>>5506392>>5505890>>5505886>>5505868You force the water-damnable, accursed element of the enemy!—from your lungs. What erupts is flame, and fury, parting the spring like the sea before a prophet. With a single desperate beat of your wings you push up, up and OUT, into the stagnant and foggy air of the cavern above. It is alive with light: Glowie’s luminescence as she pivots her great bulk and lashes out with surprisingly swift and brutal blows of her forelimbs against the encroaching horde of shapes; hurled spells of the Novice Fleshweaver and Wevenore Amabassdor also. Neither are masters of evocation or elementalism, though, and these accursed spirits have no true flesh to weave or to rend, no corporeal eyes to blind or bewilder with illusion. They are out of their element.
The Drowgon children cry, while their parents scream and thrash to pull them back from the talons of their twice-ensorcelled ancestors.
Your sons hiss in defiance—less than two weeks old, but full of the same dragonfire as you, the same drive to ascend and conquer.
“ENOUGH!”
You project Presence most fearsome, filling the cavern with the sound of your bellow and the essence of your soul. If your sons can fight like True Dragons, wriggling and barely-armoured grub-things that they are, what excuse do YOU have? You are ashamed for the fear you felt a moment ago, your near-death in pursuit of an ephemeral glory. Do you forget so easily the revelation which the Master of the Insightful Eye led you to, the promise you made to yourself? A True Dragon King is one who puts his kingdom—his people—first. Even through the dimly-lit mist, you see the momentarily frozen figures of those people—elf, Reptilian, insect…
And dwarf.
Karz Throat-Singer banishes the mist about him with a single reverberating note and a pulse of mana, then draws it about him in a swirling vortex. It is mere stagecraft, no true force of Elementalism behind it, but it clears the way for him to see you clearly, and vcie-versa. He has looked at you with curiosity and ambivalence so very often, and with more than a little of the bitter hatred which he has held in his heart for his slaver, his owner, the destroyer and violator of his people…
The one who let Davora, his friend, die.
But now, for the first time, he seems to view you with something like… Hope. Maybe even respect.
“Nobody dies today,” you assert.
No hidden subaquatic treasure could matter more.
Karz nods.
