The Dragon Heir

Chapter 208: This Is a Good Thing (Probably)

Well.By stitching together everything I’d heard so far, I more or less understood why this “priestess” had been treated like a particularly stubborn stain from the very beginning. Starved and kicked around. Whoever this Tyrant Dragon was, he had clearly been a monumental inconvenience in these people’s lives. You don’t earn this kind of hatred by being mildly annoying.

And now, naturally, all that bile had found a convenient vessel.

Me.

A priestess of the Tyrant. The sort who must have knelt willingly, forehead to dirt, worshipping a fraud and calling it divinity. The sort who might have killed in his name too. Religious patterns were the same everywhere. Faith curdled into fanaticism, fanaticism into blood. People always despised what reminded them of that.

I remembered reading about a holy war back in Randall, something that tore through the Aurelia Empire like a plague. A clash of beliefs. It nearly swallowed the entire human empire whole. Back then I’d thought it was just human foolishness.

Now that I knew the gods had long since abandoned this continent, it made far more sense. No sane god would tolerate that sort of circus. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.

But I was drifting.

The immediate issue was much simpler.

They wanted my head.

I could feel it in the way their gazes sharpened, in the subtle shifts of posture, the twitch of fingers near weapons. One wrong breath and I would be redecorating the snow.

The hatred rolling off them was almost physical.

Explaining myself was not an option. I couldn’t very well announce that I wasn’t their priestess at all, merely a temporal trespasser wandering through their past, and that most of them were likely dust in my present. Nor could I clarify whether they were truly alive or just elaborate constructs stitched together by whatever ancient mechanism governed this trial.

That would go over poorly.

I could kill them all, of course.

Their collective pressure brushed against mine, and I had to admit it was almost funny. They didn’t stand a chance. Not truly. The only genuine variable here was the artefact Alexei carried. That miniature Leviathan still radiated something strange. The same odd aura clung to Alexei now. I couldn’t define it, but it whispered of authority, and I doubted it was limited to sealing caves with ice. I also felt a similar aura from the leader, though a bit muted in his case.

Or I could simply leave.

None of them would catch me if I chose to vanish.

And then another thought slithered in.

Perhaps dying wasn’t so terrible here.

I could let a clone take my place. Instead of detonating her in a blaze of glory, I could have the body whisked away at the last moment. It would be convincing. I could even leverage the favor Alexei owed me to ensure the “corpse” was secured before the timer ran out.

Not elegant, admittedly.

There was the small inconvenience that when a clone died, I would immediately receive the prompt— explode or dissipate— and the mental pressure wouldn’t subside until I chose one. It clawed at the edges of my mind until resolved. Hard to ignore in the middle of a theatrical execution.

Still.

A messy solution was better than no solution at all.

And if nothing else, chaos had always been kinder to me than order.

But again, while it would be very convenient for this “priestess” mask to die right about now, I had absolutely no clean way to make that happen without leaving a trail of suspicion thicker than the snow under our feet. Not in this situation. Not with all these eyes watching and sharpened like knives.

I could use clones again. Turn them into those shadow-wrapped abominations and have them hunt the helpless priestess publicly. Reinforce the pattern. A recurring threat that Alexei and Maksim would recognize instantly. Something external and familiar. I could keep tipping the board in my favor with endless manufactured chaos.

Chaos really was the answer to most problems.

And for once, I had options. Many, many options.

Too bad I couldn’t use any of them.

They wanted me dead, but none of them moved. No one stepped forward. No weapon lifted. They all just stood there in silence, waiting.

For the blonde drakkari.

That confirmed it. He was definitely the leader here. Why a drakkari held authority in a place where everyone else seemed to nurture an almost artistic hatred for drakkaris was beyond me, but that was a puzzle for later. Right now, he hadn’t given his verdict.

And then something shifted behind him.

Huh?

A presence slipped into my sphere of spatial perception. A woman. Invisible, but not to me. I couldn’t see her in the conventional sense, yet I could trace the outline of her form easily enough. Was she there all along? Or had she just teleported in? Hard to tell.

She leaned in and whispered into the blonde man’s ear.

He flinched like she'd stuck him with a pin.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

The faint curl at the corner of her mouth said she enjoyed that very much.

I kept my face frozen. Priestess mask. Blank, devout and as hollow as a drum.

Then she turned her attention toward me.

This time, her expression darkened. She murmured something else into the leader’s ear. I had no idea what method they were using to communicate, but I couldn’t hear a single syllable.

Her gaze shifted.

Toward one of the carts.

...The same cart Curious was currently glued to like a particularly obsessed barnacle, studying enchantments with the single-minded devotion of a lizard basking under a heat lamp.

Wait.

She detected her?

Without the brain-melting backlash?

I had dismissed her earlier. That was a mistake.

First Avena. Now this woman. Two people capable of piercing my Quantum stealth without collapsing into a screaming heap on the ground.

I immediately dismissed Curious, even as a very loud, very outraged NO detonated through our link at the exact moment of forced dissolution. I couldn't afford her sticky little curiosity right now. Apologize later. Maybe bribe her with extra slobber-time over some juicy ruins within the ancient city wall I was seeing in the distance. There must be some, right?

The invisible woman reacted instantly. She felt it. The moment Curious vanished, her posture sharpened. She warned the blonde man. His hand drifted toward his sword almost on instinct.

A few in the crowd looked almost hopeful, as if this was finally the prelude to my execution.

He didn’t move.

Several agonizing seconds passed.

Finally, the woman relaxed slightly and whispered something else to him.

I was growing irritated at not being able to hear a word of it. But I could infer enough. She was wary of me. Very wary. And she had absolutely connected whatever was under that cart to me.

Which was… inconvenient.

I nearly let my empty little priestess stare slide sideways. Lock eyes with empty air. A polite little nod to the invisible woman.

I didn't.

No need to poke the ghost. Yet.

After a few more seconds of that tension, the blonde leader finally spoke.

“While I understand your sentiment,” he began evenly, “these blind of faith— unable to tell an imposter from the real thing, intoxicated by borrowed power— they painted the snow red with our people. Left even more breathing but not living. During this expedition, they played rat in the walls and only showed teeth when our backs were turned."

The crowd leaned into his words.

“But once again,” he continued, voice steady, “I ask you to consider the entire picture. Among all those of my kin remaining here, who would be more susceptible to the dragon phantom’s venom? The common folk ruled through fear and deceived by preachers claiming divine ancestry? Or one of those very preachers?”

His gaze flicked toward me.

“The only one remaining.”

The mood shifted.

I could feel it happen. Rage cooling and turning into calculation.

“Her death would be symbolic,” he went on. “It would show we have fully crushed the Tyrant’s faction. But it would also remove a variable. A chance to capture that dragon phantom once and for all. No more mutated beasts. No more hordes guided by a human mind. No more thorn in our side while we claw toward escape."

He turned fully to the crowd now.

"Choose carefully. I deal in certainty, not pretty lies. But every scrap of evidence, every scar earned in prior encounters, points to her as the likeliest vessel. The dragon phantom does not see all. It is not some god charting ten moves ahead while we choke on dust. We have bluffed it before. We gutted its last host. We will carve it again."

The shift was complete.

Hostility became calculation and execution became strategy.

Even I had to admit that he was good.

There was something magnetic about him. The way he held himself, the cadence of his speech, the careful balance between reason and fire. Add in the irritatingly charming face and commanding posture, and it was nearly impossible not to follow the thread of his words.

Impressive.

Could never be me.

I'd trip over my own tongue before I reached the end of a sentence that long. Or, more realistically, I'd maybe creatively insult three quarters of the audience before blowing up the rest just to emphasize my point. The image that bloomed behind my eyes was... vivid.

Tempting.

I did not shake my head this time. The priestess was stone. And unblinking. And devout. And very hollow. I was absolutely killing it at this impersonation business. Top-tier performance. Award-worthy. Hmm hmm.

Finally he gave them the choice.

He claimed he wasn’t their ruler. Claimed he had no right to decide for them. Claimed everyone here had free will.

I loudly doubted that.

Still, he asked anyone who wished to see me executed to raise their hand.

Only two hands rose.

Two.

Out of dozens.

If he'd asked that question before his little chat, I'd bet my scaly hide they'd have been elbowing each other out of the way to volunteer for the executioner's shift. Funny how a few well-aimed words could reroute a mob's bloodlust into something resembling thought.

Well. There went my grand chaotic contingency plan where everything explodes and everyone loses equally.

Shame.

I paused on that thought.

…Why “shame”?

Oh Lotte, you fat-cat dragon! Your stupid words are taking root.

IT’S BETTER THIS WAY, YOU SCALE-BRAINED IDIOT.

I am HAPPY about this. This is a GOOD thing. This is exactly what I wanted.

Bullet dodged.

I didn’t glance toward the invisible woman as things wrapped up and the crowd began moving toward the massive wall in the distance. I was still wondering how much of Blondie’s decision had been influenced by her noticing something off about me. And also by discovering Curious under the cart like some enchantment-obsessed lizard, treating the wheels like sacred scripture.

As we walked, I was granted the delightful honor of personal escort. Two faerins who clearly hated my existence took position beside me like prison wardens. The invisible woman trailed just behind, breathing down my neck without the decency of visible breath.

I pretended not to notice her.

I was almost certain she was testing me. She would drift closer. Wave a hand in front of my vacant little face like she was checking for signs of life in a carcass. Lean in too close. Sniff around like she expected me to smell like whatever she was hunting.

HEY. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT FROM DOWN THERE??!? BACK OFF BEFORE I FORGET I'M SUPPOSED TO BE A VESSEL OF HOLLOW FAITH AND REMEMBER I'M A VESSEL OF SOMETHING MUCH LESS FORGIVING!

I did not say that out loud.

Eventually she stopped the theatrics and fell back to a more reasonable distance. Suspicious and still observing.

I would need to be very careful around this one.

At least until I figured out what in the void was actually happening here and whether maintaining this mask was worth the effort. Dropping it might speed things up considerably.

Hopefully I wouldn’t need to keep it on long.

Tonight, I fully intended to extract information from Alexei.

And maybe… have a word with Lotte.

This dragon phantom business did not sit well with me. I would very much prefer not to become a convenient host for some ancient venomous spirit. Thank you.

And was it even a real dragon phantom?

I doubted that too.

For the simple reason that a couple of low Red Cores managing to trick and kill its previous host did not exactly scream “all-powerful draconic entity.” Either it was weaker than advertised, or it wasn’t what they thought it was.

But I lacked knowledge.

What was this phantom exactly? A wraith? A spirit? Something wearing a dragon-shaped mask? Whatever it was, information would be useful.

Not sure Lotte would hand it over cleanly. She rarely did. But at this point I would accept even one of her cryptic little riddles.

I couldn’t communicate with her directly. Not with my system gone.

So the only option was sleep.

As that thought settled, we finally reached the walls of the city.

They were massive.

Guards lined the entrance— mixed Red and Yellow Cores in uniform. Even inside the walls, I could sense more presences. They bowed as the group approached, especially toward Blondie. So yes. Leader. Whether he liked the title or not.

I filed that away for later.

Because right then, my perception flared violently.

Something inside those massive walls made every instinct I had scream.