Those of iron will and unwavering purpose will plot course, avoiding and breaking obstacles in their way, taking both surprising and mundane detours, but nevertheless striving to their ultimate goal. But what they have to do, if their very purpose lost its sense?
The man in his forties sat in a small room inside the thick stone castle, the room in question was devoid of anything other than a few chairs and a table, while the man in question wore an impressive but practical uniform composed of hardened leather and purple-coloured cloth, the colour alone a sign of wealth and power due to just how hard it was to make.
There were newcomers to the city, which wasn't all that big. Besides that, they arrived in a very small group, instead of a caravan or a fleet armed to the teeth and reaching critical concentration.
And they arrived on the back of a dragon.
It wasn't entirely unheard of. However, the fact that this wasn't an organised group, just a few seemingly random travellers, was what made them so unique. Or maybe they were deserters; it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were here, in his city, isolated and vulnerable, with knowledge of how to break the beasts to heel and make them a mighty tool in the arsenal of man.
And the possibilities that it opened…
Heavy footsteps and squeaking chatter came from the corridor, and soon the doors were opened, and two Norse Vikings walked inside. He made an internal sigh of relief while maintaining a stern stance; a delay in relaying information to him was unacceptable, and he feared that it was far too big to succeed. It wasn't the case, but he will make sure to discipline the responsible bureaucrats later.
The captain of the guard saluted. "Lord Governor, the mission completed successfully without losses in men."
He nodded sternly at him and pierced the two persons with his gaze. The younger man – a teenager, really – turned his own gaze away, cowed, but the older woman stared coolly, with a tint of anger in her eyes but otherwise emotionless.
"Umm. Mr-"
The Lord Governor looked at the teenager, and he shut up. Then, he relaxed his stance a little and waved for them to take a seat. No need to be inhospitable. "Introductions first. I am Lord Governor Sigge Carolusson, granted this venerable position by Prince Erik the III before his departure. But you must know that already."
A departure he never returned from, and most likely never will, just as the two expeditions sent to his personal fortress after the Blitz passed. In either case, they took his prompt quickly enough.
The burly woman was the first to speak. "I am Hilda Ingerman, and this is my son, Fishlegs Ingerman. I don't think we broke any law."
The Lord Governor looked her in the eye levelly. "I am not a judge. And no, you didn't. But I want to hear about your mastery over dragons, and it is important enough not to take any chances. How did you exactly manage to tame it?"
The peculiarly-named Fishlegs (weird Vikings tradition) suddenly gathered himself and spoke. "We didn't. She… Um…"
Sigge's eyes narrowed in thought, so they weren't the ones training the beasts after all? He had expected that, but the chance was simply too good not to take. It would require some covering up. A manufactured crime they committed and persuading them that their boss will not take kindly to failure, perhaps.
"You don't – you don't tame a person. She is a friend."
Person? What was the meaning of this? "Don't joke. I will get this information from you one way or another." He ground out. Surprisingly enough, the youth got determined instead of cowed, despite the fear in his eyes.
"I don't! You can speak with her, she knows Norse. Dragons are as much people as humans are. They just… don't really learn our language well. It is incredibly alien to them, and they are very specific, so about any word with different meanings confuses them greatly."
Hilda nodded, making the captain pause from bringing his hand up to slap the teen on the head. "It is true, they are all people, our tribe even accepted some into its clans before I left."
"You do realise how wild your claims are?" They nodded. Then he nodded as well. "Either you are insane enough to think this is true or sufficiently dumb to think it is going to help you."
Hilda straightened. "We don't. Just speak with her."
Sigge rolled his eyes. "Fine. I will check.. But know that I do not take kindly to liars."
They were still so sure about it. Peculiar. It made a small seed of doubt take its place in his mind. It would take only a moment and besides, he needed to pass through there on his way to supervise the city; doing it personally helped both morale and his image.
The place they kept the dragons in wasn't far at all, it took less than a minute to get there. And here it was, a female Gronckle, muzzled and in a cage, and several smaller ones secured more loosely with ropes — an oversight, but not big, considering that they weren't all that large. The little ones were only a metre in length and but a fraction of the mass of their adult counterpart.
He stood before the Gronckle, impassively ignoring the growling, and raised a brow at the teenager. He hurriedly went over to the dragon. "M-Meatlug, umm, the Lord Governor wants to talk."
The growling stopped. He received a look that he may have thought of as consideration if he didn't know better. Unintelligible noises exited it, but they were… as if someone tried to speak with a closed mouth.
"I-I don't think she can speak while muzzled."
Was this an assassination attempt? Convince him to check it, and let the dragon cover him in molten rock? Well, he was going to check it, but without such risks involved. Sigge gestured to a few guards around the place. "Remove the muzzle, but have it tied down and be prepared to thrust spears down its throat if it tries anything."
The dragon was tied to the bars by ropes and the muzzle removed, the Lord Governor moved a little aside, not entirely out of the line of fire but enough to easily duck out of it. He needed to see what it was doing to be sure. The dragon was surprisingly cooperative, not making a single growl throughout the entire process. Maybe…
"Get them out of the room. We can't have them potentially interfering." The Norse Vikings were led away, his men greatly confused but too cowed by his presence to ask. Good, they had proper respect for authority.
The dragon rolled its jaws like one does with an unused limb, then, to his surprise, spoke.
"I guess I have to go first?"
It… didn't hit as hard as it perhaps should. Years of expecting the unexpected, of building contingencies for as many possibilities as he could without going downright paranoid, padded the impact. The guards didn't have this questionable luxury and stared wide-eyed at the dragoness.
"…Yes. Formalities would require me to go first, but I can make an exception here."
What should he do? It was a talking dragon… And by talking, it didn't mean just talking, maybe, he needed to see just how smart it was.
"How did you come to know this language?"
"After the fall of my master and the end of the Dragon War, I joined the human tribe, the Hairy Hooligans. My friend, Fishlegs, was eager from the start to see just how much I can comprehend. My comprehension was quickly proven equal to his."
This was a more well-spoken explanation than he could have expected of most of his subjects.
"Interesting. Now, release her; that can't be a comfortable position to hold a conversation in. Untie the small ones too. Also, bring those Vikings back here."
They were shortly assembled back again, Sigge looked them all over and mused on what to do. Musing would take time, though, and he still had to attend the inspection.
"Go back to your domicile, we will speak later this evening."
The inspection went as usual.
The soldiers manning the towers and war machines on them were well-disciplined, the structures proven to be impeccable as well: short, stubby, pyramid-like towers able to survive great strikes, with even the doors made of thick steel and hwacha batteries on top of them, meant to both provide shelter for common citizens and strike back into the skies, each within range of at least two others, and the ones not on the outskirts in range of three. Catapults and ballistae replaced around half of the hwachas from the side of the port, just to be sure. New towers were slowly constructed further and further out, the city never expanding faster than its defences. Which was painfully slow, but being rash was the only guarantee of catastrophe.
The guards in small outposts spread throughout the city put on a façade of professionalism to hide their usual slacking, but as always, he managed to pry something out, improving effectiveness a little by the impression of breathing down their necks alone. This time it was hoarding food. Unacceptable, and punished appropriately – working on the new towers. A really hard and hazardous work, but the guard didn't even try to argue, what with his hidden stash being big enough to justify execution.
He couldn't follow the hunters on their usual escapades, but the load they brought back checked out, if it wasn't great, considering just how much they hunted in the forest throughout the earlier years of his reign and how long it took for prey to come back to normal numbers.
They weren't feeding the city alone, of course, frankly, their work provided only a very small part of the food supplies, only about as much as people trying to grow crops on their roofs. Mushrooms grown in nearly every alley and basement in addition to farms of pigs fed mostly by those both did nearly ten times that, the latter at the cost of the ever-present stink that practically deprived nearby residents of their sense of smell.
Then there were the fishermen, who brought back as much as three times what everyone else combined. But they needed protection; ships escorted them closely, swift and heavily armed frigates circling around them, which took a great lot of time and effort to build. But memories of purple strikes from earlier days reminded him why letting them fish unprotected was a foolish idea.
Because anything, anything vulnerable and borderline important at all, fell to the purple flames swiftly. They were demons, equally present as unseen, always exploiting even the slightest crack in defences and bringing thundering blue flames from above. Always stopping them from expanding at a speed sufficient to meet demands, always culling everything that wasn't able to reliably bring them down, and ignoring everything that could.
That is why he never gave them an opportunity, made every location he could into an impenetrable fortress, made sure that every excursion – be it to the sea or deeper into the land, whether for fish, wood, stone, clay, or raw ore – was armed to the teeth. Regretfully, from time to time the latter ones were lost. But they were nothing that couldn't be replaced with an eager – and starved, jobless – populace, as much as he hated using them as an expendable resource.
As he neared the forge district, he couldn't help but think of the Gronckles there, kidnapped… enslaved. But he couldn't just let them go, no, they were necessary for the city, and the city…
The city must survive.
The mantra forged in earlier darker days, when both outside and inside threats were breathing down this city's throat, and when his iron fist crushed them mercilessly – but not without regret – repeated in his mind.
He looked for other solutions even as he neared the house of one of the blacksmiths. Ensuring better treatment, perhaps? That would require people to check on them, but he had a lot of people; they just needed a little training to get them competent.
What truly mattered, though, was the promise of changing it all. Of breaking free of enforced stagnation, of insufficient land to even provide a job for all his people, much less sustenance. Of, finally, warding the demons off, of taking the fight to them, and ending this dark era in the history of humanity.
"Who- L-lord Gov-Governor? Oh, um, what do your majesty want- wishes to-"
"Nothing from you, citizen." Apparently, he was heard upstairs, because four pairs of gleaming eyes of young Gronckles peeked out, then a fifth, and then finally the grown dragoness herself. "The Lord Governor arrived." At this prompt, the humans went downstairs too. Sigge beckoned for them to follow him and left the house.
He wasn't about to relay his intentions to them while walking on the street, of course, neither in the house of a random blacksmith, that near guaranteed they would be overheard. No. He headed to the nearby storehouse – one housing spare hwacha ammunition. It was terribly unlikely that this would be needed soon, since there was no training scheduled for the war machine crews this week, and so the chance of them being interrupted was minuscule.
The Viking woman and the dragoness eyed him warily as he closed the doors, having left their children back at the house. And the fact that thinking of a proper house was something normal… achievement bubbled inside of him. At one point, fifteen years ago, there weren't enough tents to house his people.
But the city survived, and therefore, the city grew.
"I have some tasks for you. First and foremost, I need to check on Prince Erik the III's stronghold. There is a chance that he is still alive and only communication was cut."
"Are we sure that there won't be a Blitz patrol there?" Asked the woman.
Sigge scrunched his brow. "There may very well be. How well do you think you can fend them off?"
The dragoness backed away with visible fear. "It was just a fluke with those two! and it only worked because they weren't immediately hostile. If they spread news of us, all the others will be!"
Sigge nodded. "And so you won't go there just yet, and not alone. I will need more dragons first. It will take time, since Gronckles are needed in the forges, and we never had a reason to keep other kinds alive. So that is your first mission. Get me more dragons, especially the ones you think will fare well against the demons."
Hilda nodded hesitantly. "My son is far better with them than me." Sigge just nodded her way wordlessly. "Okay, we could head out tomorrow. Where are the nests?"
Sigge stopped to recall some of the reports, but it was unnecessary because his mind swiftly turned to one nest that was known about since the city's founding more than a century ago.
"There is a very big one south and a little west from here, inside a massive and very skinny mountain that you can't possibly miss flying in this direction. It is visible from just about twenty kilometres in that direction, but pack for a much longer journey than that. Come to the FP18 storehouse for supplies." He raised his hand to stop the obvious question. "Ask where it is, everyone living in the city knows how the stores are positioned. Additionally, I will have housing provided to you in the castle itself."
The dragoness still had something to say, so he just looked at her expectantly. "About the Gronckles in the forges…"
He shook his head, letting regret slip through. "The city needs them, so until you provide a replacement, they need to stay. Letting them go now would be too big a risk for me to take." Steel returned to his eyes. "You will relay your whole knowledge about dragons before you go, however long it takes you. I will send two scribes to take care of that."
"Actually, my son already wrote it all down while we were here."
Sigge nodded. "Good, give it to me then." They were surprised, how could they not be with the behaviour he showcased? But in the end, he was going back to the castle anyway, and it was important enough to take care of personally.
She was so sure. So sure what to do. Determined to do whatever it takes to get her freedom, and her life back. To reach the assembly of might she was responsible for creating and to join the fray again, bringing flames down on the creatures that took everything from her, returning it in kind, ending them all.
Then she slowly but surely realised that those creatures weren't monsters. That they were just like them in many respects, with emotions, thoughts and plans. Even compassion. But they were subjugating everything, they were forced to because if they didn't, they would be too weak to compete with others. Their destruction would be for everyone else's sake, if a more grim sort of work.
Then her yoke hardened and became lined with spikes, and boundless hate rekindled. They. Had. To. Go. They had to die, to burn, to go down screeching as flames consumed them, or else go down whining, deprived of all their creations and haplessly starving in the wild, hard world.
Then a human risked his well-being for her, with nothing but compassion to show for it. But he wouldn't let her go, surely, he just wanted to give her a little reprieve. She took it – with her, as she needed it for flight, like one would a tool, and besides, it was only just, right? –
But she did unto him – what was done unto her – the score was made equal enough for their satisfaction. There was no hate anymore, not even anger, just companionship. And that was that, companionship, partnership at most.
On top of that, they were aimless.
The Blitz was where she should go: her whole world, the people she had united and that, doubtlessly, would welcome her with open paws. And that she would yet again keep united, focused, determined, against all odds.
But going there might be death for the human. She could presumably avoid that. But however she bent words, in the end, it wouldn't be a happy life for him there. Her past self made sure of that.
His own plans were unknown to her, but there was only so much that he could do. Go to live with other humans, with her or without her. Even with the respect he showed, there was no way other humans would show it – not many, in any case – and she didn't want to live like a pet, with only a scant few, or maybe even one person, treating her properly.
Living with other dragons would be an option… if not for their wretched hierarchy, that she could not, would not, deal with. And besides, there would be no other humans there. It wouldn't be good for him, just like it wouldn't be good for her to live around humans alone.
That was all before even considering the raw and unbridled hate humans would show towards her, and the disdain and superiority dragons would show towards him.
What was in life for her, and for him, if they went together?
Splitting up seemed best. Until she considered her disability. Either she went with him, or took him to the Blitz, or spent the rest of her life grounded. The first would make her miserable, the second would make him miserable, and the third wasn't an option at all.
Even if they split up, with him going to human civilization and her to the Blitz, there was the issue with the Second Wave, the third tier of the plan assembled by her mate. A plan that, without a doubt, he carried on with using all he'd got.
A plan that would end in the death of this human. Of every human.
The only way to avoid it was to go to the Blitz and persuade them to stop it. And then the human by her side would be handy to show that they could be reasoned with, could be at peace.
And she knew that she had no chance of convincing everyone, and the chances of convincing someone to stop those that she failed to would be virtually undoable, just as convincing them to stand idly by while those determined to end mankind moved to carry out the last part without sufficient forces, and were doomed to fail.
The idea of creating a new faction, a society where humans and dragons lived together in peace and mutually benefited from their strong sides, swiftly entered – and promptly left – her mind. There was no way she could build it up fast enough to be more than a footnote in the Blitz's campaign.
And besides… she didn't want to fight the Blitz. It was her work, her creation, and was led by her mate; if he hadn't gotten another mate yet, if he was even alive, if the Blitz's inner workings hadn't changed so drastically that she couldn't even recognise it.
All of this meant one thing; Mater Fulgur had to go back to the Blitz, if she wished to truly live and not just survive.
The dragoness sighed and got to her paws. There wasn't a choice, was there? She almost wished her blackheart had destabilised and taken all of those decisions away from her, but no such mercy; it never failed her, even as those of those around her swallowed them in dark stars.
Find the Blitz nest, deposit the human in a city, go back to the Blitz and start the excruciating work of changing the paradigm she set so firmly: of breaking apart the idea of the hard totality of their situation and to show other, less extreme options.
It wouldn't be easy, if even possible. But she wasn't about to surrender, to let the things she despised happen.
The human returned from the fortified mining outpost he had gone to and waved at her, then at the sky beyond the underhang of rock she took shelter under.
Seeing her looking at passing dragons intensely, the human started helping to make her aware of them – but despite this help, she had yet to spot a fellow Night Fury. Whenever they passed a chunk of human civilization, as rare as those were deep inland, he in turn was leaving her, alongside some inedible parts of her prey that he collected. And then he returned with some weird human food, and presumably some information that he had no way of sharing.
It had happened four times already. She stopped fearing him sending a hunting party after her after the second. And the food he brought was peculiar, even including somewhat tasty and exotic dishes. Plus, every bite she took from what he brought was a bite she wouldn't have to take from the quarry she spent most of the night hunting, which would therefore speed up their journey.
She shook her head, sighed, then nuzzled him in thanks. He made this weird gesture with his mouth – baring teeth with happiness – and went to the saddlebags to hide his load, and gestured to her back. She nodded and he climbed. Then they were off, he pointed in one direction excitedly. Mater Fulgur mused it over for a while, then huffed and headed in this direction. He seemed to know of something, it wouldn't hurt to check it out.