>>5734679The Reptilian infiltrators stop their perturbed murmuring as they register your attentions. Your decision to spare such a foe, let alone to dedicate the victory to the kingdom they have long sought to despoil, is met with predictable disapproval. Nevertheless, they are inevitably and avoidably forced by your aura and your martial might to bend the knee and admit their new allegiance. One by one, they do so.
“Now, tell me what you know about these…” You gesture to the clay container. “Things.”
The Infiltrators oblige. Roth knows the most, which he divulges with evident bitterness but—near as you can tell—total transparency. The others piece together what they have observed in turn. It is relatively little. There are no Fleshweavers here, it seems, but merely Silkscales and Steeltalons of common and decidedly unmagical breeding. They only know how they were meant to affect the population, and the effects to then expect, and how they were meant to abandon the city to its fate.
“How many have you placed into the waters?” you ask.
A half-dozen remains the answer. Six slug-like lamprey things, vomiting parasite-like offspring into the water—not to grow and mature into their adults but, like Glowie’s race, to serve as a lesser caste with a set purpose. The larvae of these chimeras are magical things, you are tod, each infused with a single segment of a complex spell. When enough of them anchor in a humanoid, they begin setting to work remoulding their body from the inside out, until scales blossom forth like scabs and the transformation is complete. As you’d previously been told, this means only an imperfect, deformative version of the blessing the Mother of Dragons gave to your Drowgons for some: the appearance of a Degenerate. For many others it will mean sterilization, sickliness and frailty, organ failure, and death.
“Is it truly too late to stop it?” you ask.
“It will spread more slowly now, without the full ‘delivery’,” Roth admits. “But the transformations will begin over the next month, beginning with those drinking the afflicted water-sources.”
