>>5344784>>5344792>>5344793>>5344836>>5344878>>5344892>>5344936>>5344985>>5345087>>5345219>>5345284>>5345319Though a Reptilian upper crust will of course take precedence in your new Dragon Kingdom—you doubt the Chaplain would allow anything else, even fi you were so inclined—but you can see the value in this new dwarven project. These dwarves… If they could be made the understand the value of the Dark Gods, and yet their own initiative maintained, could serve as a sort of ‘mammalian intelligentsia’.
“Pointless,” the Novice later scoffed, when you voiced this theory to her. “Their minds are underevolved, simple, emotional. They are rebels-in-waiting. Simply torture them to extract their theories, and then let our own Serpent Priests advance it.”
“Is that you speaking,” you asked her then, “or your father?”
She’d stared at you then, but you simply asked her pointedly: “Will eh assign a single female of your caste to this task, or will eh assign only males, because of their more logical, developed minds?”
That shut her up, replacing her look of incensed outrage with a more thoughtful expression.
So it was that, in your first organized prayer with the dwarves, you introduced them not to the Persecutor of the Weak, but the Master of the Insightful Eye.
“Lead uss to the darkessst depthss, and exposse the ssecretsss hidden there,” you had prayed with them. “Let uss feel the flame, harnessss the heat, which casstss no light.”
The dwarf-women resent you for the deaths of their mates, their fathers. Their children regard you in holy terror. This you know. But given time… Given the chance to influence these people… Their theories of magical-scientific confluence could truly usher in a new age. You truly believe it in your soul!
That is a matter for the future, however. You must live in the here and now… A time of strife and scarcity, in spite of all your victories. In keeping the dwarves alive, you must also feed them. Their own raided provisions are scarcely enough to last them without hunting and foraging, without trading ore to the humans of the valleys below Bloodrise. With their staff ‘reduced’ by your attack, their trade cut-off, their citizens yet too untrustworthy to let into the woods unsupervised, you risk their starvation… or their own. Luckily, you have an idea—a way for one problem to solve another.
