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LLOTF - Chapter 12: Seeking answers
🕑 Added 2024-11-18 04:33:15 +0000 UTCSome time passed – how long, Tristan was not sure. He pulled away from Felicity when he had recovered and saw that the two had been left alone. “You okay?” she asked.
Tristan nodded, “Thank you,” he muttered. “I…I’ll need time to process. But not now. I have to find out what happened.”
Felicity nodded and her form shifted. Her body wiggled like some type of jelly before her form shrunk and the shape stabilized into her fairy dragon form. She flapped her wings, hovering in front of him. “Ah, much better. I don’t know how you do it, walking on two legs. It feels so weird.”
“You can just do that?”
She nodded and flew to the top of his head, settling down on it and letting her tail lazily swish behind him. “I can turn invisible, shapeshift into a half-fairy dragon form, and have that extradimensional storage space. Plus, spells just like what you have. But my spells are limited. Just illusion and enchantment.”
“Can you shapeshift into anything else?” Tristan asked as he left the tree, trying to distract himself from the anguish. There will be time later.
“If I get enough mana capacity, I can shapeshift into any heritage to blend in. I could even shapeshift into dragons from the Elemental Realms! Or other species of creatures, but dragons are easier. The only downside is we don’t get their breath abilities. I mean, one time, The Matriarch turned into one, and when she tried to do that breath thingy, a bunch of rainbows flew out. It was pretty.”
Tristan emerged from the tree and did not see a single fairy dragon. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
Felicity kneaded his head. “They probably left the tree to give you some alone time.”
“Can we leave a message?”
Felicity flew off his head and went to a clay tablet nearby. There were several such tablets stacked up, and wooden, sharp sticks next to them. Her forepaws turned into a pair of hands, and she came over to him. “What do you want to leave?”
“Just thanking them for helping me put my mother to rest. And that we’ll be back once I figure out what happened.”
Felicity nodded and scrawled out the message. After finishing, she flew over to the tree entrance, left it in an alcove that seemed specifically for leaving the tablets, and then returned to her perch upon his head. “Ready to do some investigating?”
Tristan nodded and spun his mana core, feeling the cooling, soothing energy surge through him. Directing it into the ring, the whole world turned white, and then a moment later he was standing in the room where his mother had been slain.
Turning away from the blood, he went back into the hallway. This floor, first. Starting at the far end. He went through the entire second floor of the large country manor and found nothing but shattered and smashed furniture, pillaged rooms, and signs of battle. Not a good battle, but the desperate, no-holds-barred attempts of a person to prevent their death. Glancing over the balcony rail, he grimaced once more at the corpses of the servants.
So many people he knew so well. From his childhood up through his youth and into young adulthood; every face threatened to revisit upon him countless memories. Descending down the large foyer stairs he began exploring the first floor. Nothing, he thought as he finished his tour of the house.
The only slain were the servants and his mother, and he grit his teeth and gulped knowing what he had to do next. His father, half-siblings, or grandfather could be in that pile of corpses. Pulling his gauntlets and the cloak off, setting them to the side, he set to the grisly task of moving body parts.
The stench was horrific, and threatened to overwhelm him multiple times, at which point he had to step away to clear his lungs. But he finally got the pieces sorted out to each person’s body. “They’re not here,” he muttered as he went to one of the sides of the foyer, grabbed a curtain, and wiped off his hands.
“Maybe they escaped into the city? No, that doesn’t make sense. Kidnapped?”
“Perhaps,” Tristan replied as he pushed the sorrow from his thoughts. I need to focus on the here and now. Let’s check the vault. Going to the meat cellar once more, he went to a hidden panel on the wall and triggered the lever. It opened into a room full of expensive bottles of wine. “They didn’t take the good stuff,” Tristan observed as he walked through the room.”
Felicity giggled slightly, “Can we take it?”
“Yeah, I don’t see why not. Technically it belongs to me as much as it does to the rest of the family.” If they’re still alive.
Felicity began flying around the room, tapping each item as it seemed to suck in on itself, its form warping and distorting, before it vanished. Within thirty seconds she had cleared the entire room and landed back on his head. “A lot of wine. Fairy dragons are a riot when drunk.”
Tristan suppressed a chuckle at the thought of even worse jokes, puns, and raunchy humor. Make his way to the back of the hidden wine cellar, he took the family crest from the chain around his neck, slid it into the hidden slot, and turned it. A small knob popped out with tiny, numbered markings. Turning the combination lock, a second one popped out of the wall that required a different code in the opposite direction.
“What’s all this protecting?” Felicity asked.
Tristan stepped back and pulled his amulet away as the hidden, reinforced, metal door slid aside to reveal a normally dark chamber. But to his eyes, it was illuminated in shades of blue and white. “Can Elves see in the dark?” Tristan asked.
“Duh. Of course. You’ve been doing it the whole time you’ve been down here in the cellar!”
“But it wasn’t white and blue vision before. It just looked normal.”
“Oh,” Felicity said as she drew out the word. “That means this is magical darkness. Did they have a specific light source when you came down here?”
“Yeah, grandfather’s lantern.” Tristan made his way into the room avoiding the traps on the floor that he knew like the back of his hand.
“The lantern must be an item of artifice with a higher Order spell than the shadow one that is present.” She tapped his head, “What is down here?”
Tristan pointed to a trio of chests. “The family’s reserves.” He then pointed to an iron slab of a door with a single spot for the family crest, “And grandfathers extra weapons and armor.” Making his way to the three chests, he opened them and found each to be empty. Even the false bottoms had been cleared out of the precious gemstones.
“That must mean your family cleared it out before leaving,” Felicity stated.
Tristan sighed and nodded, “Yeah. And they didn’t come into the cellar from the outside door like I did. Which meant they didn’t have to sneak in. They were allowed in the main entrance. And abandoned this place.” He went over to the equipment cabinet, slotted in his family crest, and opened it.
The container was empty, but Tristan knelt and pushed his hand into a tiny crevice, “Grandfather told me about this secret compartment. Only he knew about it, and he said when I was done with my first dragon hunt, he’d give me permission to take what is inside.”
“Oooh! Treasure? What is it?”
Tristan removed the small pouch from the secret compartment, unwrapped it, and held it up to inspect. It was a vial filled with blood. Deep, red blood that was still liquid despite the decades. As he moved it, glimmers of golden light fluttered throughout. “This is a vial of blood from the Arch Dragon of the Elemental Realm of Fire.”
Felicity’s jaw dropped – quite literally, as it distended down and plopped onto the top of his head before retracting. “That’s insane! Why would he keep it?”
Tristan stood up, “He said, ‘to give it to the heir I deem worthy’.” He glanced up at Felicity’s peeking-over-his-head eyes. “Dragonslayer is the bloodline he made. And when he did that, it created a special spell type. Only I, father, Gisele and Bertram have it. Dragonbane.”
“Oh. But how could you use it if you didn’t have a mana core?”
Tristan smiled, “None of us were born with mana cores. He just said to treat it like bad alcohol. Down the hatch in one gulp.” He popped the lid and chugged it down in a single sip. It tasted extremely spicy; like the hottest dish he had ever had. He was panting as it burned its way down his throat and into his stomach.
Then came pain. A severe pain like the worst stomach cramp. He fell forward and held himself up on the cabinet, trying to suck in breaths. Each time, it felt like he was inhaling heat from a smith’s forge.
I need to cool down. This is way too hot! He focused on visualizing his mana core and tried to spin it. Closing his eyes to help visualize, he saw the silvery-icy-blue sphere spinning around and around, exuding cooling relief into his limbs. But in that visualization, he saw lines of crimson and gold swirling around and being sucked into the mana core. He was cooling down his body and could feel his stomach settling.
After spinning his mana core for who-knows how long, he finally felt cool enough to open his eyes and cease the activity. Felicity wasn’t on his head, but was instead on the floor, looking up at him with a curious and concerned, taut expression. “You’ve changed.”
“How?” Tristan asked as he coughed a dry cough.
“Your hair. Still silver, but when you move your head, there are tiny flecks of crimson and gold.”
“All I know,” Tristan began to say. But he stopped as he felt a dry coughing fit come on. “Water?”
Felicity sighed and reached her paw out to the side. Space warped, and she was holding a canteen that she handed to him. As he drank it, the still-getting-familiar-with taste of the clearcool quenched his parched throat. Pulling it away, Felicity continued speaking; “And when you were spinning your mana core, it was predominantly silver like before, but the icy blue was mixed with slight flares of red and gold.”
Tristan nodded and handed her the canteen which she dismissed back to her extradimensional space. “Grandfather said that the Dragonslayer bloodline could eat the meat of dragons and drink their blood to gain power. The spell type of dragonbane lets you siphon more from the corpse. The fresher, the better.”
“He sounds like an interesting fellow,” Felicity said, filling the word with as much sense of ‘eww’ as she could. “Do you know the spell?”
Tristan nodded, “It’s in the Standard Tongue. Called Drain Dragon. It is First Order, but he said with enough mana you could go as high as you wanted by changing the phrasing slightly.” He thought back to his lessons where the grandfather had drilled the spell phrase into his and his half-siblings’ heads.
“Mighty beast which now lays slain, I take from you what you can no longer use and is mine by right of conquest.” As he spoke, he made the gesture of bringing his palms together with the right hand stacked on top of the left, and the fingers extended into the shape of a mouth with sharp teeth, slowly closing on each other as the incantation wound to a close.
“Interesting,” Felicity muttered as she took her place atop Tristan’s head once more. “What did drinking the blood do for you? Think it might have, I don’t know, given you the ability to resist fire?”
“No,” Tristan replied as he left the vault and tapped the releases to re-lock it. “The blood is supposed to give you, their bloodline. I guess I could use fire elementalism? The meat gives you resistance to whatever type of elementalism is appropriate to the Realm they came from. And the spell used on the body is supposed to do something with magecraft – I’m assuming he meant mana capacity.”
Felicity clapped her paws together, “So exciting! Do you know any fire First Order spells you could try?”
“No,” Tristan replied with a rueful smile. “But I’m sure I could buy-” he stopped and sighed. “Not enough money for a magecraft primer with some basic spells.” I need to figure out who cleared the vault. It had to be grandfather, father, Bertram or Gisele. No one else had crests.
“Shame. But you could always make potions from the Fey Realm and sell them! I know you know how to make medicine, but now with mana and imbuement, you can make clearcool elixirs! Drinking one will be like replacing a meal and serving all your water needs for a day. You could make a killing being the only one who can make and sell them!”
“We’ll talk herblore and alchemy later,” Tristan replied. “We need to focus on getting into the capital.”
“Why?” Felicity asked. “Aren’t there more buildings here to check out?”
“Servants quarters and the practice hall which just has the puppets we trained on.” Tristan went back up the cellar steps and exited to the bright sunlight. His eyes took a second to adjust. And he heard the tramp of armored boots from the dirt road. Quickly re-casting Disguise Form, he went back to the wall, clambered up over the familiar footholds, and dropped onto the other side. “Let’s go get some information from the neighbors.”
---
First, he went to Mr. Perry’s orchard. The man knew Tristan from his childhood and was always friendly with him; even after his elven side began to show. Sticking to the trees and avoiding the road, he went along the corridors of branches and fruit, earning glances from the few workers that were collecting the harvest.
The main house was not as large as the Anorox Estate, but that was not for lack of wealth. Rather, it was because Mr. Perry was a very astute businessman who wanted as much of his property to go towards his business. The small, two-story house had a few rooms and not much else. Workers quarters were in separate buildings off to the side.
Going up to the door and knocking, he stepped back onto the porch and waited patiently with his arms clasped behind his back. The door opened and the familiar, hunched-over and missing a leg figure stood there. “Mr. Perry, it has been a while,” Tristan said with his best smile he could muster given the situation.
“Oh? Little Tristan?” The elderly man cracked a smile, “Thought you were dead it’s been so long.”
“I wish this was a social visit, but I need answers. What happened to my family?”
“They moved to the city. A few months ago. Everyone except your mother.” He cackled, “I’m surprised you came here first. You know your house is right over that way.”
Do I keep it close to the chest or share that mother was killed? Tristan did not know which way to go, so he chose to go with his gut and do what his grandfather had always taught him. Honesty was the best policy. “The Black Company are guarding the entrance.”
“Oh, those thugs. They were harassing my workers for the past few days, but finally buggered off when I complained to the tax collector!”
Tristan held the man’s gaze. The soft, welcoming brown eyes reminding Tristan that he could be open with this man. He had spent many afternoons eating Ms. Perry’s apple pies before the sun went down – and he viewed the man as a trusted uncle. “Mother was killed. All of the servants were killed.” He felt a tear well up but pushed the sorrow back.
Mr. Perry cursed, “Those damned Black Company, I’ll wager.”
“Did my family say why they left?”
The older man shook his head, “Shame…mighty shame what happened to your kin. Do you want to come inside? Have some tea?”
“I need to find my grandfather,” Tristan replied.
“Oh, well him, he’s been gone for a few months. Went off to hunt a big dragon that was harassing the north of the kingdom.”
Oh thank the gods, Tristan thought. Whatever fate befell his mother had not met his grandfather. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. “What about my father and siblings?”
“Your father went to the south, dealing with a different dragon. I swear, things are starting to look like the Dragonstorm all over again.”
He was referring to a time in the kingdom of Bhant’s history a little less than fifty years prior. A time when the portals to the Elemental Realms were ripped open by an insane archon. The high-Order magecraft user was slain, but the time the rifts were open allowed dozens of dragons and elementals to break through to the Mortal Realm.
“If its just two, I don’t think it’s that bad.”
“I think your sister got married while you were gone. Last Winds season, I think? The days blur together a bit.”
Good for her, Tristan thought. The siblings might have grown further apart when his half-breed traits began to show themselves – mostly at his father’s insistence. But Gisele would sometimes sneak into Tristan’s room and play block building games with him. “What about Bertram?”
At that, Mr. Perry’s face went sour, “Ah, he went off to join some adventuring group. Rash boy, always was, always will be.”
Tristan full-well knew the truth of those words. Bertram had a temper, and he was quick to anger, but he was also boisterous and fun-loving. Rowdy fun. Wrestling the smaller Tristan and pinning him despite his cries of pain. “Well, at least he’s safe, too.”
“Seems like they wanted your mother. But why stick around?” Mr. Perry tapped his cane. “Doesn’t make much sense, now, does it? And why not sell the house?”
And why was the vault cleared? The best explanation he could think of was some time in the last two years the family had moved the bulk of their belongings and valuables to the capital. But his mother stayed behind, and so the servants were left there as well. She probably didn’t want them to have to uproot their whole lives, he thought. Those servant quarters were miniature houses, the servants had families. They were like a microcosm of a community.
So they were after mother, most likely. But why stick around? A thought hit him, and it brought him great sorrow and rage. Did father have her killed? So he could remarry?
“Uh, Tristan? You okay m’boy?”
Tristan nodded and swallowed the lump that was in his throat, “Yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Lad…I’m sorry,” Mr. Perry put a hand on Tristan’s forearm and squeezed it gently. “You must be devastated. If you want to stay, you are more than welcome to.”
Tristan bowed his head slightly and tucked his symbol of nobility under his armor, “Thank you, but I really need to see my sister and find out what happened.”
“Ah, she was mighty fine in her dress. Like my late wife. Stunning, absolutely gorgeous.” The man sighed as he gazed off towards the now-beginning sunset, reminiscing.
“Thank you again, Mr. Perry.”
“No problem lad.”
Tristan turned and left, heading across the various fields and orchards towards the capital outskirts. Keeping away from the main roads.
I have to know what happened.
Comments
Seras Streams
Shit. Good catch XD
rcm024
"Priam replied." Wrong series hahaha
