SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 784: His Humble Abode

"Ready as anyone can be." Trafalgar leaned back. "So today's finally the day I get to see it. This city under a mountain the three of you have been pouring the better part of two years into."

"That's the day." Dravok took a slow drink. "It's finished. Stable enough now to walk into without it finding some clever way to kill you, which is more than I'd have sworn to a year ago." He set the cup down. "We leave for Caelvyrn's the moment we're done here. On his back, it won't take long."

"Hold on." Caelvyrn's head turned. "You mean to use me as a coach horse now as well? I'll have you know I could pitch you off any time the mood took me, Dravok."

"Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say." Dravok didn't so much as glance at him. "First we show the boy the place, which means today you carry us there. After that, your part's done."

"Three years you've had out of me, and now my part's done?" Caelvyrn pressed a hand to his chest, wounded. "This is as much my concern as it is yours, old man. In fact, I'd say I've a lesson or two of my own to give Trafalgar while we're about it. Along the lines of what I taught Silas."

"I don't see why not." Trafalgar lifted a shoulder. "The more the better."

Dravok let a long breath out through his nose, the sound of a man who had already lost the argument and knew it. "Fine. Then let's go."

The four of them rose from the table.

A while later they stood in the forest that ran up against the edge of Euclid, in a clearing wide enough for what came next. Caelvyrn stepped out ahead of them, rolled his shoulders once, and let the change take him. It came the way a landslide comes, slow and all at once, the man folding outward and upward into something vast, scales spilling across him in a dark sheen, until where a tall man had stood there was a dragon better than fifty metres from snout to tail, and the clearing no longer looked wide enough to hold him.

"Right, up you get, seeing as I'm apparently doing this." His voice came out enormous, rolling through the trees. "For the last time, mind. And ladies first."

Rhosyn sighed, and climbed, and said nothing about it. Trafalgar went up after her, and Dravok after him, hauling his considerable weight up the dragon's flank without any visible effort.

"You didn't grumble half this much," Dravok noted, finding his place, "when it was Rhosyn you were ferrying back and forth."

"Oh, come now." Caelvyrn sounded genuinely offended. "You're setting a lady beside a weathered old boulder like yourself? Any dragon with sense counts it a privilege to carry a beautiful woman from one end of the world to the other. Only a madman would turn that down. You, I carry under protest."

Rhosyn said nothing to any of it. She only rolled her eyes, with feeling.

The dragon's wings opened, and the ground dropped away.

Trafalgar had flown before, on airships and lesser mounts, and none of it had felt like this. Caelvyrn moved through the sky faster than anything that had ever carried him, the wind tearing past, the land below smearing into green and grey. It would have torn a weaker man loose in a heartbeat. Trafalgar only set his grip and held, his strength more than equal to it, and watched the world blur beneath them.

Some buried part of him hadn't stopped marvelling at the road his life had taken. A year or two ago he'd have called any of this a fever dream. Now he rode the back of a fifty-metre dragon older than most kingdoms, bound for a mountain that hid a door to somewhere the world didn't know existed, and treated the whole thing as another appointment to keep.

Kilometres fell away under the dragon's wings. When Caelvyrn finally began to drop, it was toward country Trafalgar had never laid eyes on, a range of hard grey mountains standing alone with nothing built for miles in any direction.

There was a cave in the side of one of them. Or there should have been, by the look of the rock, but the entrance wasn't there to see. Something hid it, a working laid over the stone, so that the eye slid off the exact place where a mouth should have opened in the mountainside. It was good work, whatever it was. Trafalgar had a decent eye for a concealment by now, and even knowing a cave had to be there, even staring straight at the spot, he couldn't make his gaze hold it. It slid away every time, like water off oiled stone.

Caelvyrn set down on a wide ledge, and by the time they'd climbed off him he'd folded back into his man's form, brushing himself down as though the flight had put a wrinkle in him somewhere.

He walked to the blank rock face and laid one hand flat against it.

The mountain answered. A seam of light ran up the stone where no seam had been, and a whole section of the cliff drew back and open, baring the dark mouth of a hall beyond.

Trafalgar didn't bother to hide that it impressed him.

Caelvyrn caught it at once, and his grin turned insufferable. "Surprised, are you? By that little trick?" He stepped through into the dark, and it began to warm and glow ahead of him as he went. "You've seen nothing yet, boy. I did not live out the better part of eternity to end up with a hole in a rock. Come and see what a humble abode actually looks like."

Trafalgar followed him in, and stopped a few steps past the threshold.

The cave was the mountain. All of it. The stone had been hollowed out from the inside into a space so vast it ran up and up into a dark far overhead and back into distances the light never reached, so large that the four of them standing in the mouth of it counted for nothing at all. And down there, past where the glow gave out, Trafalgar caught the edges of things that had been built, structures rising out of the black, a whole silent sprawl of them waiting where the light couldn't touch.

This was only the entrance.