Intermission – Chapter 14: The Good Word
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The anqa’s powerful legs ate up the distance with each bounding stride, its iridescent feathers catching the morning light. The priestess leaned forward in her saddle, urging the great bird onwards despite the exhaustion weighing on her shoulders. She had not slept since leaving Jaesownen Vale. Could not sleep. Not whilst the kingdom remained ignorant of what stirred in the southern mountains.
A dragon.
The word felt strange even in her thoughts, maybe even a little fantastical. For people of her year, dragons were just myths. Ancient terrors from the histories of generations now passed. Yet she had seen the creature with her own eyes, perched on that mountainside whilst the world trembled beneath its presence in the wake of the defeat of the regional Lord Parsmuth.
The road stretched before her, winding through rolling hills towards the first town large enough to matter. Durinas is the regional capital of the next county over. Home to guild halls and minor nobility and the Archbishop’s seat of power.
She would start there.
The Adventurer’s Guild smelt of leather, sweat, and cheap ale. She never much liked these seedy places. But right now, she needed to be here.
The sister pushed through the doors into a common room filled with scarred warriors and hedge mages, all of them looking up with varying degrees of interest at the travel-stained priestess who had burst into their morning routine of getting drunk before the sun had risen to noon. “A dragon,” she said without preamble. Her voice cut through the ambient noise. “In the southern mountains. It has claimed Jaesownen Vale and the surrounding territories.”
Silence fell across the room.
Then someone laughed. A scarred woman with an axe slung across her back, her expression suggesting she had heard every wild tale the roads had to offer.
“Dragons are extinct,” the woman said. “Have been for two hundred years.”
“I saw it.” Sister Marythe’s hands clenched at her sides. “Black scales. Wings that blocked out the sun. The ground shook when it moved. Lord Parsmuth sent armies against it. None returned. They’re all dead.”
The laughter died. Of course, it was a hard tale to believe, but there was something about the look in the eyes of a sworn priestess of the faith that made them reconsider their doubts.
A younger adventurer, barely past his twentieth year, leaned forward with hungry eyes. “What’s the bounty?”
“There is no bounty yet. I’m riding to the capital to report. But when the crown hears -” She paused, letting the implication hang. “Dragon hoards are legendary. Enough gold to buy generations of prosperity. Enough magical artefacts to arm entire companies.”
Greed flickered across faces around the room. She saw it catch, saw the idea take root. Adventurers lived for this. The impossible challenge. The legendary reward. The chance to write their names into history.
“Where exactly?” someone asked from the back.
The priestess told them. Gave them the way, described the mountain, detailed the approach through the valleys. Watched their expressions shift from scepticism to calculation to barely contained excitement.
They would go. Perhaps not today, perhaps not all of them. But they would go. Of course, she was sure they would all die. But they would buy the world some more time with their lives. Every day they could keep the beast busy would be a day won for the powers of the kingdoms to muster themselves in defence of the realm.
Not telling them that last thought, she left the guild hall with a grim expression and mounted her anqa once more.
The Academy of Arcane Studies occupied a sprawling campus on Durinas’s western edge, its towers reaching towards the sky with architectural ambition that bordered on arrogance. The sister’s credentials as a church official granted her an immediate audience with the Dean of Mystical Zoology, an elderly dark elf whose white robes seemed too large for his narrow frame. They had perhaps fit more snugly in his younger years.
“Impossible,” he said flatly when she finished her report. “Dragons require highly specific magical conditions to survive. Those conditions have not existed in this region for centuries.”
“And yet one exists.” The sister kept her voice level. “I saw it. I heard its voice shake the mountainside. Impossible or not, it is real.”
The dean’s expression shifted from dismissal to reluctant interest. He reached for a leather-bound journal, his movements suddenly precise and focused.
“Describe it in detail. Scale colouration. Wing structure. Size estimates. Behaviour patterns.”
She told him everything. The way the creature moved. The intelligence in its glowing, ruby eyes. The cave it had claimed began to manifest the properties of a dungeon.
The dean wrote furiously, his pen scratching across parchment with academic fervour. It was slow at first, but by the time she had told him half of her details, he was sure that she was telling the truth, simply because of the specific nature of such an obscure creature that, in this day and age, only scholars really knew.
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“We’ll need to send observers,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Document everything. The first dragon sighting in two hundred years… Do you understand what this means for magical theory? For our understanding of mana flow and ecological balance?”
The priestess understood only that scholars would come. That they would poke and prod and study the creature, and perhaps in their observations find weaknesses the kingdom could exploit.
She left the academy with one more group mobilised.
The minor noble’s estate occupied prime land just outside Durinas proper. The lord of the region received her in a parlour decorated with hunting trophies and expensive tapestries that probably cost more than most villages earned in a year. He listened to her report with the calculating expression of someone whose entire existence revolved around political advantage.
“Jaesownen Vale,” he mused when she finished. “Lord Parsmuth’s territory. Or rather, it was.”
“The dragon killed him. Killed his entire army.”
“Convenient.” He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “That territory has been contested for decades. The crown never quite trusted Parsmuth. Too ambitious. Too independent. And now a dragon conveniently eliminates him and claims his lands for itself.”
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