Chapter Text

The Hailene War of Ascension left deep scars both in the land an in the very spirits of demihumanity. The genocidal scourge of the Hailene Empire had been broken by the Vishnari Alliance, but without the unifying threat of annihilation, the alliance itself began to crumble.

Allies drifted apart an became distant at best, enemies at worst. Those who were once heroes in the face of conquest and oppression began their own sojourns into carving out lands for their own rule, both just and unjust. The acts of heroism among those who once and would again be called monsters and 'savage' races were forgotten.

So began what modern history would know as the Age of Tragedies.

But it should always be remembered that even in the darkest times, there have always been and always will be points of light. One that is particularly celebrated among certain circles of bards, dragon cults and one very peculiar and influential family living in the south of Novrom began in the seventy-third year after the end of the War; when like many of his counterparts, Lord Naevarys Citraan announced a bounty on the dragons whose territories overlapped his lands...

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The shrill mental cacophony of the alarm spell snapped Pyrrhanykos of the Red Nation out of her sleep. One heavy eyelid opened, the transparent secondary lid remaining firmly in place as proof against the smoke that permeated her lair from the many small fires she kept going.

At first she didn't move, knowing that any motion would cause a small avalanche of the coins, weapons and other trinkets that made up be bed-slash-horde, giving away her position to who or whatever was intruding in her domain.

It was probably nothing though: she kept her alarm spells running at maximum sensitivity out of simple paranoia and this wouldn't be the first time a hungry rat or curious orm set them off. She wouldn't mind either one disturbing her sleep at the moment: mountain rats were delicious if prepared correctly and orms, distant evolutionary relatives to dragons, were entertaining if flighty pets.

Of course neither orms nor rats wore boots, which crunched in the gravel just inside her cave entrance like the ones she hear.

So there really was an intruder in her lair. A thief, a lost traveler or gods and demons forbid, an adventurer, she had no way of knowing, but to the Seven Interlocking Hells of the Inferno with the idea of letting them come any closer unchallenged.

Rising from her lazy sprawl, she fanned her wings and shook herself, allowing lose bits of her bedding to slide away noisily—hopefully making more noise than one would expect from a dragon her size. Coins of various denominations and mintings clattered and tinkled off her along with a truly impressive assortment of bladed implements.

Pyrrhanykos liked weapons more than coin or baubles, but if she were forced to be honest, less than half her collection of blades were proper tools of violence. A lot of them were camp cutlery because travelers and adventurers guarded that a great deal less jealously than their actual weapons or valuables. Still, even a butter knife could do amazing amounts of harm with a dragon's strength behind it.

In the dark and smoke near where the cave entrance took a sharp turn around a corner from the entrance (no dragon was dumb enough to lair somewhere opponents could just lob spells into form afar), she heard a gasp and possibly the sound of nervous swallowing.

Just as she'd convinced herself she was just going to are off some idiot lost on the mountain, a voice called out.

“H-hear me, Dragon! By order of Lord Naevarys Citraan, for the crime of poaching game from the Lord's forest, of fishing his streams without permission, for waylaying travelers, for robbery, a-and for the high crime of being an unsanctioned monster in the Lord's land, I, Jaune Arc h-have come to carry out a sentence of death. S-surrender peacefully and you will dispatched without undue pain.”

He didn't sound particularly sure of himself, but from the smell of him, he was human and Pyrrhanykos's brood mother had always warned the hatchlings that humans among all demihumanity were a wily lot with many tricks and adaptations squirreled away just waiting to surprise the unwary.

Case in point, he wasn't' coughing or seeming to have any trouble seeing in her smoke-filled lair. Either he or someone else had cast a filter air spell upon him. That also meant he'd come prepared to fight a dragon of the Red Nation like her specifically. While it was true that both red and gold dragons were creatures of the flame, the Gold Nation had a literal inner fire that kept them comfortably warm. The Red Nation, though warm blooded like any dragon (contrary to popular demihuman belief), still chilled easily and sought out sources of heat: fire, lava, what have you. A Red lair was always filled with smoke, if not ash or even pyroclastic clouds.

Luckily, her brood mother was also a wise old wyrm and had instilled on all the little dragons she hatched an important life lesson: adventurers always expected dragons to be color-coded for their convenience and rarely expected, say a Red Nation dragon to know vin the power of wind and lightning. Pyrrhanykos had chosen something more to her liking in tat regard: ferif the power of metal and magnetism.

Tapping into her inner reserves of energy, she brought a bubble of ferif to the surface, ready to call into service at a moment's notice. However, she didn't attack right away.

Cautious she might be, but Pyrrhanykos had two fatal flaws that came into play at the moment: curiosity and bravado. She wanted to know what caused this obviously terrified human to trek all the way up the mountain to antagonize her almost as much as she wanted to make it clear to him he had no chance against her.

“Oh really?” It had been almost twenty years since she had to speak the common tongue of demihumans and she hoped she had the inflections right. Also that she sounded threatening. To her, it felt like she'd come of sounding a little too... cordial? “I've been living here for over thirty years and I've never heard of his Lord Citraan.”

Saying you've been around thirty years to another dragon was like saying you've been around for the past twenty minutes, but she'd heard thirty years was a fairly big number t humans, especially in the politically unstable region around the mountain range she called home.

A nervous cough, a scrapping of metal against metal. Through the smoke, Pyrrhanykos could see the would-be adventurer trying to scratch his head through the boiled leather helm that made up his patchwork armor. That in and of itself was a curiosity to her: his breastplate and pauldrons looked to be masterworks of armor craft, but then under it he was wearing the leathers of a conscript who was at the back of the line when armor got handed out.

“Huh.” Jaune Arc said thoughtfully. “Well yeah, about that: he only really arrived in the region maybe twelve years ago? I was a kid when he first came in and said my village was part of his realm.”

Ah, Pyrrhanykos thought, one of those lords. The chaotic aftermath of the War had gone on almost as long as she'd been alive and the story rarely changed: old generals and field commanders with enough loyal soldiers to overpower the average town guard rolling into remote regions, declaring themselves king of their little hills and trying to expand. And oh yes, putting out bounties on dragons 'savage' races and powerful monsters as soon as they had the coin to spare to try and make sure nothing powerful enough to challenge them remained.

Many such men and women ended up as something unpleasant and stringy between someone's teeth—assuming there was enough left to eat. One did not threaten a fully-grown dragon—or a clan of mountain ogres for that matter—without consequence.

But then there was the small problem for Pyrrhanykos that she was not a full-grown dragon. Being in her early eighties, she was probably in a relative sense around the same developmental age as the adventurer before her and as dragons went,s he was tiny, only about the size of a horse—not a very big horse either.

Still, she was bigger than Jaune was and had the advantage of not being afraid. Flaring her wings to make herself appear larger, she stalked through the twisting cloud of smoke toward him. “Tell me, Jaune Arc, if he hasn't even been your lord your whole life, then why are you willing to risk your life fighting a dragon for him? We are quite dangerous, you know?”

She didn't give him time to answer, calling on the ferif she'd gathered and tying it to a stray copper coin on the ground between them. The coin rose off the ground, span a few times in the air, then streaked toward the awestruck adventurer with such great speed that that the air made the sound like a small explosion.

The coin exploded into sparks on Jaune's breastplate, causing him the leap back, terror in his eyes. “Blood to ice!” he swore, unaware that this particular oath is a lot stronger to a dragon of the Red Nation than most other folk.

Backpedaling, he ended up stepping on a pewter flask (which was the closest thus far Pyrrhanykos had come to securing anything like the golden chalices that adorned the nest where she'd hatched. But a dragon had to start somewhere) and ended up coming down hard on his back on the cavern floor.

“Please don't kill me!” he blurted out, managing to get his shield up between them.

Pyrrhanykos raised a ridged brow and came closer, placing one claw atop the sword he'd dropped in the process. “Shouldn't that be my line? You did come here demanding I submit to execution, yes?” Damn her eyes, she still sounded casual—almost playful—to her own ears. It was probably from learning the common tongue form listening to people talking with their comrades around camp fires. She really needed to learn how to sound threatening.

Whatever she thought she sounded like, she probably could have asked if he wanted tea and it probably would have still scared Jaune at this point. “It's not like I wanted to do this!” He babbled from behind his shield. “I've got nothing against dragons or kobolds or orms...

Pyrrhanykos rolled her eyes. Another one of those. Why did everyone think kobolds were related to dragons? Especially the kobolds themselves.

Unaware of this, Jaune continued, “I-I just needed the money. The bounty for any dragon is five thousand gold weights. I-I've got seven sisters to think of. Plus my parents. I'm trying to pay their way out of here—so they can so somewhere safe and stable like all the way to the North, to Harpsfell.”

At this point, Pyrrhanykos was wondering if being inadvertently insulting was some sort of heretofore unknown distraction tactic. Harpsfell had been the first place the dragons had been overthrown in that long-ago time when dragons ruled the mortal races. What their people had done to demihumans back then was a bottomless well of shame especially to the Red Nation.

She quickly discarded the thought because he was terrified and completely genuine. Still... “And so, to help your family escape Citraan's rule, you're willing to kill me in his name?” At least this came out satisfyingly accusatory.

“Well I...” Jaune struggled to come up with some way to justify his actions, but that was pretty hard to do when talking to the one whose life hung in the balance when it came to said actions. “I... got nothing. It's wrong. I know it's wrong, but I wasn't thinking, okay? I just hate the idea of my family being stuck here while Citraan ruins everything.”

The dragoness regarded him for a silent moment. Family wasn't a topic dragons related to well. Oh, they kept track of bloodlines and both blood parents and brood mothers (the dragons that actually did the hatching and teaching of young dragons) held some importance in a dragon's life along with brood siblings, but these weren't close relationships. Friends and mates found later in life were more akin to what a human would regard as their 'family'.

This didn't mean she was without empathy. It was clear from how Jaune spoke how much his family meant to him. And really, it said a lot that he'd come to her lair at all, given how afraid he was. Something drove him even beyond fear, morals or common sense.

Even knowing nothing of the local economy, Pyrrhanykos figured it was indeed expensive to transplant a family of ten hundred or thousands of miles to a new home. Five thousand gold weights was a lot of coin. She didn't even have a fraction of that in her horde, which was mostly copper and cutlery. Slaying a dragon was probably quite honestly the only way to make that much aside from robbing a noble...

“Hmm,” now there was an idea.

“W-was that a good 'hmm' or a 'I'm going to kill you' 'hmm'”

Humans were wily. As frightened and pliable as Jaune Arc appeared, Pyrrhanykos felt she'd need to broach the subject delicately and honestly while still maintaining the upper claw so to speak. Abruptly, she sat down on her haunches and wrapped her tail around her claws, making sure the black, calcified natural spear at its tip was clearly on display.

“I'm sorry, I was thinking,” she said, actually trying to sound cordial now. “I really do not want to kill you, Jaune—even if you were willing to kill me.”

“T-to tell the truth, I'm not really sure I could have gone through with it. Y'know, now that I've met you. I was kind of expecting you to be more scary and... draogn-y. Like a big, smart animal instead of talking and thinking like a person.”

He really did seem to enjoy digging himself deeper, she mused.

“Plus, I never really killed someone before.”

“Neither have I,” she admitted, “But you've put me in a terrible position: If I send you back, you may tell people where my lair is and someone less...” she decided not to say 'incompetent', “...thoughtful will come for me and I'll have to kill or be killed anyway.”

Jaune let his shield drop to the side and made a sign over his chest, sketching out a rough sign of the Piercing Eye of Denaii, god of Honor among other things, “I swear I would never do that! Not if you let me live.”

“Even for a portion of the bounty? A fraction of five thousand still helps your family, yes?”

Seeing not future in trying to lie to the dragon, Jaune nodded and winced. Then he tried to bargain. “B-but if I die here, they'll know for sure there was something dangerous in the area where I disappeared. I made camp not far from here.”

That was a good point. Pyrrhanykos huffed unhappily at the thought. She had no idea how well-liked Jaune was either: the whole town might rally to rush her cave for all she knew. “True. So you see my problem, Jaune: I have no good options as to what to do with you.” She made a motion she understood humans called a 'shrug', which made her wings flare a little. “Plus, now I feel a bit badly about leaving your family in their situation.”

Jane's eyes darted around the room. Dragons were known to horde treasure, so he was hoping to find something portable and expensive to ask for. What he found were scattered copper and silver coins, piles of daggers, a few swords, and the contents of several dozen campsites worth of mess kits, mostly knives. There were others odds and ends there, but nothing like the old stories told of.

Than again, the old stories told of dragons the size of houses or even entire villages, so what did they know?

Not that his erstwhile opponent wasn't impressive with vivid red scales, a series of elegantly curved horns marching up her brow ridges in ranks ascending in size, and piercing green eyes. Here and there, her scales were—for the lack of a better word—decorated by patterns of bronze that appeared to have been drizzled over them while molten and allowed to cool. Combined with pearly dagger-teeth, wicked talons and that tail barb, and she was a work of art and an engine of destruction all at the same time.

Pyrrhanykos noticed him noticing her horde and snorted, bringing chemicals into a pair of tubes running up the inner side of her throat. Spitting them both at once, she launched a globule of burning gel the size of Jaune's fist into the ground between his feet, causing him to crab-walk backward with a yelp.

“No.” she said firmly. “Besides, I'm very young: my horde isn't work all that much to anyone but me.”

It took the young adventurer a moment to convince himself she'd missed on purpose and another to marvel at the burning gel that continued to smolder long after striking the stone floor. “Uh... right. So what are you going to do then?”

It was the question she'd been waiting for him to ask. “Well. It seems to me that both out problems stem from that bounty on dragons. You need the coin and I need the idiot who put it on my head to not have the coin to offer such things any longer.”

Jaune gave her a blank look. “O...kay? You want to what? Rob him? Because I'm not sure I'd be good at such a thing and you're... well a dragon. They might notice you sneaking into the vaults.”

His reaction actually gave her hope. People apparently didn't know that much in the way of facts regarding dragons if Jaune was anything to go by. She lowered her head to be on his level. “Let me paint you a picture, Jaune: you return to Citraan with the story of how you fought the dragon who lives here fiercely, forcing her to withdraw and flee. I'm willing to wager that not many of his warriors ave managed that. He'd almost certainly want you to join his service—which would give you access to his household at least some of the time.”

At this, Jaune shook his head. “It's a nice idea, but he's never going to believe me on my word. Plus, I'd have no proof.”

“You would if in the process of driving the dragon off, you rescued a fellow adventurer who can corroborate your tale,” offered the dragoness, rising to all fours, “People in your village know you, yes? They can all agree you have no accomplices who would tell that kind of lie for you?”

“Well, yes, but where are we going to...” Jaune trialed off because something very odd was happening to the dragon and she didn't seem to be enjoying it.

With older dragons, changing shape was a fluid, almost instantaneous process, especially for the Black and Silver Nations. This usually came form practice that taught the dragon to minimize the muscle strains, bents bones, and contorted joints that accompanied such transformations.

For reference, Pyrrhanykos had changed a grand total of five times. So it hurt like few things she'd experienced before. Her skeleton creaked as her muscles changed more swiftly than it did, pulling her bones into shapes they weren't meant to assume. The itch and prickle of every scale on her body receding into her flesh maddened her. An overall feeling of being compressed in a full-body vise made her eyes water and her lungs beg for air.

For what felt like minutes or even hours, her body was wracked with an agony most would never know, struck by vertigo and sickness from a sudden, distressing loss of mass, and numbed as vast swathes of her senses took their leave.

After far too long, she felt herself falling, striking the ground like a fleshy hammer. Something pressed sharply into her side and the miraculous part of her draconic mind that cataloged every single piece of her horde could tell by the shape that she'd landed on a pie server. Why in the Seven Interlocking Hell of the Inferno she'd decided to keep a pie server escaped her for the moment.

Seconds ticked by and she just lay there, willing the various aches assailing her new body away and listening to the confused babble escaping Jaune's mouth.

“The stories never said dragons could do that!” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet. She wondered if he was going to run, but after a moment, tentative footsteps approached. “A-are you okay?”

“In a word? Not really.” She forced herself up into a sitting position and for a moment, was confused as to why all she was seeing was a red curtain. Then she realized it was her hair and brushed it aside with her hand. She had a lot of hair in human form. It was one of the features she really liked about demihumans that dragons lacked.

She could have done with some scales though. The clothing she'd conjured folded and clung and billowed in all the wrong places and made her feel like there was a living thing trying to swarm over her skin. Ugh, and the skin. She felt like it might tear if she moved wrong. She took a second to pinch her arm to make sure she hadn't accidentally made it too thin and found it resistant enough.

“That looked like it hurt.” to her surprise, Jaune was standing before her, offering a hand up.

Any other time, she would have refused the help, but her muscles were still twitching from the change and she wasn't sure she could get to her feet on her own just yet, so she took his hand. It was warm—actually very warm thanks to being in the heated cave for so long—thank goodness. She'd always imagined human flesh would feel clammy considering how much they sweated.

“So...” Jaune said once she was standing on her own two feet, “Are there dragons just walking around among us mortals all the time?”

“Not that I know of,” Pyrrhanykos said, giving her new form an experimental stretch. Most dragons were less... whimsical... with their shapechanging. Most simply became birds to travel long distances without drawing attention, or smaller creatures to enter spaces they were too large to fit into. It was mostly the Black Nation whose curiosity about demihumanity led them to take the guise of fellow sapients for any appreciable amount of time.

A beat passed in which she'd expected Jaune to fill the silence. When he didn't, she looked in his direction and... was he staring at her? With no frame of reference, she didn't know if that was a good or bad thing. There were any number of things she could have gotten wrong, and the fact that he hastily looked away when she caught him staring pointed in that direction.

Pride kept her from asking what it was and drove her to fill that silence herself.

“In case it wasn't obvious, I will play the part of the adventurer you saved. I'd have a life debt to you for saving me of course, giving us a reason for me to remain close and also gain access to the Lord's household.” She paused after a thought hit her. “Do... humans enter into life debts?”

Jaune shrugged. “They do in stories. In my village, it hasn't really come up, I don't think. Haven't been many chances to save anyone around here.”

“Do you think Lord Citraan would accept that's what happened?”

Another shrug. “I don't see a reason why not... I'm sorry, this is really weird. Are you still like a dragon on the inside, or...”

“I still have the durability, strength and inner magic of a dragon, but for all practical purposes, I am as human as you are for the moment.” Pyrrhanykos said with no idea how to prove it if he asked.

He nodded slowly, looking quite dubious at the claim. “So what am I supposed to call you?”

She tilted her head and hummed in thought. Plenty of demihumans had names in the draconic tongue, so that wasn't an issue. A lot of them had surnames though, something dragons almost universally lacked. Dragonsired, the offspring or descendants of unions between dragons and demihumans took had two names and an appellation that denoted their draconic parent's Nation, at least in the dragon cults. But then, she'd taken a fully human form, not a dragonsired one.

After some mulling over, she decided to keep things as simple as possible.

“You may call me Pyrrha Nikos.”