(Hello again everybody! Here's another chapter! Hopefully this one's a bit longer? I'm bad at estimating. Enjoy!)

“…and that is why I believe we should move out of this forest, and try to conquer some nearby villages.” Vip stated, drawing his lecture to a close. “You know, as much of a good idea as that sounds, I think I’ll have to pass?” Hym laughed. Vip’s smile faltered a little, but Hym soothed Vip. “It’s a good idea, but how would you pull it off,” Hym asked. Vip grinned and his eyes flashed dangerously. “How many people have felt the wrath of a dragon?”

Laughing, Hym said, “I’m sure that would be a great way to start being a ruler; torching my subjects.” “Trust me, I’ll handle anyone who messes with us!” Smiling at Vip’s bravado, and privately happy that his friend was so dedicated to him, Hym questioned, “Well, when do you intend to try this out?” Feeling something cold and hard jabbing him in the back, Hym turned around and saw a fully armored and armed knight eyeing him coolly through the slits in its helm visor. “How about now,” Vip jested weakly.

Five hours later found Hym seated most uncomfortably on Vip’s back. Hym was carried through the detritus that littered the forest floor. Hym sneaked a look backward. The knight, still watching him warily, had removed his helmet to let his long, fair hair down around his shoulders. Even as Hym watched, the knight flared his hair, letting it fly briefly into the air before it settled around his shoulders, but not before the tattoo marking him as a knight of the Silver Hand had been spotted by Hym.

Cursing his luck, Hym prodded Vip and told him about his findings. Hissing, Vip whispered back, “Wonder how they deal with Skaldians with endangered companions, eh?” Shrugging noncommittally, Hym pondered their situation. The Knights of the Silver Hand were dedicated to the preservation of endangered animals, and avid Skaldian hunters, not given to mercy, and professed a profound love of pious slaughter, all in the name of Uman; their one and only god.

They worshipped Uman thrice daily at their chapels, which were scattered all over the countryside. As his train of thought drew to an end, the forest’s cover broke, and they found themselves in a field, with a village in the dead-center of the clearing.

A chapel, an inn and a few minor houses marked this as a minor settlement, probably only marked on any map because of the town’s ale output. Parking his horse at the inn, the knight unlatched one of the shackles on Hym’s hands and legs and attached the other end to a steel pole in the middle of the village.

Asking Vip very kindly to stay by Hym, for his own safety, he went into the chapel. “Hey Hym. You could always just fly away? Those shackles are circular, and that pole doesn’t have anything keeping the end from slipping right off,” Vip remarked. Nodding his head, Hym said, “That seems like a good idea, except for the part where they already know where we live, and we can’t get the shackles off by ourselves.”

Sighing, Vip curled up in a ball by Hym, giving him a seat to rest his legs. The first sun was well into the sky by the time the knight left the chapel, seeming in a rather jovial mood, and he at last spoke to Hym. “We are going to Utharan, where you will be judged guilty of being a half-breed mongrel deserving only of death, and then summarily executed. Your dragon may be the only thing that will keep you from dying before you can be executed.”

Chuckling already at the thought of Hym’s doom, he turned to Vip and said, “You will be given the option of receiving a Stonecutters tag, mating with a dragoness, and going free, or you may stay with us in warmth and shelter, and all the dragoness you can mate with. Either way, you must give us your seed.” That stated, the knight freed Hym from the pole, re-shackled him to Vip, and they set off to the inn, where the knight spent a night in a bed, and Hym slept chained to a dragon in a stable, on a floor stained black with feces.

“You probably already know this, but this is actually my hometown. I never thought I’d end up back here again,” Hym muttered.

Shaking his head, causing the chains to shake, Vip looked at Hym. “Dragons gain sentience on the last day of the stay in their shell, and form a bond with the one who warms it on the day of birth. So I know some of what my ancestors knew, and some of what you know, but not all of it.”

“Well, ever since I can remember, I was here. My father was less than kind to me. He had problems with drink, and all the money went to that habit. More often than not, I ate whatever I could find as a child. Bugs mostly, sometimes rotten, fallen fruit. The house was in disrepair, to the point people who visited my father wouldn’t come inside, for fear of collapse. I spent most of my time outside of it anyways, so that didn’t really bother me, I guess.

Anytime I went home, dad would be drunk, and raring to relive his adventurer days, by beating the filthy monster. The rest of the people in this village aren’t any better. They’re bigoted, self-righteous folk. They’d sooner spit at than talk to a filthy subhuman. I got the hell out of here as soon as I could.”

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Vip rubbed his head against Hym, trying to comfort him. Hym laughed, and grabbed the scaly head, rubbing along the ridges like Vip liked. “I don’t need comforting you know, it’s in the past. I’m still alive aren’t I? I still feel the old anger, but it hardly seems worth pursuing. They’re petty, small folk, and I’d be stupid to expect killing them will change that. They suffer enough just from being themselves.” Vip nodded, his eyelids half closed in pleasure at the head rub. “We need to get some rest, I may not be the one walking, but travelling is tiring.” Leaning back on Vip’s scaly, warm bulk, Hym closed his eyes.

When Hym woke up the next morning, his hair was hanging in his eyes. It was browner than he remembered. “Great Uman, that’s disgusting!” Vip exclaimed, awoken by Hym’s stirring and spotting Hym’s hair. Defecation and dirt were caked into his head, and his body was coated in it. He and Vip had sunk about six inches into the black layer coating the floor.

Hym looked at Vip, Vip looked at Hym, and they nodded. In chorus, they both started yelling profanities, loudly enough to wake the dead. After about four minutes of this, the knight came flying backwards out of the tavern. They watched through the cracked open door of the stable as the innkeeper yelled something in an odd language at the knight, and the knight yelled back.

They sounded like they were talking with a mouth full of what Hym and Vip were lying in. The knight was red in the face, but the innkeeper ended the shouted conversation with a single word, and slammed the door behind him. The knight stomped around to the stable with a grim smile on his face. He tromped in, ruining the shine on his boots, and backhanded Hym across the face.

He lost his pinky finger into the deal though. Vip grinned through a mouthful of the knight’s blood, and swallowed the pinky. The knight’s face went pale, and he said, “Alright then, that’s how it is. Double time then, all the way to Utharan, no stops. You need to piss, do it in your pants.” He wrapped his finger in a white cloth, untied them, and led them back onto the dirt road.

Weary and sore from the long and arduous trek to Utharan, the sight of the city was almost as welcome as it was breathtaking. High walls, made of huge bricks taller than two men standing on each other’s shoulders, and twice as wide composed the walls which encircled the city.

Long, spiraling towers marked the many wizards’ abodes within the city, usually capped with odd things such as dead cows, weathervanes, and at one place an unfortunate thief. The stench hit them like a brick wall; a mix of rotting garbage, the smell of salt water, and the many odd fragrances that marked a port city launched a frontal assault on Vip’s snout.

Docks ran off into the sea on its eastern ramparts and half the city was built on water rather than land, making an amazing sight for anybody who hadn’t been here before, and even most that had. Awe-struck, Hym and Vip trailed after the knight, gazing at everything within sight, utterly dumbfounded by the sheer size of the city.

As they approached the gates, they came to their senses at the forbidding sight of the city gates. Darkwood, emanating an almost tangible fear made up the main gates, stained a foreboding shade of brownish red at places. A catapult stood nearby, the likely culprit, grinning evilly. As Hym and Vip watched, a tied up man was tossed into said catapult, and flung towards the walls, leaving yet another splotch of color.

“I guess that’s the execution system?” muttered Hym. The guards were almost as forbidding, their dark armor glinting dully in the second sun’s light. Lined up in phalanx, they were in the midst of combat training, nearly two hundred soldiers practicing on the open field in front of the city.

Dulled blades flashed and glinted as they struck the practice dummies, their cushioned steel bodies absorbing and deflecting the kinetic energy into the ground where it was sent to the wizards’ towers, who used it to light the cities walls with torches at night. Daunted by this open display of strength, Vip and Hym shrunk in on themselves, trying to hide in the knight’s shadow.

The knight swaggered to the wall, beat upon the gatekeeper’s door, and hollered something in an odd dialect. A large hatch lifted in the door, and a single eyeball stared out. The eye roamed across the knight, hopped across the dragon, and latched onto Hym. The eye narrowed, and then the window slammed shut.

The creaking of timber roared as the door finally swung open and the massive cyclopean gatekeeper stood aside to grant entrance. Hym, Vip and the knight wandered through the doorway, ducked beneath the gatekeeper’s ferocious scowl, and began their foray into the cities depths.