>>5529560The Nothic departs from whence it came, and the sigils and circles who crafted so meticulously vanish with him.
“It looks as if we will be studying together again,” you note, “just as when we started this quest.”
The Novice scoffs and chides you for your sentimentality, but you shrug it off. It is her way, after all. And anyway…
“Well?” she demands, when you do not rise to her teasing. “Shall we retire to my chamber?”
You laugh, and follow her… Though your heart and loins wince away from anything more than your usual chaste cuddling.
>>5528035The next few weeks are spent in preparation and study. You announce to your dwarven subjects, newly freed and recently reprimanded alike, that the loyal and stalwart will be given the glorious right and responsibility of bearing arms in the name of Bloodrise. Enthusiasm is high and, with the aid of the Throat-singer and the other Duergar, you are even able to prevent rioting when you tell them who their target will be.
A war on their own cousins is unpopular, but then again, animosity between rival dwarven corporations is nothing new… And that a captured dwarf is no longer regarded as chattel for life, to be worked to death or slain for supper and sacrifice makes a big difference, too.
While the Pit-Guard drills the dwarves, you set about preparing for a journey back to your first home—to the northern forward base. Bloodrise currently boasts a population of a couple hundred dwarves (many females or sprog), about that many kobolds, a few dozen Wevenore Drow (again, mostly the ‘Drowgon’ children), Glowie and your sons (bigger by the day, but still no great battle-beasts) and… Maybe a dozen members of the Reptilian master Race, including yourself and the half-breeds such as Olu the Archer. It is unsatisfactory. You cannot go to war with an army of less than a hundred.
It goes deeper than that, though. Even now cosmopolitan Dragon King of a multiethnic empire, it doesn’t seem right that you should enter into a new Age of Darkness if it is not ALSO an Age of Scales—an age of your people’s primacy, and the ascent of the long-suffering Silkscales, Steeltalons, Dragonblooded Ones, and even Serpent Priests. If you could convince those of your own race to lend you their aid, then not only would your resources be redoubled and your forces bolstered, but you would fulfill the promise of your birth—or of the lie you once believed, and now have embodied in a way that the Chaplain who thus deceived you surely never thought possible. You could be THE Dragonborn Antipaladin, a dark mirror of the humans’ Paladin Kings in Hawksong, a mighty conqueror and unifier lifting your race up to the auspicious height of the ancestors!
