>>5325419You take the amulet from the Novice, but to her palpable irritation, you do not don it immediately.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
“It is a tempting offer,” you tell her, “but I must meditate on it.”
“Youa re so WEIRD,” she laments.
You pass Glowie to her, in order to distract them both and to give you some space to think. The notion of becoming a dragon through continued modification… It’s tempting. But does it conflict with the Serpent Ascendant’s ethos of self-improvement through effort and will? Or is the amulet—created only thanks to your expeditions, your retrieval of the eggs, your decision to breed with Glowie, to be augmented with a fleshweaving regimen to which you will subject your own body—the CULMINATION of such determined effort of will?
Who can say but the Serpent Himself?
Or now, you turn to a more immediate, personally-solvable matter: that of the Junior Novice. It snarls and violently fidgets in the confines of the cage as you approach, hand outstretched in what you intend as a soothing gesture. To your astonishment, you feel the psychic pressure of a rudimentary Presence—more even than the basilisk in its pit has, or the tamed fire-lizards which lay sunning themselves on the mountainside near your chamber. Has this… THING… Become truly reptilian in some fashion? Maybe even DRACONIC? There’s only one way to find out.
>19You close your eyes and open your mind and spirit, and you reach out. Your presences enmesh, wills conflicting even as they bleed into one another. You sense fear, and loathing—an understanding, on some level, that this being’s pain and confusion is your doing. You soothe it as best you can, conveying a benevolence and, when that ails, a command. ‘I am king here,’ you say without words, ‘and what I command is law, just and righteous.’
You open your eyes and find the Junior Novice seething, but silently, glaring at you through teary eyes and clutching at itself. It does not move, snarl, or thrash, however. And you sense… Intelligence. A more rudimentary intelligence than your own, t be sure, r that of the kobolds or even the enslaved adventurers, but there is understanding there. Is this a product of the experimentation, you wonder? Or was it always there, with the only change being the connection which allowed you to recognize it?
“Give it—him—a bigger cage,” you command the Novice.
“Soft,” she hisses, “and strange.”
But she sets to it, as you return to your chamber with her amulet to meditate for guidance.
