The Dragon and the Ants
-Some time later-
One of the first things Dakka and Fina do is exchange the 3 Names required for their Contract – their Dra (body), Reh (heart), and Yiir (fate) Names.
When Dakka gets Fina's 3 Names, he learns what all of the Ant children truly are, and the Queen notices that he looks at them differently after that.
Fina, on the other hand, learns a few things about Dakka… and she's not sure how to feel about it.
When she looked into his Reh Name, she found a heart full of animalistic desires, and a lust for perfection. To Dakka, having the perfect wife means having the perfect children.
Fina learns something even more strange about the dragon; for some reason, he has this insanely strong desire to have a child that's stronger than himself. What kind of idiot wants to be replaced by the next generation?
Now that the Queen understands what drove the dragon to make such a ridiculous proposal to her, she's at least able to work with it, rather than shiver in a corner and feel confused.
Simply put, the Queen realizes that she just needs to mate with Dakka regularly and give him children. In return, he'll do whatever she wants.
She smiles just thinking about it. "So he just wants a strong wife, and I want the world. That sounds like a good trade."
Suddenly, marrying Dakka doesn't sound like such a bad idea to her.
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Really, Dakka is such a simple creature; if Fina had had a complete soul, she'd have thought this was adorable.
Every day, Fina goes to bed beside Dakka in one of the Sky Fortress's many rooms, and after that, Dakka feeds Fina some of his mana rich blood to supplement her diet. After that, he trains with her to help her control her vast mana pool.
As for when she can get out of this hellish battlefield, she knows that she still has to kill Haalfrin.
Plus, she starts feeling even more anxious to kill him when Dakka lets slip that Haalfrin is busy Advancing his Dra Name, but that he had some complications in the process; this is why he's not waking up.
Realizing that she could have an enemy as powerful or more powerful than herself soon, she thinks about batting her eyes seductively at her husband and asking him to "pretty please" let her kill Haalfrin.
However, she knows that with Dakka being so much more powerful than her, it's not a good idea to anger him.
Asking a loyal man to kill his best friend simply isn't a good idea.
And so, the Queen has to bet on the possibility of her either being stronger than Haalfrin, or on Dakka caring more about his wife than his friend – at least enough to stop Haalfrin from attacking her.
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As for Dakka's promise to keep "his" Queen fed and comfortable, he feeds her his mana rich blood every day.
Fina thinks about asking for more of Dakka's blood out of greed; she even thinks about summoning all of her Ants and begging for more food – saying that all of her clones are hungry too.
If she did this, then she'd grow in mana a lot more, and she'd eventually able to kill her husband and be done with this farce.
Why beg someone else to conquer the world for you when you can just do it yourself? Having to depend on someone else is just really annoying.
'Yes,' the Queen thinks privately in a dark room one day, 'I suppose it's bad to kill your Contracted Partner; Dakka even said that after we shared our Heart Names that we'd always love each other… but…'
She looks down and rubs her stomach, where she knows her womb is. 'Every time he touches me, I don't feel anything. I don't think him having my Heart Name worked. I was supposed to care about him, but I don't.'
Did the Contract not work?
Well, whatever. This'll be more convenient. The stupid dragon will think that he has guaranteed love and loyalty from her, which will make tricking him a lot easier.
Once she's sapped all the usefulness out of him, she can go ahead and eat him.
'But first, I need to summon my Ants,' she thinks.
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Once the Queen summons her Ant horde once more, things don't go the way she was expecting.
The first time the Queen tells her Ants to go beg Dakka for more blood, Fina watches from the balcony window, and she pays close attention to what the kids are doing.
She doesn't want those stupid girls to say something that would make her look bad, after all.
"Mr. Dakka!" one of the little girls calls out to Dakka, who is sitting on a bench in his humanoid form and reading a book about spell circles, "We're really hungry! Mother told us that you could feed us?"
Dakka looks up from his book and he sees his wife's Soul Fragments in front of him. Obviously, he can't let them suffer.
So, Dakka holds his hand out, and he presses one of his clawed hands on his palm, deeply cutting through his skin.
He then cups his bleeding hand and lets the blood pool in his palm. "Here, little one. Drink it."
"AH!" the little girl screams in horror, "Did you just hurt yourself! You can't do that! Here, let me take care of it!"
Without waiting for anything else, the Ant girl runs off, and her uncertain sisters behind her follow her out.
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Within a minute, the young girl runs back to Dakka with a roll of bandages she found in one of the supply rooms nearby.
"Let me get that treated… Oh….." The girl is surprised to see that the dragon's hand had already healed.
Seeing this Ant's antics, Dakka lets out an amused chuckle. "It's fine. Bleeding this much doesn't hurt." He holds out a small cup, which he had poured his spilled blood into. "Just drink it. It's better than starving."
The girl takes the cup and looks down at the swirling red liquid inside… and she gets a complicated look.
After some hesitation, the girl extends her hands and gives the cup back to Dakka. "I can't take it, Mr. Dragon."
"Why?" Dakka is finally getting interested in this conversation, so he puts his book down and gives the girl his full attention.
"If me and my sisters drink more blood, then we'll end up coming back over and over again. Making you bleed every day just to keep our own lives isn't a good thing."
"People eat meat all the time," Dakka refutes her. "Eating something requires you to sacrifice something else – either a plant's life, or an animal's life."
He then looks sharply into the child's eyes. "I heard from your mother that your sisters sometimes eat each other when they can't bear the hunger anymore. Isn't drinking my blood and making me suffer a little worth it, if it can prevent you from harming yourselves?"
This makes the child pause; she just looks down with a troubled expression.
Before she can answer, one of the other humanoid Ants replies without hesitation, "It's better if we sacrifice ourselves rather than make you bleed and become weaker because we love you."
"…What?"
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The Queen is listening in on this conversation, and she's utterly baffled by what her Ants are saying. Since when have her children ever disobeyed her!? Since when have her Ants suddenly decided that they can't bear to make Dakka bleed for them!?
Isn't this ruining her plans to grow stronger than Dakka? If her children won't take his mana by drinking his blood, then Fina knows deep down that she'll never be rid of that pest!
But… why are her Ants choosing to starve to death, rather than feed parasitically off of that stupid dragon? Love? Bah.
Oh… Oh wait…
The Queen realizes then that her Contract with Dakka really did work. The Marriage Contract was supposed to grant eternal love and loyalty between two people… and the Queen had been confused after realizing that she still doesn't love Dakka.
However, it appears that the parts of her soul that are capable of loving other people is fragmented among her "children".
'Well, this just means that I can't count on my Ants to help me get rid of Dakka,' the Queen thinks.
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With the Ants outright refusing to drink Dakka's blood, the dragon realizes that he's going to have to find another way to feed them. He COULD slip his blood into their water supply, but they'd catch on eventually; they're not stupid, after all.
One day, Dakka gets an idea.
During his bedside talk with Fina, he hears about how some of the ants had eaten grass before. This immediately confuses Dakka, since he knows very well that plants can't live in an environment with such thick Death Aura.
Where did the grass come from, then?
Dakka looks around, and he finds an old garden that Haalfrin was keeping long ago. Of course, the plants have long since been found by the Ants and completely picked clean. However Dakka still finds a few useful things inside.
As it turns out, plants DO exist in the Death Realm; it's just that they're the souls of plants which have already died in the living world.
What the Arkin did was they brought some excess seeds from the Death Realm and planted them in the Valor Hall to ease their need for external supplies.
…Luckily, the Ants haven't found the reserve seeds Haalfrin had been keeping; they WERE sealed away rather tightly, after all.
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Once Dakka comes out with large space bags full of seeds, he tells all of the Ants about his discovery.
The Ants all come rushing towards Dakka with open palms – saying that they want to eat some of the seeds.
However, Dakka shoos them away and tells them, "No! We need to plant these. If we do that, then you'll get a lot of food!"
"How do we plant them all?" some of the Ants ask.
"I…uh… I don't know…?" Dakka really isn't sure. "How about we figure it out?"
The Queen, of course, would also like to know how to make food grow out of the ground, so she watches through her Ants' eyes while she sits comfortably in her room.