Chương 184: Chapter 260: Mother

William Oh stole a grimoire of ancient secrets from a dragon's hoard, right under her watchful gaze. Jason Salazar Maribelle picked up Jer and Will followed her to her mother's Domain. The others stayed behind and set up camp at the sap-spring falls. Their reasoning: If the mother dragon was going to pick a fight, Will might be able to escape by himself, but a full Party of Climbers armed to the teeth showing up on her doorstep might send the wrong message.

It was a quick flight to an oversized clearing around a pair of earth hills. Will didn't see any entrance to the den, but there was a ton of miasma flowing through and around it, so it had to be special somehow. Will didn't realize that he'd entered a dragon's domain at first. It crept up on his consciousness. Unlike Nora's dome of swirling curses, the dividing line between the domain and the outside wasn't so clear-cut. The miasma inside Mother's domain felt like… stillness.

Not calm and tranquil like a serene lake or an idyllic forest. It was an ominous stillness, as if all the animals in the forest had suddenly gone quiet. The kind a predator might have while waiting for a juicy prey to enter their range. Every strand of Miasma running through the trees or the earth, floating through the sky or under the wings of the birds… was operating on some strange intelligence that lived and breathed behind the realm of consciousness thought.

Will was absolutely sure the surroundings would turn against him in an instant should he prove to be a threat. Crap. Mirabelle's mom is scary. Although I am curious to see if Aspect would resist it, like it did with Nora.

"Mother! Mother, wake up!" The nearby hill peeled an eye open. With a snort, a deep red dragon unfolded from beneath centuries of leaf-litter and detritus that had long since become soil, allowing grass and small trees to take root. Mirabelle's mother brushed them aside with a yawn as she raised her head, peering down at the two of them. She dwarfed the already titanic Mirabelle, forcing Will to stare straight up, eyes wide to try and take in her whole face.

"What is it, Mirabelle? I just laid down, and I asked you not to disturb me unless it was an emergency, didn't I?" Mother said, bopping the side of her head and causing several wheelbarrows worth of soil tumble from the cracks between her horns.

"Ummm…Jer's hurt real bad, Mother." Mirabelle said, dropping the smaller male from her back onto the ground in front of her mother.

"Hmm…Climbers have bullied poor little Jericho. I did tell you not to get involved with them, didn't I? If I've told you once, I've told you a million times. Most of them are powerless insects, but every once in a while…WelI suppose you had to learn for yourself one way or another." Mother said, rousing herself enough to lean her chin on a single paw while the other extended towards Jer.

"How do you know it was Climber work?" Maribelle asked.

"You've been around as long as I have, you start to get a feel for it. System-generated magic has a stuffy, lifeless feel to it." Mother said, swirling her paw above Jer.

"No sense of organic beauty or style." Tell me more, Maribelle's mom. Will thought. Will watched in fascination as the curses embedded in Jer's body were pulled out of him and swirled around Mother's finger, like cobwebs drawn upwards by a gentle breeze. She knows magic. She knows magic good. Is it weird to want a dragon mommy to tutor me? Hah. Jericho let out a gasp as the captured image and paralysis debuff were removed, finally able to breathe properly. His eyes and nose stopped bleeding, too.

Should probably give him some healing potions too, to be safe, Will thought, setting about using Sourdough to dump the same healing potion over Jericho over and over until he looked better. Mother stiffened for a moment, her eyes focusing on Will, as though a gnat that had been there the entire time had suddenly come into focus.

"Oh my, are you the Climber who hurt Jericho? Why are you here?" Mother said, peering down at Will as she breathed in, causing a rumble to shake the earth.

"Here to try your hand?"

"Just trying to keep things civil, ma'am." Will said, skin cold as he tried not to look the ancient dragon in the face.

"What a polite young man. Let me see your face." There wasn't really any arguing with that. Will glanced up at Mother. He wasn't sure what to expect. A smiting, perhaps, or being batted across the forest by razor-sharp claws.

"Oh, you again." Mother said, hiding a yawn behind her paw.

"Is it the Migration again already?"

"…Yeah, me again." Will said with a shrug. Apparently she'd had dealing with previous Will's. This could be an excellent opportunity to get information.

"So, Ezykial, where's your snake? Is Steve hiding out somewhere?" What?

"Mother, he said his name was William Oh." Maribelle pointed out. Mother frowned.

"Did I sleep through an entire Migration?" she asked, aghast.

"I…didn't want to disturb you." Maribelle said, tapping her claws together.

"I suppose your father's run off with some younger dragon who doesn't fall asleep for entire Coils."

"Father's right there." Maribelle said, pointing at the second hill. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"I suppose he is." Mother mused.

"Excuse me, do I look like Ezykial the Serpent?"

"Well, the three of you have the same face, so you'll have to forgive me, but no, Ezykial is a great warrior who is a fair bit bulkier than you, so I should've guessed. I was just expecting him, but I slept through it." So there are just three.

"And since you aren't sneering at everyone like a pompous prick and bugging me about learning magic, you're not Castavelle the Paragon. That makes you William Oh, the Legend."

"Is that something that could happen?" Will asked.

"I would love to learn more about magic from you. Perhaps we could come to some kind of arrangement? I'm sure a few years wouldn't be a burden." Mother frowned, peering down at him.

"You are William Oh, right?"

"…Maybe!" Will said.

"And you are?" Mother snorted, creating a titanic wind that nearly knocked Will over.

"Call me Mother. I've forgotten my name while I slept. Or perhaps I dreamt it. If you're still alive after the Migration, then seek me out. I'd be happy to teach you for a few decades." Will clicked his tongue, waggling his finger.

"You're just saying that because you know I'm supposed to die at the end of the Coil!"

"My, how well-informed. Ezykial usually falls for that. Who spilled?"

"I've got my sources," Will said mysteriously.

"It was Reese, wasn't it?" Mother asked.

"…Yeah."

"Poor creature. This Tower and everything in it is Reese's personal hell. I don't know how or when it happened, but somewhere along the line, the man achieved true immortality. His life is bound to The Tower itself, and as long as it continues to exist, it will bring him back from anything. Sadly his mind is not so robust."

"Do you know how old he is?" Will asked.

"Older than me," Mother said, shaking her head.

"That's all I know."

"And how old are you?"

"Thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred and…" Mother peered at the sky.

"forty-two years, one hundred and sixteen days, four hours, eighteen minutes, and…thirty seconds." Showoff. Will frowned.

"You're on the fourteenth Floor. How can you be that old?" Will asked. If each Coil was roughly a thousand years…she should be on the thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth Floor, shouldn't she?

"I migrate down every four or five Coils, obviously." Mother replied.

"I think we'll take the ninth Floor this time around. It's got good weather, it's pretty, and having fae there to tend the grounds should make things nice and comfortable for naps. No waking up encased in dirt."

"Do you know why I'm supposed to die at the end of the Coil?" Will asked.

"I couldn't tell you for sure, since I've never seen it firsthand, but I've got… educated guesses. I believe The Tower itself creates William, Ezykial, and Castavelle because you three reliably become very strong. I believe that once you reach a certain level of power you are used as some kind of Sacrifice to The Tower that allows another Coil to begin. After you disappear, the tears between the Floors always seal themselves up and a new Floor is created. …

In short, think The Tower consumes you to propagate itself." Will's stomach dropped, his skin going cold. He glanced at his skeletal left hand. Maybe The Tower already got a taste?

"Even after hearing that, do you plan on continuing to Climb?" Mother asked.

"Psshh. I'm not gonna let something dumb like an unfathomably ancient entity that wants to eat me stop me from Climbing." Will said, not really feeling it. The more he knew, the less interested he was in Climbing The Tower and meeting the same end as his previous iterations. And yet… he had to. Running away wasn't an option. Reese had said that knowing made everything worse. Will's first instinct after uncovering this destiny was to simply avoid it.

What Will needed was to know everything there was to know about his predetermined doom and then go to meet it anyway. Previous versions of him who knew the truth might've decided to simply avoid Climbing, and it didn't turn out well for them. Probably. Need to pry more information out of Reese. Will could imagine that if he chickened out and avoided meeting his fate, the rifts between floors might persist for an entire Coil. If that happened he'd die anyway, along with everyone else. The Tower wants to eat me?

Remembering the moment he'd Sacrificed his hand, Will tucked his shaking hands in his pockets. Gotta do the counterintuitive thing and go put my hand on the altar. And then survive it. Is the Tower just a bigger extradimensional box that I'm trapped in? For his purposes, he needed to know everything about Miasma, The Tower, and The System that operated within it."' Something dumb like an unfathomably ancient entity… Such a cheeky reply. You really are William Oh."

Mother said, smiling at him with those tombstone-sized teeth.

"Mother, is there anything I could do to get that magic lesson before I die?" Will asked.

"It's going to get awfully busy around here shortly. My mate and I act as chaperones during the migration, which will begin in a matter of years. It's a big one because we'll be moving down this Coil. I'll certainly be swamped from this day forward." Damn.

"That being said, I do have a notebook with some observations I've made in my time." Will's brows rose. In her time? her time was orders of magnitude more than a human lifetime. Whatever was in the book had to be good. Mother reached out and Will saw Miasma slice through thin air before she reached beyond reality itself to retrieve a book. The 'book' was enormous. It's pages were composed of leather taken from the pig-unicorns, and Will could walk from one side to the other in about ten paces.

Will probably would struggle to penetrate the hide of each page with his tomahawk. And yet, for Mother, it was rather small and delicate.

"This contains observations about Miasma that I don't want getting into the hands of mortals, but… you've been heralding the migration longer than I've been around. You're not exactly a mortal. In light of that, I'll give you a chance to read this and glean whatever you can before the sun goes down." Mother said. Will glanced up at the canopy. The light streaming through was heavily tilted and slightly red. The sun was already going down.

Will used his Phantom Hand to open the book and was met with intricate drawing of miasmatic structures and dense notations that spanned a surface the size of the orphanage's dining room. … In a language he had no idea how to read.

"Shit, I can't read this." Will muttered.

"That's a shame." Not good enough, Will thought. There was no way he would simply allow this opportunity to slip past him. Will leveraged his cantrip of making an instant sketch in his legend, copying the page wholesale onto a tab of his map, then repeated the process with the next page, and the next after that. Flip, flip, flip, flip, There only appeared to be fifty pages, but somehow more pages always appeared under the last.

Will gradually sped up as he raced against the sun, copying each page down in a breath before moving onto the next one, spending less than a second on each page. The sun had dimmed, and the sky above was nearly dark when the journal refused to produce any more pages, allowing Will to slump back, letting out a long breath as the tension faded.

"Wow, that was fast." Mother said.

"I was looking for patterns, hoping to make some connections between things I've seen before. No such luck though," Will lied, mentally flipping through the entire copied book in his mind's eye. I'll have to have Reese…no I don't trust Reese. Perhaps I could get some other dragon to translate. Maybe Aguilion? The young green dragon seemed like he might be easy to bribe, since he was dangling on the edge of being exiled from polite dragon society.

"Maribelle, guide William to a hunting ground where he can level efficiently. The more time he spends on this Floor, the more likely a disaster will befall us. The boy breeds chaos. It's best to let him pass through as quickly as possible." Mother said, giving them a dismissive wave.

"Yes, mother," Maribelle said, bowing to the mountainous dragon.

"Dear…dear! Wake up, wake up!" Mother's neck long neck twisted to whisper sweetly to the nearby hill. When that failed to produce a response, she lifted a leg the size of a battleship and viciously kicked the lump of earth resting beside her. A slightly smaller dragon tumbled out of the soil encrusting with a surprised squawk and slammed into the nearby forest, knocking over one of the tower-sized trees.

"We should go." Mirabelle said hastily.

"They usually mate for weeks after they wake up." Will nodded, snagging some of the highly miasma-saturated saplings that had been growing directly from the dragons, along with a few of the scales that had been littered around the ground. Waste not.