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Board & Conquest 24: Dragons at Home
🕑 Added 2025-02-13 08:58:27 +0000 UTC-------
Six. Times.
Six times had this dimwitted dragon absconded with Victoire, dragging her away into his various lairs like a trophy over the years. She would have loved to say that she had grown used to it, but the best she could muster at this point was ungodly annoyance.
At least this lair looks new, Victoire thought grimly as Insupportable carried her through the wispy clouds and towards towering rocky cliffs overseeing the Glacis Mountains. The promontory had cavernous holes dug into their sides which made them resemble a great beast’s jaws. A whiff of mana floated around these teeth of stone like an ancient creature’s breath.
Could it be? Victoire squinted at these wisps of magic and quickly noticed the similarities with Icefall’s fountain of mana. Her heart beat with renewed hope. What are the odds?
Insupportable dragged her into one of these entrances and landed inside a large cavern dug deep inside the cliff. A small settlement of roughly two dozen yetis had set up their tents and campfires there. Victoire hadn’t seen these rare, white-furred, and black-faced wereapes since her last abduction; and they recognized her in turn.
“It’s Victoire!” Some of them waved their hands and spears at her. “Hi, Victoire!”
“Greetings, everyone,” Victoire replied with a heavy sigh. “It’s been a while.”
“I return victorious, minions!” Insupportable boasted, his hand raising the captive Victoire as if she were a doll and parading her in front of the yetis. Having grown used to these humiliations in the past, Victoire simply clenched her teeth and waited in silence. “Bring me my welcome feast!”
A confused silence followed.
The dragon’s eyes slowly squinted at his servants. “Where is my feast?”
The yeti tribe’s leader, a burly and broad-shouldered male whom Victoire knew as Bernard, cleared his throat and dared speak up. “What feast, Your Glorious Magnificence?”
“I told you ahead of time through telepathy!” Insupportable replied angrily. “I thought about it on my way here! You should have anticipated my desire!”
“I am sorry, Your Magnificence,” Bernard replied with the lavish insincerity of a professional buttkisser. “Our minds are too primitive to withstand direct mental contact with your reptilian genius for more than a second."
Insupportable choked, then let out a roar that shook the entire cave. The younger yetis fled back into their tents to avoid falling rocks and icicles while the rest simply cowered.
“That is outrageous! Outrageous!” Insupportable declared angrily, his foot stomping the ground like a frustrated rabbit. “Your apology was insufficiently servile too! You forgot ‘Glorious’ before ‘Magnificence’!”
“My most sincere apologies, Your Glorious Magnificence!” Bernard knelt in submission, though Victoire could have sworn she saw him roll his eyes. “I am wholly unworthy of serving such a great and wise master like you! I shall throw myself off the cliff this instant!”
“Not before you prepare my feast!” Insupportable snapped. “The entire realm will rejoice now that Princess Victoire is back in my hoard!”
“For the last time, I’m not a princess!” Victoire complained. She had no idea where the dragon got the idea from, but neither her protests nor logic could convince him otherwise. “I am a warrior and Champion of–”
“I am a dragon. Your objection is unconstitutional.” Insupportable stressed the last word, though Victoire had no idea what it meant. “Unconstitutional!”
“Yes it is, Your Glorious Magnificence,” Bernard said before subtly waving at Victoire not to insist and drop the matter. “Shall we show your prized princess her new accommodations while you enjoy your well-deserved sustenance?”
“Yes, with haste!” Insupportable deposed Victoire on the floor and oversaw his thralls. “Stand vigilant, my minions, for those Glarmes thieves shall stop at nothing to steal back what is mine!”
“We have trained each day to resist such an eventuality, Your Glorious Magnificence,” Bernard reassured him before rising to his feet and inviting Victoire to follow him deeper into the cavern. “This lair is impregnable!”
“Of course it is, I dug it myself!” Insupportable nodded to himself and then sat in the middle of the lair, waiting lazily as his yeti servants began to drag frozen meat from inside their tents to cook for their lord. “Put a ribbon on her too. Princesses look better with ribbons.”
Victoire grunted in annoyance, but silently followed Bernard along with a cadre of guards deeper inside the cave without resistance. The yetis didn’t bother taking away her weapon, since they knew she wouldn’t use it on them.
They were friends, after all.
“It’s been a long time, Victoire,” the yeti chief noted with a bellowing laugh once they were out of the dragon’s earshot. “You haven’t visited in over a year.”
“I wouldn’t use the term visit, but I’m glad to see you alive and well, Bernard,” Victoire replied. She had developed something of a friendly rapport with the yeti after having spent five times in his dragon master’s custody. “We should find a way to meet under better circumstances.”
“Same,” the yeti replied. “Part of me was starting to miss these events though. It spiced up our daily routine.”
The first time she met Bernard and his tribe had been on her twelfth birthday, when she had been allowed to leave Promesse with a Glarmes patrol; an experience which ended with her first kidnapping. Lord Raymond and the others managed to rescue her back then, but this only started a cycle of infrequent dragon ambushes, abductions, and rescue missions.
The Glarmes had almost come to treat the whole fiasco as an exercise, both to test their defenses against dragon incursions and to teach their soldiers how to stealthily rescue one of their own. The yetis eventually grew so sick of their constant armed incursions into their homes that they helped Victoire escape their master the last two times.
“What does ‘unconstitutional’ mean?” Victoire asked. The question had been bugging her for a while.
“I have no idea. Some fool merchant said that word when trying to petition Insupportable to avoid his ‘toll,’ and now he uses it whenever he wants to sound smart; which is very often.” Bernard let out a tired sigh. “I swear he becomes a little more unbearable each year, but at least he keeps us safe.”
Victoire nodded without a word. It was in the nature of dragons to look for thralls to pamper them, so many tribes often offered their services to them in exchange for protection. The arrangement had served the yetis well over the years, though they weren’t afraid to go behind their protector’s back now and then.
Bernard led Victoire deeper into the cavern complex into what she assumed was Insufferable’s newest den. A central hole in the ceiling allowed light to refract across the ice-plated cave, while a tall ledge wide enough for a dragon to rest upon oversaw it all. Two separated, smaller caverns housed halves of a vast hoard of gold, silver, and gemstones that were frozen in ice. Insupportable usually preferred to preserve his treasures this way to both shield them from thieves and put them on display.
A tall birdcage of carved stone and wood larger than a house occupied the cavern’s center. Its insides included a carpet, a central hearth for heating, and even a bed of bear furs. The source of the cavern’s raw mana surged from there.
Did Insupportable even know what place he had chosen for a lair? Or did he intuitively pick this location the same way Wintresse claimed Icefall?
“I can’t help you escape this time,” Bernard apologized as he opened the cage’s wooden door. “Insupportable is still suspicious about the last jailbreak, and I can’t endanger my tribesmen, you understand? He says he’ll only eat us if he’s starving, but you never know.”
“I understand,” Victoire reassured him. It already took a lot of courage for them to go behind the back of a giant behemoth who could easily eat them all in a single afternoon. Insupportable had always been more bark than bite, but only a fool would test a dragon’s patience. “I left the Glarmes, so you don’t have to fear another raid on your tribe.”
“Oh?” Bernard stroked the white fur beneath his jaw. “And here I thought you might have been frozen like all the rest.”
Victoire’s eyes widened in confusion. “Frozen?”
“You didn’t know?” Bernard asked. “There’s something weird happening in Promesse right now. The whole place has frozen solid, and blizzards flow out like waves across the mountains.”
“No, I wasn’t aware of it.” This news took Victoire aback. What kind of power could trap an entire citadel in ice? Could it have been an attack of the magmorians’ god, or one of those ‘titans’? “When did this happen?”
“A few weeks back, I think? Insupportable lost interest in your city when he couldn’t smell you there, so we didn’t investigate further.”
Victoire’s jaw clenched. She had been planning on stealthily escaping this lair and rejoining her companions without arousing the dragon’s suspicion, but Bernard’s words had convinced her that something terrible was unfolding in Promesse. She had no time to waste.
Thankfully, Insupportable had accidentally given her a way out.
“I’ll have to call my new superior to pick me up,” Victoire said as she stepped inside the cage. Let’s hope he can contend with a dragon… “I suggest you step back, Bernard.”
The yeti squinted at her. “Your new superior?”
Victoire nodded, approached the mana locus at the center of her cage, then planted her spear there the same way she once did in Icefall.
A quake immediately shook the cavern, startling the yeti guards and cracking the ice covering the cavern. Divine power radiated from the birdcage in waves of energy around the area. The birdcage reshaped itself in front of the astonished Bernard, rising from the ground in the shape of a great silver wolf-faced statue.
“What the…” the yeti found himself at a loss of words. “What sorcery is this?!”
“This,” Victoire said as her deity’s newest Altar arose in the middle of the cavern under the sunlight, “is a god.”
—------
Nothing beat the feeling of gaining a new Altar!
Wepwawet sensed his consciousness expanding across the Glacis Mountains the moment Victoire marked the new font of magic. His Influence radiated for miles and covered the nearby region, from the tall mountaintops to the deepest rifts. A surge of mana fueled his reserve with nine new points to spend while his Doctrines spread across the land.
However, Wepwawet’s good mood didn’t last long.
What is this ill feeling? His spirit focused on the leylines around his new Altar. He sensed eldritch forces unnaturally redirecting their flow to alter local weather patterns. Something’s wrong here.
However, that would have to wait for later. Wepwawet materialized his spirit near his new Altar to find Victoire standing nearby in the presence of a few apelike werelings. Even better, he sensed the potential for Championship in one of them.
“Greetings, mortals!” Wepwawet widened his arms, his statue’s eyes shining to better impress his future worshipers. “I am Wepwawet, god of this land, and I bid thee–”
“What is that racket?!” a nosy voice echoed from outside the cavern and took the wind out of Wepwawet’s sails. Heavy steps echoed through the tunnels and announced the arrival of a large, winged reptilian creature with gleaming scales and–
Oh.
Oh no…
Oh heavens, please no!
Wepwawet’s spirit shuddered with the memories of a thousand traumas flooding his mind, then glanced at the rest of the room. The terrible truth became clear the moment he spotted the treasure hoards in the ice.
A dragon’s den.
“Victoire…” Wepwewet massaged his nose in anticipation of the headache he knew would follow. “Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.”
Victoire’s contrite expression told him everything. “This has already happened to you?”
“Yes, it has!” Wepwawet complained. Summoning him in a dragon’s den was a gross violation of the Champion-God trust relationship! “How could you do this to me, Victoire? After I treated you like a friend?!”
“What is this?” The dragon, whom Wepwawet’s Providence registered as ‘Insupportable’ immediately gasped upon seeing his shiny silvery Altar. “A new treasure has sprouted from the ground!”
“Don’t you dare touch my Altar!” Wepwawet warned the uppity reptile. Unfortunately, this only resulted in the dragon focusing his attention on him.
“Who are you?” The dragon’s eyes gleamed with greed. “A new mini–”
“No!” Wepwawet cut in, having heard that question far too many times in his eons of life.
The dragon stared at Wepwawet in dumbfounded silence for a moment, and then glanced at the yeti leader next. “Wereling Bernard, what is that word?”
Victoire frowned at the dragon. “You’ve never heard the word ‘no’ before?”
“I’ve never heard it spoken to me!” Insupportable snarled while stomping the ground in annoyance. “I hate it!”
“Get used to it!” Wepwawet replied. “I am a god! Your objections are irrelevant!”
“We say unconstitutional, you dimwit!” The dragon fearless charged at Wepwawet’s spirit, jaws open to bite. “Step away from my princess!”
Wepwawet let out a heavy sigh as the dragon tried biting his spirit’s ethereal substance, to no avail. Instead of taking notice and realizing his limits, Insupportable fruitlessly continued his attempts at eating him in front of his speechless prisoner and servants alike.
“Princess?” Wepwawet asked Victoire with a tired tone. “What were you keeping from me?”
“I have no idea why he calls me that,” Victoire protested.
“Are you sure?” Wepwawet raised an eyebrow, while blatantly ignoring the dragon stubbornly trying to bite him. Insupportable eventually escalated to breathing ice at his face, which harmlessly phased through his spiritual body. “Because dragons do have a sixth sense for these things. There is no better species of royalty hunters in all the multiverse.”
“I’m sure!” Victoire insisted. “Do I look like the finery-loving type?”
Wepwawet thought Victoire would look great in a dress, but he didn’t push the subject further. He had seen enough talented commoners and dimwit nobles not to care about mortal birth discriminations. The only kind of hierarchy that interested a god of soldiers like him was the military kind.
In any case, the dragon finally realized that he couldn’t harm Wepwawet and switched to complaining. “Wereling Bernard, I cannot eat or freeze this wispy thing!”
“I’m not a thing, I am a god!” Wepwawet repeated. “We created this planet and a thousand others!”
“Then you should serve me!” Insupportable shouted with all the self-centeredness his kind was capable of. “This world exists to spoil me!”
The worst part was that he believed every single word he said.
Now and well truly tired, Wepwawet cast his Ice Barrier Miracle on the dragon. A colossal, translucent wall materialized where Insupportable stood and trapped all of his body except for his head.
“Your Glorious Magnificence?!” the yeti leader asked in shock and surprise. Wepwawet guessed that seeing a dragon so easily restrained after believing them to be the world’s most powerful creatures probably shook him to his core. “A-are you well?”
“I cannot fly away!” Insupportable raged as he struggled to break out of his prison. His kind was probably immune to frost so it didn’t harm that much, but he lacked the strength to break free on his own. “Minions! Minions! Do something!”
“Victoire,” Wepwawet told his truest Champion, ignoring the dragon and his embarrassed followers. “Do this again and I’ll excommunicate you from my church. I’m not kidding.”
“I swear I had no choice,” she replied while scowling at the trapped dragon. “Are they all like this?”
“Why do you think so many gods send heroes on dragonslaying quests?!” Wepwawet snapped back. “Nobody can stand them!”
It didn’t matter the world, dragons were all pompous and arrogant pricks! Even the rare ‘wise’ dragon gods like his classmate Watatsumi had a colossal ego to match their length!
Wepwawet could count on one hand the number of non-dragon gods that chose dragons as their Champions, and most did so because they had tamed them from birth. His own pantheon had to expel dragons from Egypt and wipe out nearly all references to them in their mythology after they tried to kidnap the pharaoh’s daughters too many times.
“Do you want to know the worst part?” Wepwawet asked Victoire with a heavy sigh. “Their gods and creator are even worse.”
Victoire stared at him in silence and utter disbelief. Leaving her to contemplate this terrible revelation—and sparing her further horrors—Wepwawet turned his attention back to the local leylines. His feeling of unease grew the more he focused on the mana coursing through this land. It choked with corruption like a river obstructed by silt.
A powerful force was parasitizing this land’s very lifeforce.
Wepwawet quickly detected the source of the corruption infecting his Influence: black monoliths of the same strange stone making up the Lunarian Slaverstaff spread across the mountains and crackling with eldritch power. They redirected mana away from its natural flow further north towards a fountain fit for an Altar.
Except that one was already occupied.
Every god radiated a specific mana signature, and Wepwawet was intimately familiar with that of all his classmates’; even that bastard Horus. The foul, putrid smell of flies and rot stinking from that mana fount was unlike any of them.
This left only one possibility.
The titan infiltrator was creeping its way into Verglane.
------
Comments
David Giles
I do wonder where beings like Cthulhu fit in this mythos, god, titan, some other strange category or just not a thing.
MaliMi
The dragon might be unconstitutional, but it is a really strong aerial unit that would help with the war effort. You just need a good Vizier to keep it in check.
