Dream - 31 (Patreon)

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Race: Saurian

Bloodline Powers: Strength, Rending, Emberbreath
Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 3
Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Good Air 4, Embers 4, Pressure 3, Current/Flow 3

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“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” Sam said, shaking his head at Dussok’s impassive back.  “Everything worked out.  We’ve upgraded our bloodlines, we aren’t slaves, and I have the ingredients we need to cure Tazzaera.  I personally consider my performance a great success.  An absolute triumph if you will.”

Dussok grunted, not turning or acknowledging Samazzar in any way.

“Come on Dussok!”  He called after his sibling.  “We’re almost a week away from the caves.  You can’t spend all of that time being mad at me over a slight misunderstanding.  Can you imagine how boring things will get if you give me the silent treatment for days at a time.”

The big saurian whipped around, glaring at Sam.  Dussok closed his eyes, nostrils flaring as he took a trio of deep breaths, all the while clenching and unclenching his fists.  When Dussok opened them again he responded through clenched teeth.

“Do you know how awful the diseases that goblin inflicted on us were?  I thought I was dying Samazzar, and all I could think about was Takkla suffering the same fate, just out of reach.”

“I killed him and cured you?”  Sam said hopefully, cocking his head slightly to the side.  “I’m sure it was awful, but I don’t know what else I could have done, especially because I thought Grimmshold was in the pit with the rest of the goblins.  It was an oversight, but I fixed it.”

Before Dussok could reply, Takkla stepped past Samazzar, putting a hand on the bigger saurian’s arm and shaking her head once.  She looked back over her shoulder, her voice apologetic as she replied to Sam.

“Dussok knows that.  He’s just struggling with how helpless he felt.  The big lunk is so used to being the strongest person in any encounter that being laid low by magic did a number on him.  He’ll come around, don’t you worry.”

“Maybe there’s something to that,” Dussok grumbled. He stopped walking, instead turning and offering a hand to Sam.  “Sorry little dragon.  I was letting my emotions get the best of me.  That wasn’t fair to you.”

“That’s fine,” Sam responded, slipping his right hand into Dussok’s grasp before clapping his other hand down on top.  “I didn’t expect Grimmhold to slip away from the feast.  If I had, I wouldn’t have let the two of you off on your own while I went through my fire baptism.  They were a formidable goblin, especially if they had a chance to use their disease magic on you.”

“I’m sure you could have beaten them if you knew they were there,” he continued, voice taking on a conciliatory tone.  “Crone Tazzaera always made a point of warning me that a proper magic user can use magic to defend themselves.  She said that as exciting as it was to toss around fireballs, it doesn’t do you much good with a spear in your gut.  When I fought Grimmshold, that was the difference between us.  You might not have been able to finish off a more powerful adept Dussok, but I’ve seen you fight.  If you had the jump on Grimmshold, you could have snapped his neck before he managed to form a casting.”

“Thank you,” Dussok replied, pumping Samazzar’s fist once.  There was relief in his voice, and from the way the scales relaxed around the corner of his eyes.  Sam didn’t push the issue.  Dussok had his pride, and letting him have an out didn’t cost Samazzar any merits.

Merits.  Sam cocked his head, his scaled brows pushing themselves together pensively.

“Actually,” he began, voice slow and heavy with indecision.  “What do you want to do once we get back to the tribe.  I suspect that they won’t be terribly happy to see us.  Lellassa’s betrayal aside, we aren’t even kobolds anymore.  It’s arguable whether we would belong in the caves were we to return.”

“Lellassa won’t be happy to see us,” Takkla replied.  “The witch was always a slippery one even before she sold us to the goblins.  I don’t see that we had a choice but to work with her, but I’m not inclined to forgive her for what happened.”

“We could take the tribe over,” Dussok said, shrugging as he turned around and continued his walk across the grassy plain.  “Even if Duromak is strong for a kobold, I doubt he would pose a threat to me right now.”

He lifted the black axe they had looted from Grolm’s bed chamber experimentally.  The weapon was only a little smaller than Dussok himself, but the big saurian wielded it with ease, his new muscles bulging as he swished its blade back and forth through the morning air.

The axe blade hummed through the air.  Samazzar had read about enchanted weapons but between Tazzaera and Grimmshold’s respective libraries, he didn’t have the faintest clue how to make them.  All he knew for sure is that a practitioner with the right knowledge could imbue some of their knowledge about a mystery into a specially prepared weapon.

Obviously there were no magic weapons in the kobold tribe.  Sam’s kinsmen had struggled to collect enough iron for spears and simple armor.  Something as rare and valuable as a magical tool would never land in their clutches, and even if it did, a larger tribe like the Greentoes would have simply taken it from them.

Grolm’s axe and Grimmshold’s walking stick were the only two magical items he had ever encountered.  Unfortunately, the walking stick wasn’t that useful, it only seemed to enhance a practitioner’s control over the mystery of rot.  Samazzar felt no connection to the concepts of rot or decay, and to be perfectly honest, he had no desire to forge that connection.  It simply did not resonate with him in the same manner as his current mysteries.

The axe was a different story.  It appeared to be imbued with the mystery of sharpness, meaning that it would rarely if ever need a whetstone.  More importantly, Dussok had experimented with the weapon on one of the goblin hovels before they left the Greentoe village, and the weapon cut through wood like it was made of cheap cloth.  Unless a warrior had imbibed multiple elixirs or acquired enchanted armor of their own, Sam doubted that it would ever need a second cut.

If the axe hit someone, it would cut them.  It opened new vistas for the three of them as even great beasts such as forest wyrms, cliff salamanders and wyverns could be felled by a handful of blows from the magical axe.  Of course, those were all distant concerns, and as much as Samazzar wanted to daydream about bringing down a wyvern, the fact that it was possible now didn’t mean that one of the beasts would hold still long enough for Dussok to actually hit it.

“True,” Takkla responded to Dussok, snapping Sam out of his reverie.  “With the Greentoes gone, the area doesn’t have a leader.  I’m sure the Shattered Rock Orcs will grow upset if there isn’t someone to pay tribute to them.  Maybe we could step into the Greentoe’s role and take charge of the scattered tribes?”

“But that would mean consolidating power,” Dussok replied thoughtfully.  “I can beat Duromak in a fair fight and take control of the tribe, but if we were to purge all of his followers, I’m not sure how strong we would be.  I heard the traders that came to the Greentoe village talking about two other kobold tribes, a dredge warren, and a smaller goblin encampment in the area.  Without Lellassa and Duromak’s inner circle, I doubt we would be able to push the other tribes into following our lead.  Even with our new bodies we are only three beings.  Hardly enough to forge an empire on our own.”

“We aren’t going to strike a compromise with Lellassa or Duromak,” Sam cut in, finality weighing heavily in his voice.  “Even if Tazzaera is perfectly fine when we get back, I am not willing to let them walk away from what they’ve done.  There will be a reckoning when we return, and I see no reason to spare either of them.”

“Duromak I can understand,” Dussok said.  “He was the former chief and the tribe will understand that I have to kill him to consolidate power.  I believe the same thing happened when Duromak unseated the previous chief.  It’s simply the way of things.  If we do something to Lellassa-”

“No,” Sam interrupted, shaking his head violently.  “You don’t understand Dussok.  I don’t care in the slightest whether we take over the tribe and move it up one slot in the hierarchy of the mountain range’s pecking order.  The tribe is mediocrity, a slow death where we live out our days in squalor that we pretend is comfort because we have things slightly better than the miserable wretches, never growing or improving.”

“We are dragons,” he continued, his voice swelling to the point that it startled a pair of nearby birds nesting in the prairie grass, sending them flapping away.  “Dragons do not come to arrangements with someone that wronged them.  They burn their enemies, reducing them to nothing but cherry red cinders.  I will not compromise, I will not forgive, and I will not forget.  Lellassa put the Crone’s life at risk.  Even if she didn’t wrong us, that is enough on its own.”

For almost ten seconds the three of them walked in stunned silence, Takkla and Dussok making eye contact with each other before stealing glances at Samazar as he stalked through the waist high grass.  Finally, Takkla broke the stillness.

“Then why are we going back?  If you hate them so much, why are we wasting time with the Tribe?  We could go anywhere else in the whole world instead.”

“Because we need to save Tazzaera and settle scores,” Samazzar replied, legs pumping mechanically through the grass.  “Once we’ve made sure that she’s all right, the entire tribe can rot for all I care.  They never sought to help or work with us when we were plumbing the deep tunnels for cave rats.  Other than a small clawful of kobolds, they only wanted to exploit us.  Convince us to take grave risks while they sat in their caves burning firemoss, content to let the entire world end around them before they would lift their tails to help.”

“What would we do after that?”  Dussok asked softly.  “I can’t say I’m thrilled by the idea of just never going home again, but I have to say, I am sympathetic to the sentiment.”

“The caves aren’t our home,” Sam replied, shaking his head swiftly.  “The minute that Lellassa kicked us out, we could never go back.  Our time with the Greentoes changed us.  There is a wider world out there, something we really couldn’t see as a bunch of scared pups hiding in the dark from monsters.”

“We’ve taken our first steps toward becoming dragons,” he said, voice quieter.  “I would much rather struggle in the mud, suffering and burdened as I claw my way toward that peak than content myself with being the petty king of a pile of scraps and refuse.  Our magic and bloodlines are only a fraction of where they should be.  If we are to have any hope to reclaim our birthrights, we cannot be tied to the caves.  We will need to have the freedom to roam far and wide, honing our understanding of the mysteries while we gather the alchemical ingredients we need to baptize ourselves and hunting the beast we will need to temper our bloodlines.”

For a moment there was silence, nothing but the sound of the wind rustling through the grass as they marched onward.  Samazzar closed his eyes, tracing the air currents with his mind as they brushed over his scales before escaping into the vast plains that crouched beneath the mountain range that he had called home.

“All right little dragon,” Dussok responded, breaking the silence.

“All right?” Samazzar asked, cocking his head at the other saurian.  The muscles that would ordinarily have flicked his ears flexed, causing the ears on the smooth sides of his head to ripple.

“All right,” Takkla agreed.  “You’ve taken us this far already.  Dussok and I might have our doubts, but months ago we realized that we were inextricably tied to your journey.  Where you go, Dussok and I go.  If you think that taking over the tribe and ruling their caves is a bad idea, we don’t do it.”

“It may seem silly,” she concluded, chuckling quietly, “but when you talk like that little dragon, I actually believe you.  That somehow, you are going to defy the odds and succeed in turning the three of us into dragons.”

Sam smiled back, and the three of them lapsed into an easy silence.  For hours they marched toward the distant mountains, and by the time the sun began to fall, the outer edges of the forest where they were betrayed and sold to the Greentoes became visible.

Dussok tore up a big circle of grass so that they would have space and fuel for a fire pit.  Samazzar lit the twisted together lengths of dry grass with his new breath, and practiced keeping the flames under control with his magic while Takkla roasted the three of them some of untainted pork they’d scavenged from the burning goblin village.

After they finished eating, Takkla let the fire go out.  Dussok and her huddled together on the other side of the fire pit, whispering secrets and inside jokes to each other.  Occasionally, their laughter would interrupt the steady drone of crickets.

He grew bored, fishing the stormcrow’s air bladder out of his pouch.  Grimmhshold had taken it from Sam when the Greentoes captured him, but he suspected that the shaman didn’t even know what to do with the bladder.  When Sam had raided Grimmshold’s supplies on his way out of the village, the air bladder hadn’t been touched, experimented on, or by the looks of things, even moved.

As best he could tell, Grimmshold had taken it from Samazzar simply because they knew that he valued it.  Just another petty slight to further cement the goblin’s legacy.

Sam ran one of his claws over the edge of the bladder.  It had dried out over the intervening months, but he could still sense its magical potential.  He closed his eyes, turning out the outside world in order to focus his magical senses into the organ.

It was a tempest.  A smile stretched itself across Samazzar’s muzzle.  Thin barriers separated the bladder’s chambers from each other, detailing an impossibly complex inner geography for such a small object.  More importantly, the pressure variances between these pockets were some of the most intense Sam had ever seen.

An area the size of his thumb would have so much concentrated good air that it shone in his vision brighter than the water pressure that had ruptured his ears in the deep tunnels.  A scale away, separated by what he could only assume was a valve, was another chamber, this one so devoid of pressure that Sam doubted that any being could survive in it.

Between the two, a current of good air pulsed, once a second like a heartbeat.  The valve only opened for a fraction of a second, but when it did, the most amazing current of air moved between the two segments, concentrated enough that Sam suspected that it could smash rocks.  With every ‘breath’ from the bladder, he felt like he was touching on something greater.  Some truth or mystery that was just out of his reach.

Across the clearing, Takkla stirred, disentangling herself from Dussok’s sleeping form.  He tracked her by the heat of her body, the good air in her lungs, and the current of air around her scales as she walked past the firepit toward where Samazzar sat, cross-legged with the bladder in his hands.

It was strange.  Samazzar didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point his magical sight had eclipsed his eyes.  With just a touch of will, Sam found himself looking at a world that was more vivid and vibrant by an order of magnitude, and more than anything it just left him hungering for something greater.

“Sam,” Takkla said, crouching down next to him.

“Takkla,” he replied, opening his eyes and smiling at her.

“You’re still up,” she remarked, nodding at the air bladder in his hands.  “Fiddling with that thing you pulled out of the stormcrow.”

Samazzar nodded, stroking his finger along the dusty curves of the dried organ.

“I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Takkla continued.  “I know that our time working under the Greentoes was as hard on you as it was Dussok and I.  You just don’t show things the same way that we do.”

“I simply need to get stronger,” Sam replied.  “I know deep down that one day, goblins like the Greentoes will be an afterthought, nothing more than a bad joke, but right now I just don’t have that power.  My bloodline is weak and my magic is weak.  I need to improve both of them, there’s nothing more to it.”

“That’s why I work so hard Takkla,” he said, opening up his pouch and putting the air bladder away.  “I let both Dussok and you down.  I wasn’t strong enough to protect the two of you, but every time I touch the air bladder, I feel like there’s something there.  A mystery as powerful as fire, just out of my reach.  One noble mystery and one bloodline evolution wasn’t enough to protect my family, maybe two will do the trick.”

Takkla smiled at him, her tail swishing once across the prairie soil.

“You’ll get there little dragon,” she responded, turning around to return to Dussok’s side.  “Whether the big lump and I wanted it or not, you’ve helped us take steps that we never thought were possible.  If you lead the way, we’ll be right behind you, learning the mysteries we can and growing with you.”

“Good,” Samazzar said with finality, the hints of melancholy dropping from his voice.  “Becoming a dragon and living forever would be unbearably lonely without the two of you.”