He lands on a planet that's all ice and has three suns, which is very pretty. Uninhabited, though, so it's not his next destination—his aura is still flaring. He follows it, crossing interplanetary distances in the blink of an eye, finds the next door's location in the middle of nowhere, and floats/walks through it.
This one is less pretty.
The ground is dry, cracked, dusty. It's flat for miles. There are mountains in the distance, and in the opposite direction, something very far away, hard to see even with vampire eyes. Something that might be a small, extremely lost forest, or perhaps a single improbably enormous plant.
There is a stench on the air - discernably blood, like animal's blood but worse, impossibly worse, perhaps the worst thing he's ever smelled as a vampire.
Something is approaching, flying toward him from the direction of the mountains. Long-necked, with webbed, batlike wings.
It continues to approach.
After some time, the echolocation stops.
It starts to dive, and sweeps its head through the air like it's exhaling a line of fire. There's a faint hum, and a wall of dust is blasted up from the ground in front of him.
The dragon lands, heavily, on the other side of the dust, and screeches.
Once it figures out that it's not going to be able to dislodge him, it sinks its claws into its own neck and rips out the flesh he's clinging to instead.
Its blood smells rancid, like someone left a vat of the least palatable animal blood imaginable out in the sun and it somehow began to rot instead of just drying up. It tosses the chunk of flesh and its passenger aside, and then there's another screech of sustained LOUD.
So it doesn't want to give up. Fine. He deafens himself, makes himself even hardier and sturdier and stronger (and he has no idea how to make himself faster without messing with his synapses and really doesn't want to, he'll rely on the other things), detaches his own arms and regrows them, replacing his forearms and hands with five-foot-long vampire bone spikes that become literally as pointy and sharp as he can possibly make them (and that's a lot).
How does dragon feel about a vampire jumping with these spikes directly at its head faster than the speed of sound?
It's a long walk, even for a vampire. He won't get tired, obviously, but if he has to walk all that way he might get debilitatingly bored. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much else around.
As he comes closer it becomes clear that whatever this thing is and whatever it's doing there, it's more like a single oversized plant - many times larger than a city - than a forest. Thick tangled thorny vines and layers of bark and bulbous protrusions a bit like pitcher plants.
Walk.
Walk.
Walk.
Walk.
The creature nearest him is rhino-sized and bulky. It seems to be some sort of large, poorly-specified root vegetable. Leafy stalks extend from its head and back like spines. Thick white root-tendrils poke out from under its feet, and grow from its head like a beard. It has no visible eyes, but the way it moves its head seems to suggest it can see, somehow.
It cocks its head to one side when he speaks, like a perplexed dog.
He is prodded. The first tendril curls back in surprise when it feels how cold and stonelike his skin is, but after a moment, prodding resumes. The tendrils trace out the shape of his face delicately. It doesn't seem to be communicative.
After a while, the plant-creature's head draws back, and its tendrils relax.
Another creature approaches: two-legged and built for bounding, like a kangaroo. Its legs are potato-brown like the first creature's, but its upper body is a tangle of leaves and thorns.
It bounds toward him, and sits for a moment, and then bounds a few hops away from him, and turns to face him again. Inasmuch as it can look anything without a face, it looks expectant.
It stops and looks back every few hops at first, but once it's convinced he can keep up, it speeds up.
After a while the hopping-vine creature leads him to a group of ambulatory bushes replete with fat red fruit, and an enormous squat pitcher plant the size of a hot tub, carried on six squiggly root-legs. The bushes approach and present their fruit; the pitcher plant raises its upper covering-leaf and shades its pool against the sun, wiggling meaningfully as if to invite him in.
The vine-creature fixes him with another expectant look.
Plant-creatures don't respond.
The vine-creature's route takes them gradually closer to the enormous wall of plant. Eventually they arrive at -
Well, it looks like a patch of enormous plant wall exactly like every other such patch. But as they approach, vines and thorns and plates of bark shift aside, making a gap that expands into a gateway big enough to admit a truck.
The ground on the other side of the wall is startlingly more lush, covered in bright green grass and bushes. There's a dirt road leading to a distant city, and a pair of building-shaped trees flank the entrance.
A couple of actual human people emerge from one tree, carrying what look like maces with tangles of living thorns for heads. They approach. The older one, who seems to be taking the lead, looks him up and down.
"You got here fast," he says. "You okay, son?"
"This isn't the only universe there is, and I have a means of mostly undirected interdimensional transportation which led me here. I'm also a ridiculously overengineered species, very immortal, so yeah I killed a dragon on my own. ...well I punctured its brain on my own, that might perhaps not have been enough to kill it depending on how dragons work. It did stop moving."
"Mm, I may not be the most qualified person to explain everything to you. Plus we've got to get back to our posts, if you don't need anything else. You could go into town - follow this road to get to Exaloc proper - and talk to one of the Sky Knights posted there - they're the folks who usually kill dragons. They're shuffled around every so often so they know a lot about what's going on all over, 'n' they don't have much to do if there's not a dragon attacking."
Nyoom. He reaches Exaloc in a few moments.
The city is made of trees: trunks thick enough for a spiral staircase support interconnected globes of weaved and melded branches, windows open to the air or shaded with clusters of leaves. Dirt and cobblestone roads weave between the trunks, thronged with people and heavy-duty plant creatures, squat pitcher plants carrying shaded passengers and lumbering root vegetables hauling goods packed into gourd-carriages. There's no division between road and sidewalk; no one seems worried about being run down by a large plant. The roads are pleasantly shaded, by the higher-level tree-bridges and above them by a canopy of leaves. The air is filled with the gentle murmur of a busy city with nary an internal combustion engine.
Well, not on the ground, certainly.
Most of these tree trunks have doorways; there are, indeed, spiral staircases inside of them. Some of the big suspended buildings are bigger than others.
Here's a pretty big one, made of the interleaved branches of at least eight different trees. It's hard to tell from the ground but it looks like it might be open to the air.
The staircase he takes is labeled "watch-house," and it leads to a balcony surrounding a - well, it's some sort of building, certainly. These tree branch amalgamations can be hard to tell apart. There's a leafy curtain set into one wall, probably an entrance. No windows, but there's bushes on the roof that might be protecting skylights.
The leaf-curtain leads to a thin, snakey little passageway that seems designed to block line of sight, and then another leaf-curtain leads him into a larger, skylit room with a few leaf-cushioned benches around the edges.
On one of the benches is seated a figure in golden armor, sleek and angular and finned. A six foot long, similarly golden-hued swordstaff is propped against the wall behind him.
He looks in Sadde's direction, and a complicated three-part faceshield unfolds to reveal a grinning human face.
"So, hi," he says. "Extradimensional visitor, huh?"
"Shit. So, uh, you'll want to get up to speed, I guess."
"Okay. So. Uh. Wellsprings do everything. You can program a Wellspring to make all sortsa weird magic plants and shit." He taps the bench he's sitting on a few times, illustratively. "Trees don't just grow like this here, Wellsprings tell 'em to do it. All the big plant monsters we've got hauling around food and stuff, Wellsprings make those too. They're, like, ponds, in the centers of our cities, and if you know what you're doing you can sit by them and meditate and change what kindsa magic plants they make, but I definitely don't know what I'm doing so don't ask me too much about that part."
"Dragons are big fuckoff monsters, started showing up one day, what the fuck, right? I wasn't around then, but I got history lessons, you know - they're the reason everything's so fucked up outside the Polity. Uh, which is where you are. We're the last holdout against the dragons that we know of. There might be others but we're not in contact, cause, you know, hard to send a courier across the wasteland. Even a Sky Knight - farther out you go, the more dragons there are, even a team'll get fuckin slaughtered eventually."
"Sky Knights were dreamed up after the Brush, that's the big wall of plant outside the Polity - once people figured out Wellsprings are shit at fighting, someone built a magical cemetery called a Sepulchre. You put somebody in a Sepulchre, they wake up like this." He gestures at himself. "We die, we're reborn up in the Sepulchres. We're better at fighting than ordinary people, and we can fly around, hence, Sky Knights. Us and our support staff live in big floating islands that circle around the edge of the Polity, and whenever a dragon gets too close a few of us fly out and take it down."
"That's pretty much the basics on those three things. How'd I do?"
"Pretty well. I'd love to see a Wellspring myself and understand them better, but I won't bother you with it since it's not your area of expertise. Dragons just—attack? There's no one controlling them as far as you know, they're just animals? I tried using my translation magic on one but it just tried to kill me so that's suggestive."
"No one's really sure about dragons? Like I said, the most anyone knows is that they just started showing up one day. Lindworms - uh, little crawly ones, 'bout the size of horses, come in hordes - sometimes use something like military tactics, but there don't seem to be, like, lindworm sergeants or whatever."
"You got attacked by one? Who came and saved you?"
"You took a dragon down on your own? Shit. Guess that explains why no one filled you in. ...You should talk to Eleanora. She's the director of Azimuth - that's the big flying city I'm from. If you can fight a dragon alone and come out alive she'll want to get you deployed. Uh, assuming you want to work with us, I guess."
"I mean, if this were an actual war I'd want to hear both sides but if it's literally a bunch of nonsapient dragons who may or may not be commanded by someone but if so it's someone who hasn't actually explained why or anything like that, then yeah I want to work with you. But I'd like to eliminate the problem altogether and I probably have the means to help you do so."
"Sounds good to me, let's get going," Tobin says. "...shit, how're you gonna get in? Uh, Azimuth's not designed to be easily enterable, 'cuz anytime we need to get back into it we can just shoot ourselves in the head. Uh, I guess you could stow away on a shipment of supplies, if I told 'em to they'd probably let you, Sky Knights can pretty much get away with whatever. We'd have to go to whichever the hell city has a Gate up to Azimuth, though, which means you'd have to navigate the Gates between inner cities, which is a fuckin nightmare. ...Fuck, did I explain Gates? They're big stone portals you walk through to go from city to city, they come in pairs. But there's no big hubs like there used to be before the dragons showed up, there's like... loops? This city's connected to that one's connected to that one's connected back to the first, and if you wanna get to a city that's not in that loop you have to travel overland, and none of the Gates lead to a city next door, they all lead somewhere random halfway across the Polity, it's bullshit."
"Or I could bridal carry you through the air and, like, knock on a window, if you're up for that."
And they fly: up through the skylight, and then up through open air for a while.
Azimuth comes into view after a time. It looks like someone tore a piece of the ground out of the ground and fixed it in the air, then built a military base on top of it out of trees and hung a bunch of organ pipes off the bottom.
"Hmm... could take you up through a drop shaft, dunno if I could pry one open with my feet or not... all the skylight are grated... fuck, this is tricky. Um, tell you what, we'll land on the lip of the island, then how do you feel about riding on my back? If you fall I am 100% capable of shooting down faster than gravity and catching you."
Fly.
The drop shaft is lit from within with periodic globs of luminescent fungus. The trip upward is extremely boring.
Eventually they reach the top. The door is circular, divided in half. Tobin reaches up and wiggles his fingers into the seam, then pulls.
He growls at the doors while he's doing so: "fuckin - I'm not a lindworm you dumb shit - take the goddamn hint - let me in you useless vegetable - "
Eventually the gap is wide enough for both of them to fit through. Once they're inside, the doors snap shut. He lands, lets Sadde climb off.
This room is also circular, made of some gray wood that looks and feels almost metallic. It's lit by glowing blue-white mushrooms hanging from the ceiling.
"Okay," Tobin said. "I don't know about you but that felt extremely stupid to me. Let's go, I'll show you to Eleanora's office."
"You're not a big jokes guy, huh." Way: is led.
It winds, up staircases and down corridors and through the curtains-plus-squiggly-little-passageways that this world likes to use instead of solid doors.
And then Tobin leads Sadde through the widest curtain and squiggliest passageway he's seen so far, to a wide semicircular office...
"I used to be human, but then I became what I currently am. My species—vampire—is ageless, does not need to breathe, sleep, blink, rest, or actually move at all; we do not get sick, we are extremely durable and if you remove a limb we can reattach it—and that's in addition to personal, unshareable magic I have which allows me to manipulate my own biology pretty much without constraints including doing things like regrowing limbs or turning them into spikes which I can drive into a dragon's skull, or generating pretty much any biological matter I want. We are very fast and strong, have much better senses than humans, have perfect recall of everything that has ever happened after we turned into a vampire, have ridiculously accelerated cognition and much more room in our brains. We also become much prettier after we turn. The only way to kill us is breaking us into pieces and setting us on fire.
"Now for the drawbacks. To turn a human they must be injected with venom, which is produced in greatest quantities in our mouths, and then over the next three days the human will suffer agonising crescent pain beyond anything you could possibly imagine or actually endure. It is very common to beg for death. There is absolutely no way I can overstate how horrible it is, and absolutely nothing I can tell anything or anyone that will actually prepare them for how bad it is. Newborn vampires are often so overwhelmed by their new senses that they have a lot of trouble resisting their every impulse, including murderous ones, but this is helped by advance knowledge of it. Newborns are also much physically better—stronger and faster—than regular vampires for about a year after turning. The perfect post-turning memory also drowns out most pre-turning events if the vampire doesn't particularly focus on them soon enough.
"We subsist on mammal blood—but nonhuman blood tastes worse than the worst rotten piece of food anyone's ever eaten, while human blood tastes and smells so good most vampires in my world used to be unrepentant serial killers because of it before the current government took over and outlawed murder. Because of this, it is extremely difficult to turn a human by biting them without actually eating them. Furthermore, drinking human blood makes a vampire less likely to be able or willing to resist it in the future, as well as more feral and antisocial and less capable of living in large groups. There is a set of instincts that completely replaces human ones which also automatically treats other vampires as threats and humans as food. There are associated physical changes beyond becoming prettier; a regular vampire's skin sparkles in the sun, our eyes turn red when we've recently fed on a human, gold when we've recently fed on an animal, and black when we're hungry, and our teeth are much sharper even in comparison with our hardened skin. And a vampire is always at least a little bit hungry, which is reflected in a burning sensation in our throat that echoes the pain of turning and only gets worse the longer it's been since we've last fed.
"When a vampire lays eyes on a person they would be mutually romantically compatible with, they are immediately and eternally in magical monogamous love with them; if the target is also or becomes a vampire, this becomes reciprocal. In case a vampire looks at multiple people they'd be compatible with at the same time, they get this mate bond with all of them. Female vampires cannot conceive, but male vampires can impregnate human females with hybrids, who take one month from conception to birth in a process that often kills the mother if special precautions aren't taken to immediately turn her.
"Any questions so far?"
"In your estimation, could a vampire who did not share your idiosyncratic magic defeat a dragon in the same way you did? What were the biological characteristics, abilities, and limb configuration of the dragon you killed? Am I interpreting you correctly that if an ordinary vampire lost a limb and that limb was destroyed, that limb would not be regrown?"
"Not the exact same way, no, but I expect it would not take much more work—I only resorted to the bone spike after I got fed up with playing nice, but I was not breaking a sweat yet, so to speak. It had two legs and two batlike wings, a long neck, and was somewhat furry. You are correct in that interpretation, but it is in fact rather difficult to remove a vampire's limbs and if they're not actually turned to ash it is possible to pick the pieces back."
"It sounds like the dragon you faced was a type called a wyvern. Most wyverns have breath weapons - they can produce from their mouths dangerous substances, magical or mundane. Most other types are more dangerous and more difficult to kill. Dragon types are most easily distinguished by limb configuration. I can elaborate, if you wish. Dragons are not always made of flesh - some are composed of stone, metal, or more exotic substances. Does that change your estimation? How do hybrids compare with full vampires along the axes you've described? Would sufficient fire or heat kill a vampire if they were not broken into pieces first? Can vampires be harmed at all by extremes of cold, or by acid?"
"If these exotic substances are significantly harder than diamond that might make it more difficult but I expect a dragon would need to be perhaps an order of magnitude faster, stronger, tougher, and smarter before it posed us a serious risk. If the heat was sufficient to turn the vampire to ash on the spot that would kill them, the breaking-into-pieces requirement is just so the vampire can't put the fire out very quickly. Extremes of cold do not harm us, regular acidic substances do not either.
"Hybrids are... less physically enhanced than a vampire, but much closer to that than to a human, definitely much more than just halfway along. They also only retain perfectly memories which they choose to, have less attentional capacity and brain space, need to breathe, need to sleep—and in fact their need for sleep is a bit of a problem because although they sleep less than humans they always need to sleep every day at exactly the same time and wake up at exactly the same time and what time that is varies from hybrid to hybrid. They can also eat regular food and bear children and do not have mate bonds. That's half-half, though; other fractions of hybrid are different."
"Suppose a dragon was capable of keeping you on fire, by sustained application of a breath weapon, but not capable of turning you to ash instantly. Could this kill you? Can parts of your body be burned away without destroying you entirely - either an extremity, or a layer of skin or flesh over your entire body? Some types of dragon don't keep their consciousness in their brains, and need to be killed by destroying a large enough fraction of their body; would a vampire be able to do so? How does vampire venom interact with non-human animals?"
"This could kill me, yes, but the dragon would have a hard time keeping me in this situation. Well, this could kill a vampire other than me, I'm personally all but fireproof. A vampire should be able to destroy arbitrarily large quantities of dragon modulo aforementioned concerns about the possibility of much greater durability. Vampire venom kills animals."
"Does idiosyncratic personal magic come with vampirehood or is it a product of your world of origin? You can't regrow limbs, but if you can heal fractures you must be able to regenerate flesh to some extent; could you regrow a layer of skin that a dragon burned off during battle? A layer of flesh? Can vampires receive transplants, either by reattaching somebody else's arms as you would your own or with surgical intervention? Can vampire venom be siphoned and stored? You say you can generate biological substances; does that extend to magical biological substances other than vampire flesh?"
"It is a product of my world of origin but sometimes vampirehood enhances it where it existed previously or creates it where it did not. I am not sure whether that was a property of my world, this is the first world I'm visiting where offering people vampirism is an actually appealing option. Layer of skin—probably, layer of flesh, probably not. Vampires can't receive transplants, other vampires' venom—which coats all organs and which is necessary to reattach a lost limb—burns us. Vampire venom can definitely be siphoned and stored but it's extremely corrosive to most materials, glass being the outstanding exception. As for magical biological substances, I have not yet been able to find a pattern on when I can or cannot create them."
"Do you know by what mechanism other vampires' venom, but not your own, is dangerous? Is one of the magical substances you can create vampire flesh, and if so could you use that to contain vampire venom? Does vampire flesh separated from its body of origin die or decay? Could you create another vampire's venom, or does any venom you produce by any mechanism count as your own? Are there any other useful magical substances you can create and would be willing to manufacture for us?"
"I do not know why other vampires' venom is dangerous and I cannot generate any but my own. I can generate my own flesh, though—or bones, probably better—and use that to contain vampire venom. Vampire body parts never decay—they may dry up if not envenomed but can be restored later. None of the magical substances I've been able to produce are in themselves useful, they are typically only magical in conjunction with other things or used as part of larger magic."
He has given this explanation before. He can share all the details, too, since this world apparently is not going to torture or kill any people based on their hair colour with magic. He details all of it, including answers to the questions he's been asked before and clarifications on subtler points.
"I'll send him my notes on vampirehood and sorcery, and he can contact you when he's ready to go to work. In the meantime, I can arrange for a room for you to stay in; based on your description of vampirehood it doesn't sound like you need very much to be comfortable, but do feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that."
Librarywards indeed. This particular library divides its books into "narrative" and "reference" rather than fiction and nonfiction, and further subdivides "narrative" into "bright" and "macabre" rather than any familiar genres. The "reference" section contains mostly histories of Tairil, books on battle tactics geared toward small groups of powerful individuals fighting enormous monsters or armies of smaller monsters, and textbooks on magic.
Versus big dragons: attack rapidly and frequently. Coordinate attack patterns beforehand with your squadmates. Unless you're facing something called an Amphithere, you're probably faster in the air than your opponent; it's often better to dodge than to block. (All the guides seem to assume their readers can levitate and zoom around in the air pretty much however they want.) The fact that you will reincarnate if you die does not mean death is tactically insignificant; take steps to protect your life. Follow your squad leader's orders, because it's more important to act as as a coordinated unit than to implement every possible good idea.
Against "most varieties" of dragons, destruction of the brain "or brains" of a dragon will kill it, but they don't seem to strictly speaking need any of their other organs. Hydras, apparently, can survive without any heads.
Dragons seem to come in varieties, which tactical manuals assume the reader is already familiar with. He can discern a few details by implication, though. Wyverns, the kind he fought, are most similar to folkloric dragons, with two legs instead of four. Hydras seem to heal a lot better than other dragons, and can grow extra heads. Amphitheres are faster, and, by implication, might not have limbs. Salamanders' actual bodies are comparatively minuscule, and are usually surrounded by nonspecific environmental hazards, the sorts of things that Wyverns might exhale. Wyrms are rare, enormous, and dangerous.
The lab, as near as he can tell, is near the center of the facility. Sadde enters onto an elevated walkway above a chamber containing an array of coconuts the size of small rooms, suspended a few feet above the ground by thick vines. Against the opposite walls are tables strewn with piles of notes, leaves, bowls of what look like deep-fried crickets, and a few small stone birdbaths. Someone, presumably Zacharias, is hunched over one birdbath.
He looks up when Sadde enters, and claps his hands. "Aha! Sadde! You're Sadde, right? Am I saying that right?"
"Nah, I think I'm caught up. Lemme see..." he grabs a sheaf of papers and starts leafing through them. "Aha. Conjuring biological substances. So, here's the deal. Big dragons, wyverns and hydras and salamanders and whatever, Sky Knights handle those. But even with Azimuth there's not enough of them to effectively fight off the swarms of lindworms that come along too, so we have our plant monsters and our normal militia stationed around the Brush to take care of those. And Sky Knight weapons are magic as fuck, so they can break open a dragon's skin or bone or whatever, but we can't hand out Sky Knight weapons to every conscript. So what we have to do instead is use Wellsprings to grow trees that have magically durable wood, and turn that into weapons, and our output is bottlenecked by how fast we can develop and grow magic trees. Plus we can't test them effectively because we don't have any draconic tissue samples. So where you come in is, I'm hoping you can conjure up our magic woods faster than we can grow them, or possibly something better - vampire bone's supposed to be really durable, right? - and also make some dragon skin and dragon bone to test out our weapons on, so we can start experimenting more to make more interesting things than pointy sticks. So, that's project A of several, with me so far?"
He speaks very quickly.
"Now, what I know for a fact Eleanora's gonna want to do," he says, "is turn as many militia members as possible into vampires. And on the drinking-blood front, what I'm gonna try to do is cook up something that you guys can eat that'll work as well or better than animal blood. I'll need to put a sample of vampire venom into this guy," he taps the nearest birdbath, "and do some analytics, but I don't need you for that except for the actual sample."
"And number three," he continues, "and this is the big moneymaker, is I want us to work out a ritual to purify corrupted Wellsprings. I don't know how much you know about dragon blood, but it's dangerous stuff, and if it gets into a Wellspring it hijacks it and makes it start pumping out lindworms. In theory, Wellsprings are self-purifying, but on their own they can't filter out dragon blood. As far as we know, every Wellspring outside the Polity is full of dragon blood and useless to us. If we had a way to purify them, we could push back against the dragons, start retaking territory instead of just defending what we have. But we haven't had any luck at making something better at purifying than Wellsprings already are. It should be possible in principle if I could retool a whole Wellspring to work just on that, but something based on sorcery would probably be easier."
"Okay! So the big ticket item here is Wellsprings. Magic self-purifying lakes. Technicians, people like me, meditate on Wellsprings - aah, basically sit down next to them and try really hard to notice the magic radiating off them, and then notice the shape of the magic radiating off of them, and the patterns it's arranged in. Wellsprings radiate their magic into the plants around them, for like miles and miles around, and turn them into friendly magic plants. Like, their fruit is really good for you or they heal a particular disease or something. But when you meditate on a Wellspring, you can change the patterns of magic encoded inside it into other, more complicated patterns, that they don't know how to make themselves, or that it wouldn't occur to them to try to figure out. - I'm talking about them like they're people, and in some ways modeling them as being like people is a good approximation, but meditating on a Wellspring isn't really like communicating with another person."
"So, you can meditate on a Wellspring and look at the patterns it has, and once you've done that to a bunch of Wellsprings you start to get a feel for what patterns get what effects, and then you can start sculpting your own patterns in the Wellsprings you meditate on. Like, you tell a Wellspring, 'I want something that'll magically heal wounds,' or 'I want something that's as hard and easy to sculpt as steel,' or 'I want something that'll follow me around and carry my luggage for me' or whatever. You have to figure out a way to translate that kind of instruction into the kind of magical patterns that Wellsprings know how to interpret, and then you feed those patterns into the Wellspring you're looking at. And then, your Wellspring will either reject them out of hand, or else it'll take your patterns and kind of metabolize them, cut them up and shuffle them around and turn them into something it can do something cool with."
"And then there's more ways after that that the whole process is long and involved and complicated, but I'm getting off track. The things that Wellsprings are generally really good at are - well, you've been in the cities, you've seen how everything is made of plants? Tell a Wellspring to make some trees grow into the shape of buildings, it'll do that no problem. Tell a Wellspring to make something that walks around and does stuff for you, that's easy too. If you can make something out of a physical magical plant, that isn't too out there for a plant to do, you can tell a Wellspring to make it happen. You can make things that affect the bodies of the people who eat them really well - like, heal wounds or cure diseases or put you in the 90th percentile of physical fitness or mess around with secondary sex characteristics. You can make some kinds of magical substances, as long as they're vegetable in origin. Stuff you can't do is like - you couldn't make a plant that made you telepathic, or gave you pyrokinesis; you couldn't make Gates out of magic plants; you can't really make, like... the stuff you make has to be magically biological, or magically chemical. I don't know how much sense that makes to someone who doesn't do this for a living. With me so far?"
"The big bottleneck is number of Wellsprings, since you can only fit so much into one, plus farmland for growing the magic plants, and I don't think there's much vampirism can do for us on that front. But being a vampire would probably make it easier to get good at Wellspring hacking, plus if you've got perfect recall it's a lot easier to move patterns from one Wellspring to another, so you could probably grease some wheels going from R&D to production. Uh... if enough people get vamp'ed it'll free up Wellspring real estate that'd otherwise be used for keeping people alive or healthy. But nothing major is jumping out at me, I'm more interested in vampirism for the military and biokinesis for production and experimenting."
He snaps his fingers. "Right, vampires can't breed. Ah - the Polity's getting close to hitting saturation, they've instituted population controls recently, and everyone's gotten really into The Civil Duty To Not Overstretch The Nation's Resources. It's more popular out by the Brush, where people still die sometimes."
"I mean, vampires can in fact breed—vampire sperm still works on human eggs, but the human will typically die if not turned into a vampire immediately upon giving birth, and it's nonlethal for hybrids to carry—it sounds like it may be a good idea in the long term to slowly replace your human population with various levels of hybrid."
"I like the way you think. Although come to think of it I don't know if all our berries will affect hybrids or vampires the way they affect humans, which could cause friction - you can't be turned into a hybrid so we can't make sure the first few trials consent to being guinea pigs - uh, I don't suppose you could - biokinesize - a headless but otherwise functional hybrid body to experiment on? Or vampire body?"
"Hmm. We don't actually have a lot of glass around, but I bet my sealing coconuts beat your horrifying acid venom. Come with me."
He leads Sadde to one of the giant coconuts hanging from the ceiling, which has a metal or metal-looking wireframe staircase next to it leading about halfway up its vertical diameter. He knocks, three times, and a portion of the wall separates, slides inward, and is hoisted upward by internal vines.
The inside is white and vaguely glassy-looking, lit from above by a glob of white fungus. Heavy-duty vines cluster on the ceiling, supporting the door just by its frame. The floor is not concave, but flat and level with the doorway. Shelves extend from the wall, apparently grown naturally. They're lined with, mostly, more coconuts. These ones are coconut-sized resting on circular frames; some have little labels pasted on them. There's a few glass vessels on the wall as well, most of which wouldn't look out of place in an earthly chemistry set.
There's a table in the center of the room, also grown out of the floor, with instruments of chemistry made out of the same glassy white substance, a few plants in pots that might be some extremely magical pitcher-plant derivative, and half a coconut on another circular stand.
Zacharias grabs an unlabeled coconut and sort of twists it apart, so that without cracking it splits in half, just the way the giant one opened. "I gotta go grab some Wellspring water. You can stay here but don't touch anything."
He leaves, and returns a few minutes later with a coconut-bowl full of Wellspring water, which he places inside a shallow glass bowl so that, if the sealing-coconut does get melted, the actual glass will catch the contaminated water.
"Right in here," he says, tapping the coconut. "By, you know, whatever method you usually do this."
He seals up the coconut, labels it with "vampire venom - extremely dangerous, irreversible transformation" plus several little skull-and-crossbones symbols, and places it on the shelf. "I'll take a look at that. Somebody'll set up a workroom for you to crank out some weapons," he waves his hand vaguely, "in a few days, probably. I'll retool one of my sealing-rooms to hold some dragon flesh samples that we can test vampire bone against. I can get that done today but it'll take a few hours, and I have nothing on the docket for you till then - you can head back to your room to relax or work on your sorcery school or whatever, or you can hang out here so I don't have to send someone to find you again, your call. Ah, not here here - not inside the coconut, off in a corner of the lab."
Library! If he tries to read all the books he'll get to read about Tairil's history, primarily tribes and warlords fighting for control of Wellsprings until a woman named Joanne (they don't seem to do last names in Tairil) discovered how to alter their properties, and leveraged this ability to take over the world, found the nation of Tairil Unified, and make everyone immortal. He'll learn about architecture-magic, which is even slower and more unwieldy than Wellspring meditation; almost no one knows how it works anymore, you have to get an apprenticeship to learn about it, and it's only used for Gates between cities and the Sepulchres themselves. He'll learn about dragons - the dangers of dragonblood contamination, the variety of breath weapons they've been known to use, the fact that lindworm hordes have been observed to use some small-scale tactics but nothing like strategy. He will, if he's interested and he looks long enough, finally find a straightforward explanation of all the known draconic body plans.
Lindworms seem to have a rudimentary instinctual understanding of battle tactics. Absent any apparent outside instruction, a horde of attacking lindworms will organize themselves into squads and formations. Lindworm hordes that are following a larger dragon will wait for their dragon to disrupt the defensive line from the air and then take advantage of that disruption. Against larger forces they'll make use of hit-and-run guerilla tactics. But they have no grasp of large scale strategy - lindworm hordes make no distinction between low-value and high-value targets, make no effort to conceal their movements from scouts, do not seem to comprehend things like supply lines as they apply to enemy forces. When they took Tairil, they did it by dint of superior numbers and Tairil itself being almost completely unarmed at the start.
Dragons come in five main varieties. Wyverns, the kind Sadde fought when he arrived, have two legs and two wings, and some manner of breath weapon. After lindworms, they're the most common and weakest. Amphitheres have more snakelike bodies than other dragons; they have two wings and no other limbs, and they're much faster than other types of dragons. Instead of breath weapons, they usually have magic venom with strange effects. Salamanders look like minuscule dragon embryos within soft translucent eggs; where wyverns have breath weapons, they have the ability to surround themselves with vast storms of matter or energy. Hydras have no wings but multiple heads. They heal from wounds supernaturally quickly, even more so than other types of dragons; whenever a wound heals, it grows another head, often with a new type of breath weapon. Wyrms are much, much larger, rarer, more dangerous, and harder to kill than other dragons, long and sinuous with no limbs and the ability to levitate.
There is very little information to be found about architecture magic. It seems to involve casting complex rituals over the materials of large structures as they're being built in order to imbue the final product with magical effects. Learning enough about architecture magic to design something as powerful and complex as a Sepulchre would take multiple human lifetimes.