Chapter 35: DD2 Chapter 029 – Condemmed

The secrets Typh had sold to the Inquisition only bought her three short days before they inevitably betrayed her. On the one hand it was more than a little insulting that the arcane treatises she had jotted down in her scrawled handwriting were worth so little to the humans. The foundational underpinnings behind long-distance scrying and lighter than air architecture were all contained in the collection of notes she had handed over plain as day for any competent mage to see. And on the other hand, she was surprised that they had waited so long to fuck her over. The arcane theories she conveyed, while invaluable, would likely take humanity many years to fully understand, let alone begin practical experimentation.

She had been momentarily worried that she might have to give them something more immediately dangerous, but while the rate at which she had burned through the goodwill of her captors was far faster than she anticipated, so too was the speed at which the humans rioting within Rhelea killed one another. She had no idea of the scale of the casualties involved in the conflict, the unknown quality of the wards that focused mana inwards made it impossible to accurately estimate, but given the thickness of the energy in the air, the dead had to number in the thousands.

Typh was nervous. 

She had done everything she could think of to prepare. Her communications with Tamlin had been overly detailed if anything, right up until they cut out abruptly when she was transferred to her new cell. Over the final three days of her captivity in the Inquisition’s care, she had passed more than enough messages back and forth via undead messenger pigeon. As much as she hated to leave things to chance, the boy had enough information to work with. 

For an apprentice she had only shared a handful of scant conversations with, the child’s dedication to her was astounding, or maybe it wasn’t. In light of their disparate charisma scores, wasn’t it only natural for the young necromancer to entertain a fascination with her that bordered on the obsessive? The dragon supposed that was a problem to worry about later. Tamlin would have to learn to better guard his mind against such things before she could begin to teach him properly. Assuming of course they both survived what was coming.

From her new cell that overlooked the market square, she could see the wooden scaffolding that prominently featured a large executioner's block being constructed. The fires that burned for over a week had finally stopped spreading, and the heady cloud of ambient mana had plateaued while town criers announced on every street corner throughout Rhelea that Typh the Dragon’s Wife was in fact the Stunted Dragon all along.

How she would love to walk the streets and taverns of the city now, to see what the people thought of that revelation. As a non-human her sapience was explicitly heretical, a statement that conflicted directly with thousands of years of the church’s dogma. She strongly doubted that the announcements would have gone ahead without the local chapter deciding to try and ritually sacrifice hundreds of children under one Priest’s deranged orders. But it had, and now heresy was being talked about openly on the streets as a means to lull the populace back into compliance.

That and to lure out Arilla, but the warrior had her own orders to follow.

Her new cell was far less comfortable than the old; it had none of the luxuries she had grown so quickly accustomed to, and the food left much to be desired. Fortunately, the warding on the walls was grossly inferior and so without even flexing [Sovereign’s Perception], she had the luxury of eavesdropping on the conversations that occurred throughout the entire building and down a significant chunk of the street.

She may not have had her writing materials any longer, but Typh was anything but bored. The things that scullery maids got up to when left unsupervised would make an adventurer blush.

“Whatever it is that you’re planning, it isn't going to work,” Lord Traylan said, glaring at her from the other side the thick iron bars that separated them.

“I’m not planning anything,” she lied.

“Of course you are, but rather than listen to you deny it, I thought we could have an honest conversation before I kill you,” the nobleman offered.

“You're going to do it? Isn’t there usually an executioner for these sorts of things?”

“Ordinarily yes, but when the person to be executed is of a sufficiently high-level it is customary for the lord of the land to either do it themselves, or to auction off the rights of the killing stroke to their loyal subjects.”

“And I take it you’re all out of those,” Typh said, alluding to the chaos that had until recently occurred just outside of her cell’s arrow slit windows. 

A flicker of anger made its way across Lord Traylan’s face before he swiftly calmed himself. She would have liked to have said that the old noble made suppressing his rage look easy and practiced, for that would make what was to come next far easier, but it didn’t. The human was regrettably cracking under the strain, that or his courtly manners were never that good to begin with.

“I didn’t come here for this,” the old man sighed.

“You didn’t? Because here I was thinking you wanted to gloat,” the dragon replied.

“Well, I don't. I just want to know why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you kill my son?”

Typh looked at the noble—landed, unlike her, although if dungeons counted then maybe she was the larger land owner of the two of them—who sat opposite her. Him, leaning forwards in his finery, desperate to hear her words, while she reclined in her heavy shackles atop an uncomfortable mattress dressed only in a ragged shift that reeked of despair. Like all of her interactions there was an uneven balance of power between them, but she would argue that despite her chains it slanted heavily in her favour. 

The lines around Lord Traylan’s eyes were so much deeper than they should have been for a man of his age and vitality. His clothes, while fine, were clearly disheveled; a shirt button missing its hole, a recently stained jacket, and a sword belt hung two notches too low for an easy withdrawal. She didn’t need to smell him to know that he had already given up, that he was desperate for her to give him something, some profound meaning to his son’s ultimately meaningless death.

While she fully intended to give the man a purpose again, in this at least she would have to disappoint.

“Galen died because he wouldn’t take no for an answer when he invited me to his bed and things… escalated from there,” Typh answered honestly.

“That’s it?”

“Does there have to be more? Consent is important. Empires have fallen for less.”

“For a woman refusing the advances of a man?” he said, shaking his head dismissively. “There has to be more! Some kind of a plot amongst your kind! There has to be a reason why Traylra fell! Why your species keeps coming after my line!”

“Your son overreached. Had I been weaker or Galen stronger then sure, he would have gotten away with it. I think we both know that the power structures in Rhelea were never going to side with a fledgling adventurer over their Lord’s son. But I was far stronger than him, and he was too stupid to take my very generous warning seriously.” 

“But…” the old noble’s face fell as he trailed off. “There has to be a reason why my family has suffered so much. Dragons don't just descend from the Dragonspines, they stay at the peaks, yet my family has been the victim of the only two attacks in the past century!”

“Bad luck I guess,” she shrugged. “Maybe you should have spent your coin petitioning your King for land further to the east?”

“Insolent woman!” the noble raged, and she knew he would have struck her if not for the bars that separated them both. “Are you mocking me?! You?!”

“I may be a woman, Lord Traylan, but do not make the mistake of forgetting what I am.”

“You’re nothing, but a dragon—”

“A Sovereign Dragon,” Typh said. “Your kind is so ignorant of what that means. You think the name only extends so far as to ensure that my scales are pretty, and that they are worth more to your alchemists than of any other dragon, but you don’t understand what our role is in Creation.”

“Before this week I didn’t know that dragons could speak. I still wouldn’t believe it if an Inquisitor hadn’t confirmed it.”

“Your father spoke to Erebus—the shadow dragon who stole your birthright—right up until his death. Maybe you should have paid more attention to what was going on around the palace when you were younger?”

“That can’t be true! There’s nothing of that sort in my fathers journals. Nothing to suggest Erebus wasn’t human!”

“Pffft humans... I will never understand how you entrust so much to written records. They are so demonstrably fallible.”

“We do well enough for ourselves. We caught you, didn’t we.”

“Congratulations, you caught a malformed cripple left to die on your doorstep after half a decade of trying,” she snorted. “Your civilization must be thriving.”

“I have no desire to further discuss the state of humanity with a beast like you,” Lord Traylan said standing up from his chair. “The knowledge that when I kill you, there will be one less monster within my walls dragging me down will have to be enough.”

“Regardless of whether or not you actually succeed in killing me, mark my words: these walls will fall by the evening,” she said listlessly.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“If by some miracle you survive what is coming, please try to remember that I’d be willing to put all of this behind us going forwards.”

“Forwards to what?”

“To war, obviously.”

***

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As the sun approached its zenith, Typh was slowly led out from her cell and down the stairs to the market square where a braying crowd was waiting for her. Lured in by the promise of a public execution to unironically signify an end to the violence, the people of Rhelea were in a bloodthirsty mood. The scent of smoke on the horizon and the rich mana in the air did a lot to agitate the citizenry who had already experienced so much needless death over the past nine-days. 

Light snow fell from the sky, and Typh felt the chill of the weather through her rags even if she could power through it. From the moment she stepped outside of the townhouse that had served as her prison, rocks were thrown in her direction, along with vegetables, and insults as she was marched through the jeering crowd towards the tall scaffolding. Most of what flew through the air seemed to be aimed at the Traylan soldiers who escorted her, a clear sign as any that tensions were still running high between the Lord and his people. 

The wooden stairs that led up to the scaffolding creaked ominously as she climbed them, each step taking her closer to the headsman's block. There, atop the stage, Lord Traylan, steel ranked adventures along with knights from his household, the Inquisition and the Queen’s Alchemic Guard all waited for her. Typh sensed the apprehension in the mixture of bronze and pewter soldiers who escorted her, their presence more for show than anything else, as it was the high-level classers standing in waiting along with the runic collar against her throat that were supposed to stop her from running.

She didn’t struggle, for the humans were not what were causing her stomach to tie itself in knots. With her back straight and her head held high she approached up to the irregular block of stone that sat front and centre of the scaffolding’s wide stage. A deep groove had been smoothly carved out of the dark granite, a convenient place for her to rest her neck, along with numerous channels presumably for her blood to drain away into. Typh couldn’t stop herself from smirking when she saw the Alchemists Guild’s sigil stamped prominently on each of the buckets that were located beneath where the channels fed into. 

Everyone wanted a piece of her it seemed.

Typh surveyed the crowd gathered and saw the faces of the humans who had come to watch her die. So many people were packed into such a tight space that they could barely move, let alone run, not with the soldiers corralling them and barricades still in place from the previous riots.

Oh how she wished she could warn them. 

She had touched a lot of lives in her short time in Rhelea, and in many ways this was her final goodbye. She saw Lowry, the guard who had once tried to deny her entry to the city standing shoulder to shoulder with an injured seamstress, Madame Vanje, the woman who had once offered her help and clothes. She saw Ames, the unclassed waiter, now a Tamer of all things, who had given her sound advice and fueled her nascent love of whisky. A secretary from the guild she had cheated stood in the tall shadow of Clerk Gautier. Alchemists whose lives she had spared, a bard whose jaw she hadn’t, so many different people all with their own stories to tell.

Maybe in her next life she would be better at making plans, and those stories might get a happier ending.

Sighing, she searched the tall rooftops that overlooked the square and saw the pigeon with green fires instead of eyes. 

Not yet.

“On your knees, dragon.”

There was venom in his voice, and Lord Traylan scarcely gave her the time to lower herself to the executioner's block before a household knight to his side kicked the back of her knees and she landed roughly on the scaffolding.

The crowd flinched as she broke her fall with her hands. Brown skin scraped against the rough stone of the block and a sharp collective inhalation at the unanticipated sight escaped from the audience. Dragon or not, the visual of a high-iron knight’s armoured boot meeting her unprotected flesh was not a pretty one, but if Lord Traylan noticed, he didn’t seem to care. The furious noble was far too busy glaring intently at the back of her skull to notice anything besides how her curls swayed in the gentle breeze.

Someone cleared their throat, Inquisitor Xanthia perhaps, and the patriarch and sole surviving member of the Traylan dynasty remembered himself. He tore his hateful gaze away from her, and stepped forward to address the crowd.

“My loyal subjects! For too long the death of my son has gone unavenged,” he announced, a rune at his collar glowing bright as his voice was amplified with the power of magecraft. “The true culprit, the Dragonslayer, still hides amongst us, but their identity has finally been revealed, and their capture is now just a matter of time! Arilla Foundling is a traitor to humanity and a murderer of countless men. She has lain in sin with this beast that you see before you. A vicious dragon clothed in the pleasing flesh of the humans that it eats!”

“Together they led an army of monsters against my family's estate and killed hundreds of soldiers along with my son. I will not pretend that the search for them has been easy, or without bloodshed. Too many lives have been lost over the past nine days, but it is over now. Arilla Foundling will be hunted down and killed. Once she joins the Stunted Dragon that has plagued this land for years, we will build Rhelea back better than before!”

Lord Traylan finished his speech and raised his arms high in the air with an almost dramatic flourish. Typh could feel a skill powered by his charisma flow out from him, but like a wave breaking against a rock, where it passed her it fragmented, and only a broken fractured aura washed out over the crowd. From the look of disdain that flashed from his eyes to hers, he no doubt noticed how her aura, tightly bound as it was, trumped his.

And then the crowd booed.

In all of his haste to arrange for Typh’s execution, Lord Traylan had made one very important mistake. Once, long ago, the dragon had painstakingly designed her human body for its appealing aesthetics. Everything from the curvature of her hips to the swell of her breasts had been designed to be perfect. She may have pretended for the longest time that she had mistakenly chosen features that—subjective beauty or not—would set men and women's hearts racing, but her visual appeal was profound nonetheless.

Her attempts at passing for human may have left a lot to be desired, but when it came to crafting them, Typh was a master artist. If anything her tendency to lean a little too much into unrealistic proportions only exacerbated the unpalatable image as she knelt there with her big, gold-flecked eyes in front of the headsman's block. She looked like a damsel in distress waiting to be saved right out of a bard’s tale, she could practically feel her charisma score feeding this illusion as her hair waved softly in the wind, and fresh snow melted into her thin rags. 

A dragon that could take on human form was heresy, and while it was also true, the people of Rhelea hadn’t been given nearly enough time to come to believe it. When the crowd saw Lord Traylan, looming over her with a squadron of knights and foreign adventurers, they didn't see their noble lord and his forces standing victorious over a defeated dragon, they saw a tyrant about to behead a beautiful woman known to have spurned the advances of his dead son.

In no time at all a rock was thrown, and then another. The riots that had been temporarily calmed by their Lord’s summons to witness a dragon's execution, started up again all too soon. Maybe if she had looked monstrous and scaled, or if the knight hadn’t kicked her, or if Lord Traylan’s skills hadn’t fizzled out, or if any one of a thousand different ifs and maybes had gone the other way then things might have been different. 

But they weren’t, and within the tight confines of the town square, citizens who had never really trusted their Lord produced the cheap Rhelean steel that had been hidden under their thick winter coats, and a song that demanded noble blood—and not Typh’s—rang out in a multitude of different voices.

Traylan soldiers retaliated while the steel ranks watched in silence, waiting patiently for Arilla to make her appearance. The mana in the air that had plateaued since the announcement of her execution started to rise again, but it was already so high that the change was practically imperceptible. Typh knew it would be soon, there were only four Alchemic Knights on the stage, which meant that the fifth had to be down below, working the ritual likely with the blood of the scholars Xanthia had assigned it to protect.

When she looked for the pigeon, it was gone, and yet as reassuring as that was, it did not dispel her anxiety when nothing appeared to happen. Her fear blossomed as rough hands against her shoulders pressed her neck into the groove of the headsman’s block. Lord Traylan ignored the crowd even as they fought against his men and accepted a heavy looking greatsword layered in dragon-slaying runes.

The fires in the distance that had never quite gone out, suddenly seemed all the closer while her doubts raged within her. Could she have been wrong? Could the Inquisition have somehow intercepted her notes to Tamlin? Was the undead bird even sent from him? Typh looked down at the people fighting their own alleged protectors as the midday bells began to toll, and for a moment the sounds of violence were drowned out with the loud ringing.

No.

It had to be now, without the children to fuel the ritual, the Alchemic Knights or whatever remained of the church’s forces would have to time it perfectly, and with the mana in the air as thick as it was ever going to be, now was the time.

“Any last words, dragon?” Lord Traylan asked, as he raised the greatsword high over Typh’s head.

“Actually, could I request a two minute delay?”

“Why in the gods' names would I do that?” he responded, his eyes narrowing. “Is this part of your plan to escape? It won’t work, not with that collar around your neck.”

“Not my plan, theirs,” she said gesturing with her eyes towards the four Alchemic Knights towards the back of the stage. “Casting spells through all the rock between here and the ritual chamber beneath us is prohibitively mana expensive. It's a safe assumption they aren’t in contact with the one below, so I only need a few seconds to throw them off.”

The Alchemic Knights stiffened, and even Lord Traylan noticed. The noble and so many of the other steel ranks turned to look skeptically at the four whose reaction to Typh’s words was so out of character.

“What is it on about? Why are you reacting like that?” Lord Traylan snapped, while armoured hands smoothly fell to the weapons at their belts.

Before anyone could react any further the Alchemic Knights unsheathed their blades and with the same swiftness that had once cost Typh her hands, buried them in the surprised chests of the Inquisition’s knights in front of them.

The torrent of mana that was released with each steel ranked death made what was wafting up from the rioting crowd in the square below seem like a fine mist compared to a raging river. 

The scaffolding behind her exploded into a frenzy of violence. The Alchemic Knights who were empowered with the blood of Monsters did what they were made to do, and despite being outnumbered they began to kill with a brutal efficiency that put Typh’s best efforts to shame. The clash of steel and screams rose dramatically in volume and the fighting in the market square below stalled out. The participants on both sides backed away in fear as they watched the steel ranks fight on scaffolding that teetered forwards precariously to the sound of splintering wood.

From beneath the ground the mana shifted dramatically. The underground ritual's arcane effect had finally raced up through all that rock where it burst forth and began to move the very air. Wind whipped about violently, and the mana that had been smothering the square like a blanket was sucked in, stealing the very energy that had filled Typh’s lungs as it rushed to concentrate around the focal point of the rituals spell. The violence all around her didn’t stop, but the vital essence released with each and every death trailed upwards where it condensed around a single point no larger than a human fist. 

The ritual that Arilla had stopped days before was finally completed, albeit with the blood of runescribes and scholars who had proved to be an adequate enough replacement for all of those children.

The waiting crowd gasped in awe as the sky cracked, and a scintillating web of rainbow coloured lightning stabbed forth. Lord Traylan’s grip on his sword loosened before the slab of sharpened metal fell from his hands and clattered noisily off of the scaffolding before falling into the mass of people below.

Typh had been expecting this, preparing for it as best she could but as the soulless thing she knew only as a Monster ripped its way into Creation the dragon could only swallow her fear.

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