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.

...is that a dragon? He peers at it.

Well, it's dragon-shaped, certainly.  Two legs and two wings, great and black, with an almost doglike face.  Its torso looks furry, though.

It doesn't seem to have spotted him yet.

Huh. Anything else around?

Not much.  The closest other thing is whatever the giant horizon plant's deal is.

The dragon(?) is getting closer.  Sadde hears something - a rapid-fire rhythmic screeching, at the upper edge of his range, like echolocation.

Innnteresting. He wonders if it's sapient. He stays put.

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.

"...are you sapient at all?" he asks in what should be intelligible as a language if the dragon is in fact sapient.

The dragon crawls forward through its wall of dust and does the head-sweep move again.  This time its ray-of-something passes over Sadde for a moment.

When it does, he hears, for a moment, the loudest sound he has ever heard in his life.

Ow.

Okay, not sapient. Time to run for the next interesting thing.

The dragon takes off after him.

He hears a burst of echolocation, and then a much more sustained blast of LOUD.

It keeps pace surprisingly well for something that is not a vampire.

...he can run faster then.

Once he starts speeding up, the dragon dives toward him, extending its neck, jaws agape.  It's big enough to swallow him whole and it looks ready to prove it.

Okay so he can just stop and turn around in a fraction of a second and start running the opposite way. Thing that big's probably got a lot of inertia.

It does.  It hits the ground and scrabbles a bit, gets itself turned around, and starts bounding after him.  Rapid pulses of echolocation, followed by more bursts of LOUD.

Ugh.

Whatever.

He turns right around and runs towards the dragon at full speed, aiming for a collision.

It startles a bit, and its head goes for a lunge, sideways and feral like an enormous wild dog.

So he jumps, aiming to headbutt it.

He manages to slam into its forehead.  It yowls and starts trying to shake him off.

He doesn't particularly mind killing animals. How hard is it to break its neck?

Well, he'd be hard pressed to get his arms more than a third of the way around it, if he managed to climb over its forehead.  This thing is huge.

Yes and he's a vampire it's not like he needs to strangle it to break it. Does it have a spine he can punch or puncture?

Spine: located.  This thing's skin feels tougher than a similarly-sized mundane mammal's probably would, though.  He may have trouble doing much damage with just one punch.

Once he's on its neck it starts raking at him, with claws on the end of its wings.

He's a vampire with biokinesis, it should just quit already.

It won't, though, won't it.

Punch punch punch he makes himself physically stronger and more resistant punch.

Crack.  Scream.

It rolls over and starts slamming its own head and neck into the ground, trying to crush Sadde between them.

Good luck to it, he'll continue doing that until it's dead.

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.

He turns his sense of smell off, lands neatly on the ground, and just looks at the dragon unimpressedly.

It pounces on him and pins him under its claws.  The screech flattens into a pure tone, like a pristine tuning fork held against his eardrum; its pitch tanks to the bottom of his range and below, and then begins steadily ascending.

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?

Well, that doesn't seem like a happy sound it just made.

It screams and squeals and retches, its neck thrashes with Sadde still embedded inside its skull, and then it collapses.

It's probably dead.

Hopefully the task of getting out from inside its jaws will be comparably trivial.

It is.

And he's slimy. Ugh. He rearranges his body back to its more usual shape, reaches inside his bag of holding for a piece of rose quartz, and wishes himself clean and clothed. There, that's better.

So—weird plant-wards?

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.

Fuck walking he'll run.

Run.

Run.

Run.

Yeah this is faster though.  This thing is huge.

There's plant-creatures moving around just outside it.

Are they plant dragons. Is that what his life is right now.

They don't have wings!  They're smaller!  The horrible stench of dragon blood is weaker as you get closer to the giant plant thing, as Sadde will notice if he's turned his nose back on!  Maybe they're something else.  Or maybe they're just small flightless plant dragons.

...do they attack him if he gets close.

One of them - something slender and four-legged with a tangle of vines for a body - spots him and sprints off.  A few heavier-duty ones approach, cautiously.

"Can you understand me?" he asks.

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.

"I should be able to understand anything you say, if you can communicate somehow."

If it understands, it doesn't reply in speech.

It lowers its head towards him, slowly and gently.  Root-tendrils raise slowly and gently like tentacles; if he allows them, they will start prodding curiously at his face.

If it communicates with something other than speech he should be able to understand it anyway so he'll just wait and let it prod.

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.

...alright, he'll follow the kangaroo thing.

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.

"—I don't, ah, need to eat, but thank you. I'm also—very fast?" He zips somewhere a mile away, waves, then returns.

All the plant-creatures jump back in startlement.  The vine-creature curls its vines uncertainly, then turns around and bounds away as fast as it can.  (Sadde's top speed is still much faster.)

Yeah he can show that. "Also I don't get tired and don't need to breathe, so you can just show me the way, you don't need to worry about carrying me. It's very kind, though."

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?"

"Yeah, I am. You were warned I was coming?"

"Scout saw you, our technician got word through our Wellspring.  Come on through.  What were you doing out in the Wastes?"

"I'm from another world, I'm not whatever species probably human you are, I arrived there, a dragon thing attacked me, I killed it, then these plants brought me. My name is Sadde."

The man's eyebrows raise.  "Another world?  How d'you mean exactly?"

"You killed a dragon?" the younger man says.  "On your own?"

"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."

"That probably did it," old man says.  He exhales heavily.  "Get all the blood off?  - That's important, you don't want any of it in the water."

"I used a magic thing to clean me of it and get me new clothes. What's it do?"

"Dragonblood grows tapewyrms, tapewyrms turn you into a chimera.  'Snot fun. It can corrupt a Wellspring too, but we don't know how much it takes.  - You have Wellsprings where you're from?"

"No Wellsprings, my world's magic is different. What's a chimera? Does that happen to nonhumans as well?"

"It'd happen to other animals if there were any left.  Think bugs are too small.  Chimeras're anything with a dragon head growing out of it.  Dragon head wants to kill everybody, just like ordinary dragons."

Young man asks: "If you don't have Wellsprings what do you do for immortality?"

"My species just is immortal. I'd expect the chimera thing to not work on me, also, both because of species and because of personal magic."

"Lucky you.  You need a place to stay?  Ride into town?"

"Not really, but thank you. I'd like to—understand what's going on better."

"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."

"Okay. Is anyone going to be extremely alarmed if I run just shy of at the speed of sound?"

"I imagine they'll think you're an odd sort of Sky Knight, not a dragon or anything - they'll be startled but they won't set the watch on you."

"Okay. Thank you."

And he doesn't break the speed of sound because causing sonic booms is rude but he comes close.

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.

And is there anyone around whom he might be tempted to call a "Sky Knight"?

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.

Then into that one he goes.

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.

And it is very likely he can both hear and smell people so if he follows that...

It sounds and smells like there's people inside, certainly.  Past the curtain is a perhaps-receptionist at a perhaps-receptionist's-desk who looks up when he enters and says, "Hello, can I help you?"

"Hello, yes. I'd like to talk to a Sky Knight, I'm an extradimensional visitor and I've been told they're the ones most likely to be able to explain to me what's going on around this place."

"...I... think Tobin's in," they say.  "Uh, right through there."  They gesture to another leaf-curtain.

"Thank you!"

Through there he goes.

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?"

"Indeed. No dragons or Sky Knights or Wellsprings where I'm from."

"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?"

"No one, I ran a spike through its brain, or where I figured its brain must've been."

"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."

"If you're bringing even more to the table than being a whatever-you-are that can kill a dragon in single combat you should definitely talk to Eleanora.  Do you have a place to stay already?  If not, how do you feel about living on Azimuth for the time being?"

"I don't have a place to stay, and I don't strictly need one, I don't sleep or eat or need to breathe, but it's sounding like a good idea to do that, yes."

"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."

"Sounds fastest."

"'Kay, hop on."  He holds out his arms.

He hops.

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."

"If I fall the ground will be the worse for it, don't worry. Is there a use for riding on your back that's not merely being accompanied by you so I am allowed in?"

"My hands'll be free so I can fly up a drop shaft and pry open the door, 's'probably the only way in."

"Ah, riding on your back to the top of the shaft, I misunderstood. Yes, that's fine."

"Cool."

They land.  Tobin puts Sadde down, then turns around.  "Hop on again."

Hop.

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."

"I'm not sure you should blame your architects for not anticipating the possibility of extradimensional help who can't shoot themselves in the head to get here. But do lead the way."

"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...

...with a desk in the middle and a woman behind it.

"Hello, Tobin," the woman says.  Presumably this is Eleanora.  "Who is your companion?"

"My name is Sadde. I'm from another universe. I killed a dragon in single combat and was unhurt. I have other forms of useful shareable magic."

She leans forward and steeples her fingers.  "Really.  I'm very pleased to meet you, Sadde.  Do you prefer Tobin to stay here while we talk or are you comfortable speaking with me alone?"

"As the both of you prefer."

"Very well.  Tobin, you're dismissed."

He gives a casual sort of salute, and leaves.

"So," she says.  "Tell me about what you can do."

"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."

"Noted.  I don't suppose vampires can fly?"

"Not unassisted, not normally. There was one with idiosyncratic magic who could, and I can grow wings..."

"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."

She nods.  "Is there any known way to alleviate the pain of transforming?"

"There was a witch—someone with a magic idiosyncratic power—who could completely shut out all senses of people in an area around him, including stuff like proprioception, but that's the only known method."

"If it's magically possible at all I'd expect it to be possible to engineer a way to do it using Wellspring plants, but that isn't my area of expertise.  Now, you mentioned you have other forms of shareable magic as well?"

"Indeed. It's really just the one but it's versatile enough to be able to do pretty much anything. It's called sorcery, and from the moment I walked into this dimension everyone in it was able to use it."

"Tell me about it.  I would appreciate a rundown like the one you gave me for vampirehood, but in particular: how difficult is it to learn to use, and can it affect magic from universes other than its universe of origin?"

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.

"To be clear, are gifts a different sort of idiosyncratic personal magic from the kind that turning sometimes gives or enhances?"

"They are. The idiosyncratic magic related to vampirehood does not typically run on a battery and tends to be personality-based or at least—influenced."

She nods.  "I think I'll want you to work with Zacharias, to find points of synergy between your magic and ours.  Zacharias is one of my best Wellspring engineers; he's in charge of several projects that could turn the tide of the war.  How familiar are you with our magic?"

"Tobin gave me a one-paragraph explanation of each aspect of it, but that's all."

"I can give you my explanation now, but as I say it's not my area of expertise, and Zacharias would have to fill in the gaps later; or you can wait until you've met him and hear it then, as you prefer."

"Waiting sounds best, then, least time wasted."

"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."

"I don't really need anything at all, not even a room. I could stay on a roof or some quiet corner.—I'd appreciate books, though, to pass the time."

"We have a library."  She gives directions, to his room and to the library and to her office and to Zacharias's lab.

"I presume Zacharias is not there?"

"He is, but he's working.  I'm going to have him look over my notes before he starts working with you, so you don't have to give the same explanations twice."

"Ah, I see."

Library-wards, then?

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.

Battle tactics seem most useful.

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.

And all these names are translating to things he already knows so this is helpful. He memorises this to ask questions later.

After a time, a tiny, vaguely squirrel-like root creature scrambles up the bookshelves next to him and proffers a small, rolled-up piece of paper.

He accepts it with a "thank you."

The creature scurries away.

The note says:

Sadde - 

i read over Eleanora's notes.  i'm ready to talk shop whenever you are.

...with directions from the library to Zacharias's lab.  It's signed "Rias."

To the lab he goes.

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?"

"I am, and you are. It is a pleasure to meet you." He walks over to Zacharias.

"Yeah, you too.  Salted cricket?  No, you don't eat, right.  So, I hear you can do lotsa magic really fast."

"That's a way to put it. Should I give you the full explanation instead of assuming you already have it?"

"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.

For a human.

"Yes, that sounds reasonable."

"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."

He nods along. "I should perhaps create a new sorcery school, then. The one I made is purposefully bad at cleaning things for, ah, historical reasons related to why I invented it in the first place. It can be done, it's just much less efficient than everything else."

"Gotcha.  So, that's what I thought of looking at your magic versus ours.  I can give you a better rundown of what we can do than whatever whoever you've talked to gave you, and you can see if you come up with anything else."

"Yes please, that sounds like a good idea."

"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?"

"Yes. What's the biggest bottleneck in crafting magical effects with Wellsprings and is it possible to cheat at it by being the sort of thing that can run faster than sound and whose thought processes have been accelerated to match plus having perfect recall?"

"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."

"Has there been much reproduction going on lately?"

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?"

"—I probably could, yeah. I'd use my own genetic basis for the vampire half but I don't expect this kind of thing to vary due to genetics."

"Doesn't seem to for us.  You'll mock up some test bodies and I'll give them to some of my people to start retooling berries, and you and I can work on Wellspring purification and weapons testing in the short term, sound good?"

"Yes. I'll probably have a sorcery school that's better at purifying things in about a week. Are there any magical effects you don't care about as much that sorcery can do? If I deemphasise them it'll be better at what it focuses on."

"Medicine and personal physical enhancement or alteration, we've pretty much got covered, if that helps."

"It does, yes. I'll work on something."

"Awesome.  So, shall we get that venom sample?"

"Where would you prefer me to put it?"

"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 looks around and nods. "Okay. I'll wait. And I think your guess is correct, based on the texture of these things."

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 sticks a finger in there. "Most vampires cannot do this. Perks of my witchcraft." Venom starts being poured from the finger.

The coconut turns out to be robust to, at least, diluted vampire venom.  "That should do it," Zacharias says after a few moments.

He stops.

"That's good."

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."

"I think I'll return to the books and—read all of them."

"Works for me.  See you in a few hours."

He nods. Library!

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.

He has about infinite patience. Or something approximating it. He's most interested in the lindworm tactics, the straightforward explanation of draconic body plans, and whatever there may be about the other kind of magic.

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.

He's read stuff to the effect of the dragons' constitution like that elsewhere but always pretty oblique or just lightly described. It's good to have complete, detailed descriptions like that, and of course he memorises all of them.

Who built the Sepulchres?