Lansseax VI

The hardtack was petrified, as cold and dead as stone, and possessing nothing that distinguished it from a particularly stubborn rock. Lansseax worked it between her pearly fangs, her too-human teeth, for a moment before casting it over her shoulder, where it knocked over a brazier, sending the entire ensemble to the ground with a clatter.

"Meagre provisions, only sufficing to prolong struggles of mortality, " Lansseax noted with disdain, lifting a bottle of old wine into the air. She could feel the sediment swirl within the hardened clay, halfway between liquid and solid. Absolutely, completely disgusting, what would possess a mortal to think the longer the grapes of the vine aged the more potent the essence? Lansseax huffed, a short and sharp exhale, and turned away, dropping one of the bottles onto the ground. It shattered, and the spilled wine spread across the marble tiles as easily as the lifeblood of men once spilled from in between Lansseax's talons.

The pale witchchild, Baeraenys, watched Lansseax with sullen purple eyes, an unbecoming scowl stretched across her face, a face which now sported the visage of a child. A dried rivulet of blood coated the side of Baeraenys' face and did much to belie the belief that she was a benign child, for she paid little heed to the mark and the blood. It was a pity how easily the feeble mortal mind twisted itself into knots to protest what it saw and understood, already the fear and wonder slipped away, leaving little but anger and fury in their wake. Baeraenys was a most proud creature, a lord, perhaps, and it was not for a lord to grovel and squirm as a wretch.

Baeraenys said nothing, her lips pursed. Lansseax was amused.

"I can taste your disdain," Lansseax finally said, turning back toward her, her feet leaving wine-colored footprints on the marble floor, "Now that you are not choked with terror, you desire to renege on the deal your own hubris inflicted upon you? Do you not?"

Her words were simple, and Baeraenys had no choice, for 'serve me' Lansseax commanded, and the little thief obeyed, such was her new wont in life. A year, ten thousand, it did not matter, an eon could pass and Lansseax would endure.

Baeraenys lips curled back into a snarl, and her fingers clutched at the carven stone that bordered the door into the ancient dust-filled storeroom. Baeraenys' garment hung heavy on the limbs and proportions of her childlike frame, making her appear as a child clad in an elder's garb. In her hands, she still clutched at the rippled steel staff, and it was held in between the two as if it was a great totem. The reek of sorcery suffused the staff but such paltry gestures did not concern the Ancient Dragon that was Lansseax.

With a twist of her talons, of her fingers, Lansseax shattered the neck of the next wine bottle, raising the broken neck to her full lips, and took a swallow. The dragon stilled, letting the taste of vinegar spread across her tongue before she swallowed, savoring the sensation of any flavor after a week without the pleasure. Then she dropped the bottle, letting it shatter and crack against the stone floor. And splatter the bottom of her bare legs in red wine.

"Libations to the gods," Baeraenys said, her fingers white around her staff. The words were said through what Lansseax would almost call gritted teeth. It wasn't that adorable to her, of course, because the mewling and frustrations of lesser creatures were not much but passing amusement.

Lansseax swept by, the idle smoke from the braziers wafting after her as she stalked toward a collection of fine urns, amphora, and what could have been hydria, yet the latter was bone dry. Lansseax dipped a finger inside the rim, the waxen seal curling away, dust and ash. She pushed the hydria over, and it clunked against the wall before falling to the side with a resounding crash.

"I do not think it would be remiss of me," Lansseax drawled, half-turning back toward Baeraenys who trailed behind her like a besotted puppy, "To claim that your gods would not care for rotten wine. My, it is barely fit for dregs, and you would pour it in libation to gods? Besides, what need do you have for gods, with one before you in naked flesh, little witchling?"

Baenaerys replied with no words, only the sound of her staff clicking behind Lansseax as she followed.

Gerion was still where she'd left him, Lansseax noted with the faintest tracings of amusement. The lordling stood apart, his sword of sorcerous steel stabbed into the floor, looking like a mortal king. Diminutive, yet still possessed of a certain royal grandeur. The great windows of gleaming light lay shattered and the ash and dust swirled into the room, but yet Lansseax could not see the worms that trawled the air upon the motes, the dust was dust, its miasmatic nature diffused. It would not last, Lansseax thought, already the worms gnawed, now that they had space to masticate. The mortal man himself seemed to stare into space, eyes resting on the great scorch marks burned into the pristine floor and the broken corpsed tossed aside like childish dolls.

Lansseax considered Gerion Lannister for a long instant, her eyes staring into the sorcery that even now wormed its way through sinew, muscle, and ash. Intertwining with his being, embroidering it with a miasma that spoke of dust and ruin, the desolation of hunger. It was a fell thing, blasphemous and insidious. Lansseax's lips curled back into a snarl.

"Tell me truly, priestess, what is this blasphemy that your brethren let slip?" Lansseax asked, voice cast low as she stared up through the broken windows, at the maelstrom of ash and dust that choked the infernal city. She could not hear the roars and bellows of fouler things here in the sanctuary, but to one such as her, earthly ears did not need to hear.

"The Doom?" Baeraenys asked, and her words were hushed, quiet as if spoken within a great mausoleum where the dead yet slumbered awaiting the distant light to follow.

Doom. Lansseax rolled the word within her mind's eye, letting the idea stretch and suffuse her draconic thought. Aye, she thought, Doom was an apt word for the malaise inflicted upon the city. Madness and hunger. Worm and fire.

"Aye," Lansseax replied, "It is a fell deed, you name it Doom and I find it fitting, though I know not its genesis. You speak of seals and holdfasts, yet I see naught but ash, ruin, and worms."

Baeraenys licked her lips, seeming almost nervous if the tell she showed was correct. Lansseax waited, turning slowly to take in Baeraenys face in full.

"I . . ." Baeraenys replied, "I do not know for certain, my lady. One such as yourself must thusly know with greater certainty. You. . .you are a god."

Lansseax betrayed none of the irritation that seethed within her veins.

"Do you think I would ask if I would receive no answer, priestess?" Lansseax asked, the barest timbre of a deep bass rumble joining the last word, eons-old stone grinding against eons-old stone.

Baeraenys' arms clutched the rippled steel rod closer to herself, and her fingers twitched mightily. Her fingers intertwined, worrying at the flesh between her joints.

"There are many practitioners of deeper mysteries of purest flesh and the most ruinous of flames, more than there are pillars in the sky," Baeraenys spoke in the lowest whisper, "All that is profane is holy, and all that is blessed is defiled. Fourteen seals on fourteen secrets, written in flesh."

Lansseax watched the priestess with half-lidded eyes, "There is a fundamental order underlying all things, is there not? To remove such, to beseech what lies beyond, in the dark depths of the universe. . . to do such is Madness's demesne. Of Frenzied Flame, of Rot Unending. I surmise I see the truth of the matter, witchling."

And so Lansseax did, seals and blasphemy. The fingers of outer gods, swollen with rot and burned with deep flames, could create such an inferno, could create a hellscape upon the earth. For each desired its own order, and the new order was anathema to the fundamental order, such was the nature of elder things. Lansseax was ancient when the world was young, there were things that were already ancient when Lansseax was but a single scale. There were things that were ancient when those that were ancient when Lansseax was young were young. To such a thing time had never bound them, and reality conformed to their will, not them to reality. To speak, to dream, to consider such things was blasphemy. The kind of blasphemy that really gnawed and slithered in your mind, until it turned and turned until your thoughts were naught but unreal. Lansseax, the greatest dragon which remained, dared not consider such.

Lansseax shook her platinum locks, letting her golden eyes slide shut for a long instant as she excised the glimmer of madness that even now gnawed within the deepest sanctum of her mind. When she opened them next, Baeraenys was staring at her, something like raw horror writ across her fair features, but Lansseax paid her no mind, such frailty of emotion was expected of such a lesser beast. Instead, Lansseax turned away, making her way back to the golden knight standing in the middle of the room.

Gerion's eyes found hers across the expanse, as she crossed the cavernous open space between the innermost sanctuary of the temple and raised dais where Baeraenys had first inflicted a discourteous audience upon Lansseax. Lansseax restrained a raised brow as Gerion's green eyes dipped, lingering, before his eyes snapped back up, a ruddy color climbing over his cheeks. The sheen of sweat and the sickly stench of fear clung to Gerion's body in equal measure. This close Lansseax could almost hear the gnawing of the worms in the man's flesh, could feel their little whispers of toothed maws in flesh. Gerion twitched and shifted where he stood, golden armor little protection against the depredations of sorcerous rites.

"My lady!" Gerion called, in a voice little higher than a whisper. His tone was gaunt and haunted, stretched like a man on which the strings of lucidity stretched thin. Yet his eyes were clearer, the touch of madness rescinded like a film from his eyes, and he addressed Lansseax directly, "You, I remember. A dragon. Yes. . . . A dragon with four wings, stretched from wall to wall."

His eyes almost seemed to roll in his head, as if he was gripped in the throes of a vision, and his body twitched mightily as if he wanted to both go for his sword and genuflect before her in pure supplication. His legs shuddered and collapsed under him, as he fell to his knees before her with a thunderous crash.

He peered up at Lansseax then, his green eyes sliding across her body before he seemed to articulate slowly, "You healed me, I can feel it now. The ache in my flesh. You healed me before."

His golden gauntlets closed around the pommel of his sword. Continuing more slowly, "How. . . and why?"

Lansseax smiled, raising a finger to tap lightly against her lips as if caught in thought, a distinctly human gesture, "You have the right of it, Gerion of Lannister. I did heal you in passing, and you did pledge thusly to see my own self from this city."

Gerion stared at her, before his eyes drifted down, not toward herself but toward his gauntleted hands and his sword. He seemed to stare with rapt wonder at the sword between his fingers, eyes gazing almost hungrily into the ensorcelled steel.

"Your lucidity is most welcome," Lansseax complimented as the silence seemed to stretch, even as her lips spread into what could pass for a wry grin. Then she let the exuberance slip away from her fine features as she considered the broken mortal more carefully, "But I fear it is a blessing but momentarily. The hallowed ground and wards stay some madness, this I see plain as day, but your flesh festers even as you wear it. I would not hide such an end from you, even if you have been little more than a companion of circumstance for less than a morrow."

A little gesture of gratitude, a fledging grandeur. It cost her little. The armored man was useless, worth little more than the weight of his armor and the guidance of his addled thoughts.

"You would waste words, lower yourself to speak this barbarian tongue, even with your divinity?" Baeraenys interrupted, "With this common refuse of Andalos? What worth does this wretch have, this worm-riddled?"

Lansseax's tempers flared, hot and bright as the inferno of the sun. Did this little witch dare? Lansseax's growl shook the room as she glanced back toward Baeraenys. At where the little witchchild had stepped closer, still leaning against her staff as if she was a doddering old woman and not bearing the form of a waif, yet to flower. Lansseax's arm shot out, faster than a striking serpent, and backhanded the witch, striking the side of her chin with a crack. Baeraenys' staff clattered to the ground, down the steps of the dais where it came to rest against the armor and silk of a corpse.

Gerion inhaled sharply, the sound still and sharp in the sudden silence, but did not move from where he knelt, hand still upon the pommel and hilt of his sword. This thief deigned to reprimand her as an equal, bound to servitude as she was?

"Little witch, little priestess, little thief," Lansseax drawled, words slipping forth in tandem with her steps down the dais toward Baeraenys' fallen form, "This common refuse, this 'Andalosi,' is not a little scullion. He did not squall and scrabble at the eddies of the divine, did not seek to pilfer the domain of gods! You are beyond luck that it was I, Lansseax, and not my brother or my lord!"

Baeraenys, on the back foot twice in so many minutes scrabbled at the corpse near her feet, pulling a short dagger, little greater than misericorde from the mound of bone, armor, and silk, clutching in a white-knuckled grip, turning back toward Lansseax.

"The Valyrians are akin to gods, do we not share a fragment of the divine?" Baeraenys replied, something fiery lingering behind her eyes, "Is there not a kinship between us? What is shared divinity between the gods?"

"Ah," Lansseax said, eyeing the little witch with her golden eyes, feeling them narrow and deform, the human iris giving way under the strength and fury of her draconic might which threatened to boil free of her mimicked human form, a storm caught inside a beaker, "I see that you do not yet understand, despite my grace. Let me rectify this most grave of errors."

"You already spared me! You name me as a thief, yet I have stolen nothing but which you freely gave!" Baeraenys protested, her tone still defiant. Her purple eyes flashed as she seemed to take some small courage from the misericorde in her fingers, "What are the meagre years I took? I was in the twilight of my years, and you remain as you were!"

Lansseax snorted loudly, the sound more beast than sophisticated lady, and her voice rose, booming across the room as if it was from a deep drum, "I am not some paltry god to be fooled by spoiled libations and petrified offerings! I am an Ancient Wyrm, a Dragon who was old when the world was young. It was I and my brethren who watched as your wretched kind crawled from the Crucible of Life. Your working was clever, I would grant you that much, but you are a fool. You grasped at the remaining years of a vessel beyond the domain of time, in your hubris you could not see that such years were infinite."

The misericorde in Baeraenys hand shook. The blood seemed to glisten like tears on her cheek.

"Do not kill the child, please! Do not!" Gerion spoke, his voice cracking at the start as if he was an adolescent. Lansseax stilled before she slowly turned her head toward the lordling. He was half-raised from his crouch, resting his weight on his sword. He froze as Lansseax's eyes pierced him, and his breath seemed to leave him in a keening rattle.

"Death was never my intention," Lansseax drawled, her voice still an omnipresent rumble of stone grinding against stone, half-returning her attention to Baeraenys, "For every year this pitiful thing pilfered, I shall see it returned tenfold, until the very universe grows as cold and barren as the rocks that suffuse creation, then she will be released and wither and die. Such is my blessing."