Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who has too many damn hearts
On the fourth day, the huge vault door and its many, many traps and locks and wards finally yields.
"At last," rumbles God-Lighted Anselm the anvilthane, palm to his belly in reverent salute to his god. "The Vermillion Harlot's reign of sorcerous villainy will end, her unnatural life rectified. She may have hidden her heart inside an egg, and the egg within the darkest, remotest, most forbidding vault she could arrange, but boyos — here — we — are...."
The adventurers gaze in as the thirty-foot-high circular door rolls aside on its arcanomechanical track, letting them look in on a treasure-chamber so huge it makes the doorway they stand in seem a pinprick. And the vault is full.
The druid, whom none of them have ever heard so much mutter a mild cuss, says, "Fuck," in a choked way that might be reverent.
The vault is full of eggs. Small eggs, large eggs, shelled eggs, soft eggs; gelatinous, stony, smooth, spiky, faceted; mist-wreathed, frost-covered, smouldering; from pale speckled things that could be held by the dozen in a child's palm to intensely black, craggy ones that sit on the floor and loom to brush against the far-up ceiling. Towering shelves of eggs. Water-filled pools of eggs. Millions.
"Well," the wizard drawls from the back, finally, "I guess I can start lobbing fireballs...."
"No!" the druid squeaks, whirling to grab at his arms, as if he were about to right that second. "Oh no no no. The big black ones, you know what those are? Those are from the Brilliantine Plasmawyrm. I've never — I'd have said nobody ever saw that egg in person. They lay them inside stars. Breach that and the explosion will rip so deep it'll bleed out the earth's own magmic blood; hurl this entire mountain into the air as ash, so much ash the world will be as night for long enough for every tree to die, nations to starve in darkness."
"So, uh. Careful fireballs?"
"You see the many turquoise ones, the size of your head, scattered throughout?"
"It's all going to be like this, isn't it," the rogue mutters.
"Rot her eyes," the anvilthane snarls.
"Those are the eggs of the Chlorine Dragon. Not a true dragon; the closest living relatives of its kind are actually centaurid. Break those and the posion vapour from within will scour out our lungs from within in a dozen minutes of horrifying agony." The druid pauses, tears in her eyes. "There are so few left, after the devastation of the Skeleton Wars in the north, that there are no known laying individuals in the wild," she adds. "If you touch them, I regret I'm oathbound to slit your throat as an enemy of life. If even some of these can be induced to hatch, the perfidious witch may have saved the kind entire—"
"What about those little powder blue ones," the anvilthane says glumly, pointing, shoulders slumped.
"...Some sort of duck, I think?"
"Fuck." Anselm turns his back on the myriad ovoid vista, fist knotted painfully in his own beard. "I love ducks," he adds morosely.