SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 785: The Castle Under the Mountain

It wasn't a cave. Trafalgar had understood that at the threshold, but understanding it and walking into it were two different things.

What Caelvyrn had hollowed out of the mountain was a castle. An enormous one, grown up out of the living rock the way a thing grows that has had thousands of years to become itself, spires and vaulted halls and long colonnades running back into the dark, bridges of pale stone arching over drops with no bottom the eye could find, staircases that climbed and climbed toward galleries lost somewhere far overhead.

Mana lit it in place of the sun, a soft cold glow that clung to the stone and left the deepest parts in shadow. And everywhere, folded into the grey immensity of it, there were gardens. Green things growing under a mountain that had never seen a sunrise, whole terraces of them, quiet and impossible and perfectly kept.

And all of it empty. Not a servant, not a guard, not a single living soul in any of it but the four of them and the man who owned it.

Trafalgar walked with his head turning, and for once he didn't bother pretending it was anything less than a marvel.

"How do you keep all of this running on your own?" he asked. "The gardens alone. Somebody has to tend them, and I don't see anybody."

Caelvyrn's grin was insufferable and entirely earned. "A magician doesn't give away his tricks." He let that sit, pleased with himself, and waved a lazy hand down one of the great colonnades. "Come. I'll take you to what you actually came for. The rest of the tour can wait."

They walked, and the castle went on giving up its size as they went, hall opening onto hall, and Trafalgar found the scale of the thing settling on him differently the longer he was inside it. This wasn't built for company. It had never been meant to be full. It was the home of something that had outlived nearly everything it had ever known and had, at some point, simply stopped expecting anyone to share it.

"This place has a long history," Caelvyrn said, catching the look on him without turning his head. There was something quieter under the vanity now, just for a moment. "A great deal of it. I've done more inside these walls over the years than you'd believe if I told you plainly." The lightness slid back into his voice. "I'll tell you the whole of it one day, if you live long enough to sit still for it. After the important part."

"Fine by me," Trafalgar said. "The important part first."

They came at last into a wide, round chamber near the heart of it, and there it was.

It stood in the center of the floor, taller than a man and ringed with worked stone, and across the space it framed hung a sheet of something that wasn't quite air and wasn't quite water, a faint shimmer with dark behind it, patient and wrong in a way that made the back of Trafalgar's neck prickle.

"There it is." Caelvyrn spread his hands. "The door. We built it on the same principle as the Gates, in the end, once we stopped trying to be clever about it. You step through, you come out the other side, in the dimension. Simple as walking into another room." He tipped his head toward Rhosyn. "She did the real work of it. Dravok and I only supplied the brute end. Mana, and a great deal of it."

"He means he flooded it with power and called that a contribution," Dravok said, dry. "Her part is finer than anything the two of us could manage. That's why hers finished long before ours did, and why it cost her the most. Holding the whole of a place like this together in your mind, keeping it from tearing itself apart, that's a strain no amount of raw strength answers for."

Rhosyn, who had been quiet through all of it, gave a small tired shrug that agreed with him and didn't want to discuss it.

Trafalgar looked at the shimmer a moment longer, and turned back to Dravok.

"Before I go through it, let me ask you something," he said. "After all this. After the training. Are you finally going to tell me where the others are? The rest of the Primordials."

Dravok met the question without flinching. "I gave you my word I would. When you're ready, and not a day before." He said it flat, without apology. "Not because I don't trust you with it. Because if I took you to them as you are now, they would kill you before you finished introducing yourself, and there is not a thing I could do to stop it. The least you can do is be able to defend yourself against an average one of them."

Trafalgar's brow lifted. "Average."

"Average." Dravok's pale eyes didn't move off him. "Anyone carrying our blood stands above what you've measured yourself against so far. And in the old days, they were raised for one purpose, from the moment they could stand. Bred like war machines and trained like them too, from three years old to eighteen, in places built exactly like the one behind you." He let the weight of that land. "So yes. Average. An average Primordial would end you where you stand, and think nothing of it. That is the bar. That is what these next years are for."

The chamber was quiet under his voice, the cold glow of the castle pressing in around them, and Trafalgar let the size of what he was walking into settle properly for the first time. A castle grown out of a mountain by a dragon older than kingdoms. A door to a place where a day became a month. And at the end of it all, a people who would murder him on sight for the blood in his veins, and against whom the strongest thing he'd ever done would count for nothing.

He'd wanted the truth of what he was. This was what the road to it looked like.

"All right," he said.

Rhosyn pushed herself off the wall she'd been leaning on and crossed toward the shimmering door, and something in her expression sharpened past the exhaustion, into the one thing in all of this that was hers alone.

"Then let's go in," she said. "I'll show you how it works from the inside."