The dragon's harem

Morning came quickly, and Arad woke up feeling quite energetic. Yesterday, they got some good news. They can leave this place whenever they want. Yog had managed to strike a deal with Entropy. But, should they give up on the city? Should they leave without hunting the Blizzard Monster?

The sane option is to leave, or at least send Haru and Liliana back to safety. But sanity wasn’t always in their favor. After a short discussion, they decided to at least get into the city’s spire before leaving. The discussion wasn’t short because they had nothing to argue about, but because Haru had seen something when looking at the future.

Entropy, Gojo, and the Blizzard Monster are tied together by fate, and they can’t help but butt heads. In fact, what the fates showed her was nothing but confusing and scary.

Haru had dreamed of a bird cage, a rusty one. Inside that cage were two birds, one red and the other blue, and both burned with powerful magic. Those two birds spent most of their lives caged, but one day, the witch holding them let them go, and she leashed them with chains of fate to do her bidding.

Then, those two birds were on a tree, right outside a large veiled window, and from the outside, Haru could hear a woman giving birth. When the baby’s cries boomed, the chackles on the birds’ necks crumbled and fell apart.

Time started rapidly flying by, the house crumbled, the mountains moved, and the sun flashed through the sky, hundreds of years passed in an instant, and then when everything was gone, a lone little girl with blond hair and blue eyes remained standing alone in the snow, soon guided away by an older woman who shared her golden hair and blue eyes.

Then, in a whole other place, she saw Gojo yelling at the little girl, telling her that she should calm down, that she should take things slower instead of being so chaotic. Haru also saw him poking the older woman, mocking her emotionless face.

Haru herself didn’t understand what this vision meant, but she was certain it wasn’t a reality or something that happened in the past. It was a mere refracted light of the threads of fate, and from what she saw, she could tell several things.

The little girl was Entropy, and the older woman was Stillness. What did that mean? Haru had no idea, and she didn’t want to know either.

Due to that vision, they decided to stay for a bit longer and at least get into the city.

That would allow Gojo to work his magic at the spire, create a beacon of mana, and then have Arad warp him back here with Vorvadoss’s eldritch magic.

“You know what?” Arad called as he grabbed a large boulder and threw it back to the Yetis to carry away. “I really miss my claws.”

Gojo, who was in the front digging a tunnel with magic, looked back at him. “Well, I miss them too. You’ll never understand the value of something until you lose it.”

“That is how it usually is.” Arad approached and looked at the tunnel that Gojo was building, which made him frown for a moment.

“Listen, I’m not here trying to tell you to use your magic. But I’ve seen many brown dragons channel magic through the supports of anything they build, so the building won’t crumble later on.” He pointed at the stone walls Gojo used to support the ceiling.

Gojo looked at Arad, then back at the walls. “I mean…” Gojo scratched the back of his head. “I know how to use magic, but I’m not a builder.” He tried to channel his mana just like how Arad showed him, and soon found the walls linking to the natural flow of mana in the ground.

“I see… Magic, whenever cast, always uses a little bit of mana to stay formed. Usually, it would take decades for a stone wall like those I built to crumble, which means they don’t need to be maintained.” He smiled and tapped the walls. “But, if I want them to last longer than that, I have to link them with the natural mana so they can suck it.”

He turned toward Arad. “They built your castle like that so it won’t crumble in a few decades. We won’t need that here, but it’s a good thing to know.” He started channelling his mana through the walls. “I’ll make them permanent anyway.”

Arad smiled and returned to his work. It would take them the whole day to dig all the way to the forest. At First, Gojo wanted to locate the sewer entrance first, then dig directly toward it. But if it is buried deep underground, looking for it first won’t save any time. Besides, Gojo wanted to take a day off from fighting and work on something repetitive, mundane, and boring to rest his mind.

Back in the Mortal world, Lucy walked through Arad’s castle. Ever since her angels trashed her quarters, yes, she had two, she had to live here with Arad’s wives. At first, she had found life here to be extremely boring, as she had nothing to do besides sit and watch the clouds move, or at least that was what she felt for the first half before Kali returned from whatever she was doing.

To Lucy, Kali was a strange goddess to see. Most of the time, she remained in her little girl form because, according to her, protecting orphans is more important than controlling demons and destruction.

In that form, Kali looked even younger than Lucy, and many of the castle maids wondered why she was even allowed into Arad’s Private Quarter.

Arad’s Private Quarter was just as the name implied, a place reserved for Arad, his wives, and children; no one else is allowed inside. Some of the castle maids, not Arad’s private maids, though that Kali was Balina’s daughter, some knew she was Kayden’s daughter, and some even tried to keep her away from the Private Quarter.

Of course, Lucy asked Kali why she won’t use her grown-up form? And it was then that she understood that mere mortals can’t just look at her demonic form and stay alive. This eventually led to Kali teaching Lucy how to be a goddess, and the first lesson was fighting.