Aisling sat drinking tea in the room they rented for Zag. The inn was crowded but luckily there were still open rooms. They had found out that there was a celebratory triumph being held the next day.
“It seems it is turning out like you expected,” Aisling pointed out. “I wonder what exactly is going on, I’ve never heard of the Covenant races being this hostile towards each other.”
“They have never actually gotten along, the only thing holding it together has always been the fear each of them has of Agios Ba,” Zag explained. “Something has likely compromised that fear or Huilei has found something that scares him more than the founder.”
“That reminds me,” Aisling looked over at him. “Why does he hate you so much?”
“It isn't just him, most of his family hates me, I embarrassed them pretty thoroughly,” Zag began. “I wouldn't say I was completely in control of the situation that led to it but I went along with things and it led to what it led to…”
***
Zag had been fast asleep on the bench outside of an establishment that sold a type of honey-wine he had taken a liking to. He was startled awake by a small finger that kept jabbing him in the side.
He looked down and met the gaze of a little girl who looked at him with curious intensity.
“What are you, mister?” she asked him as her head took on a slight tilt.
“How in the world did a snake wind up here?” Zag muttered to himself as he rubbed his eyes and wondered if he was seeing things.
“That’s rude!” the girl stomped her foot. “I’m not a snake! Also, I asked you a question first!”
“Wasn’t your question rude as well, little girl?” Zag was amused by the childish antics, it had been some time since he had dealt with children directly.
“But I want to know, I’ve never smelled anything like you before,” she pouted.
“Alright then, we’ll trade, I’ll give you an answer for an answer,” Zag smiled at her.
“Hm, that sounds fair,” she nodded. “Then what are you?”
“Dragon,” Zag answered.
“Like Sharmelammusarratum?” she asked in excitement.
“Don’t I get a turn to ask a question?” Zag asked her back.
“Yes, and that counts as your turn,” the girl looked at him smugly.
“You aren't playing fair, little girl, are you sure you want to upset a dragon?” Zag tapped her on the forehead with his finger.
“Ow,” she pouted again. “Wait, that was another question!”
“How did you get out from the palace grounds?” Zag tried to gain control of the conversation. The girl giggled when she heard the question.
“I slipped away from the servants watching me and floated out of a window,” she looked proud of herself. “The patrols outside the palace are really easy to predict so I just walked out from there.”
“I see, you’re a clever one,” Zag couldn't help but be amused with how easy she made it sound.
“Yes, I’m very smart,” she nodded back.
“You’re very well read as well if you know about my mother,” Zag commended her.
“Your mother? Oh!” she exclaimed. “Your mother is Sharmelammusarratum? That means you’re Zaganursarrum!”
“Not even a flinch, you’re a brave little girl too,” Zag grinned at her enthusiasm.
“Hmph, as if some old mister sleeping away on a bench smelling of alcohol could do anything to me,” her assertion caused Zag to burst out laughing.
“What is your name, little girl?”
“My name is Liangfeng, my father is in charge of this city,” she told him as she took on a pose of smug superiority.
“Well it’s a very impressive city,” Zag stroked his beard and his eyes turned serious. “Liangfeng, what is going to happen to that servant you slipped away from?”
“He’ll be dismissed and never work in the palace again,” her demeanor did not change at all, “I told my father that I did not want that psychophant for a servant.”
“Is that the reason you’re out here, to throw a tantrum over a servant?” Zag asked her. His distaste for that kind of action was on full display through his tone of voice.
“Nonsense, do you think I’m so shallow?” she scolded him. “I’m not going to go out of my way to cause my father grief over a mere psychophant. This servant was put in place over one I was quite happy with simply because this one was a suck up and my protests were brushed off. The other reason is I’ve never gotten to go outside before. You should know how our culture is, right?”
“Ah, I see,” Zag clapped his hands once. “So you were upset and used the excuse of throwing a tantrum to go outside and run off.”
“Are you trying to make me mad?”
“Maybe a little,” Zag admitted. “Anyway, now that I’m awake I think I’ll go get something to eat.”
Zag started walking through the crowd. The beings, with senses good enough to tell what he was, gave him a wide and very nervous berth, making it much easier than it would have been normal for him to get through Tiantang’s foot traffic. He made his way to a food stall he had become fond of on his current visit to the city.
The stall served human recipes from the Forgotten Kingdom. It mostly consisted of skewered meats and potatoes. For Zag, who had spent centuries in the kingdom, it was nostalgia given physical form.
As Zag was waiting in line he felt a pair of greedy eyes as they bored into his side and he heard the loud protests of someone’s very empty stomach.
“You didn't plan a way to feed yourself did you?” he asked the little girl who had followed him.
“Nope, I couldn't exactly rob the treasury,” she answered as her eyes kept darting to the food being prepared.
“Couldn't figure out a way?”
“I never had a reason to consider the need for it…” she trailed off as her stomach growled again.
Zag ordered a handful of meat skewers and handed the little girl one as they walked away from the food stall.
They had just cleared the densest part of the crowd when Zag felt a force slam into his side. A crack of thunder rolled over the area to join the sound of him crashing into a building. The force brought the building down and it buried Zag in its rubble.
Liangfeng stared at her meat skewer which had been burnt to a crisp. It was a collateral casualty of the attack against Zag and she had barely eaten any of it. Her eyes watered as she teared up and her lip quivered as she looked to the offending party who made the attack.
The young man went from feeling on top of the world after making his successful sneak attack to being petrified. He knew that look on Liangfeng’s face could only lead to him suffering.
“Little sis, Liangfeng, please calm down,” he pleaded. “Whatever it is I’ll fix it, I promise, you just need to come home.”
Her expression did not improve. He started to panic as he felt an electric charge in the air from her barely suppressed power. His mind raced as he tried to understand what he had done to make her mad. He didn't think it was over the being he had blasted into the building, there was no way she could have formed this level of attachment in that time.
Just as he felt the air start to move in an ominous breeze coming from her direction he heard a crash as the building he had shot that being off into exploded. He could see crimson flames flicker in the dust and smoke and then all he saw was dark spots as he was slammed into the ground hard enough to scrape a small trench into the street.
“Boy, you’ve ruined my lunch, and hers as well it looks like,” the being told him. “Not to mention you ruined a perfectly good outfit of mine and I wouldn't be surprised if this scratch you put on my side leaves a scar.”
The young man made a pained breathless squeak. His vision cleared enough to see Zag as he looked down on him. He had some tattered shreds of his shirt still hanging off of him, there was a small ugly wound on his side that seeped out blood, a wound the young man thought should be much more severe based off how hard he hit him. On the being’s back two great wings spread out, the young man understood just what he had provoked upon seeing that. Those were dragon’s wings.
Zag sighed as he saw the panic set in on the boy’s face. He must have finally realized who he struck out at. Zag turned to the little girl and saw her still holding the burnt skewer. She sniffled in grief for the lost food.
“Hey, little girl?” Zag got her attention.
She looked over at him with a questioning look.
“Who is this kid?” he asked.
“That’s my older brother,” she made sure to highlight the word ‘brother’ with a displeased tone. “His name is Huilei.”
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“Hey, little girl?” Zag asked again.
“Hmm?”
“I’m going to kidnap you for a while, I can't really let a direct attack like that go without causing some trouble.”
“I’m still hungry,” she pouted in response.
“That’s ok,” Zag told her as he walked up to her. “I’ll take you to a place that has food.”
“Wait!” the young man shouted as he pushed himself up. “Liangfeng what are you doing?”
Liangfeng glanced once at Zag before she slowly walked over to where the young man was now sitting. When she was a few feet from him she threw the remains of her meat skewer in his face.
“What am I doing? What are you doing?” she yelled. “You ruined my food, you hurt my guest and you started a fight in the middle of the city breaking a building someone does business in. While I do not yet have proof of it I’m pretty sure that sycophant of a lacky which father replaced my servant with is one of your followers that you have set to spy on me. On top of all of that here you lie in the dirt with none of your guards around you with your identity exposed.”
Huilei’s face alternated between a sickly green and angry red color as he endured the tirade. He visibly twitched when she accused him of replacing her servant, giving himself away.
“Not only that do you even realize who this person is?” she asked as she pointed to Zag. “Even father would rather not fight Zaganursarrum and you just blindly go about offending him.”
Zag was standing off to one side keeping an eye open for any guards that should be attached to the siblings. He was also feeling somewhat awkward as he watched the boy get verbally stomped down. He even started to feel the vestiges of sympathy for his plight even though he obviously brought it onto himself.
“Hey, little girl,” he got Liangfeng’s attention. “We’re leaving now, he can explain to your father how he let you get kidnapped and all that, all things considered, I think you’re winning this little political game you two seem to be playing.”
“Yes, I don't think it will look good when Father finds out how brother Huilei got me kidnapped by a dragon,” Liangfeng giggled as she imagined her father’s reaction to the situation.
Zag walked over and picked her up tucking her small frame into the crock of the elbow of one arm.
“Hey wait,” Huilei shook himself out of his funk and started protesting again. Zag hit him full force with his draconic aura.
Huilei sunk to the ground in a cold sweat. Then in his state of outright fear he did something that would scar him for the rest of his life. He wet himself.
Zag and Liangfeng left Huilei to his shame and flew out of the city. Zag skillfully bypassed anyone that could hamper him taking the daughter of the city lord past the walls and for the first time in her short life Liangfeng saw the grass and trees of the outside world up close.
Once he had opened some distance between them and the city Zag landed in a clearing and sat Liangfeng down before walking a short distance away from her.
“It’ll take too long to get there like this,” he told her as he tosses his clothes to the side.
Zag shifted into his pure-blood dragon state and immediately stumbled backward as a little floated up and seemed to appear right in front of his face.
“I never imagined! Dragons must be the largest beings in the world. Your scales are magnificent! How fast can you fly when you look so heavy? Are you the largest dragon in the world? Can you talk in that form? Qilins have a lot of trouble talking but I can talk just as easily in my celestial form as I can in this one,” she went on an excited rampage of questions and statements that left Zag standing there blinking in confusion.
“Will you calm down, I can't keep track of the questions amongst all the other stuff you’re saying,” Zag grumbled at her.
She stopped talking and inhaled deeply. Zag was afraid for a moment that she was going to launch into another stream of dialogue.
“I’m still hungry,” she complained instead.
“Don't worry,” Zag reassured her. “We’ll be there in no time at all this way. Get on my back and hold on to something.”
She floated around his head and sat directly behind his horns. She patted him on the head before she grabbed a horn with each hand.
“Let’s go,” she ordered through a giggle.
“That itches,” Zag complained as she tittered at him.
Zag took off and they sped away. He suspected she was doing something because he had reached a speed that he would have normally had to strain himself quite a bit to reach normally.
The green of the treetops rushed by in a blur until they suddenly opened up to reveal a pristine blue jewel of a lake. Zag slowed down and flared his wings as he went in for a landing on the shore.
Zag saw something flutter towards the ground out of the corner of his eye but before he could identify what it was Liangfeng was orbiting his head in her celestial serpent form.
“What are those things in the lake?” she asked.
“Fish,” Zag answered as he looked past her form out to the water.
“Fish?” she asked and before he had any chance to respond she had splashed into the water and was swimming out into the lake at a much faster speed than he thought possible.
Zag blinked a few times before he walked over to a section of beach covered in smooth stones. He scraped them together and breathed fire onto them until they glowed a dim cherry red. He rolled around on the stones scraping off any loose scales, especially around where Huilei had hit him earlier in the day.
“Wamph er oo ing?” he looked up to see the little serpent. She floated near his head with a fish half hanging out of her mouth.
“Don't talk with your mouth full,” Zag scolded her. She made a face at him that he was sure would have included her sticking out her tongue if the fish wasn't in the way.
“What are you doing?” she asked again after disposing of the fish.
“This is the best way for a dragon to dispose of old scales that I’ve found,” he explained and continued to scrape himself among the heated rocks.
“Why did you heat them up?”
“The heat helps loosen my scales.”
Zag stood up and shook off the dirt and sand that he had picked up while rolling around. Liangfeng scrunched her nose as she was in the line of fire from what he was shaking off.
After Zag finished with that he rumbled towards the water and launched into the air. He glided over to the deeper parts of the lake and dove in.
He came up out of the water with a very large fish and slurped it down before returning to shore. He had to look around for Liangfeng since she was nowhere in sight. He eventually found her snoozing, she had buried herself under some of the still warm stones.
“Hey, wake up,” he prodded her with a claw.
She mumbled something.
“Wake up, we’re going to one more place, it’s better than those rocks,” he prodded her again.
Liangfeng floated out of the rocks and looked around for a moment. When she found her dress on the beach she quickly floated over and grabbed it with her mouth before wrapping herself around Zag’s horns.
Zag took off as gently as he could since he was pretty sure she was napping on his head. He kept the flight as level as possible and after a short while they arrived at the destination he sought.
Zag shifted to his human form and caught the little serpent as she fell from where his head used to be. He was amazed that a race that grew to nearly matching him in size could be as small as she was at some point in their lives.
Liangfeng groggily squirmed around in his arms until her eyes froze on the pools of steaming water.
“Wghmph,” she spat her dress out of her mouth. “What is that? I smell sulfur.”
“Water heated by the fires in the heart of this very world,” Zag dramatized. “Some of them are probably too hot for you, so go find one that is comfortable and we’ll soak for a while before we take you home.”
She shot out of his arms and started checking the pools. The third one she came to she lowered herself in and floated out to the middle with just her eyes and nose above the water. Zag strolled over and climbed in. He sat down and leaned back with his arms along the edge of the pool.
He closed his eyes and started sorting his thoughts on the current situation. He’d have to lie low for a while since a fight between him and Liangfeng’s parents wouldn’t leave him unscathed. He started to wonder where most of the humans had gone after the fall of their kingdoms, he could spend some time with them instead of sitting alone in his lair.
After some time he felt a small hand push the back of his head up straight.
“You should mind your human appearance too, you look so dignified and fierce as a dragon and yet you look like a drunk vagabond as a human,” Liangfeng scolded him as she started doing something to his hair.
“In my defense, I was recently thrown through a building,” Zag protested.
“You looked like this before you got thrown through the building,” she shot down his argument.
“Well I…” he started.
“Stop moving,” she ordered him. Zag clamped his jaw and tried to figure out how he got into a situation where he was obeying the orders of a child.
She worked over his hair until each strand was part of a series of small braids. When she was done she floated around in front of him and sat facing him on his knees. She started braiding his beard in the same manner.
“Sitting like that isn’t very ladylike,” Zag told her.
“Are you antagonizing someone who, literally, has you by the whiskers?” she giggled.
“Little girl, I want you to tell me something before I take you home,” Zag spoke despite her annoyance at it interfering with her work. “Did you lead your brother to where we were or, perhaps, intentionally lead us to where he was?”
“Maybe,” her expression gave him no hints one way or the other.
“You’re more dangerous than he is,” Zag sighed.
“Stop moving so much,” she said after she giggled at his statement.
***
“After that I took her back to Tiantang, flying directly over the troops that had been dispatched to chase us down,” Zag finished up the story, “I flew over the city and she just floated back down to her tower in the palace grounds. Her father gathered up an army and chased me around for a few years until I ended up in the boy’s and your village and met his mother.”
“A few years?” Bron said, having walked into the room in time to catch the last bit of the story, “They chased you around for two centuries!”
“Was it that long?” Zag asked. Bron sighed in resignation.
“So she is the reason you wear your hair that way?” Aisling asked.
“Well, the Boy’s mother liked it so I just kept it like this,” Zag shrugged. “Anyway, what do you have, Boy?”
“From what my contacts and the rumor mill have told me this whole mess is because of a coup in the Phoenix Duchy,” Bron began as Aisling handed him a cup of tea. “We were used as an excuse to keep the Phoenix Legion busy and out of the loop it seems.”
“I guess they didn’t have a good enough plan to dispose of the Legion at the time, or couldn't commit the forces,” Zag thought out loud.
“Most likely it was because the forces they needed were tied up since they used the Praetorian to put down a rogue legion led by a rebellious Legatus,” Bron continued. “The Legatus of the said legion is scheduled to be paraded through the city as part of a triumph and then executed tomorrow afternoon.”
“As I thought,” Zag leaned back. “There wasn't much else of a reason to keep her alive.”
“I also had someone from the palace approach me,” Bron started digging through his pockets.
“So we were found out?” Aisling looked nervous.
“One of the gate guards recognized me right away,” Zag looked surprised that Aisling hadn’t realized it. “None of the beings in this city are human, some of them have a sense of smell that rivals my own and some are even old enough to have come in contact with me.”
“I see, why are you able to just walk into the city?”
“It isn’t as if there are many beings here who can stop him,” Bron snorted a laugh.
“If the ones strong enough to give me trouble and myself came into conflict, it could very likely destroy the city,” Zag shrugged. “Anyway, what did the being from the palace want?”
Bron dug a neatly folded letter out from a pocket and handed it over.
“She told me she was supposed to hand this over to you but she wasn't sure she could do it without it being observed and she also seems to be terrified of you,” Bron explained.
“I see,” Zag unfolded the letter and began to read through its contents.
Bron and Aisling watched him read the letter with curiosity and expectation.
“Have you read this already, Boy?” Zag asked Bron when he finished reading through the letter.
“No,” Bron replied. Zag handed the letter over to him.
“I think you two would be perfect for this job,” Zag said as Bron quickly skimmed through the letter’s contents.
“What is it?” asked Aisling.
“I see what you mean, old man,” Bron agreed with Zag’s assessment before he turned to Aisling. “That story he just told you, she wants out and is asking for his help.”
“Did your new contact tell you a place and time to reply?” Zag asked.
“Yeah, it’ll be during the triumph.”
“Can you do something that will make it easy for you to track my whereabouts?” Zag asked Aisling.
“Yes, but what is going on?” she asked. “Why do we need to do that?”
“Because we’ll be leaving separately and this letter mentions some humans integrating themselves into the Covenant governments,” Bron answered. “They have some kind of magic that is described in here as “different from the northern witchcraft” and the old man is worried something could go wrong with the summon.”
“So I’m summoning her?”
“Yes,” Zag answered. “I am not sure where I’ll wind up going with the little bird once I collect her and you’ll need the boy’s wings to catch up to me.”
“I see,” Aisling moved over and grabbed Zag’s shoulder before she recited a quick incantation. “I’ve set a couple spirits to follow you, that should hold up for a while.”
“Alright, let’s eat dinner and then get some sleep,” Zag ordered.
“And discuss the pay for the new job,” Bron added on.