“Alright then,” I started before pausing for a moment to ensure I had Encrodecro’s full attention. “I guess what I want to know is how did you even get in here?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he replied with a smile. “I simply used [Crypt Walk]. It allows me to nearly instantly travel between crypts, tombs, mausoleums, catacombs, even the lychgates of cemeteries. In short, if it is a location where the dead are laid to rest, I can go there. Why, you practically built an embassy for me here, it would have been rather rude to have not used it,” he finished with a cheeky smile on his face.
“And it is a lovely mausoleum,” he commented with a knowing look on his face. “Why, just over there,” he continued as he pointed over yonder ”in that sarcophagus, is the body of an elf with broken arms and legs, one with clear signs that the legs have both been broken before and healed naturally. I’m not certain why he did not seek out magical healing, so I’m positive that there is an interesting story there. Given the state of the few others interred here, I find myself under the impression that this is where troublemakers go to ‘disappear’. Your kobolds appear to be rather industrious in maintaining your control over your territory. I just had to see what kind of clientele this establishment catered to.”
“Okay, fair enough, and why are you here now?” I asked as I glossed over the darker implications of his revelations that I had been previously unaware of.
“Why, you invited me for the conclave, why else would I be here? I know I am a tad early, but I thought it best to get a lay of the land and take in the sights.”
“That’s it?” I asked with a disbelieving expression on my face as I kicked a piece of rubble away, watching it bounce away before it sank into the floor, the process of it remolding itself having begun. “Isn’t this where you spring some sort of deal or threat on me?”
“Normally, yes,” he replied with a frown as he leaned up against the wall, his gaze admiring the statues around the room before he continued. “However, I have heard you already found a dance partner for when you earn tenure. Not that I had any plans that involved your flight to that extent, but if you wanted to build your roads to connect a few crypts out there…” he paused for a bit as he grasped his hands behind his back, on foot raised on its toes as he looked downward and rotated slightly side to side at the waist. “That would make strides to endearing you to my flight.”
“Such an arrangement is not outside of reason if the circumstances align for it,” I replied both diplomatically and noncommittally.
“Excellent!” he shouted in satisfaction as he moved over to me and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll have my people contact your people to sort out the details.” His jovial expression quickly returned to a more professional and slightly mischievous expression. “Now if you will excuse me, I need to secure a good vantage point to watch the spectacle that will undoubtedly develop.”
“What spectacle?” I asked as he continued past me.
“Oh, you will see soon enough. Don’t forget the assassins. You can send them after Sucroxiona for her impertinence if you like,” he finished as he waved his hand in farewell without turning to me. “Oh, excuse me,” he exclaimed to another Jericho who came crashing down the stairs.
“My Emperor!” she shouted as the only other Emperor nearby departed up the stairs, “I have reports of-”
“Let me guess, more dragons are cropping up around the city?”
“Uh, yeah, how did you know?” she asked as her face turned into a puzzled expression. The enchantment on her helmet to make it transparent really allowed me to understand her expression better than one of normal steel would allow.
“Oh, I just had a hunch.”
The conclave was not for another week, and yet, every Emperor, sans Bonpricha, decided to show up one after another. If anything, they waited just long enough for the previous one to finish his or her conversation, such that I would be informed of yet another intrusion to my domain right when the previous one left.
Ejnarri of The Star Harbingers came next, apparently building an observatory on top of a building in my city as a ‘gift’, with a casual request to build a few roads between some of his or her holdings “when I got the chance”. I could not discern the gender of said individual, and I am guessing they were in a rather ‘fluid’ mood. They spoke rather cryptically, never really committing to any one idea while trying to get me to ask the right questions for what they wanted to talk about. The whole experience was frustrating, but ultimately peaceful. They expected me to have her tea poisoned.
Then came Synsinac of The Pact Sealers who offered to connect me with his consulting and contracting firms around the world to help smooth out the red tape that often tied up logistics. Take a wild guess what he wanted in return. That’s right, for me to build some roads. Turns out, this world’s infrastructure is pretty terrible, and although dragons can fly, their mortal servants cannot, and so they all want me to fix that. He expected a hit on one of his family members as they entered or exited a building. I have no idea how he got into my city, he just tapped me on the shoulder from behind, and suddenly, bam, there’s another Emperor!
Karlenstein, I expected to be male, according to Nanu’s information, but apparently, Karlenstein recently has been on a binge of being a woman, and a rather attractive one at that. All business, no mirth, she didn’t seem to want anything from me other than to quickly make introductions before she stormed off. I don’t know if she is always pissed off or if I somehow snubbed her, but at least she did not request any assassins. I would have to double-check with Nanu if I should still send some anyway. She had the politeness to enter through the front gate, if not the same measure of it to wait for the guards to permit her entry. Several guards were literally clinging to her to stop her, yet she moved as if they did not exist or hinder her in the slightest.
Ossimandias of The Bone Wardens looked and acted like he should be on a beach somewhere catching some waves with his surfboard. Very chill, a little weird, he asked for flowers instead of assassins. The harder part was that he wanted them delivered unseen to his bedroom and his guards would not allow intruders to pass. I needed to find a great number of highly skilled and expendable individuals to meet all these requests, most likely ones with orifices that didn’t mind some draconic attention. While he didn’t want any roads, he did want any bones I happened to unearth in my excavations during construction, which I had little use for. No sense throwing away easily obtained goodwill, so I acquiesced to his request. It would have been so much better if he had not somehow entered my city via a tunnel that somehow went right through the obsidicrete foundation that was reinforced and enchanted to stop intruders doing that very thing.
Finally, I had about two minutes of peace and quiet after running around for the past two hours to put out proverbial fires, only for a loud boom to rip through the sky from the direction of World’s Hope. I quickly scaled a nearby building to get a good look, and in the distance, I saw green light in the sky. In the center, I witnessed a circle of said light with the silhouette of a dragon inside of it where no light shone through. Around it were many green arrows pointing towards it and to the ground beneath it, each arrow bobbing up and down slowly but insistently.
With only one Emperor unaccounted for, and no one other than an Emperor or a Titan capable of such a feat, unless some god was wasting a miracle or two, I deduced that Bonpricha was requesting an audience. Given that there were 7 arrows, she must expect all 7 Emperors to show up. I guessed this little conclave would be starting early.
I considered bringing the powder keg that is my daughter, Tamadora, as the experience would be good for her if she didn’t act out of turn and get smacked down by her betters. Kaisadoro would be a safe bet as long as he didn’t make a fuss about his schedule. Nanu was mandatory as she was my chief advisor concerning dragons. Chooka, my first love, was also the best person I had to look over contracts, and given the events of the day, I would be seeing more of those, so she would be needed. Gambino and Bambina would manage my kobold security team that kept out the riff-raff, and Jericho would manage my Knights of the Crossing. Nabonidus would be safely sequestered nearby, such that he could augment security with his ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ for anyone who snooped around. Not that any of that would actually happen, but it sorta could in a hypothetical reality that he would witness.
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It-Has-Pockets would be busy with her workload, Alterez would be on catering detail, Torborg didn’t have a dog in this fight, and The Boys would be my mount as I arrived to the fortress, which would probably boost us both due to [Dragoon] allegedly being my base Blessing, if that was even a real thing or just some joke of a cover.
Everyone of note had been on alert ever since the first Emperor was spotted, and as such, it only took half an hour to get everyone assembled and into formation to start our march over to World’s Hope. Naturally, banners, pageantry, and ceremonial accouterments were required, with several choirs of kobolds blowing horns and singing as we made our way to our destination.
Perhaps for my benefit, I did witness dragons flying over us from time to time. Each Emperor only brought two Princes with him or her as escorts, as bringing a King into the territory of another flight was a declaration of war. Skull notified me that all of them had additional escorts in the Shadow Path, but they gave her a wide berth and never entered the city proper.
A few gates and seemingly impenetrable high roads later, and I found myself in the heart of World’s Hope. All troops had vacated the courtyard, so perhaps the local commander was wise to let dragons be dragons in peace or had been intimidated. Hopefully, I will not receive a casualty report later.
A round table with 6 chairs stood about a stone’s throw away from the portal, itself a large sphere of blackness in its idle state. Six Emperors sat in their chairs, each one appearing to be custom made by or on behalf of the Emperor who sat in each one. Perhaps it was a B.Y.O.C. type of event. The various Princes and Princesses remained in their draconic form and sat or lounged behind their Emperor, some appearing aloof and at rest, but each one most likely on high alert.
As my entourage approached, I endured the pageantry and ceremony of being announced and escorted to my seat. I deployed a smaller table and comfortable chairs for those who would be joining me, the whole affair positioned behind me. I retrieved a suitably comfortable and ornate throne from my dimensional storage and placed it before the round table that was easily big enough to fit four times as many people. Once seated, I looked around for signs of the final attendant flight of the meeting, but saw none.
A change of the light clued me in that the symbols in the air had gone out, and as we all looked up, a massive portal tore open in the sky, perhaps 500 feet overhead and just as large. A proportionally gigantic arm, one clearly belonging to a dragon, reached through the portal and flung something comparably miniscule to the ground. That object then landed where the last chair should be, and upon inspection, it appeared to be akin to a stuffed animal or puppet of a dragon, albeit one that had many patches and button eyes, one of which was hanging on by a thread.
The sound of distant screaming caused me to look up again, and four kobolds plummeted to the same puppet of mostly green and browns, with hints of reds, pink, and purple on the wings and horns. The kobolds landed on the puppet and bounced off, landing hard on the ground, but otherwise appearing no worse for wear considering the normally deadly fall they just experienced. Well, the fall wasn’t deadly, but the landing should have been. They wasted little time in somehow scurrying into the innards of the puppet and getting it to move. A glance upwards revealed that the draconic hand gave a ‘thumbs up’ gesture before withdrawing from the portal, with said portal closing promptly afterwards.
After a few moments, the puppet animated rather convincingly enough to showcase that the puppeteers were not inexperienced at their craft, and a pleasant female voice called out to us.
“Alright everyone. Thank you for attending on such short notice. I know our host intended to kick this off a bit later than now, but certain events are occurring that have pushed up our timeline significantly.”
Most of the Emperors spared me a glance before returning their gaze to the puppet that presumably represented Bonpricha.
“Cutting straight to the point, the invasion is going to kick off much sooner than anticipated, perhaps tomorrow or the day after at the earliest, assuming the enemy immediately begins their incursions without mustering their troopers further. My spies have reported that all indications are to the former scenario being correct. I am commandeering this meeting to hand out assignments. This is not up for debate. I know none of you have ever had to deal with incursions before, but as for The Eternal Pretenders, we have ample experience in defending this world from such threats. Any objections?” the puppet asked as it cleaned the claws on its right hand with its mouth, the message clear that dissent was not welcome.
All of us remained silent, and each of us knew that The Eternal Pretenders were over 2,400 years old as a flight. To put it in perspective, the next oldest flight, The Crypt Lords, were some 1117 years old, and the deceased flight, The Secret Stalkers, had been 980 years old. Five of our flights were not even over 500 years old, which, compared to what I knew of the past, made us collectively extremely young. I imagine we all knew that fact rather intimately, for [Leadership] helped me detect the signs of deference to Bonpricha’s leadership and the nervousness that we would still perhaps not be up to task to succeed in preventing total annihilation of our world.
“Excellent,” the Not-Bonpricha-But-Possibly-Bonpricha puppet continued. “I’m not going to go around the room and have us introduce ourselves and name a hobby or whatever passes for team-building these days. We each know what is at stake here, and while no significant incursion has made it to this world in my lifetime, that has not been for a lack of trying from any number of different hostile entities. I know most of you do not know what I am referring to, nor do you even have the capacity to protect this world from such threats, but do not doubt that other worlds will still continue to invade ours even as we fight off this current incursion. The Eternal Pretenders have not always been the ones to safeguard this world from such invasions, but the flights that came before me have all died out.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I am here to talk about: duty. Whatever grudges you have, whatever vendettas you still need to settle, whatever schemes, plots, and games you have going on, none of that matters. It is time to put on your big-boy pants and pull your weight as guardians of this world, for if you believe all that power you have as Emperors was free and cannot be taken away at an instant by the gods, then you will find yourself sorely mistaken. Mehczeczi of The Secret Stalkers could attest to that, had his hubris not been his undoing.”
That last comment made some of us sit up straighter in our chairs. I don’t think any of us really knew what had happened to The Secret Stalkers other than that they blew themselves up, but apparently some divine wrath had been part of the equation that made such an explosion.
“We Emperors are big fish in a small pond. “The Devourers”, as the enemy is called, is but one of many scourges that rampage across the universe, conquering all it can because it can. They are merciless and cannot be bribed to go away, yet they are cunning, patient, and insidious. Expect cults to crop up, disgruntled individuals who were promised power to start undermining our efforts, and other such underhanded tactics.
“They have their own equivalents to us Emperors, but I do not know their form nor what powers they wield. We do have a significant advantage that they will not be coming through the portal unless they are feeling suicidal, for our gods will be free to empower us to fend them off, whereas their gods will not. That also means we cannot easily counter-invade them, and so, we need to hold them off until the portal collapses and the connections between our worlds sever. This will be a war of attrition and many of the dragons in your flights will perish, if not entire flights.”
The cold truth of her words certainly had our attention, and we could feel the sincerity and brutal honesty laid bare within them. She did not sugarcoat anything, and indeed, I felt inspired to contribute lest I find myself replaced with an Emperor who would.
“When I was young and another flight was old, they told me tales of the last invasion. Indeed, I have actual histories and military reports, ones that, by all accounts, are detailed and accurate. It was not the same enemy that we face now, but they should give a good idea of the scale and scope of the threats we face. I will have copies delivered to all of you shortly. Before we get down to the details of what tasks will be assigned to each flight, we have a guest.”
Bonpricha turned her head to the portal, and said portal glowed white briefly as a saurkin, old and bent with age, hobbled through and over to us. His scales were nearly white with age, his vestments ornate but tattered, as if he had spent many months in the wilderness. Clearly a priest of some sort, he leaned heavily on the staff of his office as he slowly ambled over to us, exhaustion and sorrow clearly written upon his features as he struggled towards his final act of sacrifice. For his eyes were glowing white and gold in the style of one in a state of communion with a god, and for him to be doing so for so long and away from a temple would surely take a toll greater than what the body could sustain, much less survive. We each turned to view this individual and what final message he may have for us all, our hearts and minds tuned to his voice.
