Chapter 278 - The Scale: Free (1/2)
Fight or run.
Those two things, Gronn knew well. It was all he had known in his one hundred and seventy-seven years of existence. A short lifespan compared to the higher bloods atop the highest ranges of Torr Valeris. Yet still long enough for him to reflect.
As a hatchling in the crashing rapids of the Valian ranges, he ran. Ran and ran. Picked up snippets of food here and there as he dodged hungry jaws and sneaked under prying eyes. By running, he knew how to be afraid, and knowing fear, he knew how to survive. He grew used to fear, immune to it, and by the time he achieved his first real kill, fear had been engraved into him so many times he felt it as his ally, something not to overwhelm him, but something for him to know and use to hone his instincts.
As the moments passed into days and the days flowed into months and the months crashed into years, there came a time that he made the choice to fight more than he did to run. He hunted and killed and ripped and tore past his salamander stage into a drake, and by his hundred and twentieth year, he became a fully fledged dragon.
Never once did he ever question why it was that he fought. Why he d.e.s.i.r.ed so strongly to get stronger. Why every single dragon kin around him, whether they were salamanders or wyrms or drakes or even dragons, always felt a calling pulling them towards the distance, to the horizon, to the far-ranging skies where the great peak of Torr Valeries stood mighty and tall, piercing past the veil of the clouds high above, above even the boundaries of this very world.
Become strong to ascend the peak – a message inscribed into the instinctive code of every single dragonkin in existence. A powerful instinct as impactful as that which drove fight or flight in all living creatures.
At first, he knew not why that voice beckoned to him. Where it came from. Then, when he grew strong enough, his scales as large as the brick and mortal homes humans dwelled in, he could come near to the base of Torr Valeris, past the countless mountains surrounding it teeming with fierce and dreadful life.
There, he came into the fold of the true dragons that dwelled within the hallowed heights of Torr Valeris itself, and his quest for strength became instead one of servitude. For to reach higher and higher up the rungs of the great mountain, he had to serve the higher blooded, and he did so, unquestioningly for fifty years.
For he knew no other life.
Nothing beckoned to him more than the never-ending d.e.s.i.r.e to ascend Torr Valeries. Even his unquenchable thirst for strength, the d.e.s.i.r.e to eat and rest and grow stronger and stronger, was all so that he could reach the top of Torr Valeris.
Thus, he entered into Valerikynthimos's service, for she as one of seventeen higher blooded dragons – original descendants hailing from Val, the great elder – held authority to grant passage to the heights of the mountain to those she deemed worthy.
Thus, he culled the bloodlines deemed unworthy. All dragonkin beyond the Valian ranges: dragonkin that had split off from the original blood of Val and rejected the eternal message of ascent.
He did not think much of it. For thirty years, he obeyed. He fought dragons like himself. He killed dragons older than himself. He culled dragons far younger than himself. It did not matter to him, for that was simply the way of life, of living with the blood of the dragon running through one's veins.
Death simply meant you were not prepared. The flight instincts too undeveloped, for often the dragons that left the brutal environment of the Valian ranges had grown lazy and weak in their far-flung foreign lands lording over mortal races much weaker than them. They had forgotten the primal instinct of fear that was crucial to making one strong.
They were weak, and so they died. That was the judgement he made. The judgement he laid down upon them. A judgement that came naturally for there were countless others that would have made the very same judgement upon him when he was weak.