Frost 7, 123
The witch sat down on her bed and leaned back until her shoulders met the wall, grinning. It was a Commonwealth-style bed, more like the frame of a nest piled with straw and fabrics, and meant for multiple sleepers. She gestured with one hand, ushering the other inhabitants of the room to join her.
A gaggle of children did just that, giggling as they piled in on top of her, though she was careful to make sure none landed on the heavily-bound book she’d brought with her. They were followed by a huge black cat, slinking up and around their tiny bodies as each shifted, looking for the best place to snuggle.
"Are you ready for a story?" she asked them, knowing the answer. The enthusiastic cries did not disappoint.
"What kind of story shall we have?"
“Pirates!” one shouted.
“No! Swords!” another screamed, apparently not realizing that a story could easily encompass both pirates and swords.
“Magic!” said the last, the smallest of the lot.
Imogen grinned. Entertaining kids was easy, at least when you were a fearsome adventurer from another land. They ate up pretty much anything you threw at ‘em.
“Mrrrmph.” Kitty added, plaintive.
"Absolutely not," she told the cat, arching an eyebrow, "Let’s go with the magic, and the swords… and the pirates."
She waited for the children to stop cheering, then opened up the book, flipping expertly through the pages until she found what she was looking for. The witch brought the tome up to eye level, and began:
"To start our story, you've got to understand the nature of people. At the very core of every person, there’s a contradiction- a twisty, writhing little knot. It changes over time, and most people never learn anything about it. But if you’re very, very smart, you can find it, and if you do, you can ask people a question which they can’t answer, which they can’t even fathom. And if-"
“Hey! Where’s the pirates?”
"We’ll get to the pirates," she reassured the protesting child, "See, sometimes a person comes along who is heroic- maybe not good, maybe not bad, but special. They change everything around them. And if you do that strongly enough, the gods take note. And when they do, they always test you the same way- by asking you the question, the contradiction in your heart. And if you can't answer..."
Ailos was relatively small in the scale of nations, but that didn’t mean it was small per se. She’d often heard it referred to as an island–the isle of light, the island of the dawn, and so on–but this was a serious misrepresentation in terms of one’s ability to actually fly across it.
The so-called “Citadel of Light” famously occupied the center of the isle; the spirit-message Imogen had glimpsed in her shield showed the backdrop of a broad beach, and the tug in her soul led north. Put all that together, and Imogen knew she only had to cross about half the isle, but this still took all day in the air. Thankfully, her control of the Rune of Traversion was improving, and she reckoned that once she’d mapped the terrain it would take her under an hour to get back.
If she got back at all, anyway.
The small community living on Ailos had confirmed the dragon’s presence quite readily, but that wasn’t all they’d said. Evidently, the beast hadn’t moved in living memory, and the smiling priest told her that his own predecessors had told him much the same. Even when the Imperium attacked, they’d simply avoided the dragon, and it had done little more than lie there. Why? Nobody could say.
So it was when she arrived, too. The beach in question was easy to spot from the air, and the dragon even easier. It was enormous, though not nearly to the scale of the ancient white she’d fought in Karnor a year past, and lying on the beach, napping.
Or so she thought. As the albatross witch approached for a closer look, she saw clearly that the dragon’s eyes were wide open, staring into the middle distance. Its chest rose and fell slowly, but it did not shift a single muscle. It was as if the creature was in a state of shock, but there was no such thing as shock which lasted for generations.
The witch landed on a rocky ledge abutting the sand and resumed Orkhan form. If the other orks had spoken true, it wouldn’t matter- the dragon wouldn’t react even if she climbed on it. It was hard to believe, but she had no reason to doubt them either.
Imogen retrieved clothes from her hidey-hole and dressed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the beach and the strange behemoth lying dazed upon it. Possible explanations raced through her mind: mesmerism? Affliction? Some strange artefact? Not likely. Even an archmage’s spell would fade in a span of decades, and the Dawnmartyrs would never have let some kind of cursed device torment a dragon for generations.
The witch took a step forward without looking and regretted it at once, her foot banging into a stone. She looked down, and was surprised to see a well-worn cairn in front of her, rising just above ankle height. The once smooth surface at the top was engraved in Ecithian script, but time and weather had erased parts:
"Huh!" she said aloud, her stubbed toe forgotten. Was this a monument? To the dragon, perhaps, or the dragon was guarding something else marked here?
Well, there was no way to tell from the marker alone. Imogen set off for the beach, taking things slowly at first; for all that she believed the tales of Ailos, drawing closer to the enormous dragon still set off every dormant instinct. As promised, however, her approach elicited no reaction at all. Not at five hundred meters, nor a hundred meters, nor fifty.
Soon she was standing close enough to the prone dragon that she could feel the warm exhalations, and still there was nothing. Perhaps it was truly comatose? She wondered how such a gigantic creature could survive so many years without hunting, and how nothing had tried to make a meal of it.
"Can you hear me?" she asked, staring directly at its huge face.
No reaction. Not even the slightest, most unconscious shifting of the eyes.
This was magic for sure, the witch decided. It was also going to make an ordinary investigation impossible. The dragon couldn’t communicate, and nobody on Ailos seemed to know anything more about it. Even the marker had been mostly gibberish. It seemed there was only one way she was going to get any answers about this.
"Hey, if you can hear me, I need you to stay still. Don’t… bite, or anything."
The witch extended a hand to one side and summoned the smaller of her swords. Though it would have been called a longsword by the standards of the Kalzasaern smith who’d forged it, it was puny compared to Ecithian weapons. If the dragon could see her, it would look like little more than a toothpick.
Imogen crept slowly closer, and drew her sword back, focusing on the iron-colored scale at the tip of the great dragon’s snout. With exaggerated care and slowness, she brought the end of her sword to that scale- and pressed gently, invoking the Rune of Reaving.
Ever since she’d discovered how to extract information from materials, Imogen had practiced. Simple metals were… informative in their own way, but rarely interesting as such. Buildings and stone tended to have more story to tell, though they only gave up bits and pieces. It was the first time she’d tried merging a portion of her spirit with another living being, so she braced herself for the worst.
…or so she thought. In fact, the tide of information and memory that followed swept the witch off her feet like a tidal wave, carrying her conscious mind into the dark recesses of the past.
"The invasion…" she muttered. It had to be.
”Looks like a preexisting condition." Imogen interrupted the dream, watching as the memory broke apart even further under the influence of her conscious thoughts. ”Let’s go back further."
Imogen took a moment to regain her balance, and waited for the conversation to continue; it didn’t. This must have been a very important memory, but it didn’t seem relevant to her investigation at all.
”Whatever’s going on here, it looks like it’s centuries too early. Can we skip forward a bit?"
When the darkness again coalesced into dream, the witch stood atop a hill overlooking a great battle. She got the impression of vastness, of size and scope stretching out far beyond the limits of the dream, and the misty sea of motion conveyed pitched combat to her. She squinted, trying to resolve the individual figures.
The dream obliged, and she saw at last that they were orkhan- an army of them, joined together against a great sea of brass figures. With a start, she recognized the general shape. It seemed that this was one of Kaitos Diregon’s invasions.
But this, apparently, was where the memory ended. Darkness swept back in, surrounding the witch.
”Closer, I think! Now we know the dragon wasn’t always like this, we’ve just got to pinpoint when it happened." What could have happened to change that shining, smiling warrior into the piteous figure haunting Ailos’ shore? ”Let’s try going forward again, just a bit."
Imogen sat upon the iron dragon’s great snout, leaning against her sword, pondering. Deravaecia of Iron had hardened her heart and sought to teach the world a lesson about strength, ruthlessness and brutality. But she’d faltered at the final threshold; when the gods presented her with the harvest she’d sown, she’d broken against the wheel of fate.
”And that was the question, which cut to her core-
If no one is strong enough, who was it for?"
The witch sang to the empty beach, for she now understood that the dragon behind her was seeing nothing at all; nothing but that moment, where the dead were hauled from the river, forever and ever. She’d been convinced that her methods were necessary to preserve the world, only to discover that the security it brought wasn’t worth having.
A tragic tale, she had to admit, but also one with limited applicability to the here and now. Here and now, she had a job to complete.
The Sunsinger hopped down from the dragon’s head, dematerializing her Pact sword. The sun was long gone; the moons stood sentinel above the site of her communion, like a silent commentary by the heavens.
With a frown, Imogen summoned her pact shield, shining and featureless save for the golden line where the spirits had repaired it. She spoke to it directly:
”I’ve all that I need to proceed with my spell;
But is this plan sensible? Harder to tell.
A general seasoned, a fighter from birth,
But maybe more trouble than all of that’s worth?"
She wasn’t sure she’d get any response at all–the metal spirits didn’t seem all that good at standard communication–but there was a flicker within the steel. Once again, she saw the image of the beach, of the senseless dragon lying there.
”You’re the client," Imogen muttered, ”But don’t blame me if you get more than you asked for."
A gaggle of children did just that, giggling as they piled in on top of her, though she was careful to make sure none landed on the heavily-bound book she’d brought with her. They were followed by a huge black cat, slinking up and around their tiny bodies as each shifted, looking for the best place to snuggle.
"Are you ready for a story?" she asked them, knowing the answer. The enthusiastic cries did not disappoint.
"What kind of story shall we have?"
“Pirates!” one shouted.
“No! Swords!” another screamed, apparently not realizing that a story could easily encompass both pirates and swords.
“Magic!” said the last, the smallest of the lot.
Imogen grinned. Entertaining kids was easy, at least when you were a fearsome adventurer from another land. They ate up pretty much anything you threw at ‘em.
“Mrrrmph.” Kitty added, plaintive.
"Absolutely not," she told the cat, arching an eyebrow, "Let’s go with the magic, and the swords… and the pirates."
She waited for the children to stop cheering, then opened up the book, flipping expertly through the pages until she found what she was looking for. The witch brought the tome up to eye level, and began:
"To start our story, you've got to understand the nature of people. At the very core of every person, there’s a contradiction- a twisty, writhing little knot. It changes over time, and most people never learn anything about it. But if you’re very, very smart, you can find it, and if you do, you can ask people a question which they can’t answer, which they can’t even fathom. And if-"
“Hey! Where’s the pirates?”
"We’ll get to the pirates," she reassured the protesting child, "See, sometimes a person comes along who is heroic- maybe not good, maybe not bad, but special. They change everything around them. And if you do that strongly enough, the gods take note. And when they do, they always test you the same way- by asking you the question, the contradiction in your heart. And if you can't answer..."
~~~
Ailos was relatively small in the scale of nations, but that didn’t mean it was small per se. She’d often heard it referred to as an island–the isle of light, the island of the dawn, and so on–but this was a serious misrepresentation in terms of one’s ability to actually fly across it.
The so-called “Citadel of Light” famously occupied the center of the isle; the spirit-message Imogen had glimpsed in her shield showed the backdrop of a broad beach, and the tug in her soul led north. Put all that together, and Imogen knew she only had to cross about half the isle, but this still took all day in the air. Thankfully, her control of the Rune of Traversion was improving, and she reckoned that once she’d mapped the terrain it would take her under an hour to get back.
If she got back at all, anyway.
The small community living on Ailos had confirmed the dragon’s presence quite readily, but that wasn’t all they’d said. Evidently, the beast hadn’t moved in living memory, and the smiling priest told her that his own predecessors had told him much the same. Even when the Imperium attacked, they’d simply avoided the dragon, and it had done little more than lie there. Why? Nobody could say.
So it was when she arrived, too. The beach in question was easy to spot from the air, and the dragon even easier. It was enormous, though not nearly to the scale of the ancient white she’d fought in Karnor a year past, and lying on the beach, napping.
Or so she thought. As the albatross witch approached for a closer look, she saw clearly that the dragon’s eyes were wide open, staring into the middle distance. Its chest rose and fell slowly, but it did not shift a single muscle. It was as if the creature was in a state of shock, but there was no such thing as shock which lasted for generations.
The witch landed on a rocky ledge abutting the sand and resumed Orkhan form. If the other orks had spoken true, it wouldn’t matter- the dragon wouldn’t react even if she climbed on it. It was hard to believe, but she had no reason to doubt them either.
Imogen retrieved clothes from her hidey-hole and dressed, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the beach and the strange behemoth lying dazed upon it. Possible explanations raced through her mind: mesmerism? Affliction? Some strange artefact? Not likely. Even an archmage’s spell would fade in a span of decades, and the Dawnmartyrs would never have let some kind of cursed device torment a dragon for generations.
The witch took a step forward without looking and regretted it at once, her foot banging into a stone. She looked down, and was surprised to see a well-worn cairn in front of her, rising just above ankle height. The once smooth surface at the top was engraved in Ecithian script, but time and weather had erased parts:
If no on'uv [...] uvnough, vonaho vonao [...]?
"Huh!" she said aloud, her stubbed toe forgotten. Was this a monument? To the dragon, perhaps, or the dragon was guarding something else marked here?
Well, there was no way to tell from the marker alone. Imogen set off for the beach, taking things slowly at first; for all that she believed the tales of Ailos, drawing closer to the enormous dragon still set off every dormant instinct. As promised, however, her approach elicited no reaction at all. Not at five hundred meters, nor a hundred meters, nor fifty.
Soon she was standing close enough to the prone dragon that she could feel the warm exhalations, and still there was nothing. Perhaps it was truly comatose? She wondered how such a gigantic creature could survive so many years without hunting, and how nothing had tried to make a meal of it.
"Can you hear me?" she asked, staring directly at its huge face.
No reaction. Not even the slightest, most unconscious shifting of the eyes.
This was magic for sure, the witch decided. It was also going to make an ordinary investigation impossible. The dragon couldn’t communicate, and nobody on Ailos seemed to know anything more about it. Even the marker had been mostly gibberish. It seemed there was only one way she was going to get any answers about this.
"Hey, if you can hear me, I need you to stay still. Don’t… bite, or anything."
The witch extended a hand to one side and summoned the smaller of her swords. Though it would have been called a longsword by the standards of the Kalzasaern smith who’d forged it, it was puny compared to Ecithian weapons. If the dragon could see her, it would look like little more than a toothpick.
Imogen crept slowly closer, and drew her sword back, focusing on the iron-colored scale at the tip of the great dragon’s snout. With exaggerated care and slowness, she brought the end of her sword to that scale- and pressed gently, invoking the Rune of Reaving.
Ever since she’d discovered how to extract information from materials, Imogen had practiced. Simple metals were… informative in their own way, but rarely interesting as such. Buildings and stone tended to have more story to tell, though they only gave up bits and pieces. It was the first time she’d tried merging a portion of her spirit with another living being, so she braced herself for the worst.
…or so she thought. In fact, the tide of information and memory that followed swept the witch off her feet like a tidal wave, carrying her conscious mind into the dark recesses of the past.
~ WHO WAS IT FOR? ~
Imogen found herself on the same beach, but not in the same time.
Actually, she realized, that was exactly wrong. This wasn’t the same beach, and it wasn’t a different time. It was a dream bubble, the unconscious space created by unconscious mortals to process things their waking mind couldn’t. It seemed her spell had knocked her unconscious.
But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If she followed the dream, it might lead her to the things she wanted to know. She rose from the sand, looking around.
The world was… well, dreamlike. It was hard to make out details of anything, more full of the impression of waves and trees than the sight of them. But those impressions were enough; she could hear, in the distance, explosions. Smoke billowed on the horizon, and the sun was blood-red in the sky above.
"The invasion…" she muttered. It had to be.
The dragon lay motionless before her, exactly as it had been, but now there was another figure- a young Orkhan woman who Imogen did not recognize. She was kneeling in front of the dragon, tears welling up at the corners of her eyes. The woman was dressed in simple, but quality armor, emblazoned with the emblem of Arcas, the coat of arms of the old Order.
“Please…” the woman begged, “You can help us. Wake up.”
The dragon’s eyes remained motionless. It did not react in the slightest.
“There are already so many dead!” the young woman said, trembling with fear or anger or a mixture of both, “Please, you have to do something, you can’t just lie here forever, or what are you for?”
The dragon’s eye did not so much as twitch.
“Unknown take you!” the woman swore, jumping to her feet and spitting on the great wyrm. “What’s the point of you? Why! Why won’t anyone hear us?”
The woman turned away, then back for just a moment, her face a mask of rage and pain. “Fine, then! Rot here forever!”
The memory grew darker as the Orkhan woman fled. The dragon did not move, but Imogen thought she could detect just the barest shimmer on the surface of its eye.
”Looks like a preexisting condition." Imogen interrupted the dream, watching as the memory broke apart even further under the influence of her conscious thoughts. ”Let’s go back further."
~~~
A dull iron dragon hardly larger than Imogen lay curled in a great darkness. There was light above, though indistinct, but little of it reached the bottom of the cave. Or was it a cave? There were what seemed like walls all around, but they also seemed to be… moving?
Song filled the space, something so deep that the ork could not even hear it, but she felt it in her bones. It was a harmony with no melody, an endless and spiraling hum. Though the song had no words, it nevertheless spoke to her; it sang of strength, of the rightful power borne by those who have heart to do what must be done.
The little dragon looked up, and spoke. Even in the throes of memory, Imogen could not understand what it said, but she felt its meaning.
“Why do I have to be strong?” it asked the light above; but the darkness around it answered, in a voice devoid of warmth.
“Because the world is divided, little one.” The sound nearly knocked the witch flat, it was so deep and vast that she could have sworn the earth itself were speaking. “It is flawed. If you do not live, you must surely die.”
Imogen took a moment to regain her balance, and waited for the conversation to continue; it didn’t. This must have been a very important memory, but it didn’t seem relevant to her investigation at all.
”Whatever’s going on here, it looks like it’s centuries too early. Can we skip forward a bit?"
~~~
When the darkness again coalesced into dream, the witch stood atop a hill overlooking a great battle. She got the impression of vastness, of size and scope stretching out far beyond the limits of the dream, and the misty sea of motion conveyed pitched combat to her. She squinted, trying to resolve the individual figures.
The dream obliged, and she saw at last that they were orkhan- an army of them, joined together against a great sea of brass figures. With a start, she recognized the general shape. It seemed that this was one of Kaitos Diregon’s invasions.
A number of figures stood on the hill near her, and though she mostly couldn’t make out their faces, one stood out in great detail; an Orkhan woman who stood almost two feet taller than the witch, clad entirely in iron scalemail.
It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.
“The tide turns, if slowly.” she said in Ecitherese, though the intonation and even the words seemed foreign to Imogen. “We must break the force today if we are to reinforce our northern cousins.”
“The clockwork devils are hard targets.” replied a deep voice, which roiled and flowed like a river, “My people tire; they do not. Victory will come slowly, if at all.”
“No,” the dragon replied, voice filled with quiet confidence, “It is true that people tire and machines do not, but that is not the end of it. Malgar's weapons are stronger than the usurper king's. Your people can be roused to fight like an army twice their size, with the right inspiration.”
“How?”
The dragon turned and gave the indistinct figure a winsome smile, then set off at a brisk walk towards the battle below. Darkness seemed to sweep across the field behind her like the shadows of great wings, and she drew a sword.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the woman swept across the field, faster than anything Imogen had ever seen (save perhaps Norani, but that was another story and her hair frizzled just thinking of it). She delivered a series of cuts so precise that even the master swordswoman could hardly see them, and automaton after automaton fell, collapsing as key cogs were cracked, springs cut in twain, and steam-tanks ruptured.
A vast cry went up from the army. Even in the dream, unknown centuries away and totally disconnected from the invasion, Imogen felt a twang in her heart, an almost irresistible urge to cheer.
But this, apparently, was where the memory ended. Darkness swept back in, surrounding the witch.
”Closer, I think! Now we know the dragon wasn’t always like this, we’ve just got to pinpoint when it happened." What could have happened to change that shining, smiling warrior into the piteous figure haunting Ailos’ shore? ”Let’s try going forward again, just a bit."
~~~
The next bubble was inside, though it was hard to say inside what. It was stone–marble in fact–like the temples of Drathera or the Senate chamber, but not nearly to that scale. It struck her more like the office buildings in Zaichaer, which aped the grandiose scale of traditional royal structures but couldn’t quite escape modern budgetary constraints.
The dragon stood there, of course, still in Orkish form, along with several more figures. Surprisingly, she wasn’t the tallest figure in this room- that honor went to another, who must have been nearly ten feet tall. Dragonborn, perhaps?
“With their gods gone, their armies are broken.” said the enormous figure, in a surprisingly soft voice. “The Golds have withdrawn; left to lick their wounds. It is a complete victory.”
“Not quite complete,” the iron dragon objected, “The devils have fled to the depths of the wastes, true, but they retain their human slaves. Two, three generations from now and they will be able to field an army anew.”
The shadowy giant turned, regarding the dragon. Imogen could discern no expression on its face (or a face, really), but she imagined an emotionless mask. “And what follows from that, Deravaecia?”
“You would do the future a favor,” Deravaecia replied evenly, “To rally the armies and stamp them out now and for ever.”
“My people fought to free their brothers and repulse a threat, wyrm. They will not be so moved to invade a land they have never known, or shed their sacred blood upon the sands.”
Deravaecia stepped forward, her face stern- yet when she spoke, her voice was pleading. “You trusted my advice in our raids, great one. Trust me now in this. To strike a foe’s sword from his hand but leave him alive is unwise.”
The giant shook its head, turning away to look at a light point on one of the distant walls. A window, perhaps?
“This generation has done enough honor to Skar. It is time to worship at other altars.”
The dragon hissed, a sound of threat and frustration which belied even her enormous stature and filled the grand chamber. “Beware, O king. The price of mercy is higher than you may realize, and your grandsons will be the debtors.”
The god-king turned away, ending the audience.
~~~
“Have the Menders taught you nothing?” Deravaecia asked, voice cold as the depths of Lake Udori.
It was another chamber, though this one was much smaller, more austere. The dragon was among the tallest figures in this room, though Imogen really wasn’t sure if the height in these memories was literal at all.
More shocking, though, was the reference to the Cult of Mending. After all the battles and intrigue involving figures in the distant past, here was one she herself had been warned of.
“G'uvniar.” said one of the figures, the only one of which was seated, “You forget yourself, but I will grant you leave. Speak.”
“They came among us as poison,” said the iron dragon, “And it was only by chance that we survived them.”
“The half-giants are not Menders.” said another figure, and Imogen started to realize that her voice was familiar. Yet… not familiar enough for the witch’s mind. She couldn’t place it. “They are sick, yes, but they harbor no malice.”
“So you must hope, but hope is dead. Cast him from your mind and harden your hearts! The price of betrayal is too high to pay, the cost of folly I have warned of since the turn of the ages!”
“Enough, G’uvniar.” the seated figure spoke again, voice firm, “In all things you have been the voice of practicality, but the war is done. My people have grown tired of death.”
The words clearly grated on Deravaecia, who grit her teeth, the most spectacular display of emotion yet. “The Orkhan grow tired? Only because you allow it. Does Raxen discard his swords when they grow dull? No, he hones them. Hone the spirit of your people, and they will do what is needed for the future.”
“My nation is not a sword. We have fought for more than a pile of weapons.”
The dragon shook her head, clearly frustrated, and made for the invisible door. “Then what, I wonder, is the point of them?”
~~~
Deravaecia approached a great stone gate.
Actually, it was a relatively unimpressive gate. The great trade gates in Zaichaer stood twice as tall; the fortifications of Drathera dwarfed them further still. It was cast of marble, for some ungodly reason, and covered in images of divine heroics, but Imogen reckoned that she could have battered it down given a few minutes.
The Orkhan guarding the gate stiffened as she approached, then saluted as they recognized the dragon. She did not return the gesture.
“Chivae,” she instructed them, “Report.”
“All quiet tonight.” one reported, “The Coron'uvr has command of the city still. We weren’t expecting-”
The dragon lifted one hand, nodding. “Thank you; that will be all. Inform your superior officers of their surrender.”
Neither of the soldiers reacted, clearly baffled by this direction. One’s brow knit, as he tried to work out what the general could be referring to.
“As of tonight, I am taking command of this city.” Deravaecia explained, “Not as general, but as Chi’ufein.”
This, at last, got a rise out of one of the men. His hands drifted toward his spear, but before he could so much as grasp it-
The dragon’s hand blurred, again faster than Imogen’s unaided eye could track, and the orkhan man’s head simply disappeared into a fine mist. Deravaecia’s arm wasn’t even stained by the impact, the droplets and traces of gore too slow to mar her gray skin.
She turned to the other guard. “If you have objections, register them later. I want you to inform your commanding officers before I kill you.”
~~~
In the weeks to come, Deravaecia turned the entire city inside-out. It required only a few impromptu executions to convince the city’s home legion to surrender command to her. A few of the prior God-queen’s favorites went the same way, though she largely chose to let them escape into the jungles.
This was not mercy. She needed word to spread.
Once she had established command, the iron dragon ordered a full census of the city and began reorganizing. Those with business or lives which could not serve her new army, she reassigned on pain of death; those who could, she ordered to work or drill on an aggressive schedule.
Time and again, Deravaecia had warned the god-kings and queens of Ecith to vigilance, to keep the people ready. She had served in their armies, again and again bolstering them, the last guardians of light in this dismal world of endless betrayals. And each time that some great evil had been vanquished, they had stopped at the threshold. Too weary of war to ever win true peace.
No longer. If the gods and kings would not listen to words, the dragon would speak to them as a warrior spoke. Blood was the oldest language of these shores, and she would write her missive upon the land until it could never be forgotten again.
~~~
Once she was done forging the core of her army, the dragon began her campaigns. The population of a single city was nothing compared to the great warbands which had won Ecith’s survival and glory, but that didn’t matter. One city would become two. Two could defeat four. She would overrun the continent, if they did not learn. If they did not remember.
The campaign wasn’t easy, of course. The orkhan had been lulled with false promises of peace, but the dragons and the gods who dwelt with them were still terrible foes. Yet, few were willing to take the field directly, for Deravaecia had served many of old, and knew their secret weaknesses. So she won, again and again. Her ranks swelled.
In the process, of course, she made innumerable enemies. Not just the displaced god-kings; for every Ork she impressed into war, two escaped to spread the word of her sudden and brutal campaign. In the distant coastal cities, they began to call her the Traitor Chief, or the Queen of Misery. The proud lords there began to gather their own armies, readying for yet another campaign against yet another evil.
And in the night, Deravaecia smiled, tears in her eyes. Win or lose, live or die, she was going to win. The world would be safe.
~~~
Disaster struck in the sixth battle.
The iron dragon had carefully crafted her army and armaments and strategies, optimizing them for terror and brutality. Every enemy who threw down their arms in terror was one less you had to spend resources on, and one more you could recruit thereafter. She had impressed upon her commanders the importance of this, of taking as many resources as possible.
Unfortunately, one problem with setting yourself up as an evil dragon-queen is that your loyal officers… might have somewhat differing reasons for joining the reign of terror.
She was neither particularly surprised nor disappointed to hear that one of her subordinate generals had taken the initiative to attack a city without her direction. It was inevitable, and would give her a fine opportunity to reinforce her troops’ fear of her when she finally offered reprisal.
When reports returned that her army had slaughtered the city, she shrugged off the hyperbole. It was war, after all. Inevitably, soldiers took the slaughter too far, and some civilians died. Perhaps it would even make things easier; if she came to the city, dealt with her disobedient general and showed the survivors her even-handed magnanimity… well, they would kneel much more easily.
~~~
But there was no hyperbole.
When Deravaecia arrived at the city, it had been razed to the ground. Not stone left upon stone, the ashes themselves singed by the fires.
There were survivors, of course. Not enough to form up a regiment out of, but still some. The soldiers she’d trained and outfitted and molded into avatars of despair had taken it to heart, and slaughtered well over half of the civilian population. Some had survived as prisoners, but many had been driven into the river to swim or drown by laughing men clad in skins of iron.
But…
“Where are the children?” the dragon wondered. Some would have died in the battle and the ensuing pillage, of course. That was inevitable.
~~~
When Deravaecia entered the ruins of the palace, she found her disobedient general set up like a chief. He greeted her warmly, smiling ear-to-ear, intoxicating spirits on his breath.
She didn’t understand. Did he not understand she was here to kill him?
“You have disobeyed my orders, general.” she chided him, “Taken the city without direction. Squandered its resources, left its people to the mercies of your men. Don’t you fear reprisal?”
“Absolutely not!” he proclaimed, not even bothering to remain standing in her presence, “We’re all going to die, eh? I will die here, as a chieftain of old, upon the throne a god once sat! Pretty good for a man who was once a farmer.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “I hope you had your joy of it, this past week.”
The general nodded amiably, extending a horn of something for her. She did not take it. The man shrugged, then downed it himself.
“It’s been good, this last year.” he told her, “You have shown us what we were, what we were meant to be. What we could be!”
Even coming from a dead man, the praise warmed her heart a little. She’d taught, but she was no ork herself; when the soldiers nodded along with her lessons, she could never really know if it was simply fear.
“Spare my men, will you? They’ll be loyal, with me gone.”
“I will spare those who I spare,” the dragon said gently “those who are worth reclaiming, I will reclaim.”
The general nodded, face taking on a dreamy look. Deravaecia suspected he’d taken something potent in the drink, to make sure he would die painlessly. She did not begrudge him this. Nobody would ever know.
“One thing, first.” she said, “What did you do with the children of the city?”
“Ah.” the general said, “Future dissidents. Kill the parent, the child is never really yours. We gave them to the river.”
~~~
Deravaecia stood there for days as her soldiers dredged the river, pulling up bodies. First by the hundreds, then the thousands.
They weren’t all children. Given the nature of rivers, she didn’t even know if every one was from this battle. But they were all hers, weren’t they? They were the price she’d extracted from the land for her ‘lesson’.
Gaunt, slimy, covered in the detritus of the land, they were paraded past her. She could have left; nobody could force her to stay here and confront the endless, glassy, accusing eyes of her victims.
But she didn’t. She watched as every one was exhumed and laid out. Not identified though- in the fire of her war, there were none left to remember any of them.
For three days and nights she stood, and on the third, her heart broke. The Traitor Queen disappeared into the darkness, and was never seen in those lands again.
~~~
Imogen sat upon the iron dragon’s great snout, leaning against her sword, pondering. Deravaecia of Iron had hardened her heart and sought to teach the world a lesson about strength, ruthlessness and brutality. But she’d faltered at the final threshold; when the gods presented her with the harvest she’d sown, she’d broken against the wheel of fate.
”And that was the question, which cut to her core-
If no one is strong enough, who was it for?"
The witch sang to the empty beach, for she now understood that the dragon behind her was seeing nothing at all; nothing but that moment, where the dead were hauled from the river, forever and ever. She’d been convinced that her methods were necessary to preserve the world, only to discover that the security it brought wasn’t worth having.
A tragic tale, she had to admit, but also one with limited applicability to the here and now. Here and now, she had a job to complete.
The Sunsinger hopped down from the dragon’s head, dematerializing her Pact sword. The sun was long gone; the moons stood sentinel above the site of her communion, like a silent commentary by the heavens.
With a frown, Imogen summoned her pact shield, shining and featureless save for the golden line where the spirits had repaired it. She spoke to it directly:
”I’ve all that I need to proceed with my spell;
But is this plan sensible? Harder to tell.
A general seasoned, a fighter from birth,
But maybe more trouble than all of that’s worth?"
She wasn’t sure she’d get any response at all–the metal spirits didn’t seem all that good at standard communication–but there was a flicker within the steel. Once again, she saw the image of the beach, of the senseless dragon lying there.
”You’re the client," Imogen muttered, ”But don’t blame me if you get more than you asked for."
