Chapter 125: Chapter 125: Wedding Ceremony

The wedding was held at a different location rather than the Dragon Palace.

It was held on a vast land filled with green grass, surrounded by massive snowy mountains that eerily resembled the claws of some colossal dragon buried beneath the earth.

The sky was neither too clear nor too cloudy, providing a perfectly cool breeze for the ceremony.

In this comfortable environment, both ordinary dragons and noble ones were able to join and witness the once in a century marriage.

To stage the wedding perfectly, in the centre of all, stood a long rectangular platform made of polished sandalwood, decorated with colourful flowers and vines,

The guests from and afar were served special beast meets, while they wait for the main hosts to arrive.

In human forms, the Dragon Lords and elders occupied the inner rings.

Their combined auras created a pressure that the green grass beneath their feet responded to by growing slightly faster and slightly more vividly than the surrounding area.

Raza sat on the old female’s shoulder in his small black dragon form, producing occasional celebratory bursts of black flame that the surrounding guests had learned to lean away from without making it obvious they were doing so.

Then there were the human guests.

They had arrived the previous evening from three separate kingdoms, representatives of the handful of human nations that maintained what could generously be described as non-hostile diplomatic relations with the Dragon Kingdom.

They were a small group, twelve in total, dressed in their finest court attire which looked, in the context of the surrounding landscape and company, somewhat like candles placed next to bonfires.

They had been given a section of seating near the middle of the gathering, close enough to observe everything clearly and far enough from the larger dragons that no one felt unnecessarily crowded.

They had not stopped talking since they arrived.

“I have been a diplomatic envoy for twenty three years. I have attended royal weddings, territorial summits, and on one memorable occasion a peace negotiation conducted entirely underwater. But I have never seen anything like this,” said the senior representative from the Kingdom of Halveth.

He was an old man with an impressive grey beard and the permanently slightly startled expression of someone whose career had repeatedly placed them in situations their training had not covered.

He was speaking to his junior attaché.

“The mountains, my lord,” the junior attaché said, staring upward at the enormous snowy peaks surrounding the valley. “Do they genuinely look like claws to you or is that my imagination.”

“Yes. Your fear is correct,” the senior representative confirmed solemnly. “They are real claws of a fallen dragon. An ancient one at that. You don’t understand how their potential were in millenias back. They ruled the world once.”

“Gulp!”

Across from them, the envoy from the coastal kingdom of Serath, a tall woman with sharp eyes and the practical bearing of someone more accustomed to merchant negotiations than ceremonial occasions, was making notes in a small leather bound book with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that what she was witnessing had significant intelligence value.

“A double wedding,” she murmured to herself, writing quickly. “Dragon Queen and a former human princess, both to the same groom on the same day. Unprecedented in any recorded diplomatic history I am aware of.”

She paused, tapping her pen against the page.

“Who is this young man exactly?”

The answer came from the third group of human guests. They were a pair of older nobles from the inland kingdom of Carthas who had been asking variations of this question since they arrived and had been receiving increasingly impressive answers each time.

“Adonis Kingsbane from Fernis Kingdom” the elder of the two said, for the third time in an hour, in the tone of someone repeating something they still had not fully processed.

“I don’t know the inner details, but word is he killed his half brother, leveled half of the Fernis capital, fought three Royal Guardians to a standstill. Also, he is apparently the successor to the Progenitor dragon herself.”

He paused. “And he is just 18 years old.”

His companion, a thin man with spectacular eyebrows, said nothing for a moment.

“Sigh, I feel as though I have achieved very little,” he said with a sigh.

“We all do,” the elder noble replied.

The question of the groom’s identity had been circulating through the human section of the gathering with considerable enthusiasm since the previous evening, gathering additional extraordinary details with each retelling in the way that genuinely extraordinary stories tend to accumulate embellishments that are somehow all true.

“I heard he destroyed the Grand Arena of Fernis with a single art,” one of the Halveth junior staff whispered.

“I heard he transformed into a 50 meter dragon in the middle of the Royal Court,” someone whispered back.

“I heard the Dragon Queen herself flew across two seas to save him from a combined force of Royal Guardians and Gratis Kingdom powerhouses.”

“All of that is correct,” said Orvyn, passing behind them with his hands clasped behind his white robed back and his expression entirely serene.

“He is truly just 18 years old, Orvyn?,” the Serath envoy said slowly, looking up from her notebook.

“Yes,” Orvyn confirmed pleasantly, and continued walking.

The spectacular eyebrow noble turned to his companion.

“Yep. I definitely achieved very little,” he said.

Then the food arrived, carried out by a procession of dragon maids bearing platters that required two people each to carry, and the question of the groom’s identity was temporarily overwhelmed by the question of what exactly was on those platters and whether human digestion was equipped to handle it.

The answer to the first question was extraordinary in every sense, dishes built from ingredients that existed nowhere in any human kingdom, prepared according to techniques developed over millennia by a civilization that had an entirely different relationship with fire than anyone else, seasoned with elements that had no names in any human language and produced flavors that human taste had simply never encountered and had no existing framework for evaluating.

The senior Halveth representative took one bite of the first dish placed before him, sat completely still for a moment, and then turned to his junior attaché with an expression of profound personal revelation.

“I have never actually tasted this kind of food before today.”

“My lord, I do not think any of us have either.”

Just then—

Dong-Dong-Dong-Dong

The brides and groom had arrived.

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