Chapter 41 - Bonding

"No, please, no more. It hurts so much," Henderson begged as the pain washed over him again and again. "Please, just a short rest, please I'm begging you!"

"You asked for this, Contestant. You welcomed the God of Chaos into your heart and soul, and you assured me that you were strong enough and willing to accept the challenge you have been offered," the dragon said. "Do you accept the challenge and understand that through pain comes growth, through perseverance comes experience, and through hardship comes strength? Or are you, as many of my kin would presume, just another weak, small human?"

"Just one minute, just one minute to regain my strength, a second to rest, a short pause please I'm begging you. I'll do whatever you say, just let me rest. It hurts so much."

"Never!" cried the dragon inside Henderson's mind. "To rest is to accept weakness and defeat into your heart. You do not need rest. You do not need a pause. You need to be pushed harder than you've ever been pushed before, harder than you've ever experienced in your younger days as you grew up in comfort inside the City walls. You know nothing of hardship, nothing of having to push through every fibre of your body telling you to quit and give up. You know nothing, little human and I will erase these terrible habits."

"Please," Henderson whispered, trying one more time with tears wetting his cheeks. "Please."

Henderson let his head hang down as he fell onto all fours. This ridiculous method of training that the dragon had decided to put him through as they were both confined to the dungeons, had taken its dire toll over the last few days. There was really nothing else they could do but train while they were both trapped there. Of course, Henderson had a date when he would be released in the next few days, whereas the dragon, who had not shared its name, knew that eventually it would be taken to the arena and most likely die at the hands of a skilled, high-level Contestant. After all, the dragon was a prize of the City because never before had a nest guardian been caught and brought back to the City to be locked away in the dungeons. Never before had a nest guardian been removed from its charge. But that brought an opportunity to the dragon. Never before had it been able to infiltrate the mind of someone within the City walls, and never before had it been able to create an ally so close to the heart of the enemy that they could almost reach out and stab it.

Of course the nest guardian had come across humans before, out in the wilderness beyond the City walls, but they had never been the civilised type, more usually simply scavengers that desired food more than anything else. This boy, though, this Henderson as he called himself, the nest guardian could sense within him the desire for revenge, the burning hatred and anger to allow the God of Chaos to envelop his very being and provide an opportunity that seldom reared its head.

"Do you want to be powerful, human? Do you want revenge on those who have wronged you? Do you want to prove to everyone you have ever met, who has laughed at you or looked down upon you, that you are more than they could ever imagine? That you could destroy them with a single thought? Do you understand that this training you are enduring at this very moment is moulding you, is creating something that you cannot yet comprehend?"

The question of course, was a misnomer because comprehending something that is incomprehensible is nothing shy of impossible.

"I understand, I understand," wailed Henderson. "I am not asking to stop. I am asking for a moment's pause."

"We do not have a moment," the nest guardian roared. "In a few short days, you'll be released from this place. By your own admission, then there will be no time to train, only time to use what you have learned to grow without my help. Now, close your eyes and focus once more, or I shall be done with you, and the God of Chaos shall turn her back on you."

With those words, Henderson gritted his teeth and fought himself back onto his feet. He, once again, as he had been doing over and over for what felt like an eternity, closed his eyes and focused his mind on the beast that resided in the cell opposite him, the nest guardian, the dragon that he knew was far beyond his own station.

With his mind, Henderson reached out and felt the presence of the nest guardian. It was easy; the thing was like a shining beacon. The dragon stood tall amidst a sea of darkness, and Henderson pushed his ethereal self, his will and dominance, against the form of the glowing dragon again and again.

His will smashed against the dragon as if it were a wall made of granite.

Inwardly, Henderson begged that he would find an opening, that he would find a sliver of a weakness that would allow his will to seep into the beast as it had commanded. This was what the dragon was teaching Henderson: how to take control of a monster so that he could bind with it and become one with the God of Chaos that resides within all things monstrous.

But the dragon was simply too strong for Henderson, and they had both known it from the beginning. However, the dragon had told him that he had no alternative but to train Henderson this way. The other beasts in the dungeon, Henderson could reach out and touch, but without the proper knowledge and training that only the nest guardian could provide, he would not learn to control his ability, and it would falter and ultimately fail.

With each collision of his willpower against the granite-like dragon in his mind's eye, Henderson felt his entire body creak and buckle under the pressure. The mental damage he was causing to himself was converting itself into physical pain, and the more he tried, the more time passed, the more he searched for that sliver of an opening, the closer he felt the darkness coming. It would not be the first time that his training had caused Henderson to blackout entirely, and he knew that once it happened, it would not be the last time either.

Something inside Henderson told him that this method of brute force, of trial and error was going to do nothing other than get him killed. As his energy and consciousness flickered between light and dark, he allowed his willpower to stand off from the stone creature in his mind's eye. Instead of throwing his willpower at the beast again, he simply stood back and observed. He closed his mouth, his nose, and his ears to the senses of everything else around him, and he walked slowly around the guardian without making a single sound, even as his ethereal feet grazed the ground beneath him.

But even though Henderson wasn't throwing his mental self against the stone nest guardian in his mind's eye, simply holding onto his ethereal form in this manner was taking its toll. He could already feel his heart beating out of his chest, and his breaths were coming short and ragged. But something told him this new approach was far more likely to yield results than what he'd been trying so far. Something told him that he was pulling at a loose thread that would unravel the entire jumper of difficulty that was the guardian.

Then just as Henderson's mind's eye reached the back of the terrible scaled creature, he saw something that he hadn't noticed before: something that he knew he'd been looking for this entire time. He saw a tiny sliver of darkness, a crack in the otherwise infallible stone armour of the nest guardian.

There, his heart skipped a beat as he recognised this tiny crack for what it was: the culmination of the training that this dragon had been putting him through. It was what he had been looking for the entire time.

Hesitating for just a moment before calling his mind's eye into action, Henderson took a deep breath and then approached the dragon. Its stone form was unmoving, though somehow daring him to try it, but he had no alternative. He knew the stone nest guardian was too difficult to penetrate in any other way than finding a weakness, and this was it. He knew it. This was the weakness, his one way in.

Henderson's ethereal self took two tentative steps forward, coming into touching distance with the dragon. He reached out his hand, his fingers stretching towards the dark chink in the stone dragon's armour, just inches away, then one inch, and then he touched it. His fingers made delicate contact with the creature before him, the creature that towered over him in both physical stature and level. He had expected it to feel cold to the touch, but as he laid his palm flat against the stone dragon, Henderson surprisingly felt nothing.

And for a moment, nothing happened.

But then, like he had touched fire with his bare hands, Henderson's fingers lit up, and the world around him spiralled as he felt himself drawn inside the nest guardian. It was like nothing he had ever felt before and he wanted to throw up immediately but was rendered unable to.

The scene that then greeted Henderson before his very mind's eye flashed swathes of desert, of forest, of mountains, of rain and fog and he realised all too late that he had seen through the dragon's eyes a memory of a time long past as the dragon had flown high above the landscape outside the City walls, a landscape that Henderson realised he had never spared a passing thought for.

But then the vision was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and a deep blackness enveloped Henderson's mind. All that he saw before he succumbed to his unconsciousness were two deep red eyes as the nest guardian expelled Henderson from its mind, freeing itself from his bond.

"The child has finally discovered that brute force is not always the way to get what you want," the dragon said in Henderson's mind as his consciousness returned a minute later. "Sometimes a single thorn may be more effective than an entire thicket."

"I saw… I saw the landscape past the walls," Henderson breathed out. "I saw…"

"You saw a distant memory of my past," the nest guardian explained calmly. "You saw something of myself, and it will be the same every single time you bond with a being of Chaos. You will see a part of them, either a thought or a memory, and each time it will be something different."

"So, I bonded with you?" Henderson asked.

The dragon let out a guttural grumble before replying. "Do you know how long you were in my mind for? Do you know how long we were bonded together for?" it asked.

Henderson shook his head.

"We were bonded for one-tenth of a second," the nest guardian explained. "Because your level is so low, and mine is so high, to have attempted anything longer would have completely destroyed your mind. Destruction, I fear, that would have been permanent. This is the next lesson you have to learn: if you attempt to bond with a creature beyond your means, the attempt itself could kill you."

"What?" Henderson asked. "How will I know if a creature is beyond my means? How will I avoid taking such a risk?"

"It is not an exact science," the guardian replied, "but you will understand more as time goes by. To begin with I would suggest refraining from attempting to bond with any creature more than ten levels your senior. Once you have trained and grown away from this place, you will understand."

"I don't understand," Henderson replied.

"And this is your biggest problem as far as I can see it," the nest guardian replied. "It is that you close your mind and open your mouth far too quickly. As I have just said, with time you will come to understand, and right now, you should not understand."

Henderson opened his mouth to speak again, perhaps to protest, but as he did so, the dragon's words seemed to penetrate his skull, and he snapped his mouth shut with a click.

"That is better," the dragon said. "Now do it again."

Henderson groaned.