SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 798: The First Time

"Do you want me to tell you about me?"

Trafalgar hadn't expected that.

Caelvyrn had spent the last hour talking about dead power houses, broken weapons, and wars whose victors had rewritten half the details afterward. For a man who clearly enjoyed talking, he'd managed to say surprisingly little about where he fit into any of it.

Trafalgar looked around the sealed room once more. "I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to."

Caelvyrn gave a quiet breath that might have been amusement, then moved toward the shelves. "There isn't much point collecting history if you're going to pretend you weren't part of it. I've lived through enough of what sits in these rooms."

"That's still a very careful way of avoiding telling me how old you are."

"It is."

"So how old are you, exactly?"

Caelvyrn looked at him over one shoulder. "I'm not answering that."

Trafalgar stared at him for a second before accepting that he probably wasn't going to get anything better.

"Fine. Start somewhere else."

Caelvyrn stopped before an old weapon mounted alone against the wall. It was a spear, or what remained of one. Half the shaft was gone, the metal head split nearly through its centre, with a deep cut running diagonally across it.

"I knew Dravok long before either of us had much reason to like the other," he said. "You've already heard us mention that we fought. That wasn't an occasional disagreement."

Trafalgar remembered the conversation in Velkaris well enough.

"You crossed blades more times than you could count."

"Blades for him. Claws and teeth for me, depending on the century." Caelvyrn studied the ruined spear. "We were on opposite sides often enough that seeing him across a battlefield stopped being surprising."

"What were you fighting over?"

"Different things. Territory. Alliances. Wars started by people who'd been dead for years before we ever reached the field." His mouth tightened slightly. "That happened more often than you'd think. Two rulers decide they hate one another, and twenty years later thousands of people are still killing each other because nobody remembers how to stop."

Trafalgar leaned against the edge of a stone display.

"And you and Dravok kept ending up there."

"Dravok was the general of the Primordials. When they moved in force, he was usually somewhere near the front of it." Caelvyrn glanced toward him. "I was younger then, and considerably more interested in proving things that didn't need proving."

Trafalgar almost smiled. "You? Arrogant?"

"I said younger. I didn't say completely different."

There was a faint trace of humour in it, but Caelvyrn let it fade quickly, as if even acknowledging it gave it too much importance.

"He was one of the few people I couldn't simply overpower and forget about afterward. That mattered to me then. Every time we met, one of us had something to prove, and neither of us was particularly good at leaving things unfinished."

"Who won?"

"Neither of us, in the way you're thinking." Caelvyrn corrected, his tone sharpening slightly. "We both survived. That was the only outcome that ever mattered in the end."

"That's convenient."

"It's the truth." Caelvyrn turned away from the spear. "There were fights where I left him bleeding. Others where he left me worse. A few ended because the armies around us had already finished destroying themselves while we were still occupied with each other."

Trafalgar could picture that rather too easily.

Dravok already felt like something built for war even now, older and quieter after centuries away from it. Caelvyrn in his true body was fifty metres of scale, teeth, and power. The idea of the two of them repeatedly finding one another across ancient battlefields sounded less like a duel and more like a problem for everyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

"So when did that change?"

Caelvyrn's expression settled.

"When the Void came."

That answer stripped the last lightness from the conversation.

Caelvyrn walked farther into the room, passing beneath an old banner so damaged that Trafalgar couldn't make out the crest anymore.

"The war you've read about wasn't clean. The books make it sound as though the Primordials stood against the Void Creatures, won at terrible cost, sealed them away, and everyone else survived because of it."

"That's more or less what I was taught."

"It's broadly true." Caelvyrn looked back at him. "It's also missing most of the war."

He continued walking.

"The Primordials carried the worst of it because they were the only bloodline capable of meeting the Void directly at that scale. But they weren't alone. Dragons fought. Humans fought. Elves, demons, races whose names aren't spoken anymore. By the time everyone understood what the Void actually meant, old wars became very difficult to justify."

Trafalgar followed him. "Including yours with Dravok."

"Especially ours."

Caelvyrn stopped before another display. Inside lay a length of blackened dragon scale, cracked straight through its centre.

"The first time Dravok and I ever fought on the same side, neither of us planned it. We'd entered that battle from different fronts. By the time we met in the middle, there was nothing left between us worth fighting over."

His fingers rested against the glass.

"Void Creatures were pouring through faster than either army could kill them. Dravok had lost a large part of his force. I'd lost people of my own. We saw each other across what was left of the field, and for once neither of us raised a weapon at the other."

"What happened?"

"He pointed at the breach and told me to take the left."

Trafalgar waited.

"That's it?"

"That was it." A faint smile touched Caelvyrn's mouth. "No grand speech. No apology for the centuries we'd spent trying to kill each other. He told me to take the left, I told him not to get in my way, and we fought together until there was nothing left coming through."

Trafalgar could believe that too.

"And afterward?"

"We still didn't like each other very much."

That drew a short laugh from Trafalgar.

Caelvyrn continued, quieter now. "But once you've trusted someone to stand beside you while everything around you is falling apart, it's difficult to return completely to what you were before. We still argued. We still fought more than once after that. But it changed."

"Respect."

"Eventually." Caelvyrn nodded. "Then something closer to friendship, though I doubt Dravok would have called it that at the time."

Trafalgar thought of the two of them now. The insults were still there, the old competition underneath them, but so was the ease of men who no longer needed to ask whether the other would show up when it mattered.

Centuries later, Dravok had needed help building a place to train Trafalgar.

And Caelvyrn had come.

Trafalgar looked around the room again. "You kept things from that war too."

Caelvyrn's attention stayed on the cracked scale.

"More than I should have."

Something in the answer changed.

Trafalgar caught it immediately.

Caelvyrn left the display and crossed toward the rear wall, where another door sat almost hidden between two shelves. This one was smaller than the entrance they'd used, plain stone without markings or decoration.

He rested his hand against it but didn't open it immediately.

"The things outside are history," he said. "Wars, kingdoms, people I watched rise and disappear. They're easy enough to talk about after enough time passes."

His hand pressed against the stone.

The door began to open.

"What I kept in here is different."

Trafalgar looked past him into the darkness beyond.

Caelvyrn stepped through.

"If you actually want to know me, this is where we start."