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Race: Draconian

Bloodline Powers: Improved Strength+, Rending, Firebreath+

Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 5, Wind (Noble) 3, Sound (Advanced) 2

Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Oxygen 4, Embers 4, Pressure 4, Current/Flow 4

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“Denied!”

Samazzar couldn’t tell whether Jamise or Adam shouted it first. Sandra froze in her saddle, eyes widening as both of the captains stared her down.

“It’s a trap of some sort,” Adam said, squinting slightly at Jamise. “We might have arrived just as they were clearing out once, but there is no way that it happened twice in a row. The bandits knew we were coming and they’re absolutely trying to lure us somewhere.”

“Agreed,” Jamise remarked, casting a sidelong glance in Adam’s direction. “Right now, I think what’s important is that we spread the army out into a defensive posture. Our current formation is incredibly vulnerable to a surprise attack. The Knights should dismount and the guard should begin digging earthworks. Obviously the bandits knew we were coming for a day or so. That means they are completely prepared.

“I’ll pass the word on,” a Knight behind Jamise said, inclining his head slightly. “We’ll have the column stop moving and get our defenses airtight within the hour.”

The man took a step away from the cold fire, but Adam raised a hand, stopping the warrior. He shook his head slowly at Jamise and the retreating Knight.

“No. It’s a trap, but I don’t think that we are at risk of an attack. If the bandits knew we were coming, they could have ambushed us long before now. It’s possible that they’re trying to lead us into a fortified position, but the same reasoning applies.”

“More likely,” Adam continued, kicking dirt over the cooling fire pit as he turned in a circle to survey everyone in the encampment, “it’s an attempt to draw us deeper. I don’t know if the plan is to attack our supply carriages or to distract us while their main forces slip away and I don’t particularly mind. Whatever their game is, I’m not playing it.”

Jamise nodded hesitantly. It was clear that the man was reluctant to agree with Adam, but at the same time he was having a hard time disagreeing with his reasoning.

“Captain?” The adjunct standing behind Jamise asked, looking at the more senior knight rather than Adam. “Should I go and tell the men to get into a defensive formation? If the enemy attacks we are in for a massacre and every second counts.”

“Lieutenant Sathon,” Jamise barked, turning to face his assistant. “Enough insubordination. I may disagree with Captain Joosen, but he is the commanding officer here. We can voice our opinions, but once he gives an order, that is final.”

“Also,” he continued, nodding toward Adam, “now that he has begun to explain his reasoning, I am not as sure that I disagree entirely. Captain Joosen, if you would, please give us our orders.”

Adam nodded at Jamise, some of the tension leaving the corners of his eyes as he accepted the man’s endorsement. He squeezed his hands into fists, metal of his gauntlets creaking. Finally, he clapped them together with a clank, his mind made up.

“Back to Vereton,” he said decisively. “We can leave a handful of scouts behind to investigate what happened, but there is no way the bandits would have known about our attack without someone alerting them beforehand. That suggests an intelligence gap that I do not feel comfortable trying to bridge. Right now, we don’t even know their numbers or composition. I am not attacking an unknown enemy in a defensive position that is ready for us. I would prefer my name not go into the history books as a synonym for foolish blunder.”

Samazzar snapped his fingers, claws clicking as realization hit him. The practitioners and knights turned their attention to him. The words died on the tip of his tongue as the weight of their gazes settled onto him, but Adam broke the tension with a gentle smile.

“Go on Sam, if you have something to say, feel free to say it.”

He coughed nervously, clearing his throat and buying himself a second. It was funny really, Samazzar didn’t have a problem tangling with monsters three times his size. He had jumped from cliffs and dove into lava in the pursuit of the mysteries without fear or hesitation. But the idea of speaking publicly in front of a crowd of moderately important individuals? For some reason, that was his limit.

“Err,” Sam mumbled before taking a deep breath to center himself. “Right. When we were outside of the City about a week ago I managed to listen in to a conversation amongst some of the bandits. They said that something had changed and that they were being recalled. That would roughly comport with when A- Captain Joosen was beginning talks for this expedition.”

“What,” Jamise hissed, his eyes narrowing. “How come this wasn’t in any of your reports?”

“Because we aren’t soldiers and don’t give reports,” Takkla cut in, her voice heavy with derision. “We delivered our goods, Samazzar had a brief talk with Adam to relay what he remembered, but Adam was busy. If it slipped his mind it slipped his mind. We only thought it was important for the purpose of timing our escape. Outside of that, it didn’t seem to stand out.”

“How did you overhear it?” Sathon, the knight standing behind Jamise, asked aggressively. “It seems like an awfully large coincidence that you happened to be in an enemy camp a week before an attack on their base was thwarted by poor intelligence.”

“I overheard them with the mystery of sound,” Sam said evenly, crossing his arms as he stared the man down. “You’d be surprised at how many people comfortably talk about their nefarious plans with the utmost confidence if they think that they won’t be overheard.”

The Lieutenant froze, his eyes widening.

Then his sword cleared its scabbard and he was lunging toward Jamise’s unprotected back.

Samazzar grabbed hold of the wind, redirecting a gust of smoke from the still cooling fire pit into the man’s face and eyes.

“They know!” Sathon choked out. “Kill them now, we can blame an ambush later!”

His blade hit Jamise’s back, but the burst of wind had disrupted his aim. Rather than hitting a flat weak point in the armor, it struck a pauldron creasing the gleaming metal as it deflected off in a spray of sparks.

Around the circle, swords rasped from sheathes and magi took a step back, their enchanted focuses at the ready as they tried to size up everyone else standing in the clearing. Then, magic began to gather. Swords shimmered, becoming sharper. One knight almost seemed to become bigger and more substantial. Balls of dirt, ice and bone spun themselves into being in the empty air before some of the practitioners.

Sathon jumped backward, and for a second no one moved. The entire clearing was filled with tense silence as the people all eyed each other. Sathon reached up, with his spare hand, wiping the tears streaming from his eyes after the blast of soot and ash.

“I’m sorry it came to this sir,” he growled, “but your scaly little friend heard something he shouldn’t have. We can't let you go back to Vereton. If you can hold the army still for six hours, I promise that no ill will come to your men.”

“We?” Adam asked. “Who is ‘we?’ Everyone here is loyal to Vereton and these bandits are trying to destroy the city.”

“I’m not talking to you goody two shoes,” Sathon spat out. “Captain Jamise. You’re a smart man. You know how to make compromises. We aren’t trying to destroy the City. I can’t say what our goal is, but if all goes well, today will be the end of it. The siege will be lifted and everyone will be able to go about their lives as if nothing happened. But if Vereton seeks to resist, it will anger powers beyond its understanding. The City will be crushed by its hungry neighbors in a matter of months. Really, our group is the compromise. We’re the ones trying to save it.”

Jamise took a deep breath. All eyes shifted to him as he took a step away from Sathon, casually reaching down to draw his sword.

“I may know more about the underside of politics than a moral man should,” he said slowly, turning the weapon over in his hands to let the light reflect off of the perfectly polished blade.

“But let it be known,” Jamise continued, shifting his weight and lifting the sword into a simple guard, “I am no traitor. I am willing to compromise who I am to protect my City, but I am not willing to compromise Vereton itself. If your demand is that I let something happen to my home to rob it of some measure of its sovereignty in order to prevent some unspecified future harm? Those are the words of a blackmailer or an extortionist. I would rather die with my blade in my hand than let Vereton be whittled and chipped away by the likes of you.”

Sathon spit on the ground, lifting his own weapon as dropped into a light crouch.

“So be it, patriot.”

A thousand things happened at once.

Jamise and Sathon clashed together, their arms moving in a blur as their alchemically enhanced bodies lunged forward with the speed of a striking snake. In their wake, Samazzar’s wind sense was almost overwhelmed with input. A blizzard sprang into being overhead, pelting the draconian and his siblings with razor sharp icicles that shattered against their thick scales.

Sam squinted his eyes against the bitter cold only for the assault to abate as one practitioner threw what looked like a massive skull at the other only for the defending magus to summon a wall of ice to stop the attack. Another four knights charged toward Adam, their swords drawn.

Almost immediately two of them were forced to a stop as a wall of stone grew from the earth in front of them, redirecting the men toward the third magus that had been assigned to the expedition. The heavyset woman nodded to Samazzar and her siblings, summoning a head sized sphere of granite in between her hands as she intercepted the warriors.

The wind screamed a warning at Sam as a human-sized shape rushed toward him from behind with the speed of a galloping horse.

He spun around, claws blurring from bloodline magic as Samazzar swiped them through the empty air, forcing the sprinting knight that had tried to attack him from behind back a step. The woman frowned slightly under her helmet, bringing her sword up to her shoulder for a broad, across the chest stroke.

Rather than try to match a trained and tempered warrior strike for strike, he opened his mouth, triggering his bloodline once again and engulfing the woman in flames. Without pausing, he bent at the waist, leaning backward just out of reach of a blind slash from the human.

He flapped his wings once, skidding along the grassy clearing away from the inferno consuming the knight. Five paces away, Sam struggled to regain his balance while maintaining the flow of magic to the fire, still not entirely used to incorporating flight into his combat routine.

The knight grunted, but Sam could feel through his magic that she wasn’t burning properly. He jumped into the air, flapping once to gain enough height that the follow up stab hit nothing but air.

She slashed, poked and swung her sword wildly, fire crackling off of her as she tried to find Samazzar. Evidently, she had taken at least one elixir and trained her resistances to the point that she was as heat resistant as someone that had taken a lesser potion. The flames pouring off of her skin might be blinding her, but they weren’t doing much more damage than an ordinary person touching their hand to a piece of dark metal that had been laying out in the sun on a clear day for a couple of hours.

He frowned slightly, increasing the heat once more. Finally, the woman stumbled. She was still upright and swinging her sword wildly, but the flames completely blocked her sight. Even if Samazzar had remained on the ground it was unlikely that she would have been able to find him.

Another flap of his wings kept Sam aloft as he turned his attention to his siblings. Each of them was fighting a knight of their own, but neither was faring terribly well. Takkla had followed his lead and taken to the air where she was peppering her opponent with arrows that he was easily slapping aside with the flat of his blade. A flash of steel glinted in the man’s off hand and she dove to the side, barely missing the hatchet that buried itself haft deep in one of the palisade’s logs.

Meanwhile, Dussok was fighting a human that was almost the same size as him. The knight wove a sword that should have been held two handed through an intricate pattern of darts and thrusts that would have put a duelist to shame, forcing the big draconian back. Really, the only explanation for why Dussok wasn’t covered in deep wounds was the harpoon in his left hand.

Every time the human warrior began to gain an advantage, a fairly often occurrence given the man’s extreme proficiency with his blade, Dussok would interrupt his axe strokes with a thrust from the spear, forcing the knight to parry and disrupting the pattern of his attacks. Still, the draconian had a number of shallow cuts on him. Evidently the heavy sword and the muscles behind it were so enhanced that even the heavy armor of his sandy scales couldn’t hold up to a glancing blow let alone a dead on strike.

A twist of Samazzar’s hand grasped a handful of flame from the burning warrior that was still blindly seeking him out. He flapped his wings, jetting above Dussok and the knight. The human glanced up at his flying form, buying Dussok enough time to step back and wrench in a heaving breath.

Sam threw the sphere of fire, expanding it with his mind as it zipped through the air until it was a net rather than a concentrated ball. The human jerked backward, moving with the speed and agility of a tiger or panther despite his huge size.

It wasn’t enough. Samazzar might not have enough control over his magic to thread the flames through the eye of a needle, but tracking the human’s movements wasn’t much of a problem, even with his attention divided. The net wrapped itself around the knight, hissing and burning as it wove itself around the plates of his armor and sunk into the padded cloth that he wore underneath.

Another flicker of will and the fire wrapped itself around the man’s neck, forming a brilliant scarlet collar for a fraction of a second before Samazzar transformed the flames, detonating them. The blast wasn’t enough to kill the human, and frankly Sam would have been surprised if it had. What it did do was stun the man and produce a billowing cloud of smoke that he immediately redirected into the knight’s eyes, nose, and mouth with wind magic.

The man choked on the ember and ash. His superb swordsmanship devolving into wild swing that Dussok easily batted aside, opening the knight’s chest for a stab from the spear.

His armor was almost enough. It was impossible to know what alloy and enchantments were used to make it strong enough to resist Dussok’s thrust, even for a fraction of a second, but in the end, it would have been easier to stop a charging auroch than the hulking draconian.

Armor crunched, fizzles of enchantment sparkling like fireworks as they were destroyed by the attack. Then, the spear sank deep into the human’s unprotected flesh, only stopping when the tip hit his backplate.

Samazzar dove toward the soldier fighting Takkla. The two of them were at an impasse. Her poisoned arrows unable to penetrate the human’s defense while her agility was too great for him to catch her with one of the half dozen hatchets he had hanging from his belt.

A blast of flame changed that. The knight twisted aside, swinging his blade at the cone of flame. Somehow, the slash managed to stop the fire cold. One minute a cone of fire was rushing toward him, and another it was like it hit a wall.

But Sam would not be deterred. Tentacles of fire curled around around the parry, striking his limbs like adders and setting the man ablaze.

The knight let out a choked scream that was silenced as Samazzar’s bloodline enhanced claw caught him in the throat. Maybe his armor would have been strong enough to stop Sam’s talons, but human flesh, no matter how enhanced, was far from the task.

Samazzar flapped his wings, pulling out of his dive. He shook his hand once, dropping the handful of trachea and viscera into the clearing as he wheeled around. Both of the knights plaguing his siblings were dead, and before Sam could line up on the woman that had attacked him, Dussok’s new harpoon slid through the air, punching through the back of her armor and finishing her burned body off in one efficient stroke.

That left the rest of the group that had coalesced at the outpost. Sandra was frozen, her eyes wide and a sword in her hand, but among the officers and practitioners, the struggle was much more costly. Both Adam and the stone magus had brought down one of the two knights fighting them, but the other battles were more evenly matched. Jamise and Sathon were moving so fast that their limbs seemed to blur, each sporting a half dozen nicks and scratches that bled freely, while the bone and ice practitioners pummeled each other with spells.

As Sam curved through the air toward the two fighting magi, a whirling thresher made from femurs and teeth latched onto the side of a warrior crafted from perfectly clear ice. On either side of the magical battle, the practitioners stood perfectly still, sweat streaming down their faces as they poured their willpower into the creations.

Samazzar exhaled gently into his right claw, creating a small globe of fire that he tossed over the ice magus’ head. It caught the man’s gaze, and a fist of frozen water closed around the ball a fraction of a second before it detonated, creating a webwork of cracks in the spell’s fingers.

At the same moment, the whirling cylinder of bone and teeth redoubled its movements, gnawing at the side of the ice guardian and flinging a half dozen ivory slivers toward the opposing magus.

The ice practitioner threw up his left hand, raising wall of ice just before the bone slivers tripled in size, turning into spears that rammed themselves deep into the defensive structure. Samazzar could see that the man was breathing heavily, a trickle of blood creeping down from his nose as he tried to recover the momentum after Samazzar’s distraction.

But the flurry of activity served its purpose. The traitor practitioner likely would have been able to stop any attack that he saw coming, but the weakness of the enchanted robes he was wearing was that they didn’t do much for surprise attacks.

Samazzar’s feet slammed into both of the human’s shoulders, claws digging deep and lodging themselves into the bone as he picked the man up off the ground and lifted into the air. Frantically, the human summoned a cloak of ice around himself and pushed it upward toward Sam’s legs only for the draconian to counter with the mystery of heat.

He didn’t have long, almost immediately Samazzar could feel the more experienced human overwhelming him in a contest of will, but he had never intended to engage the man in a protracted struggle. Instead, once they were about ten paces in the air, Samazzar dropped the injured practitioner, spitting out a cone of flame to chase the falling magus toward the distant ground.

The traitor managed to condense the water in the air into a wall of ice between Sam and him in time to absorb the fire, and even with Samazzar’s best efforts he couldn’t increase the heat of the flames enough to break through the barrier. For a brief second, a flash of triumph flashed across the injured magus’ face before a spike of bone erupted from his chest.

Sam’s gaze followed the bone downward to where one of the downed knights had shattered, magic causing their ribcage to grow and twist together into a spear that had plucked the falling rebel from the air. He nodded his appreciation to the bone magus, and the human nodded back, his breath coming in short ragged gasps after the exertion of the final summoning.

As Samazzar spun in the air, he found that the battle was all but over. The stone magus had turned the ground beneath her final opponent to quicksand, hardening it around him as soon as he was neck deep. As strong as the knight was, escaping from the grip of solid rock was well beyond his capabilities.

Adam had also made short work of his enemy. Whether by magic or brute strength he had shattered the man’s sword before disarming him quite literally. Sam thumped into the ground next to the Knight as he dropped to one knee next to his unconscious opponent, creating a magical flash of light that burned and cauterized the wound that had severed the man’s right arm at its shoulder.

Jamise had needed some help, but Dussok and Takkla had been happy to provide it. Only one of Takkla’s arrows had managed to penetrate Sathon’s defenses, and the poison on the arrowhead had only managed to slow the Knight lieutenant’s reactions by a hair, but that was more than enough for Jamise to knock the man’s sword from his hands.

Then, it was only a matter of Dussok tossing a spear at him to force the desperate traitor into an ill timed roll that the large draconian ended with a sudden and precise stomp that broke the man’s leg like a twig.

The outpost descended into silence, ragged breaths and the moans of the fallen the sounds in the wake of the sudden violence.

“By the fallen gods,” Sandra whispered. “I-”

Sathon began laughing, a cackling hyena sound maddened by pain.

“Why?” Adam asked quietly from where he kneeled next to the unconscious traitor. “Daniel, Becca, Kurt, Jaden, Matthew, Annette, William, Pierre, and even Magus Wolsham. Vereton has been all of your homes. For your entire life it has sheltered you, paid you, given you a life of power, status and luxury. How could you turn your back on it?”

“I’ve turned my back on nothing,” Sathon shouted back through gritted teeth. “The Patrician has turned his back on all of us. He knows exactly why today is happening. A request was made, one that you cannot say no to, and he said no. His arrogance put all of us at risk, and worse yet he has the temerity to pretend to be mystified when force was brought against the City.”

“What do you mean?” Adam questioned, standing up and turning to finally address the downed knight. There was more rage in his eyes and tight jaw than Samazzar had ever seen there. “You swore an oath to the Patrician. What could he possibly have done to deserve this kinslaying and betrayal?”

“Ask your scaly friend,” Sathon sneered. “We could have all just sat out here in the forest, chasing rumors and ghosts while the City was attacked a second time, but you heard him. He overheard our entire plan. We had no choice but to act.”

Adam and Jamise both turned their attention to Samazzar, but he had no real reply beyond a half-hearted shrug.

“I didn’t actually overhear anything from the knights,” Sam replied, embarrassed. “I think he just heard subtext that wasn’t there when I gave my report and jumped to conclusions.”

Sathon blanched, sinking back into the closely trimmed grass of the clearing as he stared up at the sun.

“Fuck.” The epithet wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. Just a general but deeply felt curse directed at the vagaries of an uncaring world.