By the time evening rolled around, Sable had done some serious environmental damage.

An enormous section of the plains and forest burned blue, throwing up plumes of smoke and darkening the sky. Navigating the mess was irritating to say the least. Could dragons get lung damage from smoke inhalation? She hadn’t taken any ‘HP’ damage, so she figured she was fine.

Imagine, though. Dying to smoke inhalation as a dragon. What a way to go.

The Aspect never reared up to fight against her slow and deliberate destruction of its host city, which was good. She played it carefully, never coming within five times the distance she had when the monster had first activated. While tedious, her work was effective, the flames engulfing the city faster and faster. With a new tree added every few minutes, the city was a bundle of kindling in only an hour or two.

From there, igniting the direct surroundings was tedious, but at least Sable could swoop down and breathe fire directly. Doing so burned through her mana, but she thought it was effort and resources well spent.

She returned to Aylin. Having set her down a good distance away, she was safe from the spreading wildfire. Sable admired the enormous plumes of smoke, and was, reasonably, concerned how far they would spread. But that was rather out of her hands, now.

Er, out of her claws.

“It worked,” Aylin said. The goblin girl was seated on the edge of the outcropping, feet dangling off the edge. She had a contemplative look on her face. “She didn’t even fight back.”

[Never got close enough.]

“It’s strange that it works that way.”

Sable shrugged. Compared to everything else? Not that odd. That the monstrous creature had limitations had been obvious from the outset. Otherwise, wouldn’t it have tried its hardest to kill her, rather than flinging a single spear then sinking back into the city, annoyed it had missed?

[I’m more concerned how it happened. How that thing arrived in the first place.]

Aylin shrugged. “People messing with things they shouldn’t, I’d figure. That’s how it happens in the stories. Doubt we’ll ever get an answer.”

When the city had been wiped to the man, and was now an enormous bonfire? Yeah, Sable doubted she’d be getting concrete answers on what had happened.

[More importantly, I hope only this city was affected. That there aren’t dozens of these.]

Another shrug.

[Regardless,] Sable said. [Our plans have been delayed. We’ll return in the morning to continue our true goals.]

“And what are those, anyway?” Aylin asked curiously. “Conquering one of the clans, I take it, but how?”

[With careful applications of terror,] Sable said simply.

***

Early the next morning, Sable passed over the sprawling, blackened patch of earth that had once been a city. The stain had spread staggeringly far, the wildfire taking a life of its own. But it had died down. So, there was that.

And, though the wisdom of doing so she’d been supremely dubious on, she had decided to make sure by flying down to see if the Aspect was truly gone. Her entire body vibrated with nerves during the tentative expedition, and she’d been ready to flee at a moment’s notice, but no enormous liquid-black monster clawed out of the ground to scream at her, even when she set down into the smoldering husk that used to be a city. So, the plan had worked. The evil god’s influence had been burned away.

She hadn’t received any experience or bonuses for doing so, but she wasn’t surprised by that. She doubted she’d killed the thing … just scared it away. Or something. Who knew how evil goddesses worked?

Regardless, her good deed for the day had been accomplished. That satisfied her more than she would have expected. Her dragon-half didn’t care at all, but the part of Sable that mattered—her human self—certainly did.

And being able to help society at large, while still working on her own goals—via masquerading this destruction as her own—satisfied both halves. So, she was quite pleased with herself.

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That done, and with daylight burning, Sable set off to handle the next stage of her plans.

Gadenrock was one of the larger cities, as indicated by the cramped notes tucked to the margins of Aylin’s maps. Knowing that, she had a decision to make. If she were going to spread the lie that she had ‘razed Gadenrock for refusing to accept her tyranny’, then she would be best served presenting that fact to someone who wouldn’t despise her for it—like, say, a direct, allied neighbor of Gadenrock’s.

She should seek out a city further away who would still be horrified at what Sable had done, but who were ultimately enemies to Gadenrock, and thus less likely to hate her. Fear was good, but hate would get in the way. That was how rebellions started. And Sable had no intentions of squashing a rebellion and making good on her threats. It was a delicate tightrope to walk.

Politics. She was really about to wade into politics. As a giant, flying, lizard politician. What had the world come to?

But, as she’d figured, what other way did she have for quick growth, that wasn’t despicable? Making a living as a cold-blooded politician, draining resources from cities under her control, was far from squeaky-clean ethics, or even morally good in any interpretation. But at least she wasn’t burning cities down.

Er.

Burning living cities down.

She would take a reasonable amount of her target’s resources, ultimately leaving her subjects not worse for wear. Maybe their economics would take a hit, but she also intended to smooth that over. She had a few ideas on how she might provide value to her people. Both long-term and short-term.

Though some of the simplest ways might hurt her image, such as ferrying enormous pallets across great distances. Doing something like that would be a great boon for a burgeoning society, with transport always a tricky limitation, but acting as a delivery service probably wouldn’t be great for seeming like a terrible tyrant.

Plus, when it came to ‘doing good’, Aylin had mentioned the northern clans were in turmoil, not just with the increased monster frequency, but with each other. Having a forceful monarch would smooth things over. Peace through tyranny. Because what insane clan would initiate hostilities against another clan which had a dragon at their head? Subsequently, that peace would provide security and improved economic conditions, further creating value both to add to her hoard, and for the people at large.

It seemed like a fair enough plan, if admittedly not an airtight one. She would decide on the details later. For now, she had to scare her first city into submission.

The key, of course, was going to be Aylin. It wasn’t like Sable could speak herself. And what use was there in having a classed goblin minion if not to be her diplomat?

***

Aylin still didn’t know what Mistress Sable’s plans were beyond the broadest overview, but she supposed it was reasonable a dragon wouldn’t treat her as a confidante, detailing each and every of her machinations.

Really, for being selected purely by chance, Aylin ought to be grateful she’d found any sort of status at all. Of all the varied races across the land, goblins weren’t generally what a person would think of when it came to ‘a dragon’s inner circle’.

And, truthfully, she was grateful. From nowhere, she’d been granted a class, been equipped, gained significant experience as her mistress scorched her way through a dungeon, and it was increasingly looking like Aylin wouldn’t be dismissed, as Sable had first alluded to.

That probably hinged on her performance today.

Which was, Aylin couldn’t help but feel, outrageously unfair. The first real task she’d been given was diplomacy? Skill with words? Aylin was a warrior, through-and-through. She thought she’d proved that down in the dungeon, despite being enormously outclassed by her adventuring partner. Of course she was weaker than Sable, and couldn’t imperiously stride through traps and char a boss monster into a blackened husk in a few seconds, but for a mere mortal, she’d done well. Or she felt she had.

Unfortunately, a warrior wasn’t what her mistress needed, right now.

She needed someone who could negotiate the surrender of a powerful northern tribe. Lacking a way to communicate without forcing the city’s leader into her thrall, using Aylin as a middle-man was Sable’s simplest path forward.

According to the stories, some day Sable would have a half-dragon form and be capable of doing so herself, but neither of them had any idea when that would happen. Or whether it would at all. Maybe only some dragons received half-dragon forms. Aylin was hardly an expert on how dragons worked.

But her. Aylin, acting as a diplomat. How ridiculous.

Though diplomat wasn’t completely the right word. More accurately, she was negotiating a city’s surrender under the threat of extreme violence.

And how was she supposed to just waltz in and do that? Her? Aylin? Nobody-orphan from a small southern goblin clan? The northern tribes were … well, the northern tribes. A single one could wipe out the forest-dwelling clans to the south—Aylin’s people. Though the Rustling Woodlands were hospitable, easier to live in, that didn’t mean they’d prospered and grown more powerful than their northern neighbors. Living in a harsh place like the Red Plains meant a higher chance to get a class—and that was as much of a benefit as a gentler environment. More so, maybe. The strongest societies across the world did tend to spawn from the harshest regions, as far as Aylin knew.

So her, a nobody orphan troublemaker from an unimportant southern clan. She was supposed to act like she mattered? Threaten the leaders of a northern city?

Except … those were her old circumstances, weren’t they? Nobody she interacted with would have the slightest idea who she was, beyond Mistress Sable’s champion, the first dragon in centuries. That held weight. And Aylin had always had a certain bluster to her. She’d learned to put on a tough act, back home, out of necessity. It wouldn’t be much different here.

To the northern tribe, she was, effectively, who she pretended to be. Any image she created became the truth.

That realization settling into her, she decided maybe she could handle this.