Collide Gamer Chapter 1063 – Christmas Friends 2 – An ancient family

There was much confusion on the faces of the guests, but little in the way of panic. Between the hosts and the guests, the Palace was one of the most guarded places on Earth at the mont. Feeling a second tremble, John quickly headed towards the nearest door to investigate. Aclysia ca along and Rave made initial motions to co as well, until she realized they were heading outdoors. “…Imma just stay here where it’s warm,” the heat-addict said, stopping a couple of tres away from the door.

“You do that,” John responded. If sothing bad happened, his girlfriend, among the rest of the capable fighters within the harem, would join in a matter of seconds. Several of them already ca close, but John felt several more of the vibrations and they were coming closer. He reached for the door handle, when a series of knocks reverberated from the woods. They were notable only for the softness compared to the tremors that had preceded them.

John opened the door just in ti to see a massive claw, the tip was about the size of John’s head, pull backwards. Behind it, a serpentine body ca into view. Most of the scales covering it were of an ultramarine colour, sparkling wet in the sunlight, with the underbelly a simple white like that of an orca.

The one hand that had knocked on the Palace ca to be placed by three others just like it, each absurdly large and belonging to a creature whose movents would indeed make a building shake. Over fifty tres long and seeming ready to swallow a school bus, the weight of the monstrosity could not be understated. Aside from his arms, the sea-creature only had a pair of wings without mbranes in terms of limbs. They stretched and then laid closely to the equally slender and massive body, almost disappearing against it.

The higher dragon’s head took the place of the hand, just as John stepped out. Six horns extended from the back of it, the eyes of the creature glowed blue, turning almost white in their intensity towards the centre. The upper jaw of the dragon was considerably larger, with both parts ending in a pointy, bony covering that gave it a beak-esque look.

“rry Christmas, John Newman,” Tilgun greeted in his usual, smug and arrogant tone. “You have to widen your rivers. I fit through the Harbour opening, but it was a true pain – not even ntioning scaling the walls of your fortress.”

“You should be happy that I added you to the Sentry Golem exceptions,” the Gar responded with crossed arms.

“You grow more insolent each ti I encounter you,” Tilgun noted with a hint of displeasure.

“You grow less threatening each ti I encounter you,” the Gar retorted. The Maw of Souls was level 450 and seed to have restored the level of strength he was usually at when maximally satiated in the regards of soul eating. That would still be quite the difficult encounter for John to beat, but between his elentals, Tilgun’s relative physical weakness, and the fact that John had a better Stat scaling per level, he was fairly certain he could do it.

More importantly, he had the backing of soone really important.

“TILGUN!”

Hearing the shout, the Gar just stepped aside. Stomping towards the open door, Nathalia approached rapidly.

“Ah, my dearest and only sister, I knew I slt you more intensely than last ti I was around here,” the higher dragon said. “It has been six-hundred years… how have… you… been?”

The words turned less certain and arrogant by the second, as the Maw of Souls was forced to pull his head back to not co into contact with the steadily advancing Fire of Destruction. Once his neck was practically folded, Nathalia finally stopped. “I expressly allowed you to help my mate, Tilgun,” she growled at him.

“I provided him a valuable ore from my hoard, how much did you demand?”

“I did not demand anything, I ALLOWED you to help.”

“Sister, you allowing anything is not a call to action,” Tilgun responded.

Nathalia growled, the snow around her lted, and the grass underneath turned to ash.

“Alright, alright, calm down,” John said, taking hold of Nathalia’s neck and giving her a relaxing massage. “I don’t appreciate his tone, but your brother is right. You allowing him to help doesn’t an that he has to.”

“Fire and brimstone,” Nathalia cussed, but lowered the heat until John was no longer losing HP from touching her.

Quickly glancing down to make sure his clothes were still intact, the Gar then returned to the conversation. “We were going to have our family etings tomorrow,” he said, “and I would invite you… but you’re a giant serpent dragon and my mundane parents are there, so I guess you’re welco to stay today.”

Inviting Tilgun at all felt sowhat out of place. Honestly speaking, the Gar did not particularly fancy the Maw of Souls. He was like Richard, if Richard had traded in the rest of his clarity and sense of humour for the arrogant, permanently frustrated attitude of a higher dragon that needed to get laid but only had a couple dozen possible partners the world over. However, as the saying went: ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.’

Best to get along with the weird uncle, or whatever Tilgun could be best characterized as.

“That’s acceptable,” Tilgun conceded, as if that much was the minimum appropriate respect to be given.

John just sighed, knowing better than to waste ti lecturing the dragon. ‘Perhaps after I get powerful enough to slap him about when he annoys ,’ he considered, before speaking up. “Well, did you co here to do anything else besides check if Nathalia was back?”

“It has reached that you encountered what remains of Mother Chaos?” Tilgun responded with a quizzical bent to his words.

“Yes,” the Gar responded. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“So I can imagine. I communed with her a couple of tis after Babylon. Her descent was interesting to follow,” the Maw of Souls bent his serpentine body to be less folded while he spoke to John and Nathalia.

“You don’t sound bothered by the developnt at all,” noted the Gar.

“Why would I?” Tilgun sounded honestly amused at the re suggestion. “For Mother Chaos to change is in her very nature. For her to beco sothing impossible in order to grow into a new threat is the way things are. Tiamat spawned from your observations of nature, spawned from the dam you erected against the regular floods getting destroyed by the storm of a millennia, from the fields succumbing to a storm of unstoppable locusts, from drought, from the son of the good king becoming a tyrant, from all the inevitabilities you didn’t and couldn’t prepare for.”

“You really are fond of her,” John remarked.

“How could one not be fond of ultimate power,” the Maw of Souls responded. “Mother Chaos’ body degenerated before my eyes as the aeons passed and the less pristine she beca, the more she warped what was good and evil around her. My very powers were born from my proximity to her. All becos changed, around Tiamat.”

“Careful, Brother, with your veneration,” Nathalia growled, igniting a fla in her right hand. “I wouldn’t want to burn your Lorylim-claid corpse out of this world. I went through great pains raising you.”

“Oh, do not misunderstand, dearest Sister, I have no intention to join Mother Chaos in her current form – I rely observe what becos of her before her inevitable death and rebirth.” Tilgun tilted his head. “Perhaps I shall beco the new god of chaos when that ti cos?”

John doubted it. For all of his worship of the concept, Tilgun was far from an actually chaotic individual. Had he been a mundane human, the higher dragon would have likely been the kind of nihilist that ticulously planned each aspect of their day, while wondering where the worth was in any of it. “Speaking of her death – why isn’t she dead?” John inquired. “Attempting to destroy Gaia should lead to a swift end.”

“Knowledge for knowledge,” Tilgun humd his mantra, only to flinch back when his sister growled at him yet again. “Nathalia, we are from the Faith of the sa people. Surely you wouldn’t hurt because I stay true to what I have always preached?”

“It is fine,” John interrupted before Nathalia could turn this into a sibling feud. “After all, I have sothing you want to know, right? What happened in the Death Zone in all of its details.”

“Ah, confirmations – that would be worth my theory of what happened to Tiamat.”

“Theory?”

“Truly, she did not know herself then and what little of her sanity was there has since been drowned away. For my part, I could not confirm,” Tilgun gave that much away. “Now, speak first, John Newman.”

The Gar considered demanding the order be reversed, but that would have just complicated matters. Once he was powerful enough to show Tilgun his place without Nathalia’s help, he would certainly do so. “Alright, listen closely…” the Gar started.

“…Truly remarkable,” Tilgun said by the end – not in response to John’s achievents. “That Mother Chaos’ first son was still alive. Enki, a gorgeous silver star of unrivalled brilliance, forged out of her pristine scales and flesh. A worthy end for a dragon of such beauty.”

“Eaten away, kept in ignorance, a prisoner in his own body and mind?” John wanted to know.

“Forging the greatest gathering of Astrotium into a hull that even a creature of two divinities could manifest in, killed by the Celestial Devourer, but not before giving the vestiges of his power to soone of worth,” Tilgun let out a longing sigh, “I spent many nights with this brilliant mind. A forging star, no doubt.”

John rolled his eyes. “Your end of the bargain. Tell what happened to Tiamat.”

“Establishing contact with her after Babylon was, as you may imagine, a difficult task,” Tilgun switched gears imdiately, “I stayed clear of the area for the better part of a hundred years or so, to let the purge of the Abyssals run its course. When I returned and found many of the larger or more significant barriers still intact, I was pleasantly surprised. Enki’s barrier anchors, crude as they may be compared to what you create today, still worked and various barriers were even populated by a rare shambling being.”

“Lorylim?” John theorized.

“No, this predates their lding,” Tilgun responded. “They were remains of Tiamat’s body. A rib laid as the fundant of a ziggurat, a scale worked into a breastplate, a heap of raw at, left to attract inhabitants of Natural Barriers. Such things were usual in the late Akkadian Empire. The people of sopotamia knew how to harness chaos, and in their ruins I found the clue that Mother Chaos was still alive.

“It took quite a while to work out a way to communicate with her. Theorizing that she had been transported into a different Kingdom, one shackled to this planet like the elental planes are, eventually allowed the breakthrough and to talk to her. She was sweet, sweet as Tiamat could be when her mood manifested that way, and told that she was trapped in a world without anything but sealed, alien power.”

Tilgun paused and looked expectantly at John, challenging him to present his own theory. It didn’t take long for John to develop one or, rather, pick one among the several he had previously created that worked best with this new set of information. “Rather than kill Tiamat, Gaia opted to seal her away and she chose the sa space she used to seal the Lorylim.”

“Such I assu,” Tilgun agreed. “When I talked to her again, ten years later, she had broken out of her seal and started the process of lding with the old god of genocide. All contact afterwards rely confird that the old Tiamat was gone and that sothing new, sothing exciting, had been born from the in-between. Watching the Lorylim act is remarkable. Almost as remarkable is the question of why Gaia would allow such a thing to happen. Is our supre deity so incompetent? Did she not think leaving them both in the sa place would lead to problems? Perhaps she planned this?”

“But wh- Because that would solve several issues,” John interrupted and answered his own question, rubbing his chin. “Gaia violated her non-involvent policy when she removed the Lorylim. Perhaps she wants humanity to face this threat at a pace we can handle… why then get Tiamat involved when she just as well could send the old god out in chunks?”

“Because of death and rebirth,” Tilgun gave an answer, even if it wasn’t the definitive one. “If Mother Chaos dies, a new god of chaos will rise and the new god of chaos would inevitably seek to shatter the order of the world imposed by Gaia. Remove Mother Chaos, bind her to an entity that will take millennia to annihilate, even with precision action, and interrupt the cycle of rebirth. Otherwise, the supre deity would have to purge the land in each cycle of chaos’ resurgence.”

“That would be the least interrupting thing in according to her principles,” John mumbled. “It also ans that the Lorylim are still being nourished by the Faith of chaos… which isn’t exactly a low amount.”

“Only contributing to the continued diminishing of the ancient’s importance,” Tilgun cackled, slowly making a fist with one of his four hands. “The magical force of an entire ancient civilization, slowly getting more and more diluted by the endless flow of human Faith. Empty a glass of water into a lake every day and eventually you will see it rise. Perhaps one day Tiamat will be overbearing in more than just presence on that shattered hivemind.”

“Perhaps…” John humd and sniffed, the sll of baked apples reaching his nostrils. “Interesting and horrifying as that is to ponder, I actually should get back inside and have fun. It is Christmas after all.”

“What could be more entertaining than the mounting forces of chaos?” Tilgun wondered, as he was left to catch up with his sister.