AN: I'm back for another few updates on this. I'll probably pull it to the end of a plot mark and then move on to other things.
Chapter 4
Karin stared silently at the massive bulk of the Dragon unconscious in her family's stable. It was rather disconcerting, even for her, to realize that its head and mouth were quite literally large enough to swallow her whole, if the creature had ever successfully come close enough to do so. It was fatiguing her family's Healer considerably to constantly enspell the Dragon to keep it unconscious, but Karin knew that the instant it awoke, violence would resume.
The fact that its armor seemed resistant to magic, only made matters worse. The journey back to the Valliere estate from the academy had been slow, what with hauling the Dragon's bulk and her youngest daughter's delicate condition. In spite of the days it had taken for the journey, and the two days at the Academy it had taken for Karin to be healed and recover adequately, Karin and her men had only managed to begin removing the Dragon's armor.
Colbert, who had been the one ultimately to figure out how to remove the first piece of armor, one of the claw-gauntlets, had been rather firmly of the opinion that the armor was explicitly designed to be hard to remove, unless one knew exactly how it was done. Considering that during the entire journey, the only other components they had managed to remove were the other gauntlet, or perhaps boots would be a more appropriate term, and part of the greaves. The creature's entire torso, tail, neck, and head were still armored.
Even with the armor, though, it was easy for Karin to discern just what this creature had been attempting to turn her daughter into. Why it had been trying to transform her daughter into one of its own kind, she was uncertain, but she doubted she would like its motives any more than she liked the endeavor itself.
A gentle knock on the stable's door interrupted Karin's thoughts.
"Come in, Cattleya," Karin said, "I want you to take a look at this."
The door swung open slowly, and Cattleya entered slowly, being assisted by her personal handmaiden, Gretchen. The dark-skinned Germanian girl was shorter than Cattleya, but was a stout and sturdy as Cattleya was frail, and long since accustomed to helping Cattleya about the Valliere estates. Cattleya herself could have been a carbon copy of Karin, save that Karin, in developed musculature, posture, attitude, expression, and that special something extra that goes beyond natural senses, radiated a hard strength, and Cattleya was the very essence of delicate gentleness and compassion.
"Oh!" Cattleya said, once she was far enough into the stable to catch sight of the Dragon, "What a magnificent creature! Wherever did you find it?"
"This is Louise's familiar," Karin said, her voice firm, rather than harsh for her sickly daughter, "What do you know of Rhyme Dragons?"
"Oh mother," Cattleya said with a smile, indicating for Gretchen to help her towards the Dragon, "That is not a Rhyme Dragon, just for starters, it has fur!"
Cattleya gestured towards the Dragon's legs, which were, indeed, covered in fur.
"Whatever made you think it was a Rhyme Dragon?" Cattleya asked.
"It is intelligent, capable of using magic, and can alter its form to that of a human."
"By the Founder!" Cattleya said excitedly, he slow gait quickening slightly, "This is an entirely new species then! However did Louise summon such a thing?"
"According to Louise," Karin said, "She simply conducted the Familiar Summoning ritual in the same way as any other student. Are you certain this isn't a Rhyme Dragon? They are the only species known to exhibit such traits."
"Unless this is a Rhyme Dragon that used its transformative abilities to grant itself fur," Cattleya said firmly as she reached the creature, "This is not a Rhyme Dragon. However did Louise acquire such high-quality armor for the creature?"
"According to her account," Karin said, "It was in human form when she summoned it, and she has never seen it outside of its armor, though it rarely wore the helmet."
"Its armor shifted forms with it?" Cattleya said, eyes going wide as she carefully sat down and began a tactile inspection of the Dragon's leg.
Karin nodded. Cattleya was an earth mage, though not much of one as her body did not handle the stress of magic very well, but like her younger sister, she had compensated for her lack of practical ability with prodigious academic study. She was not as well-versed in magic as Eleanor, who was an outright academic, but Cattleya was extensively familiar with both the technical and more ephemeral elements of earth magic, in order to better allow her to make efficient use of what little power she could safely channel. Due to this, she was quite aware that the Dragon's armor had to be, of necessity, not only masterfully crafted, but masterfully enchanted.
Cattleya frowned as she ran her hands through the Dragon's shaggy fur, finding it to be coarse and ruff, with a thicker undercoat appropriate to a creature that lived in cold climates.
"Mother," Cattleya said firmly, looking up at the woman, "There is more to this than a simple summoning. What is going on?"
So Karin told her everything she had seen herself, and everything Louise had told her thus far.
((()))
Siesta's world had changed a great deal in the last month. As with the changes to Miss Louise and Joshua's lives, it had begun with the Knight's summoning, but unlike for them, the effects had taken some time to set in. Her extended contact with Miss Louise, first as the only member of the general castle staff literate enough to help the girl, and later as her personal handmaiden, had been the first time she had really gotten to know a noble. Miss Louise had been every bit as proud as she had expected of a noble, but had completely lacked the pettiness she had come to expect from them.
And, of course, Miss Louise had immediately moved to protect her as soon as she had discovered Siesta was in distress. It was the first time Siesta could think of that any noble had done anything genuinely beneficial for anyone she had ever known. And then, of course, Joshua had fought for her. And won. True, it had not been anything special about her that inspired him to fight, but in some ways that was better, because of what it said about his strength of character.
As time continued to pass, working in Miss Louise's service, Siesta found that Louise was not only a noble she could respect, but something between a friend and a little sister that she could feel pity for. Getting to know the diminutive pinkette had taught Siesta that while most nobles paid no concern at all for the things that commoners lived and died over, they had things of their own that worried them. Siesta still felt that most nobles would benefit greatly from spending a year living as a commoner, and that they had little appreciation for how easy their lives were, but Siesta would prefer her close-knit, warm, and loving family, or the ready camaraderie amongst the staff at the Academy as a commoner, to the twisted webs of social intrigue amongst the noble-born students at the academy.
Certainly, it would be nice to be able to partake of the rich foods, and have a great deal more time to read rather than work twelve hours out of the day, but she would not take such things if it meant the distance, the lack of trust, the isolation, that the nobles experienced. It also made it easier for Siesta to understand how callous nobles could be towards commoners, as they were treated so coldly by their peers, and even their 'friends.'
And then Miss Louise's mother, the legendary Karin of the Heavy Wind herself, had come to the Academy, and Siesta had learned that the coldness and distance extended even to within noble families. The terror in Miss Louise's eyes when she discovered that her mother was coming to the Academy…
After what the Duchess Valliere had done to Joshua, part of Siesta could easily understand being frightened of the woman, especially after seeing how she had seemed to completely ignore the fact that her arm had been torn off in the fight. But still, but still…
Part of Siesta's heart simply could not comprehend how anyone could be, or why they would ever need to be afraid of their own mother. It made Siesta's heart ache for her patron, and all the more so once she saw the mixture of relief and brokenness in Miss Louise's eyes when the young noblewoman learned that her familiar had survived the fight with her mother, but lost.
The young Valliere had been like a shell ever since, simply laying silently in the covered carriage that had carried them to the Valliere estate. She answered questions when asked, but never initiated conversation herself, and Siesta suspected that if she had not already been hand-feeding Miss Louise her meals due to her physical changes, the girl would not have accepted food. Between the pain of her body's changes, and the young woman's black mood, Louise barely moved, only the occasional painful tremble running through her body.
Siesta tried as best she could to relieve Miss Louise's pain, massaging her muscles gently, reading aloud to her from her academy texts, and simply holding the girl's head in her lap, stroking the hair that was beginning to become more of a mane. The only direct sign of response she received was when sometimes, when they had stopped for the night, Louise would turn her head into Siesta's lap and cry silently. Siesta usually ended up crying as well.
Part of the reason she spent so much time with Louise was because she couldn't bear to leave the carriage any more often than she absolutely needed to. Outside the carriage, she would have to see Joshua, in the form of a dragon, tied down, in an enchanted sleep, and slung across four carts hauling him to the Valliere estates. It broke her heart to see the strong fierce Knight who had been both her and Miss Louise's protector, and in many ways, provider, held in captivity.
Siesta had not seen the fight between Joshua and the Heavy Wind, but she had heard it, and seen the aftermath. Some of the lava had still been glowing with heat when she followed Miss Louise's escort to where Duchess Valliere stood with Professor Colbert beside the unconscious Dragon-form of Joshua. It seemed as though half the forest had been destroyed by their battle, and there was a massive sword sticking out of the earth nearby. And Karin of the Heavy Wind conversing casually with the Professor while she waved her arm about for emphasis.
A very small part of Siesta was fiercely proud that Joshua had been able to wound the harsh woman, especially considering her legendary combat abilities. More than anything else though, she was terrified of the woman who stood so casually in such destruction, terrified for herself, her mistress, and the man she was falling in love with. At least the Duchess seemed to respect her position in relation to Louise, and considering that she could have effectively fired Siesta by cutting Louise's allowance from her family, that mattered a great deal.
While part of Siesta wanted to flee back to Tarbes and her family, Siesta refused to repay those who had shown her such loyalty to her with abandonment. And that had brought her, more than a week after the Duchess had arrived at the Tristain Academy, to the Valliere estates. Siesta had known, in abstract, that the Valliere's were the wealthiest noble family in Tristainia, when she accepted Miss Louise's offer of employment, but seeing the Valliere estate had suddenly driven that into a very pointed reality.
It was massive. Unlike many modern nobles, the Vallieres still retained their residence in a castle, rather than a manor-house, and even Siesta's untrained eyes could see it was still kept at battle-readiness. As they approached, she could see that a fair number of the ballistas lining the outer wall were manned, and archers posted on the inner walls kept a watch upon the skies. Siesta was by no means a student of warfare, much less the strategy and tactics involved in a siege, but the multi-pointed shape of the castle, with the entrance lying in the recessed area between two of the points, looked like quite a painful place to assault to her.
Once she entered the castle, she found that it contained an entire village's worth of residents. All wore the crest of the Valliere family somewhere on their garb, and even in the short period of time it took for them to pass through outer courtyard, gate through the inner wall, inner courtyard, and into the central keep, Siesta identified a smith, two farriers, a number of farmers, a plethora of armsmen, three cooks, two scribes, and any number of general servants. While they passed through the inner courtyard, the group separated as Joshua was taken to the stables, and Siesta moved with her mistress into the inner keep.
The inner keep, Siesta found, was designed in a very similar manner to the Tristain Academy, which helped her feel a little less out of place, something she appreciated. Moving Miss Louise from the carriage had been a delicate matter; Siesta had once again covered her mistress with sheets, and a quartet of armsmen carried her carefully into the keep under the Duchess watchful eyes. The youngest Valliere's quarters were on the third floor of the keep, but the Duchess cleared the way ahead of them to ensure that no one would catch a glimpse of her youngest daughter.
Siesta found that Miss Louise's chambers were even larger than her quarters at the academy had been, though at this point that did not surprise her. They included a sitting room, which is where the primary entrance from the rest of the keep was, a bathroom and a bedroom, both of which branched directly off from the sitting room, and a smaller maid's quarters, which adjoined the bedroom, and also had a servant's exit to the rest of the castle. Siesta expected she would be spending a considerable amount of time in her mistress quarters in the coming days.
((()))
"Ahem," A gentle voice sounded, snapping Siesta to wakefulness.
She had fallen asleep in Miss Louise's bedroom, with the younger woman's head cradled in her lap. It had not originally been her intention, but it was very difficult for Miss Louise to get to sleep these days, and once she had fallen asleep on her lap, moving her was out of the question. Rather abruptly awakened, Siesta was made aware of the muscle cramps and aches that came from sleeping in a largely upright position, and, of course, that someone else was now in the room.
She blinked bleary eyes, trying to focus on the room's new occupant, but all she could see was the silhouette of a woman with pink hair and a dark blur at her side. Brain still not operating on all cylinders, Siesta hunched protectively over the unconscious girl in her lap.
"Please, Duchess Valliere," She whispered, still trying to blink her eyes clear, "Miss Louise needs her rest."
"Oh, I quite agree," A gentle, amused voice said quietly, "However, I believe you have me confused with my mother."
Siesta shook her head, then carefully raised her hands to wipe her eyes clear, then attempted to focus on the pink-haired figure in front of her again. Once her vision cleared, Siesta wasn't sure if she should be embarrassed or not. Aside from an obviously frail physique, the young woman in front of her was practically identical to Karin Valliere, her completely different demeanor notwithstanding.
"I'm very sorry, milady." Siesta said quietly, her cheeks deciding an embarrassed blush was appropriate even if the rest of her wasn't sure.
"I am Cattleya," The woman said softly as the maid assisting her helped her over towards Siesta, "Louise's elder sister. I understand you are Siesta, her new handmaiden?"
Siesta nodded silently, uncertain of what to do. Cattleya picked up on the young woman's nervousness, and smiled gently at her, and indicated for her own handmaiden to help her sit down beside the maid.
"I am something of an expert on creatures," Cattleya said softly, "Both magical and non, and my mother asked me to have a look at the Dragon. She thought it was a Rhyme Dragon, but it isn't; Rhyme Dragons don't have fur. In fact, I am unsure if any Dragon species known in Halkeginia has fur. After I explained this to her, she filled me in on the events of Louise's summoning, and what has followed since. Unfortunately, my mother tends to be rather… rigid in how she chooses to see things, so I was hoping you could explain them to me from a different point of view."
Siesta stared at the woman in confusion, not entirely understanding why a noble was asking her, a commoner, to tell her account, when she had already been told the story by a Duchess. Cattleya, recognizing the source of the pretty maid's confusion, reached over and gently pulled Siesta into a hug.
At that point, Siesta's stressed, frightened, and confused mind, short-circuited and stopped functioning altogether. With her restraint demolished, Siesta's body went limp, and tears began to course from her eyes. As the young woman began to completely fall apart, Cattleya carefully angled Siesta's body against her own, so that her head came to rest in the crook of Cattleya's neck, and began murmuring reassuring words in her ear.
Siesta fell asleep again within minutes, overwhelmed by her emotions.
((()))
Some hours later, after Siesta had roused and recounted the story of Joshua N'bara's arrival and time in Halkeginia, before Cattleya firmly ordered her to rest properly, Gretchen escorted Cattleya back to her own quarters. Once Cattleya was ensconced in the reclineable chair that her father had specially constructed for her, and Cattleya had cast a subtle anti-eavesdropping spell, they began to speak.
"What do you think, milady?" Gretchen asked.
"I think," Cattleya said as she enticed one of the kittens that resided in her quarters into her lap, "That mother has completely misunderstood things." Cattleya sighed, before continuing, "Again."
"That's more or less what I picked up as well," Gretchen said wryly, "While a Rhyme Dragon would have the memory to remember all the details of a story invented on the spot, we have no way of knowing if this species would too. And even so, all the Dragon species known in Halkeginia are notoriously indifferent to human affairs, save where they directly overlap with their own. His behavior in both accounts seems more appropriate to a human capable of assuming the form of a Dragon."
"Yes," Cattleya said, eyes on the kitten in her lap, which was purring softly as she rubbed its belly, "And the simple lack of detail he gave is very consistent with a soldier stranded within a nation not allied, or even necessarily neutral, to his own."
Several minutes passed in silent thought, during which Gretchen appropriated one of the kittens that inhabited Cattleya's room to occupy her hands with as well.
"What will we do?" She eventually asked.
"I need to speak to this 'Joshua' myself," Cattleya said, "I will simply have to convince mother or father to allow him to awaken."
Gretchen nodded, and then asked the question that she had been carefully avoiding up until this point.
"And what of the changes to your sister's body?"
Cattleya lifted the kitten, and held it against her face and chest, her eyes closed, silently struggling with her emotions for some time before she responded.
"I don't know what to think yet," Cattleya said finally, her voice strained, "I do not like what Siesta described about how much pain my sister has been in. I'll need to speak with her tomorrow."
((()))
"Louise?" Cattleya called softly as Gretchen assisted her into her sister's chambers, "Are you in?"
A hurried, and barely audible, exchange of whispers from the bedroom was conducted, before an almost growling, croaking distortion of her sister's voice answered.
"Please don't look at me," Louise said, the brokenness in her voice making Cattleya's heart lurch for her younger sister's pain.
Gretchen, with long-developed sensitivity to her mistress body language and moods, immediately swept Cattleya off her feet, and carried her into the bedroom.
"I saw you yesterday while you were sleeping," Cattleya said firmly as she pushed the door open and Gretchen carried her to the pinkette's bed.
Louise, her face screwing up in pain as she did so, began trying to pull her blankets up over her head, her enlarged and misshapen arm making the task as difficult as it was painful. Siesta, who was seated beside Louise on the bed, swiftly, but gently, pushed Louise's arm aside, and moved the blanket herself. It was not hard for Cattleya to read that she did not wish to do so, but knew her mistress would not stop attempting the task herself if she did not.
"Louise," Cattleya said sadly, "You don't need to hide from me."
Louise said nothing, but turned her head away beneath the covers. This had the effect of drawing attention to how abnormally long and robust her neck had become, but that only distracted Cattleya for a moment.
"Gretchen," She said, turning to gesture towards Siesta, "Could you please show Siesta around the castle, and introduce her to the family retainers she will most need to work with?"
"Yes, Miss Cattleya," Gretchen said, turning to smile at Siesta, who was looking worriedly between Cattleya and Louise's covered form, "Don't worry, Miss Cattleya can take care of her sister."
Siesta waited for a few seconds to see if Louise would say anything, but as she didn't object, the maid from Tarbes allowed herself to be lead out of Louise's chambers.
"Louise," Cattleya said gently once they were alone, "I came by to visit last night, I have already seen what has happened to your body."
Louise still said nothing, and Cattleya sighed. Moving slowly, as she always did, Cattleya gently pulled back the edge of Louise's blankets, and slipped underneath them herself. It was quite warm beneath them, as Louise's inhumanly massive body generated a great deal of heat. Cattleya was careful as she moved beneath the blankets, but then Cattleya was always careful in how she moved. Still, it took only a few moments for her to mover to her sister's side and wrap her upper body in a cautious hug.
No words passed between them for the rest of the night, but eventually, Louise turned to bury her head against Cattleya's side, and cried herself to sleep in her elder sister's arms for the first time in years.
The next morning, Louise would give Cattleya her halting account of what had happened, before eating a massive meal, and falling into sleep again as her body exhausted itself in growth.
((()))
Karin Valliere was not noted for being very convincible once her mind was made up, especially in matters regarding her daughters, or in this case, her daughter's familiar. Over the next week, her men were gradually able to remove the rest of the Dragon's armor, though it took them an entire day to work the helmet free. Beneath the armor, the Dragon had deep brown fur with fiery red markings patterned across its entire body. Cattleya and Gretchen spent a considerable amount of time measuring the Dragon's proportions, and testing the range of motion on its joints.
Once the initial measurements had been completed, Cattleya enlisted the help of two of the castle's healers for internal study of the Dragon's anatomy. It was something Cattleya did mostly because she knew her mother would have ordered it if she hadn't, and everyone in the employ of the Valliere family knew not to be cruel to animals around her. Or anything else.
The first thing they discovered was that the Dragon had strong affinities to all four elements, strong to the point where any constant-effect spell that attempted to penetrate his body would very rapidly be drained to fill his own magical reserves. It turned out that it had not been the creature's armor, but the Dragon itself that had made using sleep spells on it such an ordeal for the healer who had kept it unconscious during the journey to the Valliere estate. Cattleya very much wished that this had not been the case, as it meant that diagnostic spells would not be a viable method for understanding the internal workings of the creature's body.
Instead, it meant knife-work and healing spells, something Cattleya would never have consented to if she hadn't known her mother would have forced the issue under someone else's direction if she didn't. If the Dragon's magic-absorbant property had also rendered it immune to healing spells, rather than just made them less effective, she would have stood between the Dragon and the knife herself, though she knew it would have done no good. Her mother was an unparalleled master of the Wind element and had proved more than willing, more than once, to manipulate her daughters physically with it to enforce her will.
Once they had opened the Dragon up, she, as she had expected, found that the major muscle groups in its limbs and abdomen by and large corresponded to those of other six-limbed Dragons. The musclulature of its torso, neck, and head, on the other hand, were substantially different. Its jaw had an unusual set of muscles that, as best she could tell, was intended to open the jaw with great speed and force. The muscles along its long, robust neck, were wrapped around small air sacks that reminded her of the air-pouches in a bird's chest used to enhance the duration of air flow through its lungs, except they were not connected to the Dragon's lungs. The neck muscle arrangement also seemed configured to more effectively regurgitate material, rather than swallow it, though she knew in order to eat it had to be capable of both.
It was in and around the thoracic cavity that the true reason for the unusual muscle structure became clear. The junction at the base of the Dragon's trachea extended branches not only into its two lungs, but also into several other organs. Two of them secreted and stored a viscous liquid that ignited upon contact with air; a discovery which nearly burned Cattleya's hands, and also revealed that the Dragon was utterly immune to injury from fire or heat. An escalating series of experiments with branding irons had confirmed this.
After the two identical fire-organs, they found what Cattleya would have taken to be a craw, save that it was attached to the Dragon's cardiovascular, rather than gastrointestinal system. In it, she found a few pebbles and rock-dust mixed in with a secretion that seemed to serve no purpose except lubrication, which she expected was intended to allow stones to be ejected with greater ease. The final organ was simply an extremely muscular pouch, filled with water. Cattleya suspected it was the physical element of a fourth breath weapon, one which had not seen use in the Dragon's fight against her mother.
The final major difference between the outlander Dragon Louise had summoned, and currently known Dragon species, was the massively overdeveloped musculature involved in breathing. While the diaphragm was perhaps twice as developed as on more well-known Dragons of similar size, the muscles around its rib cage were insanely overdeveloped, and a muscle-valve at the join between Trachea and lung was most probably present to allow for the pressurization of the lungs.
On the whole, the entire array of organs related to breath weapons was unique, as every known species of Dragon in Halkeginia simply relied upon an outright magical organ to create its breathe effects, and perhaps exhalation to expel it. It took them six days to learn all of these things about the Dragon's physiology, at the end of which Cattleya reported it all to her mother, and then she, and the exhausted healers, all went to rest for a day.
While Cattleya spent the first week after they removed the armor studying the Dragon himself, Karin was more interested in the armor. It was literally the most complicated piece of metalcraft she had ever seen, and that was only the beginning of it. It was multi-layered, the metal comprising only the outermost and second outermost layers, with successive internal layers made out of a variety of materials she was not familiar with. The outer layers of plate alone were incredibly intricate; interlocking and overlapping plates of quite thin metal, they provided near total protection without impeding mobility in the least. The plates were also not made out of any metal her smiths were familiar with, as despite being unusually thin for armor, they were utterly impervious to damage. The plates were also engraved with extensive runes of a language none of them knew.
The next layer beneath the plate was crafted of some form of gelatinous substance sheathed in an extremely malleable elastic material. It reacted strangely to impacts, becoming partially rigid when struck with sufficient force, by no means which Karin or her family's enchanters could recognize. Karin could readily see its utility for spreading the damage inflicted by blunt weapons and large-scale impacts, especially when combined with the apparent-indestructibility of the outer plate layer. This layer was also inlaid with tiny runes, shaped from metal wire and somehow bonded with the sheath and gelatin both.
The innermost layer was a fibrous sheath that any experienced eye would readily be able to recognize as strongly resembling human muscle in form. It, like the other layers, was inlaid with runes, and had been connected directly to several portions of the outer plate. Extensive experimentation had revealed that while it, and the gel layer, were very malleable, they were just as impossible to actually damage or destroy as the plate layer. Testing had also revealed that the false-muscle bundles responded to electrical shocks by contracting, which was enough for Karin to conclude that it served exactly the function it appeared to, additional muscle for additional strength.
It was also the innermost layer that had featured the strangest feature of the entire suit of armor, a small metallic protrusion which had been connected to a port in the back of the Dragon's skull. Karin made an educated guess that this allowed the Dragon to control the extra muscles, and had something to do with the helmet.
The helmet, Karin still did not understand. Like every other part of the armor, it was fitted to the head with exacting precision, though the plate layer was vastly simpler, due to the rigid nature of a Dragon, or for that matter, any creature's skull. What was overlaid over the interior of the visors that shielded the eyes that bewildered every single person who had a look at it. Words and characters in a language unknown in Halkeginia were writ across the interior of the visors in glowing letters, the majority of them identical on both eyes, some few things differing between the two. A few of the characters were numbers, apparently the only element of the Dragon Knight's language that was shared with the written language of Halkeginia. What was particularly significant, however, was that the glowing overlay changed depending on what, or who, was in front of it. Any time Karin stood in front of it, she was outlined in red; any time an exposed weapon was held in front of it, the weapon was outlined in yellow.
When the helmet had been taken to Louise's room, it had outlined both Siesta and Louise in blue, and appended a string of characters to the outlines. One of the sets of characters was a set of numbers, which increased or decreased with the distance between the helmet and the person it was tracking.
Taken all together, Karin found it to be an ill omen the sheer degree of utility wrapped up in the Dragon's armor, especially considering that she, her husband, her daughter, and all of the mages employed at the Valliere estates could not make heads or tails of how the armor's enchantments had such effects. The augmentation to combat ability the various layers combined to lend, combined with both the known and unknown capacities of the helmet's display, were a powerful package. Karin found it particularly foreboding that anyone would think a Dragon would have sufficient need for an enhancement to its strength that it would justify whatever insane amount of cost involved in that layer of the armor's construction.
Karin was seriously considering asking the Queen's royal enchanters to have a look at the armor, but was uncertain she wanted to deal with the questions it would lead to, especially considering the Princess' relationship with Louise. Louise herself, was spending most of her time unconscious, and most of the time she was not unconscious eating copious quantities of food, literally enough for a score of men, as her body continued to increase in size and density.
Her thoughts on that particular issue were rendered moot when the Princess, apparently having heard of her friend's illness decided to visit of her own volition.
((()))
End Chapter 4.
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AN: for those wondering, this is a crossover with the original work of someone I know; it's had some personal distribution to a variety of people he knows around the world, but isn't published. I carefully omitted any direct names purely proprietary to the world.