>>5707982“My contacts confirm it,” reaffirms the Redwell Paladin. “Shortly after reports of mysterious happenings in the Bloodrise mountains subsided, there was an attack on the Barony of Blackpine. A watchtower collapsed in the battle, they say… And when I rode to the border, there it was, in ruins.”
“But Baron Blackpine says…?”
“An earthquake.”
Ewal purses his lips, before chewing n his greying beard slightly—an anxious habit from his youth, which he’d long thought overcome.
“And the rest?” Sir Ewald asks, quietly, hoping—praying—the serious young paladin before him might change his tale in the second telling.
“I have not laid eyes upon the ‘visiting nobility’ myself,” Marzineo admits, “but those who I have been able to contact confirmed one another’s stories: they arrived from the west, from the direction of the mountains, with a coterie of monsters. Their leader transformed, they say, into a dragon… Before reverting later to a man.”
“A shapeshifting lizardman,” Ewald murmurs.
“A ‘reptoid’,” agrees Marzineo, sneering at the neologism.
“And this ‘noblewoman’…” Ewald continues, unconsciously crumpling the scroll in his hands as he tensely re-rolls it.
“She, like her husband, is variously described as a visiting dignitary from the East or South, or as ‘King and Queen of Bloodrise’ by those who were there… Or, at least it is said this is how the reptoid introduced himself to Baron Blackpine, after strongarming his way into the baron’s own castle with a display of sorcery.”
“The East,” Ewald whispers with dread. “Red-orange hair, bronzey skin, green eyes.”
“The reptoid? Yes.”
“And the woman…”
“Seemingly human—seemingly—but with brown hair, green eyes, pale complexion, Northern features, and very recognizable to anyone who has attended a royal event in the last twenty years.”
