Kyuuketsuki Duo: The Movie
Sanguis Draconis Part 14
They stood outside and took their first good look at the heart of the dragon lands. Having been declared Haoxian's responsibility since he had brought them here, the little dragon now accompanied them. "It didn't always look like this," he said in defense of his homeland. "This once was a grand, sparkling place."
"What happened?" Quatre asked.
"Time happened. And then Epyon happened."
Meiran pieced together what she had learnt of the demon realms. "But it doesn't have to stay this way, does it? I mean, if the land is shaped in accordance to your will..."
"This land -is- shaped in accordance to our will." The dragon's mouth curled as if he had tasted something sour. "This is what our collective will has been brought to. We have grown withdrawn from this world, and it shows."
"How many dragons are there?" Quatre inquired.
"Not as many as there once were." His eyes grew distant, as if remembering times past. "I would not be able to give you a number. It really depends on what one might call a dragon, and what one might call alive. My brothers and I are quite nearly the only dragons of any substance left." His focus returned, and he fixed them with a strange, almost hopeful gaze. "Do you really think that you can bring Shenlong back?"
Quatre looked to Wufei and back again. The silent man's attention seemed lost to the landscape, and so the spiritualist answered in his place. "We're certainly going to try." He wished he could promise more, but he couldn't. "So where are all of the dragons? Do they each have their own piece of territory within the dragon-held lands?"
A blink, and their brazen dragon friend was back. "Some of them." He lifted his shoulders in an approximation of a shrug. "Those who can, those who wish to. Others don't bother staking a claim."
"I'm betting that Shenlong had a home territory, then, right?"
"That is correct."
"I'm not really sure I have a good handle on how the geography of this place works, so does that place still exist? Or has it gone poof with the times?"
"If it were anyone other than Shenlong, perhaps it would have gone 'poof'." The amusement at the term was evident in his tone. "But it was, and so it remains. Much faded from its original glory, but still holding its own, all things considered."
Meiran finished the thought that Quatre started, a hint of excitement in her voice. "So if there were anywhere that Shenlong's energy would have 'gone home' to, it would probably be there."
"You're pretty clever. For humans," the dragon appended.
Quatre grinned. "That must be a complement, coming from a dragon."
Haoxian snorted lightly and picked himself up off the rock he had been lying upon. "Come, I will show you the way." With a slight flexing of his hindquarters, he took a gentle leap, and flying much further than physics would have predicted, he alighted upon Wufei's shoulder, startling the young man out of his reverie. Had the dragon much weight to him, he might have thrown Wufei off-balance, but instead his presence was barely felt. With a flicker of his tail, he pointed in the direction they were to travel, and they set off.
"You keep interesting company, Chang," the dragon said, casting an eye over his shoulder to where two of the humans were discussing the possible things they might find with a bit of enthusiasm. "I wonder how you came to be with them."
Wufei glanced over his shoulder as well, his eyes noting Meiran and Quatre, then sliding over Trowa, to land upon the Shinma guardian, who had not spoken a word since they had entered the dragon lands. "I wonder that myself, sometimes."
As they traveled, the scenery grew more complex. There seemed to be hills, yet they crossed over them without the land ever being anything other than flat. Trees were scattered here and there between the broken foundations of ancient structures, the dusty rock-strewn earth finally giving way to dirt that could support green life. On occasion, Wufei thought he could spy a dragon or two out of the corner of his eye, but always they were gone by the time he focused on them. Apparently, they thought it wise to keep their distance from possible trouble.
They reached a hillside that didn't seem inclined to flatten itself for their passage. In it was an unpresuming entrance into the earth. Quatre asked permission before summoning a fire elemental to light their way, and then in they went. The passageway was far from claustrophobic, being large enough to easily accommodate the largest dragon they had yet seen. It ended in another of those brief waves of disorientation, and Quatre murmured a brief prayer to himself before opening his eyes.
It was in vain. He looked behind them, and saw only an archway leading off into the darkness. In front of them lay a dilapidated palace, and above them, open sky. "Why can't this place make any sense?" he bemoaned quietly.
Haoxian heard his complaint, and repeated his sentiment from before. "It wasn't always like this." The grim tone faded when he leapt from Wufei's shoulder to prod the humans once more. "So, we're here. Now what?"
"Hmmm," Meiran pondered aloud, studying the ruins before them. "I don't sense anything, but then again, I'm hardly the most sensitive person here. Anyone?"
A minute of silence passed as they tried to discern something useful from the fallen halls before Quatre shook his head. "Nothing here." He saw Wufei respond with only a frown, and turned his attention to the silent guardian. "Duo?"
Duo favored him with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.
The spiritualist grit his teeth for a moment before unclenching his jaw and attempting to be pleasant. "Anything?"
"My part of the agreement was to get you here. Now it's your turn."
"Do you or do you not sense anything here?" Something other than mildness slipped into his tone.
Duo's lips curved just a millimeter in something like amusement. "Nothing out of the ordinary," he said with a careless shrug.
Quatre locked eyes with him, trying to figure out whether that meant he had sensed something or not, before finally giving up with a small sound of exasperation. Duo hadn't brought them all this way just to watch them fail. If he had information that would be useful to them, he would share it, even if he waited to do so in his own good time.
He turned to study Wufei's reaction instead. The frown on the man's face had not disappeared.
"There must be something...," Wufei said without prompting. A quiet intensity underlay his words that spoke of growing frustration. "I -feel- there's something... but I just can't -sense- it."
Meiran laid a gently reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Well, if you're feeling something, then you must be sensing it on some level."
"The air... it just seems... heavy." He moved towards the entrance to the old structure, Meiran's hand slipping off of his shoulder as he did. No gates had ever swung from the still proud archway. He passed beneath it and into a courtyard, where even though the stones were cracked and gray, it retained a sense of magnificence.
The faded red latticework of another gateway marked the entrance to another section of the estate. Opposite it were a set of doors large enough to accommodate the greatest of dragons. He chose the doors as the next stop on his tour, and laid his hands hesitantly upon their pitted surface. Unfortunately, they did not swing open with his touch. With his features set in a determined scowl, he set his shoulder to the door and pushed all of his weight against it, but it did not move. Quatre joined him, then Trowa, but the doors decided not to yield to them. They paused, took a breather, rethought their strategy, and tried again. Meiran would have joined them, but would have been too close to the hinges to do much good.
"Are you sure we're supposed to push and not pull?" Quatre puffed out, his feet not gaining enough traction against the dusty floor to offset the force he was applying to the door with his back.
"Don't even say that," Wufei grit out.
Haoxian stopped watching them to turn to Duo, who stood back observing them as well. "Why are you here, Shinma?"
He could have quibbled over the continuing use of the incorrect label, but it was hardly worth the fuss. It was irrelevant whether or not these dragons knew anything of the inner workings of the Shinma. "Afraid I'll corrupt Shenlong's inner sanctum with my presence, dragon?"
"I simply wonder what your stake in this is." Dragons were not very good at affecting innocuous tones.
"Or perhaps you wonder about your chosen champion and his questionable choice of allies."
"He certainly keeps interesting company."
"You can trust Chang. He is devoted to your cause."
"And you?"
Duo's smile had a cool edge to it. "And I? I just don't like Epyon."
"You're no dragon. What do you care of Epyon?"
"Nor do I like the Shinma he has working for him."
The dragon ah'ed in understanding. "Now that is a much more reasonable answer."
"Yes, hate does make the world go round, doesn't it?" He hadn't had anything personal against the Shinma in question, but now that he had something of Duo's, it had become very personal. The offender would pay for his crime, and soon. And it would be painful. Yes, very painful.
"It's moving," Trowa announced from his place at the middle, where he could see the slight offset they had managed to achieve from the other door. He was pushing just as hard as the others, yet somehow managed to look casual about it.
Once they got it moving, the rest wasn't so hard. They needed only a few feet to allow them to slip inside. Quatre called forth another flame to light their way. The hall was massive enough that the light illuminated only the small patch in which they stood. Another was summoned and sent forth into the darkness to do reconnaissance, and something skittered away from the light.
"Something's in here," he breathed tensely, and everyone went on guard. He requested and received the aid of a few more flames, but still it wasn't enough to reveal the hidden stranger.
A member of their party moved, stirring the air in his passing as he flowed forth and was swallowed by the darkness. A scant second later, and a low keening sound that was felt more than heard burst into the silence.
"Duo?" Quatre called out anxiously.
A flame too bright to be natural sprung up in a wall fixture, and beneath it stood Duo, watching over the shadow he had pinned to the ground. It made an almost surreal image, an island of light floating in a sea of darkness. All the shadows moved restlessly with the flickering of the fire, save the one.
"Is that it?" Meiran asked before venturing further inside the darkness.
"It is."
"Figures there'd be wall sconces," Quatre muttered to himself as they headed over to Duo's puddle of light. "Think we could get some more lit?"
The request was filled. The guardian needed no light to see by, and found them all easily. One by one in succession, fixtures spaced along the walls found themselves filled with more cold-burning flames until the entire room was lit.
The trapped shadow cringed back from the light, but had nowhere to go. Duo's bindings did not allow it. He crouched down beside it. "So tell me, little one. What are you doing here?" A silence, and then Duo's eyes hardened with a flash of pale silver. "Tell me," he ordered again.
It shrank into itself, but obeyed with a few timid mindsendings.
"I see." He flicked his fingers at it, and it disappeared.
"What was that?" Quatre asked.
"It was left here to alert our enemies if anyone came here." He stood up with the slightest hint of a smirk on his face. He had tasted the little shadow's link to them through the darkness, and now had the first impression of -his- aura. Yes, they would meet, and when they did, Duo was not going to be polite about it.
"So they know now?"
"It won't be alerting anyone."
"Why not?"
"Why, I sent it on vacation." There was something very sinister about those words, despite the light tone with which they were uttered.
Meiran got over it. "If they left something here, then that must mean that there's something significant here, right? I mean, why else would they leave someone to watch over this place?"
"Hmm, I wonder if they did anything to hide the power?" Quatre mused.
"Is there something they could have done? If they had that sort of access to the power, I can't see them not doing something more harmful to it instead."
"You don't really need access to it to hide it... but on the other hand, to do much else, you'd probably leave your own energy trail or something behind, and that would probably be easier to detect than Shenlong's, and we've seen nothing like that yet, so probably not, I guess."
"It makes me sort of nervous that they would just leave it lying around, then, if they knew it was here. Wouldn't they consider it a threat?"
"Maybe they figured no one could access it, and they were just being cautious by leaving a guard here. We aren't even one hundred percent sure that we can access it, after all. Or maybe they just didn't consider it a threat. I mean, if you were an uber-powerful demon bent on hell's domination, you probably wouldn't consider much of anything to be a threat, right?"
"Yeah, bad guys are stupid like that, aren't they?"
Wufei barely listened to their theories. Instead, he closed his eyes to the reception room and tried to listen to the walls, laying a hand against the cold stone in case the physical contact might help. It was an exercise in frustration. It sounded as if they were speaking, but in a language he couldn't understand. Some sort of power was in residence here, whether Shenlong himself or just a remnant of him, but he couldn't touch it. The harder he tried to reach out to it, the more it seemed to elude his grasp.
He opened his eyes, and Meiran was by his side. She could tell that he had found nothing. "Come on," she said softly. "Let's explore the rest of this place. Maybe we'll find something."
He snorted wryly. "Like what? Ye olde hearthstone of Shenlong's energy?" But still he went.
Meiran smiled briefly, glad that he at least had the energy to joke about it, no matter the bitter undertone. "Hmpf. It would serve you right if we did find such a thing."
They wandered the halls of Shenlong's palatial estate, and found a number of rooms both small and large, a lot of dust, and some lovely murals, and it was all quite impressive, but nothing resembling a ye olde hearthstone of anything. Apparently there was nothing that a dragon might possess that would be the focus of all its power, no special room where it might exercise its power regularly, no conspicuous item that couldn't have been there when Shenlong first abandoned this place. Nothing manifested, glowed, pulsed, shone, or sparkled. Nothing at all that shouted, 'Look at me! I'm special!' It was quite disappointing.
They ended up in another courtyard, somewhere within the walls of the manor. Quatre observed the mood and proposed that they call it a day. It had been a long and well-spent day, even if they hadn't found what they had been looking for. There were rooms in the estate that were appropriate for human consumption, for demons could take on human form, as Hilde had said quite pointedly. Haoxian decided to stay with them in Shenlong's home, declaring quite blithely that he had no desire to go back and face the others without having anything to report, and then they all adjourned to sleep on it.
*****
It was almost like sensory deprivation, but almost entirely unlike it as well. He couldn't feel his body, couldn't hear a sound, couldn't see a thing. Not with his physical senses, anyway. But he could feel the shadows crawling through his mind. He could hear Trant's will directing the darkness as it created something from nothing. He could see the occasional flicker of black upon black upon black, moving in an incomprehensible pattern. The strands of shadows emanated from him and spread out into the blackness, showing him things as yet beyond his grasp.
He gathered himself and scrunched down to wait in the corner. There he would bide his time until Trant saw fit to let him free from his prison. There he sat quietly nursing the muted bond that still tied him to his partner. There he kept as much of himself as he could safely away from the dark powers that his temporary master wove through his being. There he watched and learnt what he could of Trant's little pet project from the inside out, from the bottom up.
He could wait. Trant had a purpose in his experiments. The Shinma executed his plan eagerly, but with relish. It would be done soon. It would be something grand, but for all of the Shinma's scheming, it would only be a minor obstacle for the hunter. When he was released, he would find his way out of the new restrictions being placed upon him, he would learn to work with this new programming that Trant was installing, and then he would finish his mission.
Heero always finished his missions.
TBC...
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