The dragon's harem

As Arad regained his human form on the moon and was getting ready to return home, Altair, who was by his side, asked about how he intended to do that. From all she knew, his teleportation range with void step was just 4000 kilometres, and the distance between the Earth and the Moon was far bigger, like almost a hundred times bigger.

While her question would have seemed silly at the time, what Arad saw in that question was that she had grown stronger, at least enough to be able to tell that he was doing something different. Altair was right; even if it looked like Arad was preparing to teleport directly to the surface with void step, he wasn’t trying to do that at all, but instead was about to use Vorvadoss’s space manipulation.

Arad quickly explained that he was going to use Vorvadoss’s space magic instead of Void Step, and then showed her that while Void Step had an almost instant casting time, its range was limited. Vorvadoss’s magic, on the other hand, took almost ten times as long to cast as Void Step, but had a nearly unlimited range as long as one had enough eldritch mana and authority over space.

The time Arad was talking about was just a fraction of a second, and a few more fractions of a second, a time shorter than anyone could ever notice, but in a battle against an Avatar of Nyar, that split moment was enough to get beheaded.

Arad shifted to his humanoid form, and so did Altair, who appeared standing by his side. "I see, and not just anyone can learn Vorvadoss’s magic, right?" She looked at him, and he nodded. Out of everyone, Arad was the only one who could use eldritch magic. Merlin did achieve it, but due to Doma’s curse that is helping maintain control, she can only use eldritch magic inside her labyrinth.

"Only I can do it. But you can also use regular teleportation magic to achieve similar results. It is just that regular magic is slower, costs more mana, and is much less reliable." He looked a bit troubled. "And it is more complicated to learn for me. I do find eldritch magic simpler to understand and perform."

"So, is eldritch magic just objectively better than regular magic?" Asking that question caused Arad to actually think for almost a whole minute as he contemplated all the spells he knew. After a while, he found the answer. "No, eldritch magic is objectively stronger than regular magic, but objectively inferior as a type of magic."

Altair didn’t understand, so he had to explain further. "Regular magic had been refined for ages, and keeping the caster alive is just as important as achieving the desired goal. In regular teleportation magic, I need to use a scrying spell to mark where I’m going to teleport to every single time or the spell will fail. That is good since it allows me to know for sure that I’m not trying to teleport into a wall or a rock... but it is sure annoying when you want to just disappear quickly."

He then teleported to a nearby mound and back to Altair. "The regular teleportation is also slower, since it sends a pulse of mana first, then pulls you toward where you want to go. Mana waves travel at a third of the speed of light, so basically, I’m three times as slower as Betty."

The first wave is for the scrying magic, which flies out of the caster toward the targeted location. Then the scrying magic would make sure the place is suitable, and that wave would have to travel back to the caster, trigger the spell, and then pull him toward the targeted location at the speed of mana.

The distance between the mortal world and its moon is almost two light seconds, meaning that teleporting from the moon to the surface would take eighteen seconds, which is fast, but not fast enough for Arad. Six seconds for the scrying wave of mana, another six for that wave to return to Arad, and another six for Arad himself to be pulled to the surface.

Vorvadoss’s magic, on the other hand, only needs Arad to see a thread of space that extends from his location to where he wants to go, touch it, and he’ll warp toward that location. And since he is warping and not just moving through space with magic, it can even take him from one point to another faster than light. That is why Arad needs it to teleport to the universe’s crust.

But Vorvadoss’s magic had one downside: it expected the caster to be able to endure the crushing pull of the fabric of space, and that was a deadly thing. If someone like Altair was forced to teleport using Vorvadoss’s magic without Arad protecting her, she would instantly die. That was the case for all eldritch magic; all safety was ignored, and most eldritch spells can outright kill the caster or break their mind.

Arad then carried Altair in his arms, looked at her with a smile, and asked her a horrifying question. "Want to see how it is to teleport using Vorvadoss’s magic? I’ll protect you as little as possible so you can experience it, but I’m sure it’ll hurt a lot." She was indeed a bit scared, but her draconic curiosity got the best of her, and she nodded.

Later, Altair would describe this experience as being forced through a realm where even gods cannot exist. One that she would never forget and would try to explain to Merlin thousands of times without being able to get her to understand a single thing.

Altair saw the fabric of space clearly since she was a void drakaina, and it looked like a titanic mesh of threats that extended infinitely in all directions. From above to below, from right to left, and from front to back, but that wasn’t all; the threads also came from all directions and angles equally, not just the three cardinal axes.

Those axes also weren’t spread apart, but packed tightly enough that they looked like a solid drowning all of existence, and even one atom would have several billions of those threads crossing it. Just being able to fathom required the special anatomy of the void dragons, and yet that alone didn’t allow Altair to keep up with whatever horror Arad was playing with.

One moment she was fine, and in the next, her entire body was crushed and forced to fit inside just one of those threads. But since that was space itself, her body somehow managed to fit, which both cracked her mind and caused her immense pain, as existing in such a state should not be possible for beings made of matter.

But unlike her, Arad was able to create his own threads of space inside that thread, giving him and her enough space to not just die, and yet, she still felt like her entire draconic body was forced to fit in the space of a single grape.

But then came the acceleration, which in itself didn’t make sense since they were inside a thread of space, unaffected by time or speed. That had felt like every cell of her body was getting slapped by Dalla thousands of time a second, feeling the weight of the entire universe trying to crush her into nothing as Arad dragged her behind him, flying through that looked the whole of existence from the dawn of existence to the end of time, and when they finally came out, she fell on her face, screaming and covered in blood from head to toes.

Arad quickly healed her, and she gasped for air, having just felt the biggest pain in her life, having had all of her bones crushed to dust and her cells torn apart. "What... was that? How can you use it?"

He looked at her with a smile. "A delicate balance between using my own space magic to keep myself and those I’m dragging with me safe, and not using too much space magic so as not to cause the magic to collapse and crush us."

She had expected a rough ride, and Arad shot her with a cannon instead. Is this a level of power she could achieve when she grows older, or is he just abnormal? She later asked his mother, Violet, and was told that what Arad was doing was something not even she could do as cleanly. Using eldritch magic required an alien constitution, the biology of a creature not bound by the rules of the universe.

In the entire history of the universe, only a few mortals were talented enough to be able to use it, and they are Cain Lisworth, Arad, and recently Merlin.