Chapter 6: DD2 Chapter 000 – Prologue

Xan looked across the narrow table at the woman facing her and struggled to suppress her smile. It was a rare occasion that she got the opportunity to talk to someone who wasn’t terrified merely by being in the same room as her, and as unprofessional as it was, she was enjoying the company.

The interrogation chamber on loan to her was small and claustrophobic. The austere furnishings and the pervading scent of old blood made it impossible to ignore the room’s singular function of extracting information from the unwilling. A small part of her regretted that the more gruesome implements of her trade were not on show. Their presence always served to give her words that little bit of added emphasis and she was unused to conducting interrogations without it, but then she had to remind herself that this ‘interrogation’ was supposed to be a polite formality. The woman sitting opposite her was not someone she could afford to nail down to her table no matter how much she wanted to, at least, not without causing an even bigger storm back in the capital.

“Tell me again," Xan asked, the joy in her eyes not making its way down to her impassive face as she carefully studied the adventurer’s response to her request.

“I’ve already told you three times,” Mara said, the healer's frown deepening as she grew visibly more frustrated. The high-level adventurer was clearly unused to being on the backfoot for quite so long and as much as Xan may have sympathised with her, the woman's frustration suited her needs perfectly as she had come to learn over the decades that frustrated people simply made more mistakes.

“Then you won’t have trouble with a fourth time, will you?" she asked politely, her lips barely twitching upwards into a small, almost imperceptible smile as a flash of anger appeared on the healer's tanned face before it was quickly suppressed.

“Inquisitor Xanthia, surely your valuable time would be better spent pursuing other lines of inquiry,” Mara said, trying diplomacy again. It was a passable effort, but the woman gave herself away by subtly grinding her teeth before speaking.

“Please, call me Xan, and indulge me, Mara. I would like to hear it one more time."

“Fine, but as I’ve already told you three times, there isn’t much to tell. I saw Azoth for scarcely more than a few minutes before we parted and yes, while we did arrange to meet up again, I was to contact him by messenger with the details later," Mara explained, her story unchanged if a little bit briefer the fourth time around.

“And you had no further contact after this point?” Xan asked, tenting her fingers in front of her.

“Of course not, he disappeared that very same night—”

“—Died," Xan interrupted, silently relishing the look of shock that wiped the smug look of annoyed condescension from Mara’s face.

“I’m sorry?” the healer asked, her voice breaking slightly as she registered the new information.

“Azoth is dead. He died on the top floor of the Moonlit Rose on the same day as your meeting. The owners covered it up as the assassin left no body to dispose of and they didn’t want to take the hit to their business," Xan continued, taking no small amount of pleasure from the woman's discomfort.

“...I see,” Mara said, recovering swiftly. The speed at which she got over her shock elicited no surprise from Xan, who knew all too well that death and destruction were the bread and butter of every adventurer. “If there was no body, how do they know that he died? Azoth was iron rank and triple classed. Perhaps there was some kind of mistaken identity?" she asked, her hopefulness sounded painfully genuine to Xan’s perceptive ears.

“Let me stop you there. Azoth is dead. He was a regular known to the brothel and its staff. Two of whom witnessed his quite gruesome death. Now I want you to tell me everything about your meeting. Including the bit you left out.”

“...She wanted to know about the stables,” Mara confessed, sounding defeated.

“The Royal Alchemist’s Stables?”

“Yes.”

“And this would be this Typh girl you brought with you?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t question how an unclassed commoner already knew about one of our kingdom's most secure facilities?”

“It’s not like that; Enora brought it up in front of her. Typh is an innocent. Just another traumatised girl who very understandably hates dragons.”

“Because of her condition when you found her in the dragon's lair?”

“As I told you before, yes.”

“Can you expand on that?” Xan asked, as she watched Mara carefully for any signs of further deception. A few of her skills quietly thrummed away in the back of her mind to help Xan impose her will on the proud woman.

“When we found her she was sobbing naked on the cave floor covered in blood and viscera. I couldn’t see the true extent of her injuries as I healed her before we cleaned her off, but I assume they were severe based on how much mana the spell I used drained my reserves.” Mara explained.

“And you didn’t find that suspicious? I know you walked away from your family's title, but as a highborn woman you are still privy to certain... secrets, about the true nature of Creation.”

“Of course I was suspicious. I tested her myself; I observed her under daylight, I watched her eat untainted food and handle silver cutlery. I put holy water in her beer and made her cross running water not once but three times. My party mocked me for it, but I am certain that she is just a normal traumatised girl.”

“Then how do you account for the mana cost? The unclassed aren’t supposed to be that hard to fix.”

“They’re not, but she had been sculpted, extensively so. If I had to guess, whoever did it made mistakes that were slowly killing her, as they certainly made mistakes with her proportions. Added to that, dragons aren’t known for treating their captives well.”

“Dragons that young aren’t known for taking captives at all.”

“...No they’re not, but the Stunted Dragon isn’t normal is it. Maybe it was already under the influence of the Dragonrider?” Mara said with a shrug.

“Did you see any evidence of it being in contact with a human other than Typh when you entered its cave?”

“No, aside from the pieces of dead adventurers it was just her. She claimed to have been its captive for over a year and didn’t mention anything about the dragon receiving visitors.”

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“A year you say…” Xan repeated, her mind racing as she thought through the implications that were obvious to them both.

“Inquisitor Xanthia, I assure you, she is just a normal traumatised girl,” Mara insisted, oddly invested in a girl she had admitted to barely knowing. That certainly piqued Xan’s curiosity. Everything she knew about Mara suggested that she was hopelessly in love with her teammate, Caeber, a man who had made no real efforts to hide his affections for other men.

So why did Mara care so much? Could it be Typh’s charisma score? Reports on the mageling's stat-distributions were wildly conflicting, something that Xan had attributed to exaggerated tales from Typh’s growing legend.

Dragonwife, Leech, Immolator, Dragonrider.

Not the most flattering of titles, but well-known ones especially for someone so new to her class, even if the last was demonstrably false. What Xan wouldn’t give for a peek at her status.

“Just a normal traumatised girl who hasn’t been seen since or heard from since before the attack on the Traylan estate,” Xan deadpanned.

“She hasn’t? ...I—I had hoped that she would have lived longer,” Mara said, letting out a low sigh that seemed to almost deflate the proud woman. “She was a bright spark, but I suppose mage classes have a very high mortality rate, even worse for the self-taught… What?”

“It’s nothing, it’s just this perfectly ‘normal traumatised girl's’ adventuring partner has managed to make it to level 37 in under half a year, which either makes her the greatest talent in a millenium or something else is going on. She’s wisely keeping her head down from the Guild, but that level gain had to come from somewhere.”

“And what? You think she got it from killing Azoth?”

“Initially yes, but the timelines don’t match. Those levels came from somewhere and I think that whoever power levelled her did the same for Typh.”

“So why are you telling me this?” Mara asked, finally getting around to the meat of the matter.

“Because I need your help,” Xan admitted. “I want to find this Typh girl because I think she knows who the Dragonrider is and I do not believe that she’s as dead as everyone seems so keen to believe.”

Mara hesitated, the woman mentally wringing her hands as she debated complying with the Xan’s demands, but for all of the social training that the woman had undergone in her youth, that youth was a long, long time ago, and those carefully honed instincts had dulled with age.

She was like putty in Xan’s hands.

“What do you want me to do?” Mara asked, finally saying the words that Xan always knew she would.

Xan’s impassive face faltered the moment Mara left the room. Adventurers, they made her sick. How a noble from a dynasty as prestigious as Mara’s could have walked away from her responsibilities to play at being a hero was part of a worrying trend that like so many of her other problems stemmed from the century-old clusterfuck that was Rhelea. If she had her way the entire city would have been put to the sword decades ago, but nobody ever asked Xan to prevent problems from growing, no, she was only ever called out long after the shit had piled up high enough to drown a man.

She supposed that this was the life she had chosen for herself when she had agreed to take her position within the Inquisition, forsaking family, marriage and even the eventual possibility of children in service of something greater than herself. Her father had said that she would grow bored within a decade and come to regret her decision, but it had been over a century now and she still had no doubts. The child that she never had was the peace that existed between Terythia and everything else—human or otherwise—her work the culmination of several lifetimes' worth of secret dealings and clandestine missions.

She was Inquisitor Xanthia Karatos and it was her sacred duty to ferret out the monsters that could play at being human, to sniff out treason, insurrection and espionage—all with a frighteningly small staff, especially considering the seriousness of her duties. All too often it fell to her to put a stop to the increasingly regular revolts where the peasants' eternal rage against their highborn betters threatened to boil over. It was an all-consuming job, that at times felt like it had swallowed her whole, but she still loved it.

Most of the time, that is. Rhelea, as the locals were so keen to say, was different. Here she would have her work cut out for her.

The King had predictably finally seen reason and returned the city, for that's what it was now officially, over to the Traylans. A decision that may have been a little too hasty or far too late, as the current patriarch was seemingly blaming the inadequacies of the city's adventuring community for his son's admittedly quite dramatic death. The already antagonistic relationship between liege lord and unbound classers was one that threatened to tear the city apart as he searched high and low for the elusive Dragonrider. The one human who had done the impossible and tamed a dragon before they even hit bronze rank.

If that was the extent of her problems then she wouldn’t be quite so worried, but she also had the Royal Alchemists Guild breathing down her neck. Surprisingly, not for the unavenged death of one of their own, or even the capture of the elusive sovereign dragon, but over a severed hand found beside the young lord Galen’s corpse.

The alchemists wanted to know exactly where it had come from and more importantly how they could get a hold of more of the apparently odd flesh. Their early experiments had purportedly yielded results so impressive that even the Queen had gotten involved and dispatched a squadron of her Alchemic Knights to ‘aid’ Xan in her inquisitorial duties, but she knew her politics well enough to know that those twisted creatures the Queen called knights were the blunt end of her worryingly desperate diplomacy.

Then there was the ratling army, which had razed a noble's stronghold down to its very foundations within an afternoon before essentially disappearing in a puff of smoke. A force at least four thousand strong and unprecedentedly well-armed and armoured that was still in the wind.

There was Epheria, the old bogeyman in the west that gave kings and queens across Astresia nightmares. Word had it that the empire had found religion again in a big way and while the Terythian church was busy tearing itself in half trying to decide whether or not to declare the Epherian Angel an arch-heretic or the promised messiah, spies from all corners of the map were reporting the mass conscription and levelling of the classless into new soldiers as priests shouted from their pulpits that the end times were finally upon us.

The worst thing was, they might be right. As winter took hold of the continent, most monsters typically went dormant, ready to emerge again with the spring thaws. But across the board from every town and city, reports of dire beasts and grotesque monstrosities attacking were higher than ever before and if Epheria truly was preparing to march for war against Terythia, then learning the secret behind the mysterious Dragonrider might be the only thing that could save the country. And at the centre of it all was a missing mageling, a human girl who was the kingdom's best chance at finding out how the Stunted Dragon was tamed. Her initial arrival in Rhelea seemingly the first in a long chain of increasingly dire events.

As Inquisitor Xanthia held her head in her hands, she couldn’t help the words from escaping.

“Where are you, Typh, and what secrets are you hiding?”

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