Chapter 74: DD3 Chapter 20 – Demands

The Old Road was covered in a thick layer of black that crunched loudly beneath Arilla’s heel. Drifts of still-warm ash fell from the sky like snowflakes and where they landed, they stained everything they touched in shades of grey. From the wounded struggling to their feet, to the vibrant red of Arilla’s enamelled armour, everything was covered by the falling cinders. The scent of the dead and the dying were carried along by the mid-morning breeze—a perversely appetising stench of burnt flesh and cooked fats that the warrior tried her best to ignore. 

Cries of anguish and rage sounded out in the distance and more locally too, vastly outnumbering those few wails that were filled with pain. This was not to say that there weren’t many wounded amongst the army’s survivors—for there certainly were—but Arilla had come to learn over the past year that those suffering from truly serious injuries rarely had the energy left for high-pitched screams or agonised howls. 

Real wounds made you silent and so the warrior walked alone down the scorched stone of the Old Road in an eerily quiet that was only punctuated by the repetitive sound of crushing ash and distant, heartfelt anger. 

With every passing moment, Arilla could feel the weight of her guilt bearing down on her like a physical thing. On all sides were scenes of human suffering so extreme in their depictions that it felt like the exaggerated horrors from her nightmares. Except for this time, there would be no waking up when the accusing stares found her and demanded retribution. Looking around at those cradling the remains of their dead friends and comrades, Arilla was confronted with the inescapable fact that like Helion's flourishing Southbank, she was responsible for this too.

How she wished she could pinch herself and wake up. Instead, she soldiered on. Her strides remained confident and her gaze unflinching. Agonised self-pitying wouldn’t undo what she’d done and it certainly wouldn’t help anyone who’d weathered the brunt of Typh’s golden flames. 

Arilla hardened her heart and kept moving, swiftly stepping over the half-melted body of a man who raised a searching hand up towards her. How he’d noticed her approach with that ruin for a face she'd never know, but his career as a soldier was over unless he received the kind of healing that pewter ranks were rarely given. Considering that the low ranked and recently classed would have undoubtedly made up the vast majority of the casualties, he was lucky to be alive. Although not lucky enough to be left in a condition where he could stand, let alone walk back to the nearest city.

Like the smell and the sounds, Arilla tried not to think about what would happen to him when she was done.

She travelled for another minute through the wreckage she had wrought before she was stopped. In that time she’d witnessed another dozen or so human tragedies and each one had threatened to melt her fraying resolve. When the interruption finally came she was grateful for it. 

A solitary arrow glanced off her runeplate, drawing a noticeable amount of mana from her reserves. She stopped where she stood and waited, [Slayer’s Sight] made it all too easy to observe the ranger’s hurried approach.

“That was rude,” the warrior eventually declared.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put my entire quiver through you, Dragonrider,” the ranger spat.

The hush that had fallen when the arrow struck her chest, immediately exploded into frenzied whispers when the word ‘Dragonrider’ was uttered. The searching eyes of the wounded who had puzzled over her presence twisted into something hateful, but above all that, Arilla could see their fear. 

She took a moment, noting that the injured all around her were slowly climbing to their feet and looking about for their discarded weapons. In the distance, haphazard lines of shell-shocked soldiers hurried into a ragged formation while an unsaddled horse trailing smoke sprinted away from the Old Roads and into the lush green lands that surrounded the magical structure.

The Noble Slayer forced a smile onto her lips, and channelling a confidence from her class that she didn’t feel, she made her demand.

“Because I’m here to accept your surrender.”

***

It had only been a matter of minutes since the attack had ended. The road was still warm from the dragon’s breath, and several lingering fires had yet to go out. The brilliant gold that clung to discarded equipment contrasted sharply with the omnipresent black and grey. In the end, the ranger had shot her again, but when her second arrow bounced off Arilla’s helmet and the warrior declined to escalate matters further, she eventually consented to fetch her superiors.

It was an uncomfortably long wait. The accusatory stares only grew more intense as more soldiers arrived long before any of the nobles who were in charge of the shattered army. There was an immense pressure to wilt before all that fear and hate, but Arilla had a part to play and she could not afford to bend.

The time for being a hero had unfortunately passed. In hindsight, it was gone long before Typh had massacred this army. The moment the King had died and they were forced from the palace was probably when it turned. The reason why the Queen’s propaganda was so brutally effective in turning people against them, was because in part it was true. No matter her justifications, she had brought war to Terythia, brought monstrous creatures into the ancient heart of the country. 

It was all for the greater good, but having walked over the powdered remains of those she’d sacrificed for it, those words sounded as hollow as they felt.

Arilla had done evil things and her sins could never be erased by a larger amount of good. 

Trying to cling to a paper-thin veneer of heroism whilst surrounded by her victims would at best make her look like a hypocrite and almost certainly get her killed. Playing the uncaring villain would save lives; theirs, hers, and possibly hundreds of thousands more depending on how far Typh was really willing to go.

Arilla stood tall. She met the accusing stares, removed her helmet and smiled back at them—she was almost surprised when they flinched.

I’m sorry.

It took at least ten minutes before the first noble appeared. Covered in ash and with an arm in a hastily made sling, the nobleman looked like any other member of the walking wounded. It was only his noble tag and his iron rank guards that set him apart from the mass of burnt soldiers.

He shot them a disgruntled look and they backed away.

“Why are you here, Dragonrider?” the nobleman asked. Arilla frowned, trying to place who he was from the long list of portraits she’d seen, but those tastefully painted oils had all shown regal men and women with confident expressions, dripping in finery. The haggard man before her with a tired, angry scowl looked nothing like them and she assumed that when the other thirteen arrived she’d be faced with a similar problem.

“Which Noble Lord, in particular, am I talking to?” the Noble Slayer inquired.

“You have the pleasure of addressing Lord Anicius of Mantioclos,” the man replied through gritted teeth and Arilla blinked. That made him the Queen’s uncle and the current patriarch sitting over the most important border city they had with Epheria. She had not expected him to make the journey south personally and his presence… complicated things to say the least. “Now, answer my question before I tire of this.”

“No. Not yet, we’ll talk when the other thirteen arrive,” Arilla said.

“Then you’ll be waiting a long time. Lord Kurkuas of Nezeze is dead, so too is Lady Athenais of Saridus. I believe four more of our number are currently being seen too by healers and I do not know when they’ll be done,” Lord Anicius stated stiffly.

“Half-healed or not, summon them and someone who can speak for the dead. Time is short.”

“You dare to give commands? You who have approached an army alone having just mauled it?”

“I’d say I did more than just “maul” it, but yes I dare. Now be quick and fetch your noble kin.”

An angry expression crossed Lord Ancius’s face, and his guards tightened their grip on their weapons. The tension rose dramatically until it broke and the nobleman barked off a string of orders which sent a nearby messenger running.

“This had better be good, Dragonrider. They say that you survived being tortured for a hundred days and a hundred nights to earn your dragon’s love. I will see that boast tested if this is anything less than a waste of my time,” Lord Ancius threatened.

“I don’t know about good… but I’m not wasting anyone’s time,” she said, unsure how she felt about that particular rumour.

The noble grunted and then in dribs and drabs over the next fifteen minutes thirteen more noblemen and their escorts arrived. While Arilla struggled to identify them all, she knew enough to recognise that several were far too young to be anything other than replacements for those who were either too dead or too injured to stand posturing in the middle of the road. 

Like Lord Ancius who had arrived before them, each noble and their entourage came bearing furious looks. Several decided to complement their obvious hostility with threats and demands that Arilla hand herself over to be summarily executed after lengthy and extravagant tortures. 

She did not find it hard to decline.

“I’m here to accept your complete and unconditional surrender. By my count, you have a little over an hour left to accept,” Arilla declared and the response was predictably uproarious.

The hostile looks that had only been growing in intensity since their arrival erupted with drawn blades and even more shouts to take her head. This continued for a while with various nobles competing with one another to yell the most outlandish method of execution they intended to perform on Arilla. 

Crucially, not one of them took a single step forwards to implement their threats. Honestly, she was flattered by their restraint. She had levelled more than once from Typh’s attack, the ignored notifications blinking away in the corner of her vision attested to that, but she was still high bronze and amongst the fourteen gathered nobles there was at least twice that in iron rank knights, warriors and mages. Whether it was her reputation or simply their noble manners that kept their threats from becoming a reality she didn’t know, but it helped her remain calm while they exhausted themselves with their verbal onslaught.

Eventually, Lord Ancius grew tired of the unproductive yelling and hushed his peers. 

“Explain yourself. Why would we surrender to you—an isolated woman who’d make an extremely valuable hostage—when we still have forty thousand fighting men to hand. We have suffered a setback, I will concede that, but this war is far from over.”

Arilla knew that forty thousand was a gross overestimate. Ordinarily, it would be a realistic-sounding number to have escaped a fairly brutal massacre, but Typh’s assault was of an entirely different scale to a normal massacre. If Arilla hadn’t been watching from Typh’s back as the dragon had killed, then the warrior might have believed it, but with her airborne vantage, she probably had a better idea of the true number of survivors than Ancius did. 

If more than one in twenty walked away from this with a sword in hand she’d be very surprised.

“Which one of you is Lord Basilius of Eurionkon?” Arilla asked. 

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“I am, now what does this have to do with me?” Lord Basilius responded.

“In a little over an hour, Typh will fly over Eurionkon. The first thing she will do when she reaches the city is to dive down from behind cloud cover and destroy what passes for your palace—presumably, this is where your family resides. Once she’s satisfied that every mana focusing ward has been rendered nonfunctional—a task she will accomplish by reducing the building to its foundations—she will strafe along the inner perimeter of the city’s walls repeating the process. Once any lingering resistance is stamped out, Typh will then spend the rest of the afternoon leisurely destroying what remains of the city from the sky,” the warrior explained.

No one said a word. Instead of denials that it couldn’t be done, there was silence. The dramatic fall of Traylra to Erebus a century ago was a relatively recent event in Terythia’s thousand-year history. Every noble would have been briefed on the dangers of angering a dragon, and it was finally hitting home that that was exactly what they had done. Somewhere in all the carefully worded missives and peaceful declarations, they had forgotten that Typh was more than just a figurehead, she was a dragon and today they had all felt her wrath. It was such a shame that so many people had to die for them to remember.

Lord Basilius’s face had gone several shades paler since she began her explanation, and it wasn’t from the falling ash. Everywhere he looked was a physical example of exactly what would befall Eurionkon if he didn’t concede and Arilla didn’t need her class’s whispers in her ear to know that the noble was suitably terrified by the prospect.

“Lord Basilius won't bow to threats of such wanton slaughter. His family serves at the pleasure of Her Majesty, Queen Constancia! Surrendering to your demands would be tantamount to treason,” Lord Ancius spoke.

“Yes it would, but don’t speak for Lord Basilius, he has his own people to think about,” Arilla said.

“You can recall the dragon from range?” Lord Basilius asked.

“I can tell her to spare Eurionkon. Then she’ll fly directly to Naucra… Speaking of which, which one of you is Lady Iulia?” the warrior asked and a stern woman towards the back of the pack froze. Arilla smiled. “Think carefully, My Lady. Typh can make the flight from Eurionkon to Naucra in less than three hours if she’s taking her time.”

The discontented murmurs that had started with Lord Ancius’s protest stopped and suddenly everyone knew why Arilla was confident enough to risk her life with this confrontation. The warrior watched the implications of her words sink in, saw the anger turn to fear and then finally resignation. Like any good villain, Arilla recognised that look as her time to monologue. 

“You have all made the mistake of confusing Typh’s mercy for weakness. Helion still stands and its former Queen still breathes because we aim to take the palace with minimal loss of life. It is the very heart of our nation and it is from there that the dragon intends to rule. It wouldn’t send the right message to have to rebuild it from scratch.”

“You are all governors of Terythia’s northwestern cities. Fourteen in total and while each one is strategically important, not one is particularly essential to this nation. You are not important enough to warrant that same level of restraint. Had you simply stayed in your cities we wouldn’t be having such a blunt conversation, but you took your strength from your walls, marched it south and now it's gone.”

“Typh is a peak-iron sovereign dragon. I understand that Terythia has hundreds of iron ranks, and dozens of steels, but how many of them can fly? How many can spit fire in a cone that can melt stone whilst soaring faster than a horse can sprint from hundreds of feet in the sky? Were your walls fully manned then it wouldn’t be worth the risk, but you took two-hundred thousand fighting men away from your territories! Are you confident enough that the classers you left behind can repulse her when you all failed so abysmally? What are you personally willing to risk on that misguided belief that she can be stopped? Because if it is anything less than everything, then I implore you to kneel on the ground and give me your surrender.”

Time passed while they thought, but considering the weight of their choice, not much time passed at all.

“What exactly are your terms?” Lord Basilius asked to quiet cries of condemnation from his peers.

“Largely the same as they are currently; your line will retain control of your current lands in perpetuity. You will pay a yearly tithe to Helion and recognise Typh and her heirs as your Lord Sovereign. Sapient nonhumans that decide to visit your territory are to be welcomed as full-fledged citizens of Terythia and hunting them down is to be treated the same as murder. Classes are to be made available to all at no cost and without restriction. And finally, the mana focusing wards that run through your territories are to be immediately dismantled and the construction of new ones is to be made punishable by death.”

“That’s all?” Lord Basilius asked and Arilla couldn’t tell if he was relieved or incredulous.

“You’ll have to take the oath, but yes. That’s it,” she confirmed.

“To the dragon?” he asked, his nose wrinkling.

“To the dragon.”

Arilla reached into her pack and produced a large bundle of cloth which she roughly unfurled over the ash-covered ground. Dozens of banners in a myriad of colours depicting bestial representations and clan marks were stitched together into a single long tapestry. At one end it featured the flags of Rhelea and Helion, and at the other, a solid gold statuette of a snarling dragon.

The calm that had fallen with Lord Basilius’s apparent submission shattered as fresh cries of uproar emerged from the gathered nobles. The reality of the human flags being cast down in the ash, below the obviously goblin and ratling banners did something to aggravate the nobles’ wounded pride. Arilla herself didn’t care about flags—they were just dyed cloth—but perhaps this had been one insult too many.

There was another long round of protests that ended abruptly when Arilla reminded them that an entire hour had very nearly passed, and just like that Lord Basilius was the first on his knees before Lord Arilla Foundling, the Noble Slayer, the Dragonrider, the Dragon’s Consort and a half-dozen other titles too wordy or offensive to bother listing.

With anger in his voice and tears in his eyes, he made the oath. Said the necessary words to tie his Noble class to that of another, except when it came time to kiss the statuette and seal the deal, the nobleman moved his lips to kiss Arilla’s boot instead.

“No,” she said, already feeling the nascent tether of power connecting his class to hers.

“Yes, Your Grace,” he said with a grim smile. “Better a foundling than a dragon. Terythia is a human nation and it deserves a human sovereign to look over its people.”

“This isn’t what we agreed.”

“It’s close enough, Your Grace,” Lord Basilius shrugged. “Will you really consign my people to death because I’d rather swear my allegiance to you? Say what you will about our northern obstinance, but we have read your missives. You two claim to be equals—partners in all things. Surely the dragon will tolerate you having a measure of your own power.”

“I refuse to accept your oath,” Arilla said hastily.

“Then my people will die, and it will be your fault. I will not swear over the futures of the citizens I am meant to protect to a man-eating dragon. I simply won't do it.”

Arilla looked down at the man kneeling before her in the ash. She ignored the noble tag, the paltry level and saw the man. There was a resolute glint in his eyes and whether it was a noble skill affecting his bearing or something else entirely, she believed with certainty that he could not be dissuaded.

“Arise, Lord Basilius. I recognise you as my governor and your line as noble. Long may Eurionkon flourish under your care.” 

She didn’t know where the words came from, but they felt about as right as the situation felt wrong. Arilla didn’t need to look at the other nobles to know that they each bore the same resolute look of determination.

One by one, in the order of Typh’s proposed flight, they got down on their knees in the ash and swore. Each one pledged to follow her line, and every time a kiss was planted on her boots, Arilla felt a new tether of power add itself to her warrior class while the Noble Slayer within her chest screamed in frustrated torment as it tried to shake loose its new bonds.

When it was done, instead of a ceremony she ordered them to pack up and march north back to their homes. They obeyed, worse, with the fledgling connections between her class and theirs she knew that they’d go. They were hardly loyal, likely to abandon their oaths at the first sign of weakness, but Arilla had no plans of ever being considered weak.

She stood there in silence while they retreated into the column and she retreated into herself. Nearby soldiers gathered the wounded and packed up in preparation to march once again. Not all the nobles fled her presence, some stayed to watch their new liege. It was one of them who broke Arilla’s contemplative silence. 

“If I may ask, Your Grace, why do you look so glum? By all rights today is a triumph for you. In a single swoop, you’ve claimed over a third of the cities in all of Terythia.” Lady Iulia asked. 

Arilla sighed.

“Because the northeast marched their soldiers south as well… Now I have to go claim them in a single swoop,” the Noble Slayer said.

“Oh…” Lady Iulia answered, a look of sadness replacing her previously stern expression. “In that case, Your Grace, let me congratulate you on your imminent victory. I can’t imagine that they’ll put up much more of a fight than we did.”

“No, I can’t imagine that they will.”

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