The cold room had been running low for two days before anyone said anything about it, and the reason nobody said anything was that nobody wanted to be the one to suggest they slow down.
Dragon meat was that good.
Three weeks of it daily had started as deliberate — the book said regular consumption, so regular consumption it was — and had become something else entirely, which was that Mira had found twelve different ways to prepare it and every single one of them was the best thing the household had eaten in living memory. The steaks were first. Then a slow braise that filled the farmhouse for six hours with a smell that brought Thomas in from the east field twenty minutes early without explanation. Then a soup with the bone broth that Lyra had helped Arthur render from the processed dragon bone powder, which was thick and mineral-rich and which everyone had three bowls of without discussing it.
The bone broth had been its own discovery. Lyra had helped him work through the processing notes from the monster biology book — the specific temperature and duration required to render the powder into something the body could absorb — and the result was a compound that the book had described as improving skeletal density and structural resilience permanently. What the book had not mentioned, possibly because no author had thought to record it, was what it felt like from the inside.
It felt like your bones had been replaced with something better.
Not painful — nothing that had happened in the last three weeks had been painful — but a deep interior settling, the specific feeling of a structure that had always been slightly uncertain of itself becoming certain. Edric had said, on the third day of the bone broth, that he had not noticed his back hurt until it stopped hurting. Mira had said nothing but had stood up from the kitchen table with a quality of movement she had not had before, and Thomas had gone out to the barn and come back an hour later and said, simply, that he had moved the stone feed trough by himself.
The trough weighed four hundred pounds.
Arthur tracked everyone's signatures daily. The progression was consistent and cumulative — exactly what the data had predicted, which was satisfying in the specific way that confirmed predictions were always satisfying. His parents were the most dramatic because the pills had given them a significant head start, but everyone in the household was measurably different from where they had been four weeks ago, and the trajectory was still climbing.
He had been thinking about what he was doing to his sisters and had not yet decided how he felt about it.
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The hunt had been Lyra's idea, which surprised no one who knew Lyra.
She had been documenting the progression in her journal with the focused precision she brought to anything she had decided to understand, and three weeks in she had looked up from the journal and said: 'I want to test the actual output. Not the signatures. What it translates to in the field.'
Which was how four people ended up in the winter forest on a Tuesday morning, wearing dragon leather and running.
Saya went first. She had been testing her new baseline in the basement against the dummies for three weeks and had a reasonable internal model of what to expect — or thought she did, until she opened up to full sprint in the open forest and the full sprint was not what it had been. She covered a hundred feet in the time she would previously have covered sixty and pulled up at a tree with the expression of someone whose internal model had just been significantly revised.
'More than I thought,' she said.
'More than I thought too,' Arthur said. He had been watching her signature and the gap between what it predicted and what her body was producing was narrower than it had ever been — her physical output was catching up to her mana capacity in a way that the Ao Kitsune physiology apparently favored when given the resources to do it.
Clara did not run. Clara launched herself up the nearest large tree with a speed that startled two birds out of their branches, sat on a limb twenty feet up, looked down at them with an expression of pure delight, and said: 'I went up that in four seconds.'
'I saw,' Arthur said.
'I'm going to do it again,' she said, and came down and did it again, slightly faster.
Lyra was in the clearing running a light working through her ring — the sustained focused beam she had used on the dragon — and the output was noticeably stronger than the same working had been a month ago, the light more coherent, the focus tighter, holding steady for longer before the ring's reserve began to draw down. She stopped and made a note in the journal she had brought. Then she ran the clearing's length at full speed, made another note, and looked at Arthur.
'My stride length increased,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
'That's a physical baseline change. Not mana. Physical.'
'Yes.'
'From eating dragon food.'
'Yes.'
She looked at the journal entry. She looked at him. She was nine years old and she had just outrun her previous best time in a clearing and her light magic had strengthened noticeably in three weeks and the specific expression on her face was one he recognized: the expression of someone who had understood something and was not sure how to feel about it yet.
'Are we going to be very overpowered,' she said.
Arthur thought about this honestly. He thought about what another three weeks would add, and another three months, and what the cumulative trajectory looked like when he ran it forward.
'Probably,' he said.
Lyra made a note. 'All right,' she said. 'Good.'
He thought: I have done this deliberately and I would do it again and I am also slightly concerned about what I have done. He filed the concern in the appropriate place and focused on the hunt.
◆ ◆ ◆
They came back with seven kills.
This was more than expected for a morning hunt with four people, two of whom were nine and eight years old, and Arthur attributed it to the combination of the new physical baselines making everything faster and the new clothes making everyone considerably more willing to press an advantage than they had previously been. Clara had taken two Glimmer Rabbits with direct fire spells at a range and speed that would not have been possible a month ago. Lyra had coordinated with Tsuki on a Stone Boar — the specific calm patient approach that was Lyra's natural hunting style, different from Clara's committed enthusiasm — and the Stone Boar had not gotten the distance it expected to get.
Saya had caught a Vine Serpent with her hands, which none of them discussed at length because it had been very fast and they had all seen it and it was clear that her new baseline was still being discovered in real time.
Arthur had the absorption from all seven kills directed into Shadow's containment vessel rather than to himself. The vessel was three quarters full by the time they reached the farm's edge and he sealed it and took it to the basement and spent an hour on the compression work, producing four pills — smaller than the dragon pills, weaker, but solid and stable — that he added to the growing stock in the storage cabinet.
Two of them would go to his parents that evening. Two would hold.
He went upstairs and changed his boots and thought about the trajectory and what it meant for the next month and the month after that, and then thought about something else.
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