Drayya had a spring to her step as the two of them left the tower. She twirled around with a smile wider than any other plastered across her face. She was scanning Lieze for any sign of elation, disappointed to see that she was as affectless as ever.
“Can’t you at least smile?” She asked somewhat hopefully, “You found what you were looking for, didn’t you?”
Drayya had to know that Lieze was satisfied. She had become quite dependent on the girl, in that strange way - reliant on the cracks in her unfeeling personality to fuel her own happiness. More than anything else, Lieze thought, she wanted the two of them to become closer.
“I did.” She gave a shallow nod, “All I’m left with now is the apprehension of straying onto a new path. All this time, I’ve been nothing but a puppet for Sokalar’s beliefs. Now I have the responsibility of deciding on my own identity. Do you know how terrifying that is?”
Drayya skipped over and grabbed her hand. Her features were darkened by the sun setting over her shoulder. “I want to be by your side during that.” she said, “I don’t want you to take what Sigmund said seriously. Whether you were ‘created’ to serve a purpose or not doesn’t make you any less human.”
Lieze paused, “...But who can I be, other than myself?”
“Lieze is Lieze.” She said, “-And I know ‘Lieze’ better than anyone else, and the ‘Lieze’ you could become if you weren’t so abstinent. Like I said before - if you were just a little more true to yourself, you would be so much happier.”
‘Being true’. ‘Being happy’. Beyond the innocence of her youth, Lieze had forgotten what it meant to seek joy. People terrified her. Or, rather, it was the enveloping emotion of others that pushed her to the brink of sobbing. The Order had crushed any desire to step beyond that fault. She was wrong to think it was an incurable facet of herself.
Drayya hugged her. She squinted her eyes to avoid the glare of the orange sunset. When they parted, the two of them exchanged glances. A bolt of desire struck Lieze in the gut. She placed both hands on Drayya’s shoulders and moved in to steal the girl’s lips. A muffled yelp of surprise escaped from her lips, but she did next to nothing to resist the embrace.
When Lieze retreated, she could glimpse the pinkish shade of Drayya’s cheeks burning through her shaded features. Her mouth was a straight line, feigning indifference. “W-What was that for?” she wondered.
“I felt like it.” Lieze answered, “I don’t need a better reason.”
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Lüngen was poring over a scroll torn with claw marks when Lieze and Drayya returned. They were able to locate him via the smoke signal from the campfire he had so graciously constructed. The site was located below a great cliff jutting out from the landscape. Water vapour danced in the air from a nearby waterfall, worsening the bog’s already-unbearable humidity.
As soon as Lieze climbed down from the Manticore and met eyes with Lüngen, she couldn’t help but shrink away as a certain scrutiny flared up in his gaze. He lifted a hairy hand towards his beard and squinted his eyelids, as if not entirely certain that the woman standing in front of him was Lieze.
“What are you staring at me like that for?” She asked.
“I take it something good happened?” He wondered, “You’ve got a look on your face that reminds me of when you were a youngling. I never thought I’d see it again.”
She didn’t look - or feel - any different than normal, she thought. But Lüngen was a discerning man if nothing else, and it couldn’t be denied that she was rather pleased with how her expedition to the tower had turned out. Trying to maintain her straight face, she shook her head. “Have any of the Deathguards returned?” she asked.
He shook his head, “-For the better, I think. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to nothing but the terrified shrieks of monsters in the swamp for the past few hours, so they must be doing an excellent job.”
The swamp was being emptied of life. Lieze’s army still had room for more thralls, but she would have to create more Skeletal Necromancers in the near future if she wanted to maximise her manpower. “We’re not staying here for long.” she said, “It’s time we made our move on the Dwarves. They still aren’t aware of our presence here, and we need to exploit that.”
Lüngen held the scroll towards her, “Another missive from Marché. Now that you’ve given them permission to kill freely, they’ve been causing quite a stir in the mountains. Panic is spreading through the population.”
Lieze gave the scroll a once-over, skipping any superficial details to arrive at the meat of Marché’s correspondence. He and Roland were attempting to destabilise the region from within, using the prestige gained from Baccharum’s trial to exert their influence within the mountains’ political climate. At the same time, they were performing clandestine murders and carefully accruing a supply of thralls that could be sprung like a plague from within at the drop of a hat. She rolled up the scroll and handed it back to Lüngen.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Alberich is the Scion of enchantment.” She said.
“Oh?” The pudgy scholar raised his eyebrows, “Is that so?”
“There’s no other explanation for what we already know about the Dwarves’ defensive capabilities.” She continued, “Their trebuchets and ballistae and machines are decades beyond anything the Sovereign Cities were capable of. If Alberich was granted the power of enchantment, it would also explain his supposed invulnerability - he’s probably wearing an enchanted suit of armour that deflects any blow.”
Lüngen smirked. There was something like pride in his eyes, as if he had been expecting Lieze to say something similar for a while. “And how do we overcome this technological disadvantage?” he asked.
“We ignore them.” Came her answer, “Instead of proceeding to the mountains directly, we’re going to loop around the coast and attack the border. All of the siege weapons there will be pointing the wrong way if we approach from the north, giving us exactly the sort of advantage we need to emerge victorious.”
Drayya shoved her head into the conversation, “-They could just turn them around, you know?”
“Maybe if we were still in the midlands.” Lieze replied, “Those weapons are far too big to move in a short period of time. I wouldn’t be surprised if the border was built around them.”
“At least one Dwarf will escape from a battle like that.” She argued, “The mountains will be prepared for us if news of our infiltration manages to make its way north.”
“The mountains will be prepared for us either way.” Lieze said, “-And more to the point, there isn’t an easy method of marching our army into the anthills without attracting the ire of the siege weapons. Once we make our way inside, we’ll have the advantage, and that advantage will only be more pronounced if we have more thralls to work with.”
“Mm…” Drayya lowered her head, “I suppose we’ll have to attack the border no matter what we do. If we march on the mountains only to be flanked from behind at a pivotal moment, we’ll have no escape route to consider.”
Lüngen piped up, “Shall I send a message to Marché seeing if he can’t find some way of disabling the mountains’ defences?”
“No. I don’t want a repeat of the Baccharum situation. We shouldn’t infringe on his plan to sow chaos within the country.” Lieze said, “We’ll spend a day or two reinforcing our army in this swamp before beginning our march on the border. I want plenty of Rot Behemoths and Horrors to act as meat shields for the upcoming battle.”
Lüngen sighed, “-And I suppose you’ll be returning to your studies in the meantime?”
“No.” She glanced away, revealing a self-conscious trepidation to her reply, “...I want to eat something tasty first. The rations aboard that ship have left my teeth feeling like they would shatter if I bit into another stale biscuit.”
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Lieze didn’t care for food. Not in the slightest. Or, at least, that’s how she had been raised to act. Sokalar would punish her ineptitude as a child with starvation, permanently altering her relationship with the concept of a good meal. Food was not enjoyable, she thought. A necromancer should not find things ‘enjoyable’ to begin with. She reduced it to a process - a repulsive mechanism of the imperfect human body.
Drayya was ecstatic at the opportunity to prepare something for her. She were left wanting for variety and aromatics in that humid swamp, but that wasn’t to suggest a lack of prime game. Boars in particular, she said, liked to descend from the verdant hills of the north to roll themselves around in the muck. Lieze didn’t bother to ask how she managed to catch one - Drayya was Drayya, after all. For her, there was always a quick way to do something.
“The north is covered in great oaks and groves and plenty of shade.” By the time night fell, segments of the skinned and carved boar were impaled over the campfire. Drayya twirled the spit while explaining the merits of wild meat, “This boar will have eaten nothing but acorns and mushrooms its whole life. You’ll be able to taste that in the meat.”
In the light of the fire, she seemed very content with her lot in life. Lieze couldn’t help but be jealous of her spontaneity and longing for happiness. Two decades had passed without so much as a passing desire for luxury sprouting in Lieze’s chest, but without Sokalar to loom over her, she came to realise the scope of the freedom she now held. But in spite of that, she was still very much the same - still the inept daughter of a man who couldn’t have despised her more.
She found comfort in that cage of hers, where duty and apathy were her only concerns. The mere notion of stepping beyond her constricted world terrified her. Hours later, when the roaring fire had smouldered down to embers, she regarded the roasted loin with a glance of sudden pickiness.
“...Maybe I’m not so hungry after all.” She muttered.
“-Because you’re afraid of how good it will taste.” Drayya seated herself on the moss-covered log, “Because you aren’t worthy of enjoying anything, or allowing yourself more than the bare minimum. You are hungry, but you’ll only settle for scraps, because that’s all you deserve.”
Lieze didn’t respond. The meat had a delightful smell. It was lean without being overly dry, and cooked just long enough to retain its texture. She jabbed a stripped branch into the tantalising piece of flesh and lifted it to her lips, suppressing a reflex to swallow as soon as it entered her mouth. Drayya watched her with an elated smile, unaware of how distracting her gaze was.
“How is it?” She asked.
Delectable. Scrumptious. Decadent. All of these words and more sprang into Lieze’s mind, but none of them suited her personality. There was a time when she would have chastised Drayya for wasting her time cooking instead of tending to the thralls. But she was only now realising how much that sort of reply sounded like something her father would say.
“Hm…” She resisted the urge to lick her lips, “It was… delicious.”