>>5807642You nearly stood up in your excitement. This was the lead you needed! Izirina… The vision had shown her body crawling with serpents. You swore you’d seen her eyes’ pupils narrow to slits!
“What are they?” you demanded. “An evil experiment by the Archmage? Some kind of… Of chimera, like yours?”
“Hey, don’t talk shit about Hershy!” Zith-Zi snapped, and the golden-feathered drake glanced towards the two of you, recognizing his name.
“…No offence,” you added, glancing at ‘Hershy’. “Some of my best friends are chimeras.”
Zith-Zi sniffed, glaring, but eventually shook her head.
“That’s not it, anyway. They’re not that kind of thing… Not made my your mages. They didn’t come from Hawksong at all. And… Truth is, there WERE people disappearing, some and going through Hawksong’s sewers. The rat-monsters were a scapegoat… Scape-RAT, I guess. They’d been down there a while—they didn’t fuck with us, we didn’t fuck with them. They got cleared out when the lizards showed up… or when they made their move, anyway.”
Zith-Zi continued her story, and a creeping dread filled you as the tale was told: of shapeshifting agents of some underground empire, foreign to Hawksong, who could appear as humans, and dealt with demons… Who were sneaking people into and out of the city, though rarely did the same people both come and go.
“What do you mean?” you asked, fearing the answer.
“People—usually poor people, by human standards you know, drunks or druggies hopped up on too much shirin, or up to their eyes in debt… They came out. They went off to the hills and farms down in the southern plains there… But they didn’t come back. Those who came back… They weren’t people.”
She leaned forwards, lowering her voice.
“Lizards, wearing people’s skin.”
You shuddered, and she smirked a little bit, clearly enjoying your reaction.
“How do you know all this?” you’d asked.
“Well,” she said, with a shrug and a grimace. “When you’re coming and going through the sewers… Well, Goblintown is right near the drains, right? Or was. And goblins, we don’t ask questions if there’s coin involved.”
“So you WERE to blame!”