A Tyrant, Sort Of

Aylin watched the subsequent fights with as much fascination as the first. Maybe she couldn’t make full sense of them, but they were a wonder regardless. Shadows of her future, assuming she didn’t screw up and get kicked out of Lady Sable’s service.

Gritzn guided the group through the mist-filled halls of the dungeon, seeking out Quil and her missing team. With a divination mage to aid them, they made quick progress, turning here and there, descending when appropriate, and likely bee-lining for the missing party of adventurers—or whatever would give them a clue as to what happened.

Banr, Rukni, and Vex were showing signs of exhaustion by the time they arrived. They were stronger than Quil and her group, but not by an excessive amount, and so clearing this dungeon posed difficulty for them, even boosted by Sable’s empowering spells. The Labyrinth of Lost Echoes was no walk in the park, even for the strongest of Skatikk’s heroes.

Entering a new room, and finding the clear target they’d been seeking from the start, the group went quiet.

The carnage was clear. More even than the fights earlier in the dungeon, the room had been torn up in whatever brawl had happened here. More than that, it looked less like the destructive powers seen from the Labyrinth’s monsters, and more like two teams of powerful classed fighting each other. That had been Skatikk’s leading theory as to what had happened to Quil and her team, and even Aylin’s untrained eye could tell it must be true.

She grimaced as something caught her attention. She hadn’t been the first to see it. Rukni, the rogue of the group, nudged a severed arm with her boot, looking down at the limb with a raised eyebrow.

“Hope that wasn’t one of ours,” she said dryly.

Banr and Vex seemed less humorous about the situation, and they gave the goblin woman a vaguely disapproving look. Aylin didn’t fault Rukni for the morbid humor. Some people couldn’t help but make jokes in this kind of situation. People handled battlefield viscera differently.

Gritzn crouched down next to the arm, digging out her notebook and pen. She didn’t seem too perturbed at the gore, though neither did she look fully comfortable around it, either. She was no warrior class, as the others here.

“If nothing else,” Gritzn said, “it will serve as a potent catalyst for my skills. It makes this easier.”

Which was a grim sort of optimism, and it drew a snort from Rukni.

The team went about scouting the rest of the room as Gritzn leveraged her class to find answers, but besides lots of blood, structural damage, and the severed arm, there weren’t many clues. There’d been a fight between classed, but anything more than that, Aylin couldn’t discern.

When they’d scoured the space, everyone turned to Gritzn, who was still scribbling away, chewing her lip as she consulted with whatever mystic powers guided her class. She didn’t seem to be a mage in the traditional sense, or at least not from what Aylin had seen. She had cast no glowing spell circles like Aylin had seen from Lady Sable and the Wither Witch. Perhaps the woman was capable of it, but for this event, she used only her skills and class-given instincts. Or so Aylin surmised.

“Yes,” Gritzn eventually said. “They were defeated by a party of Nightshades. They’ve been taken. But there’s something I don’t understand.”

Receiving the group’s confused looks, Gritzn said, “There was an orc here.”

That made everyone pause.

“An orc?” Banr asked. “What? Working with the Nightshades?”

“No,” Gritzn said. “It seems he fought for Quil’s party.”

“Huh?” All three of Skatikk’s heroes seemed bewildered by that.

Gritzn shrugged. “My powers aren’t perfectly reliable. But to suggest something so odd, with such recent and potent evidence? I think it’s accurate. An orc was here. I’m fairly confident he fought with Quil. That’s all I can say.”

The group chewed over this, and Vex said, “Doesn’t change anything, I guess.”

“No,” Banr said. “The mission is the same.” He turned to Gritzn. “They’re alive, then?”

“Four of them are,” Gritzn said. “One died. But I don’t know who.”

That, obviously, brought silence to the group. Nobody seemed surprised, but that didn’t mean it was good news there’d been casualties.

“One isn’t so bad,” Rukni said. “Four alive. About the best we could expect from something like this.”

Vex shot the dagger-wielding woman an annoyed look, but Rukni shrugged in reply. Aylin could tell the woman had a fatalistic view on the world, both from her earlier jokes and now this. Aylin could see Banr and Vex agreed with what she’d said, but they thought stating it outright was too blunt. That Quil’s entire team had died had been a distinct possibility; only one fatality really wasn’t ‘so bad’.

“They were captured, then,” Banr asked Gritzn. “Where were they taken?”

“To Bragghaven, I believe,” she replied. “They’re imprisoned, already. This happened some days ago.”

The team of adventurers grimaced as one. “Already at Bragghaven,” Banr said. “So we’re too late.”

Through the events of the dungeon, Aylin had been feeding the happenings to her Lady Sable. She had mostly listened in a passive manner, not replying. Now, she chose to chime in. In Aylin’s mind, she heard a dragon snort.

Aylin relayed her words, feeling her own dry sense of amusement. “Not much we can do?” Aylin asked. “Lady Sable takes offense at that.”

The three classed goblins looked at her, blinking. Aylin suspected they’d mostly forgotten they had a dragon on standby.

“Right,” Rukni said, a grin splitting her face. “We can’t charge an enemy city for a prison break. But a dragon? Maybe rip open the roof and give us a few minutes to find them? No problem.”

“The three of us can’t handle an entire city of classed,” Banr said, a concerned expression on his face, “but if they’re not prepared, and we search the space quickly, we can be in and out before they mount a meaningful response. It won’t be ‘no problem’,” he said, shooting a reproachful look at Rukni, “but possible.”

“Prison break, then,” Vex agreed.

[And the slightest bit of terrorizing a populace,] Sable said. Aylin could tell by her tone that it was addressed toward her, idly commentary, and not meant to be relayed to the rest of the group. [I think it’s time I let my name spread to other tribes. So they’re prepared for their eventual surrender.]

As always, Lady Sable considered the event from a utilitarian approach. It was, while not as terrifying as a dragon willing to rampage through cities at the slightest offense, still enough to send a shiver down Aylin’s spine. Strategic dragons. This world didn’t stand a chance.

“But handling escape, assuming we find them,” Banr said. “All of us, and five more?”

“Four more,” Rukni corrected.

He grimaced at that. “Four more,” he agreed. He turned to Aylin. “Lady Sable can carry us all?”

He obviously didn’t mean from a weight issue, but a logistics perspective. Sable had already had her hands full lugging five goblins and a stone golem to the dungeon. Four more would be rather ridiculous.

Still, she hardly couldn’t. “Just have to be creative,” Aylin said. “Hold on to each other, I guess.”

“Then let’s get a move on,” Banr said. “We’ve found what we needed. And I don’t want Quil and her team stuck in enemy territory any longer than necessary.” He grimaced, considering what might be happening to her. Aylin didn’t know how the northern tribes handled prisoners of war, but she doubted they were living in luxury.

They spent a few more minutes going over the scene of the fight, but found no new information. Soon, they backtracked their progress through the dungeon, headed for the surface. They faced minimal resistance. The dungeon didn’t restock itself that quickly, though one or two stragglers did pose some threat—you weren’t ever fully safe in the dungeon. And some traps only activated when moving in reverse, so the three veteran adventurers made sure to scour the floor, walls, and ceiling with as much diligence as the first time through.

Not more than twenty or twenty five minutes later, they’d climbed back to the surface. Lady Sable was there, waiting for them, seeming impatient. Aylin knew she’d been practicing spellcasting while they ventured through the depths, so she hadn’t been truly bored—but waiting on a group of goblins likely grated her nerves, more patient than a typical dragon or not.

After a quick battle-plan discussion, Sable lifted the group into the air and took off. Their destination: the city of Bragghaven, situated near the border of Bonecracker and Nightshade territory.

A prison break. Not how Aylin had expected the day to go, setting off for war council discussions. But that was life as a dragon’s minion, she supposed. Always something new.

To be honest, it sounded kind of fun.