Chapter 12: DD2 Chapter 006 – Separation

A series of sharp blows hammered at the door in rapid succession. Their highly anticipated arrival caused Typhoeus to groan with frustration as he finally forced himself out of Arilla’s sinfully comfortable armchair. It was a beautiful piece of high-backed furniture that really tied the whole living room together, another part of human civilisation that he was sure to miss in the coming weeks. His long expedition over the autumn had only served to reinforce how much he had come to love the creature comforts of urban-life. He tried not to think about the many trials of camping as his bare feet padded across cold floorboards and towards the increasingly frantic sounds of a small human fist impacting hard against the wood.

When finally Typhoeus opened the door he feigned surprise when he saw Tamlin standing there before him. The boy’s presence and unfortunate condition had cropped up in Typhoeus’s field of perception long before he had made his way to Arilla’s door. The child had clearly been beaten again; his lip was split and trailed a thin line of dried blood down to the neck of his linen shirt where a sickly yellow bruise could be seen peeking out from behind the frayed hem.

Seeing him like this was almost nostalgic.

“You should come in,” Typhoeus instructed, offering the boy a small sympathetic smile as he escorted him inside of Arilla’s home.

“Who is it?” Arilla called out, her voice travelling across the flat from her bedroom where she was still getting ready.

“It’s Tamlin,” Typhoeus replied, raising his voice to ensure that she heard him over the clanking of metal on metal that originated from her room.

“What’s he doing here?” she yelled back, but Typhoeus was more concerned with guiding Tamlin past their bulging haversacks than he was in replying. The youth and the dragon both had to weave through the piles of assorted camping supplies that littered the floor of the hall leading to Arilla’s front door.

The boy had yet to say a word since his arrival, silently following Typhoeus with an intense look of determination in his downcast eyes as the dragon led Tamlin into the living room where the boy sat down sullenly in an offered chair by the fire. Once the child was seated, Typhoeus took a firm hold of the boy’s chin, working his mana to pull the injuries into himself. His own lip cracked open with a small spurt of blood as a large bruise appeared on his chest to replace the one now missing on Tamlin’s. Despite the ease of casting the familiar spell, Typhoeus found himself hesitating, taking several long moments to realise that the last time he had cast it, it was to save Arilla’s life, nearly at the cost of his own. It had been a moment of self-destructive folly, one that he would be eternally grateful to her for stopping.

“How?” Tamlin asked softly, his eyes once again wide with child-like wonder as he looked up at Typhoeus, and tentatively probed at his freshly healed lip.

“Magic. Now, tell me what happened?” Typhoeus asked as Arilla entered the room. The warrior’s armour was only half on, her set of runic plate complete from the waist down, with just her casual clothes on from the waist up.

“I lost it. The musical egg. Some older boys took it from me,” Tamlin said. “I tried to fight them, but…”

“But you got your ass handed to you,” Typhoeus finished for him. “Don’t worry about it, I can always make you another one, although we’ll have to find a bard to copy the song off of.”

“You can make another musical egg?” Tamlin asked skeptically.

“Of course I can,” Typhoeus answered honestly, unsure as to why the admission was a big deal.

“Ahem, while I’m sorry to hear that you lost your magic rock, shouldn’t you be telling this to a nun?” Arilla asked, standing back with her hands on her hips. “Why did you come to my home, and for that matter, how do you even know where I live?”

“Sister Sybil keeps your address pinned to the pantry door in case we run out of food. I wanted to talk to Typh and I thought that as she’s your girlfriend—”

“Ex-girlfriend,” Arilla cut in.

“Whatever,” Tamlin grunted with a roll of his eyes that made Typhoeus feel both old and uncool. “She’s here, isn’t she?”

“I am. So why were you looking for me? I hope you don’t think I’m going to fight your battles for you?” Typhoeus asked.

“No. I want you to teach me magic,” Tamlin said with a cold certainty to his tone that was decidedly unnatural to hear from someone so young. Then again, the boy had killed his own father, and that must have required an aberrant degree of resolve, regardless of how justified it may have been.

“Absolutely not!” Arilla said quickly, her voice firm and unwavering as she tried to shut down that avenue of conversation.

“Why not?” Tamlin asked.

“You are a child. Typh isn’t a safe person for you to be around,” Arilla said.

“Why? Because she’s the Dragonrider?” Tamlin asked. “I’m not afraid of dragons.”

“She’s not the Dragonrider,” Arilla stated a little awkwardly whilst Typhoeus merely laughed, delighting at the current set of circumstances.

“But they said that she is, that she tamed a dragon with her …wife parts,” Tamlin said blushing, his admission ruining the dragon’s good mood.

“Child, I’ll let this slide just this once because I like you, but don’t reference that song in my presence ever again,” Typhoeus threatened.

“Typh, don’t threaten a child!” Arilla exclaimed before turning back to Tamlin. “See, she isn’t safe for you to be around!”

“Life isn’t safe. I need to learn magic and Typh can teach me. Besides, it’s hardly your call. Especially if she’s your ex,” the boy said defiantly.

“You don’t even have a class. The orphanage won’t let you near a stone while you stay with them, so it’s not like she can teach you anything you can actually use,” she argued.

“That’s none of your business. Like I said, I’m not here for you and I don’t need your permission,” Tamlin argued right back.

“No. I will not stand for it!” Arilla yelled, before turning to Typhoeus. “Surely you can’t be entertaining this idea?”

He was entertaining the idea, quite seriously in fact. While Typhoeus had no real knowledge about necromancy beyond what was useful to know in order to kill a necromancer, all schools of magic shared the same basic fundamentals. More importantly, he knew that under the right conditions necromancers could level faster than pretty much any other mage class, and that was definitely something he could use.

“I could teach you,” he offered, smiling as he felt a sense of rightness about making the decision.

“Thank you,” Tamlin said.

“Don’t thank me yet. It will be hard, probably the hardest thing you have ever done. I will show you things that you aren’t ready to see and teach you secrets that most would rather remain forgotten. While I can keep you safe while you grow—safer than you will ever be with the nuns—I will one day demand that you fight. Do you understand what I am offering you?”

“Typh...” Arilla began, but went no further, a growing look of dismay on her face, as Typhoeus completely ignored her, focusing all of his considerable attention on Tamlin.

“I think so,” the boy said.

“Then do you accept me as your teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Typhoeus smiled, relishing the look of earnest joy on his new apprentice's face.

“So what now?”

“Now you go home. Arilla and I have to leave town for a little while, and it’s far too dangerous for you to come along,” he explained.

“But you just said—”

“I know what I just said. Now scurry off back to the orphanage and I’ll come get you when I’m done. I’ll adopt you or you can run away, I don’t really care either way, but I can’t take you with me and the orphanage will keep you safe for a few more weeks.”

“How do I know you’ll come back?”

“Because I said that I would,” Typhoeus stated plainly.

“But…”

Typhoeus looked at the child, who seemed so deflated from the look of earnest joy on his face mere seconds ago.

“Fine,” he relented, sparing a few moments to look around Arilla’s flat for something suitable before he eventually settled on a wooden coaster with a cork base. Typhoeus pushed his mana through his finger, hastily scrawling runes onto the wooden surface, humming a tune as he worked. When he was done he blew away the loose wood shavings and handed it to his new apprentice. “If you push a little mana through these runes and it doesn’t light up, then it means that I’m dead and you’re on your own. Keep it close and don’t lose it, or else I’ll have to think of some kind of menial punishment for you to suffer through.”

Tamlin took the offered coaster and looked at it appreciatively for a long while before he stuffed it down his bloodstained shirt. Soon after receiving his gift, the child left Arilla’s flat on Typhoeus’s urgings, leaving the dragon with an irate warrior.

“That was my favourite coaster,” Arilla complained bitterly.

They barely managed to leave within the hour. Arilla took even longer to get ready, as after Tamlin left she insisted on putting on the rest of her armour by herself, despite Typhoeus’s numerous offers to help. They trudged through the snow-covered streets together, Typhoeus in a thick fur coat to cover his sundress and Arilla in her full set of runic armour. The pair headed straight for the northern gates of Rhelea, an entranceway to the city that saw little use at the best of times, let alone during the height of winter.

The northern quarters of the city were primarily residential as the lack of through traffic coming from the north gate vastly reduced the appeal for shopfronts and warehouses. While there was the occasional ale house here and there, the streets were quiet as people stayed indoors to wait out the poor weather. Everyone knew that the only thing that lay along the Old Road to the north was the neighbouring nation of Lintumia, but to get there through the mountain pass, you’d have to first travel past Traylra, and no one sane attempted that.

As Arilla grew increasingly on-edge with every step they took towards the northern gates, Typhoeus thought that her mood might have something to do with their destination, but as usual he was surprised to learn that he was wrong.

“I don’t even know where to fucking begin. I’m just so pissed,” Arilla said, unable to hold her tongue any longer.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Typhoeus asked.

“How could you possibly agree to teach Tamlin magic?” she yelled, stopping in the street to glare at him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, standing still and quickly scanning for nearby eavesdroppers with [Sovereign’s Perception]. “I thought you wanted me to be more likeable and eat fewer humans?”

“You know exactly what I mean. What if he gets a class like ‘dragon disciple’ or ‘dragon student’? You can’t trust a child to keep your secret!”

“I can trust Tamlin,” he said, feeling rather calm about the whole situation.

“He’s a child,” she reiterated.

“Yes, he is,” Typhoeus confirmed. “What's really bothering you?” he asked when he realised that the pained look of exasperation wasn’t disappearing from her face.

“How can you trust a boy you met yesterday so easily, but you made me jump through hoops for weeks?”

Typhoeus paused for a brief moment, unsure of what exactly to say. He trusted Arilla with his secret and by extension his life, but Tamlin’s was another matter altogether. As much as it embarrassed him, he couldn’t deny that in his absence his guard appeared to have latched onto religion of all things and he was fairly sure that like so many of humanity’s bad habits, the automatic execution of necromancers stemmed from that glorious institution.

“Tamlin has secrets that make it easy for me to trust him,” he said, deciding to be vague.

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“And those are?”

“None of your business.”

“I thought we were done with lies between us.”

“I thought there was no us,” Typhoeus reminded her. “You’re just here because the world is ending, remember?” he prodded, deriving some small amount of satisfaction from the look of hurt on her face, at least until his short-lived joy was replaced with guilt.

Arilla was quiet after that, instead of replying she simply covered her head with her helmet and resumed walking. They travelled in silence for the rest of the way to the walls, but were stopped short a few streets away from the gatehouse by a small group of Traylan guards who had formed an impromptu roadblock that was causing a discontented crowd to gather around it.

The guards were all new, and like so many of the recent additions to Lord Traylan’s forces they were predominantly dual-classed. Still tagged as their higher-levelled professions prior to taking their lord’s silver and joining the guard. The apparent leader of this barricade was tagged as a level 16 baker and was flanked by six other men in metal breastplates over boiled leather, the Traylan’s crest of a silver pearl wrapped in green thorns emblazoned prominently on each of one their chests. The squad of soldiers were tagged as a mixture of apprentices, students, and even one entertainer rather than the customary warrior tag that Typhoeus had come to expect from human soldiers.

“Listen folks, I can’t let you pass,” the baker-turned-guard yelled over the noise of the crowd, his hands raised up high in an unanswered plea for calm.

Angry voices sprung out of the gathered group of civilians along with raised fists and jeers. “My house is past here!”, “You can’t do this!”, “Let us through!”. There were so many angry people that the meaning of any individual shout was lost in the chorus of outrage. The baker continued to call for calm but when a building behind them neatly collapsed in on itself along with a single cry of heartfelt despair the crowd very nearly turned violent. People pushed and shoved against the beleaguered guardsmen who were only able to maintain some semblance of order by baring steel on the unarmed civilians.

“Please be calm! This is a scheduled demolition! You’ve all been warned and fairly recompensed for the inconvenience! Now get back and disperse!” the baker yelled. The man seemed to be even more scared now that he held a sword in his hands than he was when it remained in its sheath.

“If you call the handful of drachma and a promissory note ‘fair recompense’ for my home then you’re cracked in the head!” an old man screamed back at the guards, somehow hobbling forwards on a thin cane to stand at the forefront of the crowd. “My family has lived in our home for more than fifty years and now I’m being kicked out so Lord Traylan can build a bigger wall?! Well, you’ll have to gut me with that pigsticker first, Baker!” he continued, practically spitting in the armed guard’s face.

“Sir I—”

“What? You can take the noble ponce’s coin but you can’t kill an old man?” the elder mocked, raising his cane in the air as if he meant to strike the beleaguered guard while the crowd at his back roared their approval.

Typhoeus was not so limited in his perspective as a human was. With [Sovereign’s Perception] and the calm of someone thoroughly uninvested in the current conflict, he could see the tragedy that was about to unfold with perfect clarity. As Arilla grit her teeth and her hand strayed towards her sword, Typhoeus saw people in the crowd produce glass bottles and rocks from beneath thick layers of winter clothing. He saw the guard to Baker's right clench her eyes shut, and smelt her fear as the muscles in her arm bunched in preparation of swinging the sword in her hands—possibly to parry the old man’s blow, possibly to simply kill him instead.

It was going to be a bloodbath and strangely enough, Typhoeus found himself caring, even if just a little bit for the strange humans who were about to die.

Faster than the idiotic creatures could kill themselves, Typhoeus wove a spell and a golden shield of force enveloped the old man just in time for the guard’s sword to rebound off of the arcane barrier. Startled voices cried out in alarm, Arilla’s eyes went wide beneath her helm as for reasons that he didn’t fully understand the dragon brought thick walls of golden mana into Creation to corral and separate the newly transitioned mob from the guards.

Scores of hands ineffectually slammed against the arcane walls, countless blows barely costing him a trickle of mana as every set of eyes suddenly fixated on Typhoeus through the lens of the translucent golden barriers. The attention brought with it that old familiar fear, as forgotten worries of being exposed came rushing back to him, threatening to swallow him whole.

“Are you done?” Arilla asked, her question and unimpressed tone stalling his spiralling anxiety as he was forced to look at the crowd he had captured with just a mere moment of his draconic will. Dozens of humans penned in helplessly like cattle, a thought that caused his stomach to rumble and his lips to curl up into a smile.

“Not quite,” he gloated. Twisting his spell just a little, he forced the crowd to part, opening up a wide corridor that effectively bisected the mob and allowed for them to pass through to the front.

“Show-off,” Arilla commented before stepping forwards and passing along the passage as the crowd looked on helplessly from either side. Typhoeus followed quickly in Arilla’s wake, trying not to pay too much attention to the whispering crowd that scarily enough seemed to recognise him.

Typh, Dragonwife, Leech, Immolator, Dragonrider.

Aside from his alias, they were all titles that he would rather not possess. His unwanted notoriety had completely failed to die down on its own in the months that he had been absent from Rhelea. Muttering a curse beneath his breath, he offered up a quick prayer to the Great System that Eliza would get what was coming to her, but he held no hope for that to come to fruition—Typhoeus knew that evil was so rarely punished in this world.

“Is everything okay?” Arilla asked the guard in charge once they reached the barricade, Typhoeus’s hallway collapsing in behind them giving the crowd slightly more room to breathe whilst they remained penned in.

“Yes. It is for now. Thanks for that, the name’s Baker,” the man said unironically, extending his hand, which Arilla and then Typhoeus shook.

“It was nothing. What’s going on Baker?” Typhoeus asked.

“Construction. That’s what. Now that Rhelea has officially been made into a city, the inner walls are to be expanded along with a new set of outer ones. These folks’ houses will be too close to the rebuilt fortifications and are being demolished to maintain the security of the city. They’ve all been paid and given time to move out, but some people just like to make a fuss,” Baker explained with a shrug.

“Maybe they didn’t appreciate being forced out of their homes? Or being paid a fraction of their property's true value?” Arilla said scathingly, her tone making it crystal clear who she sided with.

Baker looked momentarily taken aback, “Are we going to have a problem here?”

“No. No problem, Baker,” she said with a long tired sigh.

“Good,” the man replied, his tense expression being quickly replaced with a look of earnest relief. “Cause if you don’t mind me saying I wouldn’t want to go against the pair of you. Not with a squad barely a month into their combat classes at my back.”

“Only a month? Shouldn’t there be more of you then, considering your low level?” Typhoeus asked.

“There should be, but we’re stretched thin. This is nothing compared to what’s going on in the slums,” Baker said, gesturing towards the penned in crowd.

“They’re clearing out the slums in the beginning of winter?” Arilla asked aghast.

“Yes. Lord Traylan wants the outer wall well underway by spring, and the derelict buildings out there are in the way,” Baker said.

“And I’m sure it has nothing to do with how much more valuable the land those houses are sitting on will become once they’re behind a warded wall,” Arilla retorted before turning to Typhoeus. “This is going to turn ugly. We should help.”

“I think we may be a little preoccupied dealing with our own problems soon enough…” Typhoeus replied, nodding towards one of the guards who had just unfurled a small roll of parchment.

The guardswoman kept looking between it and then Typhoeus, each time managing to go a shade paler with fear. She then proceeded to cautiously approach Baker whom she tapped on the shoulder and relayed a short whispered message that seemed to cause the more senior soldier to pale in turn.

“I think that’s her, the mageling, the one the Inquisitor wants!” he was only half listening, but [Sovereign’s Perception] made it very trying to ignore people at times. Typhoeus had never heard of an Inquisitor before, but judging from the soldiers reactions, it was probably bad news.

“You—you wouldn't happen to be the mage known as Typh, would you?” Baker asked, his voice shaking as his eyes practically begged Typhoeus to lie.

“Yes. I am her,” he admitted, technically only half-lying.

“Then I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” Baker said, swallowing audibly as he moved his hand to once again rest on the hilt of his sword.

“May I ask why?”

“No,” Baker said firmly.

“Officers, is there some kind of financial arrangement that we can agree on, to get you to look the other way, just this once?” Arilla began, smoothly producing a heavy coin purse as she spoke. Clearly his warrior had already gotten used to bribing officials in the few short months that had passed since she became part of the city’s elite.

Baker barely even looked at the bribe. Instead, he took a deep breath and drew his sword, the action mirrored by the six soldiers to his side, all of whom seemed surprised to swiftly find themselves pinned between panes of golden light, suddenly trapped in the exact same manner as the crowd that had attempted to overrun their barricade.

“Typh—” Arilla warned.

“Relax,” he said, dismissing her concerns with a wave of his hand as he stepped forwards close to the barrier, the golden light reflecting off of his brown skin. “Baker, tell me why you want to take me in.”

“You’re not under arrest if that’s what you’re worried about, or at least you weren’t until this, but I can’t tell you why,” he said, rather resolutely for a man at Typhoeus’s mercy.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I won’t tell you anything—”

“Won’t then…” Typhoeus interrupted, raising a hand up before his golden eyes where a small bulb of flame appeared hovering above the tip of his finger. “Baker, tell me your orders that concern me, or I will cook you alive in there.”

“Typh you can’t—” Arilla began, silencing herself after Typhoeus shot her a glare.

“You know what I am, Arilla; I can do whatever I want,” he said. “Now Baker, what will it be? The truth or a very painful and public death?”

“You can’t threaten me, there are witnesses, it’s a crime!”

“I think I’ll trust the mob that was about to kill you to keep quiet on this one thing. Now, are you going to talk or not?” he asked, staring the human down.

“…Fine. Like I said, you’re not under arrest. But the Inquisition has made it very clear that we are to bring you in, should we encounter you,” Baker admitted. “Now are you going to let my men go?”

“Thank you,” Typhoeus smiled, ignoring his question. “Come on Arilla, let’s get out of here.”

They quickly passed through the northern gates and into the slums without challenge, leaving behind the guards and common folk trapped in Typhoeus’s spell where they would remain until long after they were both gone, which Arilla only stopped complaining about once he mentioned to her that the barriers were quite warm, more than hot enough to melt snow and keep their prisoners safe from the elements.

As they moved through outer Rhelea, Typhoeus kept the collar of his coat up and his head down, but it proved to be entirely unnecessary. While Traylan soldiers were out in force, they were very busy. Wherever he looked, Typhoeus could see people being ripped from their homes, often in tears and clutching the few possessions that they still had. The Traylan soldiers seemed to be, for the most part, unperturbed by the scenes of hardship that they were instigating. The men and women with the thorned pearl on their chests were largely all too happy to evict so many people, even at the point of a sword.

While the houses and businesses that the soldiers were forcing people from were hardly well-built—with most showing significant structural instabilities or signs of dilapidation—they were all occupied. Their newly homeless residents milled aimlessly between the narrow side streets and the Old Road as if they didn’t know what to do, unable to process the sudden loss of everything they had once owned. Those few who resisted were quickly taken down, most taking non-lethal strikes and ending up in chains, likely destined for forced conscription or a jail, but not everyone was so lucky. Considering the sheer size of the population outside the walls, it was probably a miracle that such a tiny fraction appeared to be dying, but given the numbers of people involved, it was still a staggering number of corpses arranged by the sides of the buildings where they had fallen.

More than once Arilla tried to intervene, but each time Typhoeus stopped her. They had a quest of their own to get to, and however heartbreaking his favourite human may have found this experience to be, Arilla knew from the memories that he had shared with her that it all paled in comparison to what was going to happen in Rhelea if the Great Wards continued to fail. And so with heavy hearts and guilty consciences, they both ignored the numerous pleas for help and walked north away from the city, a place where cruelty always seemed to be just out of sight.

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