Dream - 26 (Patreon)

Sam sat on the dirt floor of the poorly thatched hut, squinting to read the poor handwriting of the tome open on his lap.  Outside, the hooting and gibbering of goblins was barely audible over the sound of drums as the tribe finished its workday.  Soon, the town would devolve into an orgy of feasting on what food was available followed by mating.

The first time he’d seen a pair of goblins wrestling around in the muck, each trying to pin the other while slipping their loincloths off, Samazzar had been aghast.  Now?  He just made sure to give the pairs and trios of green figures a wide berth as they went about their business.

One time he hadn’t moved fast enough and a goblin had tried to pull him into the fray resulting in a deeply embarrassing situation.  Sam had won the fight.  He was bigger and had more experience wrestling and fighting unarmed due to his training with Dussok, but that wasn’t even the problem.

As soon as he pinned the two goblins, they had stopped squirming, instead looking up at him plaintively.  When he had tried to walk away, they had hooted at him angrily, summoning an entire crowd of the angry green figures that had promptly marched him before Grolm.

The Chief had laughed, a booming sound that made their massive gut jiggle as they rocked back and forth.  Apparently the issue wasn’t that Samazzar had fought back and won, that was an important part of the mating ritual afterward.  His error had been to not follow through on that victory.

Much to Sam’s distress, Grolm had ripped off their loincloth then and there revealing both male and female genitalia.  He shuddered, thinking back to how the big laughing goblin had explained that their entire race was hermaphroditic.  That mating was a ritualistic battle for dominance with the loser bearing the children of the winner.  Supposedly the process ensured that the strongest and fittest of goblins reproduced the most, but for Samazzar, all it did was turn his stomach.

Walking away had broken that order, and apparently the two goblins he’d triumphed over were upset that he hadn’t mated with them after their scuffle.  Grolm had shooed them away, telling the tribe to leave the three kobolds alone, an order that for the most part the goblins had obeyed.

Still, the meeting hadn’t been all negative.  The Chief had questioned him about his work, and Sam had mentioned that he was trying to work out an alternate recipe for elixirs based upon the materials the goblins had available to them.

That had piqued the big goblin’s interest.  Suddenly, they were all business questioning Samazzar over the ingredients and laboratory acces he would need to actually need in order to produce the elixirs.

Grimmhold had been eminently unhappy to learn that their carefully hoarded alchemical equipment was to be shared with Sam, but as soon as the Chief mentioned the elixirs, the shaman fallen into line.

That led to where Sam was right now.  Flipping one of the brittle and yellowed pages of the book as he read more about natural toxins and their effect upon living beings.  It was a fascinating study really.  Many of the raw materials that he’d learned about under his tutelage with Crone Tazzaera had alternate usages,

The Crone’s books had simply told him not to do certain things, that some materials needed to be tempered or treated before being ingested.  Grimmhold’s library took that a step further.  They provided exhaustive details about how a savvy alchemist could weaponize those materials, turning something beneficial into a weapon that could kill hundreds.

Perhaps the most interesting element was the synthesis of the two schools of knowledge.  At lower levels, the body could benefit from the safe and easy energies unlocked by beginning alchemists, but before long it wasn’t nearly enough.  If a compound was safe, it simply didn’t pack enough force to truly alter the physiology of a powerful target.  At the same time, many of the more potent toxins could be mixed with reagents to amplify their effects.

As best Sam could tell, it was a matter of balancing the right poison with a corresponding alchemical ingredient.  Usually, a person’s body would naturally fight all outside effects, but if carefully selected and measured, a select toxin would weaken the body’s defenses, allowing it to fully absorb the chemical potential of the positive ingredient.

That was the secret to more powerful potions and elixirs.  Knowing just enough about the body’s workings to keep the user on the brink, poison breaking their body down while the other ingredients put them back together faster and stronger.  All of that chaos, the constant creative destruction took a toll on a body meaning the final part of the mix was medicine.  Elixir’s needed just enough healing ingredients mixed in to keep the recipient alive.

His claw tapped down on the page, just below an entry for flowering snakeroot.  Sam licked his muzzle, lips moving slightly as he took notes of the poison effects on the heart and circulatory system.

“Little dragon!” Dussok shouted from outside the shack, leaning against a staff about half again his height with a shield strapped to the top.  “It’s feeding time, and you know how the scale hounds get when we’re even fifteen minutes late.”

Samazzar glanced up.  Reaching for the leaf he used as a bookmark only to stop.  He grinned down at the entry on flowering snakeroot and very carefully put the leaf between another two pages, an entry on black river mud, before closing the book and returning it to Grimmshold’s squat desk before running out of the hut.

Dussok grunted, leaning down to pick up a large wooden bucket with his right arm.  The tub sloshed, The offal and viscera from whatever livestock the goblins had slaughtered for the night’s festivities slopping over the side.

Sam sighed, accepting the bucket from his sibling before following the other kobold to the grid of logs that kept the scale hounds from running wild in the camp.  Takkla stood nearby, tossing a small sack from claw to claw.  She broke into a smile as they approached before calling out to them.

“Hurry up boys, Snappy, Chompy and Bitey are getting impatient.”

“I still can’t believe Chief Grolm let you name his scale hounds that,” Dussok remarked with a shake of his head.   “The names just don’t fit a trio of heavily armored killing machines strong enough to rip a goblin’s arm off through full armor.”

“They didn’t have names before so the Chief didn’t mind,” Takkla replied with a shrug.  “Plus, I think they like having the names.  It calms them down a little for me to address them directly.”

“It probably does,” Sam agreed.  “Scale hounds actually have a draconic bloodline too.  They’re a lot smarter than they look.  Not quite as bright as a goblin, but much smarter than any normal wolf.  I just think that Chief Grolm has driven these three mad by prodding them with sticks and forcing them to fight enemy tribes during territory wars.”

“Just throw the sedatives Takkla,” Dussok grunted, walking around the smaller kobold as he prepped his staff.  “We want the Snappy triplets as sleepy as possible before Samazzar jumps in there to change out their food.”

“Don’t worry about it, Dussok,” Sam said with a quick grin.  “I know what I’m doing and I trust you to keep them off of me while I fill their slop trough.”

“That’s the sort of attitude that’s going to cost you the tip of your tail, little dragon,” his larger sibling replied, both of them watching Takkla as she tossed and caught the satchel in her claws once before whipping it through a hole in the scale hounds’ enclosure.  “You need to be more careful Samazzar.  The hounds are bigger and faster than you.  Arrogance about their capabilities can only come back to hurt you.”

Inside the dog pit, a flurry of barking and yelping drowned out the rest of the conversation.  Sam leaned over the edge, jerking himself back just in time as Snappy threw himself against the log he had been standing next to, shaking the entire wooden cage.

A wolf head, almost as big as Takkla, shoved itself through the gap.  Warm dry air wooshed over Samazzar’s scales as it snapped at him, curling lines of sparks and flame trialing from its nostrils.  The creature slipped slightly, its paws losing some of their grip on the mud walls of the scale hound enclosure as it glared at Sam from a pair of beady red eyes set in its thick, greyish black scales.

“I think Bitey needs a second dose,” Samazzar remarked, taking a step back from the growling scale hound.  “As much as I hate to admit when Dussok is right, he seems a bit too lively.  Another round of my special blend should set things right.”

“That’s Snappy,” Takkla corrected him, putting a small capsule into the soft leather bed of a sling.  She gave it one quick twirl before releasing the projectile.

Sam closed his eyes, feeling the sling bullet push the air past him, creating a low pressure tunnel behind it that good air flowed into.  It cracked against the hound’s face, releasing a cloud of white dust.

Almost immediately, the creature’s glare lost focus.  Its gaze became distant as the drugs did their work, clouding the wolf’s senses and inflicting an almost insurmountable lethargy on the animal.

Its paws slipped, losing their hold in the loose mud of the pit’s wall.  Samazzar felt it fall, its body displacing good air and creating a billowing wall of wind as it splashed to the floor.  He was so close to another level in both current and pressure that he could taste it.

Unfortunately, without a mentor Sam had no way of knowing whether he understood the mysteries enough to advance.  He probably did.  The past month of captivity hadn’t terribly slowed his research.  In between his duties as an alchemist for the tribe, Samazzar made sure to take time on one of the village’s towers, contemplating the hawks and sparrows that flew by as he sought to understand how the mysteries that powered them truly worked.

Ultimately, at this point he would just have to experiment.  There wasn’t any way for Samazzar to know if he was ready for the next level without going through a baptism, which simply meant that he’d have to plan out a baptism.

Sam turned to Dussok, giving the kobold a thumbs up before picking up the bucket full of meat scraps in both claws.  Dussok simply grunted in reply, shoving his pole through the gap in the logs.

Taking a deep breath, Samazzar ran two steps before jumping into the pit.  He landed barely a second later, eyes stinging from the fine mist of airborne sedatives unleashed by Takkla’s first throw.

He spun and struggled through the ankle deep mud toward the hounds’ food trough.  The stone groove was empty, licked clean from the previous day’s feeding by the ravenous monsters.

Behind him, one of the hounds growled and took a hesitant step toward Sam’s back.  He ignored it, trusting Dussok to ram the animal back with his pole.  Instead, Samazzar quickly emptied the heavy bucket into the communal food tray before slipping it over his right shoulder and leaping at the pit’s wall.

It was muddier than usual, a recent rain leaving the pit’s walls slick and slimy.  Sam simply grunted, focusing on the latent magic in his bloodline.  His claws itched, sharpening themselves to a razor edge.

Below him, he heard a muffled thump as one of the huge dogs tried to leap for him only to run into Dussok’s pole.  Normally, stopping the scale hounds would be all but impossible.  The creatures were strong, fast, and vicious, but the dust he’d supplied Takkla with did the trick.

Samazzar clambered up the side of the chamber.  Each of his claws easily carved handholds from the mud, letting him almost run up the slimy dirt wall.  Just as he made it out of the pit, Sam winced at the tell-tale snap of wood from below.

Still holding his breath, he set down the pail and stepped away from the edge.  A moment later, his body heat swelled outwards, cooking what remained of the sedative off of his scales and rendering the substance inert.

Finally, Sam took a deep breath, savoring the foul air of the goblin encampment.  Dussok approached him, mournfully looking at the shattered remnants of his pole before speaking.

“We need a new poking stick.  Chompy managed to get its jaws on this one while you were making your escape and shattered it like kindling.”

“That shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”  Sam stretched, rubbing his neck and shoulders as he tried to quiet their complaints after the sudden strain he’d put his muscles through.  “I can just trade some strength powder to a goblin and they’d be happy to bring us another.”

Dussok paused, chewing on his lower lip for a minute as he thought something over before he finally responded.

“You know little dragon, this hardly even feels like captivity.  I suppose technically our job feeding the hounds is dangerous, but after the first week you turned it into a routine.”

“Even the food is better here than at home,” Takkla chimed in, walking up to the two of them.  “Honestly?  You’re really the only person taking risks.  Dussok and I mostly just sit around all day.  Every once in a while we help out with the pig herd, but in reality we have more free time here than we did back in the caves.”

“I told you not to worry too much about it,” Samazzar replied with a wink.  “Chief Grolm only had a couple of goblins that had made it to the first level before I arrived.  It was just too expensive to trade the human merchants for elixirs.  Now, with my help, he has over a dozen.  The next time he fights the Shattered Rock Orcs for territory, the goblins might even be able to hold their own.”

“I think that the Chief would adopt me as their son if I weren’t a kobold,” Sam continued proudly.  “I’m really learning a lot from reading Grimmshold’s texts on poisons.  Before long, I should be able to dramatically lower the casualty rate of the elixirs.  Maybe then Chief Grolm will get over my scales and fully accept me.”

“About that,” Dussok interjected wryly.  “I’m not exactly sure that Grimmshold is happy with you having access to all of their hard work like that.  In fact, I’m sure that I’ve heard the shaman grumbling about how your ‘elixirs’ aren’t much different than their poisons.  After all, something like two thirds of the goblins that take them end up dying.  That’s hardly a positive rate of success.”

“Eh,” Sam replied with a disinterested shrug.  “Grimmshold is about as cranky as the scale hounds.  As for the goblins that die taking my elixirs?  There are plenty more where they came from.  I’m working on improving the effectiveness of the compound.  I’ve had to substitute out some of the ingredients that Crone Tazzaera used, and there have been growing pains in finding the replacements, but I haven’t had any shortage of volunteers.  If a goblin wants to risk their life in order to start gaining levels, I’m hardly going to stop them.

“About Crone Tazzaera,” Takkla began, a frown creasing her delicate features.  “Do you think she’s-”

“There is nothing we can do for her right now,” Sam cut her off, shaking his head decisively.  “That said, we’ve already been here for almost two months.  The plan isn’t to rot away forever in the Greentoe encampment.”

“The good news,” he continued, “is that Grimmshold has amassed a fairly large storeroom of alchemical ingredients.  I’ve already managed to identify what we’ll need for the coming days.”

“A healing potion for Tazzaera.”  Samazzar put up one claw as he began ticking items off of a mental list.  “Tempering solutions for the three of us, and the specially treated and prepared items we’ll need for our baptisms.”

Proudly, he displayed the three raised claws to his siblings, a jubilant grin on his muzzle.

Dussok raised a single eyebrow at Samazzar before looking past him and taking in the huge swath of dilapidated shacks, churned stinking mud, and rutting goblins that made up the Greentoe village.

“As much as I don’t like being forced to stay here,” the big kobold said wearily, “I’m not sure I like the idea of trying to grab some of the most valuable items in the entire tribe and run.  Chief Grolm wouldn’t even hesitate to release the scale hounds on us, and they would catch the three of us in a matter of hours.  As much as we’ve grown, I have no illusions that we would be able to defeat creatures of their caliber.  We would be red smears on their jaws by the time the rest of the goblins caught up to the hounds.”

“I told you not to worry so much.”  Sam winked at his brother.  “It’s all part of the plan.  The Greentoes might’ve taken us captive, but we’re only going to come out of this bigger and stronger.  Trust me Dussok.  It’s all under control.”