Chapter 19: DD2 Chapter 013 – Decency

Arilla’s bed exploded into splinters of wood as it collided with a trio of miners who were flung backwards from the impact and out through the temple’s open doors. Men rushed at her with drawn swords held high and she clumsily parried their blades away with one of her own, a hastily looted shortsword of questionable quality that was growing increasingly curved as the metal warped dramatically with every checked blow. The force of Arilla’s strikes drove her attackers down to their knees. Her inexpert swings backed by her impressive strength score were more than enough to break bones and crunch through armour, provided of course, that the fragile sword continued to hold up to the abuse that she was subjecting it to.

Concussive blasts of heat and golden light sent members of Cawic’s militia staggering back, while the sounds of steel on steel filled the room and drowned out the moans and groans of the settlement’s injured defenders lying supine on nearby sickbeds. The Priest who was supposed to tend to the hall was nowhere to be seen as the fight quickly ramped up in intensity, with freshly injured humans to add to the old. The small sliver of open space that made up the temple’s foyer was rapidly transformed into yet another battleground within the once quiet village of Cawic. Villagers, who had been ordered into battle by their Steward Kalle, fought to kill their formerly celebrated saviors mere feet away from their friends and neighbours who were laid out on bloodstained straw cots where their injuries had put them, fear blossoming in the eyes of the few who were cogent enough to realise how close they were to the growing storm of violence. 

Kalle strode forwards past Arilla and the clash of steel. Her confident steps only highlighted how unnecessary her thin cane was as it tapped loudly along the tiled floor. The older woman, who now seemed powerful and full of a youthful vigor, raised her lit-pipe to her narrow lips and inhaled deeply with a wicked smile, before exhaling out. Twin clouds of thick grey smoke streamed out from her nostrils and formed together into the shape of a large wolf with vacant eyes that rose to meet the temple's tall ceiling. The conjured beast snarled, gaining definition as it dripped saliva onto the floor and leapt at Typhoeus who responded in turn with a tight beam of fire that extended from his finger. His spell travelled quickly along the beast’s stomach, trailing a snaking line over the grey fur which blackened and split open, only to turn back into inert smoke before the beast’s entrails could slide out.

Kalle blinked once in surprise as her conjured beast was eviscerated before it could even complete its leap. Her forward motion abruptly halted as what appeared to be her trump card stalled out in front of her.

“Enough!” a voice cried out. The word was as loud in its volume as it was in its contempt, and was said with enough conviction that it brought a momentary pause to the hostilities.

The command came from a very unexpected source, or at least one that Typhoeus didn’t expect to hear from. The healer who he had brought with him was looking up from beside the bedside of an injured hunter with a mixture of anger and disgust in her brown eyes. Her hands were stained red with blood as before her watchful audience she healed a massive bite wound along her patient’s leg. The torn and gaping flesh sealed itself shut as it was flushed with her magic, the angry inflamed wound diminishing in redness until it left behind newly healed pink flesh.

“Do you have no decency?! Take it outside! This is a temple and a hospital. There are patients literally everywhere, and I will not have you endanger them with whatever this stupid conflict is!” she yelled, not stopping in her work until the villager before her began to breathe deeper and with considerably less difficulty.

Her words had a sobering effect on everyone present with the notable exception of Kalle, who took the opportunity to conjure a pair of wolves out of smoke and sent them both lunging at Typhoeus. The dragon lazily batted them aside with a wave of mana that shook the building when the constructs were dispersed back into smoke upon their forceful contact with the temple’s thick stone walls.

“Ignore the healer! Kill them! They’ve betrayed us to the Dragon beyond our walls!” Kalle screamed, her voice suddenly frail with exhaustion as she pointed a trembling finger at Typhoeus who stood back unimpressed, arms crossed over his chest.

“The healer is right, Kalle. You should have known better than to bring men inside the temple,” Tonisim said calmly, the aged hunter having just arrived along with Machero and a handful of other armed villagers who looked distinctly unpleased with what they were seeing.

“Tonisim, you have no right to interfere! They’ve brought back one of the Dragon’s people to spread lies and poison amongst us! We must cast them out before they can divide us any further!”

“Do you mean before we can tell everyone that the reason behind the attacks is because you double-crossed the Dragon? Because you decided that after all these years of taking his gold that you could just break his faith without consequences?” Typhoeus asked, assuming that most of the town didn’t know the specifics of Kalle’s deal with Erebus.

“Lies! I would never—” Kalle began, her eyes still confident as she looked around at the villagers in the room, most of whom appeared to be confused, but more than a few looked back at her with a mixture of dawning understanding and anger. None more so than Tonisim, whose face contorted into a picture of dismay and then outrage, a purple vein practically throbbing on his wrinkled forehead as the aged man shook with barely constrained emotion.   

“You said those merchants were from Lintumia! You promised me that there was no risk to the village!” Tonisim yelled, the tide of opinion finally turning with his outburst. “Gods help us, just what have you gotten us into, Kalle?”

The old woman hesitantly backed away from the crowd who now slowly turned to point their bared blades in her direction. Muttered accusations and curses began to circulate amongst the gathered villagers whilst Typhoeus and Arilla stood well back from the unfolding drama.

“They’re lying Toni. You know me; you trust me. I would never endanger Cawic so,” she said imploringly, her arms outstretched to the side in a silent plea for his faith.

“...The timing of it all just makes too much sense. Damn me for not seeing it earlier! If merchants found a way past the Dragon, then they would have expanded the route over the years. We should have flourished like in the old days, rather than just limping on,” he sighed. “And like you said, I know you, Kalle. You’d risk Cawic for your ego. You’d take gold from the Gods themselves and spit in their eye if it pleased you. You always thought yourself smarter than everyone else. I should have remembered why you came here,” the old hunter said as the Steward’s face fell until it hardened into something hateful. 

“Well, someone had to do something! You’ve never understood anything Toni!” Kalle spat in an abrupt change of tone. “Cawic was dying! What the prospectors and hunters pull out of the Dragonspines hasn’t been close to what we need to make it through winter for decades. When the Dragon’s people came to me in secret and made me an offer, I took it for the good of the village!”

“How is this for the good of the village!” Tonisim raged, gesturing to the injured lying in their beds. “Cawic has lost a fifth of our people this winter! A fifth! And the Gods alone know how many will choose to stay once the roads are safe again come spring!”

“Usually when you make a deal with an entity far more powerful than you, it’s in your best interest not to screw them over,” Typhoeus idly commented, pleased that nobody was currently trying to kill him.

“We could execute you for this, Kalle. First for betraying Terythia for dealing with the Dragon, second for indebting the village to it without our knowledge, and third for betraying the beast and bringing all this death down upon our heads.”

The Steward’s eyes went wild, and she looked briefly towards the open door, taking a half step in that direction before the swords levelled at her were raised several inches, the threat clear.

“You want to kill me for saving this place?! Look around you Tonisim, where do you think the money comes from to call up runescribes to maintain the wards on our walls? The artists who restore the paintings on this so-very-fine ceiling? The carpenters and wines for our inn, the mana-infused-steel for our blacksmith, the fucking scented soaps in our hot-springs! We are a poor mountain village that simply cannot survive without the trade that flows along the Old Road. We either deal with the Dragon or our way of life dies!” she ranted, her tirade seeming to deflate her further. “Thanks to my actions, and the risks taken by a trusted few, we’ve thrived since Traylra fell, when every other village along this road has fallen along with it!”

Tonisim looked thoughtful for a moment before he spoke again.

“You know I’m going to need the names of the people who knew what you were doing,” he said gravely.

“They’re all dead! Died weeks ago during the siege,” she spat quickly. Too quickly for Typhoeus, and likely Tonisim, to believe.

“I see…” the old hunter said, gesturing to the others around him. “Take Steward Kalle into custody. Confine her to her home until we find her collaborators and decide what to do with them,” his words spurring on the actions of the villagers he had brought with him and she with her, who began to do just that.

“Wait!” Typhoeus interjected, earning himself numerous looks, some still hostile, others less so. “Why did you go back on your deal with the Dragon? What did Erebus want from Rhelea that you couldn’t deliver?”

“Wouldn’t not couldn't, girl. The Dragon wanted people. Unclassed or Mages, the younger the better,” Kalle cackled, as she was dragged away by strong hands gripping her arms.

“And the gold?” The dragon asked, prompting the villagers to pause once again in their removal of the former Steward.

“What gold?” Kalle replied vindictively.

“The gold that you took to deliver these people that you never handed over.”

Kalle smirked, “It’s well hidden within the village. You’ll never find it before the spring thaws—not without my help. I could be persuaded to disclose its location in exchange for assurances of my safety and enough of it to see myself comfortably set up in Rhelea.”

“So it’s in the village then…” Typhoeus trailed off. “Okay, Tonisim, you can take her away. I can find it without her.”

“Are you sure? As much as I hate to consider it, if repaying the Dragon’s people will make the attacks stop I have to do it,” the old hunter said, his face grim and his posture slouched. The unexpected betrayal of Kalle appeared to have aged him even further.

“I have a nose for these things. I am supremely confident that if it is in the village I can find it,” the dragon boasted.

Knowing what he was looking for, it took Typhoeus all of fifteen minutes to follow his nose to find the gold. Given all the expensive decorations inside the larger buildings within Cawic he had a few false starts, but the scent of gold is a powerful one, even to a dragon as young as Typhoeus.

Nestled behind a false wall in the tavern's surprisingly expansive wine cellar was a narrow passage that appeared to lead to an escape tunnel out of Cawic. But halfway down [Sovereign’s Perception] revealed another hidden door, this one covered with crude obscuring runes. When Typhoeus ripped through it and shrugged off the primitive booby-trap he found Kalle’s gold. The sheer quantity of glittering metal piled in front of him was large enough to make Typhoeus’s eyes water and his mind rheel with one poignant question.

“Just how many people did Erebus want to buy?” he wondered out loud.

The room glowed gold in the torch-light reflected off of the minted ingots. Small bars of the precious metal, each one no larger than a thumb, filled the discreet chamber, piled haphazardly atop one another in almost flowing mounds of material wealth. Gold talents hailing from numerous nations, each one featuring the likenesses of their respective rulers: Epherian Emperors, Lintumian Mages, Tolisian, Stenian, Aberian and Terythian Kings all stared back at them from within the vault. Kalle’s hidden fortune stirred Typhoeus’s draconic instincts exciting his hunger and his lust as he drooled at the sight of gold in quantities that neither he nor Arilla had ever expected to see in a remote village like Cawic.

“I don’t know…” Arilla trailed off. “This is considerably more than what we found in the Traylan vault.”

“I know. Kalle must have been skimming off the top for years, or…” Typhoeus began.

“Or Erebus wants a fuck load of people,” Arilla finished.

“Yes, hopefully it’s the former so we can keep more of it,” he said, wiping the drool from his chin with the back of his hand.

“And if not?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we arrive in Doomhold.”

“Doomhold?”

“Erebus renamed the city.” Typhoeus explained with a shrug. “I know it's a bit…”

“Gauche?” Arilla offered, surprising him with her expanded vocabulary.

“Yes. Apparently it’s because he intends to hold off our collective doom there, but...” he trailed off again, lost in the pull of the yellow and ruby gold.

“That isn’t foreboding at all,” Arilla commented. “So what now?”

“We show the gold to Tonisim and persuade him to let us return it to Doomhold to bring an end to the attacks. Rinton and his students are waiting at their camp for us. So we’ll head north with them and with a little luck, we’ll actually manage to get some sleep travelling in such large numbers.”

“Great. Is there any hurry?” she asked with an interesting look in her eyes.

“Not really. I mean, we can’t stay too long. A necromantic ritual on the scale we witnessed will certainly prompt investigation from someone in Rhelea, and I may have used a little too much magic putting them all down to escape a particularly observant mage’s notice. But even a steel rank should take more than a few days to head this far north.”

“Good, because scented soap and a bath in a hot-springs sounds pretty nice to me right about now,” Arilla stated, prompting Typhoeus to smile.

“I do love a good bath…” the dragon agreed.

The hot springs were everything that had been promised to them and more. Fed from a natural mana vein, it gave the water energising qualities that not only warmed the baths but served to refill Typhoeus’s mana pool just a little bit faster. It also provided a pleasantly tingling sensation that he found to be quite agreeable. The scented soap was quite nice too, probably not worth the lives of all the villagers who had been lost in Cawic’s month-long defence, but his pores certainly appreciated the exfoliating action. They were a bit overly floral for his tastes; Typhoeus much preferred the smell of spices to flowers, but the prospect of changing his and Arilla’s usual scent to something other than old blood and stale sweat was a worthwhile trade.

They had the entire women’s section of the baths to themselves. The facilities, which they had been told were normally quite popular with the locals, were entirely vacant. Even Old Horatio, who was known to be as warm and friendly as his temperature-controlling aura barely gave them a nod of greeting before he politely ushered them in. Their involvement in exposing Kalle’s treason had shaken the small village to its core. The few villagers they had seen on their way to the baths had all conspicuously avoided their eye contact, Cawic’s residents struggling to comprehend the scale of their Steward's betrayal. Their incomprehension was further exacerbated by the mounds of gold that were being slowly removed from the tunnels beneath the inn and piled high into a large wagon under Tonisim’s watchful eye. The vehicle had already been runically reinforced by Typhoeus, just so that it could handle the weight of the valuable metal that was to be returned to the Dragon Erebus. 

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The women’s baths had a capacity of more than twenty, dating back to Cawic’s old glory days, and the two of them had plenty of space to stretch out amongst the hot water where thick steam slowly rose up off the surface and into the frigid air. Typhoeus was by far the most physically relaxed he had ever been. The pleasant sensation of the contrasting hot and cold on his skin was only marred by the knowledge that the extravagant facilities would soon be in terminal decline without Doomhold’s wealth to prop the village up.

“Why can’t all of our sprees of violence end with a nice warm bath?” Typhoeus asked wistfully as he floated on his back in the open-aired pool. 

“I don’t know, but I’m sure if we stick to urban conflicts we can probably arrange something,” Arilla wrily commented, before pausing as an uncomfortable look appeared on the warrior’s freckled face.

“I’m sure Rhelea is fine. You shouldn’t worry about it so much. What we're doing here is far more important.”

“Bathing?”

“Finding out why the Great Wards are failing,” he retorted.

“And what if we can’t stop it? What if it’s like the slums? Another problem we can’t kill our way out of?” she asked, seeming genuinely worried. Her round cheeks flushed pink with the warmth from the baths acted together to make her seem even more sincere.

“...We could run,” he suggested after a long pause, his heart hammering in his throat as he did everything in his power to try to remain calm and collected.

“What?” she replied, sounding disbelieving, as if she doubted what she had just heard.

He turned to face her, not out of need—his skills made eye-contact amongst so many other things irrelevant—but because it was polite and because he was desperate for her to take his suggestion seriously. He looked past her athletic beauty, his eyes barely lingering on her body as she reclined against the side of the bath. The gentle swell of her breasts high and firm above her toned stomach stirred feelings in him that had no place in this critical moment. He righted his own body in the warm water and stared across into the hazel eyes of the woman, who despite everything, he knew that he still loved.

“If we can’t stop it, which in all likelihood we can’t, I want you to run away with me,” he stated clearly, taking his time to steady his nerves and himself, to better ensure that he wasn’t misheard.

“No.”

Her refusal nearly crushed him, even if he wasn’t surprised by it. It wasn’t the first time that Arilla had rejected his advances, and he had thought himself mentally prepared for another dismissal, but he was wrong. The weight of her rejection fell on his slender shoulders and caused him to slump beneath the shallow water even as he was buoyed up to the surface by the shape of his feminine body.

“Fighting the Monsters as we are is madness. We would certainly die. We should stay out of it and let the higher ranked creatures like Erebus fight them. Without us,” he continued, trying again to persuade her to live.

“And what about the people of Rhelea? Terythia? Astresia? All those ‘lesser species’ you like to talk about, will any of these higher ranked dragons lift a finger to help them?”

“Dragons don’t have fingers—” he began.

“Typh,” she warned. 

“Fine,” he acquiesced. “Probably not, but humanity will survive in some shape or another. The Elves will see to that at least. There’s no point dying with the rest of humanity on principle, not when we could be together.”

She looked almost angry at that.

“Typh. I’ve told you before, I don’t want to be with you, and I especially don’t want to run away while human civilisation ends,” she said firmly, before softening slightly as she saw the hurt on his face. “Listen, I’m not completely blind to our connection or what you’ve done for me. You’re my patron dragon and I... I think that I can accept that. We can be friends, isn’t that enough?”

“No,” he said emphatically, “How could it ever be enough when we were so good together?”

“We weren’t good together. You lied to my face every second of every day.”

“I lied because I didn’t want to lose you! I—”

“Don’t say it, Typh!”

“I love you!” he declared, hoping that those three words would make some kind of difference.

“You don’t love me,” she said dismissively. “You don’t lie to the people you love.”

“I was scared,” he explained, suddenly feeling so very vulnerable. He wished that he had his clothes to pull tight around his body, as if cottons and silks could somehow protect him from this very specific fear.

“Goblinshit. You lied to me because it’s what you do. You lie about who you are to everyone you meet, including yourself.”

“I don’t lie to myself,” he said defensively.

“Really? Because from my perspective it's all you do,” she said, leaning forwards in the water.

“I don’t know what you're talking about,” he lied, ignoring the uncomfortable knot of fear in his stomach as she got perilously close to asking the one question she had avoided since learning his secret.

“Really? You made that body of yours with a skill. You sculpted every inch of it to your liking, right?”

“Yes…”

“So why did you choose to become a human? A horse or a dog would have worked out just as well, if not better, if you only wanted to hide from adventurers.”

“I have my pride,” he said, choosing to be obtuse, he was well aware of what she was getting at. While humans may have been the most numerous choice, they weren’t the only one, if he had chosen a ratling, a kobold, or something else for his [Alternate Form] he wouldn’t even have had to hide what he was.

“And why a human woman? I haven’t forgotten that your draconic form is male. I don’t believe for a fucking second that you couldn’t have made a perfectly good man’s body to match if you wanted to,” she said, confronting the lie that he had been telling himself for years now.

“...Creating bodies is hard. Human art simply has far more representations of nude women than it does men,” he began, desperate to avoid saying the truth. Hating that the lie that he had chosen to respond with sounded so weak and shallow, even to his own ears. “It was just far easier to make this body with the reference material I had available.”

“Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?” Arilla asked flatly, causing him to look down beneath the water and blush out of embarrassment. “I’m not trying to be mean. There’s no shame in your choice to look and act the way you do, but it is a choice, stop trying to justify your decision to live as a woman as a simple accident brought about by your own ignorance. You chose this,” she pointed, her finger trailing from his wide hips to his large breasts with no hint of sensuality in her blunt appraisal.

“You’re smart, Typh, and you’ve said that you spent years working on your body. I don’t believe you when you sit there pretending not to love the way you look: from the clothes that you wear, to the way that you swing your hips when you walk and how you choose to style your hair. You love it, and if you didn’t then you’d just change it!” Arilla finished.

“...I—I’m a dragon; I’m not supposed to enjoy being a human,” he hesitantly admitted, surprising himself by actually vocalising his hidden shame. “I don’t know what wanting to be this way means.”

“Does it have to mean anything?” she asked.

“I don’t understand, it obviously has to mean something.” 

“Does it? You’re a fucking shapeshifting Dragon! You don’t have any family to disappoint, or any rules that you have to follow. You’re not going to harm anyone by being true to yourself, so who gives a shit what anyone else thinks? If you decide that being Typh feels right, then who cares. Just stop lying to me about who you are.”

“So I don’t have to choose?”

“Only if you want to, just be honest with yourself and the people that you are trying to date, then maybe, just maybe, you might someday find someone who can look past the very long list of heroes you killed and subsequently ate.”

“Arilla...”

“What?”

“Thank you,” he said, meaning it.

“It’s nothing Typh, just basic human decency is all,” she said before pushing herself off from the side of the bath to the middle where she began floating on her back in the warm water where she stared up at the sky.

“What’s that?” he asked, joining her on his back in the centre of the pool. Seeing the sky inviting him up above, and for the first time in a long while feeling no need to fly through it and clear his head.

“Something rarer than it should be,” Arilla answered wistfully.

“Huh,” he commented. Trying to enjoy the water as he floated.

Typh or Typhoeus, was it even a choice?

Maybe he could be both.

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