>>5266474Your imagination is aflame during the entirety of your journey to the place where the Chaplain and other high-ranking Serpent Priests hold their dark rites. A mission! The surface! You have only ever known the World Below, the half-hollow husk of your ancestors’ proud legacy, muted in colour for lack of light and the monochrome nature of your Darkvision. You have heard whispered tales of the sights and sounds, delights and delicacies, which await those who travel upwards to the Stolen Lands…
But what could you have been called upon to do up there? It cannot be infiltration, can it?
“Kobolds?” you repeat.
“Yes,” the Chaplain replies, “kobolds.”
You half-kneel, head bowed slightly, before the Serpent Priest called Chaplain here, in your people’s most northerly forward base. He wears the stone-black, white-embroidered robes and golden, cobra-like headdress which befits his station. The Novice, his daughter kneels beside you and mirrors your posture, though the Chaplain addresses only you. You are within the Star Chamber, so-called for the gem-studded ceiling, faintly illuminated by ensconced torches to glow in replica of the stars above. Ingenious engineering once allowed them to be rotated, you are told, moving with the night sky above; centuries of entropy and neglect have relegated the Priesthood to simply cross-referencing with seasonal charts to determine when the stars are right.
It is an auspicious amphitheatre to be allocated such an inauspicious assignment.
A band of kobolds has begun to cause trouble, you are told, in the northwesternmost foothills of the Bloodrise Mountain range, which skirts the coast and sweeps down into the hot southern climes. Normally, such trouble is ignored, or even subtly encouraged and directed to weaken the filthy mammal-men, but apparently the trouble these kobolds are causing is less pleasing than the usual sort. They dig deep and plumb ruins which belong to the Master Race alone, you are told, and not to slaves. They draw attention from the mammals to these sacred sepulchres with their rapacious raids, and they grow strong and proud in a manner ill-befitting them.
“Forward scouts speak of heresy,” The Chaplain tells you. “Of these whelps turning their back on the Dark Gods, and proclaiming that a new power gives them greater strength. It is insult.”
“Yes,” you acknowledge. “They must be punished.”
Still… It’s KOBOLDS. They are pitiful little creatures, barely worthy of being called Reptilian at all—essentially serving as the lowliest and most expendable labourers to the sovereigns of old. Is this really worthy of a Dragonborn?
