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Chapter 46 - Dawnfire's Bad Day

Postmaster Dawnfire was having a bad day. Only a few short months ago, everything has been good. She had been on track for a promotion, ready to tackle the problem of the missing coal barges, ready to finally get her life in gear and clean her kitchen, and then They had turned up.

It had started in the very late autumn, with just a couple of refugees. One or two people with carts and baggage had arrived at the city gates, and she hadn’t thought too much of it. The local government had dealt with them, and the only reason she’d heard about it at all was she attended the local council meetings.

The local council meetings mostly consisted of sitting in the back of the pub with the mayor, ten minutes after anyone else had failed to turn up, but that was how it went sometimes.

The next week had brought a couple more, and on the third week, everyone had turned up to the meeting, which she had never seen before. Not once, in all her years of working in the city, had she seen everyone turn up, it was unheard of.

That was how Postmaster Dawnfire was first clued into the fact that something was wrong.

The first few people to arrive had been put into isolation, on a farm outside the village. Interviewed and forgotten about. Over the course of the next week another ten had turned up in drips and drabs, and the government had become more worried. If what they said was true, then there would be more turning up the next week, and then the week after that the city would be over-run, as those who were travelling on foot started to catch up.

It was still the beginning of winter at that point, and they didn’t think many on foot would make it once the first snow hit, but by that point, there were almost a hundred of them. The thing nobody was mentioning, Dawnfire put forth, was where they had come from.

The chairs were dusted off and maps were bought out and pinned up onto the walls of the council chamber. East as the dragon flies, there were two small cities, barely blips on the map. One had even been built after the map had been made, to take advantage of a nearby coal-seam, and after some consultation had had to be drawn on in pen and ink. The other was a fishing town, barely worthy of the name of town, never-mind city.

The refugees didn’t know what had happened, only that they had been told to leave one day, the bells were rung and the evacuation orders were given. They hadn’t been allowed to head towards the fishing town of Tole, a name she only knew because of her position as Postmaster, but rumours were that it had fallen to pirates.

Some had said pirates, others had said plague. One man had blamed the dragon before they were quickly shot down by Dawnfire. For it to have struck down a city, they would have had to be hundreds of miles off-route. It was extremely unlikely.

The man she had admonished sank down into his seat after that and didn’t speak again for the rest of the meeting. Good, she thought. Serves him right.

More rumours were bandied about after that. Maybe they were at war again, but why would they have struck at a random fishing village. Maybe something had crawled out of the forest and eaten all the villagers, but why couldn't they fight it off. Maybe the gods themselves had struck the place down, and were going to go for other coal towns next, for succumbing to the evils of industry.

Nobody knew for sure, and eventually, order was called, the mayor herself standing upon a chair and shouting for them to quiet down.

After that, the discussion went on for a couple more hours, in much quieter voices. Where were the refugees going to be housed, who was going to feed them, what to do if it was a plague, and by the end of her night her head was spinning.

She was glad she only had to deal with the postal side of things. Letters and parcels for those two cities would be set aside, and the dispossessed could call in if they thought something belonging to them was in that pile. Simple as.

-

The people were right, and after the first snow, no more refugees arrived. The lack of the two villages and added people were a strain on the city, which was felt more than Dawnfire had expected. Lack of coal for the fires, lack of fish for dinner and a shortage of crops on the weekly markets, although thankfully they were mostly self-sufficient in that regard.

With the harsh winter behind them, and Spring transitioning into summer, she had been hoping for a break. Then the stiffs had turned up.

They weren’t anyone she’d met before, but they were the bosses of her bosses bosses, their uniforms crisp and sharp, their movements strange, as if they were thinking just a little too much about each movement, their gazes a little too sharp.

They had turned up in her office one morning, as she had been attempting to negotiate with an old man about his tobacco shipment, which was apparently sub-par. It wasn’t her problem, the number of packages and parcels that came through her office each day was countless, although she did keep good books, and if he wanted to take up with somebody the fact he had been sold common grass rather than actual tobacco, he should do it with whoever had sold it to him.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The old man had been trying to hit her with his stick and she had been fighting him off with a bundle of letters, when They walked in.

Both her and the old man had frozen for a moment, before he had politely put his cane away and left, and she had deposited the letters into the sack where they belonged, before making eye contact and greeting her visitors.

-

"We're here to commandeer 'Crests the Skies on Wings of Knowledge." Stated the first figure, once they were all seated in the back of the pub. Dawnfire could tell they were a stick in the mud by the way they gave the full name every time, nobody did that unless they were way too far up the social ranking. That and the fact she was the only one who'd bought a drink, and gods was she going to need it.

"We need him," nice avoidance of the name, "to go and see what's happened in Cericil and Tole. We've had no contact with them over the winter, and this is the closest stop."

Dawnfire was sceptical, "How are you going to manage that? He can't speak, as far as I know, he just has route he's trained to fly? Do you think you can change that?"

Different people had different opinions about 'Crests the Skies on Wings of Knowledge', and oh gods now she was doing it too. Some argued that he merely flew where he had been trained to fly, others argued that he might be more intelligent. The range of that intelligence differed depending on who you were talking to. At one end of the scale were the cultists on the island of Vocil, who revered it as one of the gods, to the average postal worker, who she would say considered it no smarter than the average dog.

Dawnfire hadn't interacted with it enough to know on which side of the fence she stood, but it was somewhat closer to "dog" than "god". It landed, it grabbed his cow, it let them load its packs and then it left again. That was all. No more intelligent than a minecart.

It was nice of it to eat the cow elsewhere, though. Much less traumatic for everyone involved.

"We'll strip the bags off and put a rider on him. It's been done before." This was news to her, but she didn't question the veracity of it. She liked her job.

"Is that… Safe?" she countered instead, "If the cities really have fallen to plague like the refugees say…"

The three of them shared a glance, before the one in the middle finally spoke, an air of embarrassment in her voice, "there are refugees?"

-

The Dragon had turned up two days later, and by then the plan had changed completely. They were going to send him out alone, and they had several artists waiting back on the ground. Once it returned, if it returned, then they would draw different things and try and get it to point to which ones it'd seen.

This was utterly bonkers, but the stiffs seemed convinced that it wasn't. The artists were being paid, and she didn't want to lose her job, never-mind her new promotion. Her heart had sunk as she'd seen the silver shape in the sky. They were really going to do this?

Fifteen minutes and one confused and rather naked looking dragon later, they were absolutely going to do this. The artists were already hard at work, pencils and inks out, making the most of the rare opportunity to sketch him without being chased away by the postal workers.

'Crests the Skies on Wings of Knowledge' crouched on the floor with his head on his front paws, and stared at the three of them, resplendent in their shiny blue uniforms.

"Okay," started Stiff Number One, who referred to themselves as Wintersfoil. The second was Batsblack and the third was named Landblight, which was far too on the nose for somebody investigating a plague, and she had questioned it. They had smiled, but said nothing.

Wintersfoil pointed at the map, "We need you," she said, very slowly and pointing with an exaggerated motion, "to go to this city…"

The explanation went on for a few minutes, and by the end of it, half the people in the area looked as confused as the Dragon. It had watched the demonstration with interest, waited until it was over, and then tilted its head like a dog. A confused dog.

It had looked around the area, at the amassed people, and his eyes seemed to say "What's wrong with this guy, I just deliver letters!"

Batsblack had tried next, recruiting one of the artists to help, a middle-aged man named Windwash. He had been in town to help design the new civic hall, but had jumped at the opportunity to sketch the dragon. She had her suspicions that he might have been hanging about even without the added incentive, there was always one.

Batsblack's approach was abandoned even faster than Wintersfoils. A few sketches in, and the artist threw his hands up in the air, pushing his pencil behind his ear as he did so. "He doesn't get it," he exclaimed, "this is pointless, you're just gonna have to send somebody with him."

"We can't do that." Batsblack had countered, unphased by her failure, "if the city has fallen to plague then there's a chance it's still there. You're a military man, you know the regulations."

Windwash had huffed in agreement, before looking between the three of them and rolling up the paper he'd been drawing on, slipping it into the back of his belt. "Well if you can't even communicate with it right now," he pointed at Crests the Skies as he spoke, "then how do you expect to get information out of it when it returns?"

Something crossed his face for a moment, as he looked at the dragon, a complex mix of emotions, but it was gone in an instant. "You can always just circle, whoever you send doesn't even have to land."

Landblight had spoken up then for the first time, and their voice was lighter than she had expected, their intonation completely neutral, unusually so. "He won't accept any riders other than children. This has been tried in the past." They looked around the area for a moment, at the assembled postal workers and artists, "There is an orphanage in this city?"

Dawnfire nodded, "down on Charity Street, it's not far."

Batsblack nodded back. "One of you go and fetch a child from there. Old enough to speak, that's our best bet, and they won't be missed."

Windwash had lowered their hands, one laying on the paper on the back of his belt, the other over the ear holding the pencil. "You're going to sacrifice a child for this?"

Batsblack shrugged, their face as impassive as their voice. "It's our best option. They won't need a harness, and can tell us what they saw when they return."

Windwash stood there for a moment, frozen in his odd pose, before shaking his head and moving his hands to a more neutral position by his sides. He took a moment to compose himself, his face twitching between anger and something else.

"If you care about them so much, you may adopt them yourself, if they return." Batsblack nodded, as if this was a completely normal thing to say.

The artist had stood for a moment longer, and then looked at the dragon, which was crouched down still and appeared to be watching the conversation with interest.

Then he had thrown his hands in the air, shouted something incomprehensible at Batsblack, scrambled up the side of Crests the Skies, and had stolen a dragon.