through several times, then put it down again as she'd done before. It was a book that detailed the exploits of Heero, a mage who for quite some time had been heralded as one of the greatest mages in all of Earthland before he disappeared. She'd met him personally and while she couldn't have said to approve of his demeanour she wouldn't deny that he was strong.
One of those exploits was the tale in which Heero supposedly slew Acnologia, finally ridding the world of an ancient menace. It was a good read for someone interested in heroics although Akeya found it a bit too straightforward and over the top: she preferred her stories with some more complexity in it so you could get properly immersed in the setting. The story wasn't from too long ago, at its longest about a decade. The austere assassin could remember when the book was released (it sold pretty well, since Heero had no hesitation in appealing to the masses).
While the story wasn't as detailed as Akeya would have liked it described the fight with Acnologia quite well, and the dragon's defeat was well recorded.
And yet Acnologia had showed up again at a later date.
The first conclusion people would arrive at was that the creature's demise had been proclaimed prematurely, that Heero had managed to injure it but hadn't delivered the finishing blow like he thought he had. If that was the only issue Akeya could write it down as a case of misjudgement, but that was only one in a pattern...
Another book, also thoroughly studied and then closed again. Rather than a biography this one was filled from front to back with memorable and significant events in the history of Fiore and its surroundings, most of them wrought by mages solitary and in groups. It was written in a style which appealed more to the research-minded scaled beauty, with a heavier focus on actual information rather than entertainment. While she wouldn't deny that sometimes a good story was worth the time she would nine times out of ten choose to absorb information and knowledge instead.
And in this book it was recorded several times that the king of dragons had met its violent end at the hands of other powerful creatures, human mages and others. The book dismissed it as nobody ever managing to kill the calamity, but combined with the other sources that Akeya had been digging up...
There were too many records of that black dragon having been slain in some form or another. And every time he came back as if nothing had happened, even if there was usually several years in between. And nearly every record stated with confidence that the dragon had died, usually in a manner which was extremely difficult to survive. Once you began to truly look at what was written down it became obvious that something was amiss. The question turned into why this was happening, and as aforementioned Akeya's personal perspective was leaving her troubled.
One explanation was that people were just too eager in proclaiming the dragon king dead. She doubted that one, because she was pretty sure most people would be more likely to believe that he couldn't be killed. There were plenty of stories calling him a calamity more than a creature after all. Beyond that there was the issue that some of the documentations were too precise and originated from sources normally thought credible. To dismiss all of them would be an oddity in itself.
If the dragoness had to hazard a guess herself she'd have to come to the very worrisome conclusion that the rumours of Acnologia being immortal were actually true. There were plenty of creatures in existence which were terribly hard to get rid off: there were countless methods for delaying the inevitable and escaping from oblivion's hungry maws. But most of those were based around avoiding situations which would kill you, or making yourself unkillable through mundane means. Neither of those applied to Acnologia who sometimes appeared to attack with a suicidal frenzy, and who (once you gathered all the reports) had apparently experienced quite the variety of defeats and endings. Some of them even included attempts at sealing the monster.
The persistence with which the creature returned to haunt Earthland and leave disaster in his wake left Akeya with no real explanation other than that some force was ensuring that the dragon king would exist to spread misery. And while this anti-social predator didn't have much reason to concern about the troubles of other people she couldn't just dismiss the fact that something like Acnologia would continue to return no matter what anybody did about it.
Reaching up she scratched the little dragon on her head behind the horns, an act which got her the reward of listening to a pleased churring. She was trying her best not to spoil the triplets but she had to admit that with how cautious she was to ensure nothing could harm them she was making it difficult for them to learn about the harsher parts of life. She hadn't even let them hunt for themselves yet, aside from some rats which had been sneaking about.
But the oddities with Acnologia didn't end there. Something else she had noticed was that, for some reason or another, he was never defeated by the same person twice. The moment someone was recorded as having taken down the black shadow of death their paths never crossed again. That might be another reason why this phenomenon hadn't been brought to anyone's attention before now: those who dealt with the arrogant bastard never encountered him again, and so never noticed what was going on.
There was the theory that it was always a different dragon, but the description was nearly identical each time. And Acnologia never gave the impression of caring for anything other than turning something into rubble and ashes. It'd have to be a massive coincidence for all those black dragons to be different ones, nearly identical and behaving exactly the same.
WC: 2,002
TWC: 2,002/12,500