Throne of Steel

Chapter 01 - Long Bullets

"So you actually did it. You took your country back."

"Indeed. And we couldn't have done it without our new allies. When the countess snubbed the Seraph and sent them running for the hills, she played right into our hands. Her neverending hubris set us on a path to success."

"And what of the Commander? He talked to Grell about Shaemoor. Did he confront you about his involvement? Does he suspect anything?"

"He's aware that I'm keeping my secrets, but he seems to prefer blissful ignorance about Shaemoor. He has no idea about our joint operations."

"Well that's just too sweet you two, but remember that the rest of us still have messes of our own to sort out! Now that you have a foot in the door, when are you sending him to Metrica?"

"The Commander will go wherever he deigns to go. If I just went around sending him from place to place to solve our problems then all that trust we've built up would be lost. As of right now, the places most pressed for time would be Ascalon or the Shiverpeaks. Scarlet's glorified mercenaries are making their way north and the tensions between the legions are reaching critical mass."

"Then just pick one and send him off already!"

"It isn't that simple. Wherever it is that he heads to next, he needs to believe that he came up with it himself - or at least that I didn't nudge him in that direction. So as of right now, I'm waiting for Scarlet to make her next move. From what he told me about their interaction prior to the Searing, it appears to me like she planned to turn him into her personal attack dog. And seeing as that whole idea blew up in her face, it is inevitable that she will send some kind of angry response to Kryta's change in management."

Preparations in restoring Kryta were well underway. The moment their efforts began to venture out into the lands around the city, their focus went towards securing a supply of building materials. First they repaired the sawmills outside the forest east of Shaemoor, then they sent construction crews west to set up new quarries with what wood they could process for that purpose.

The turn of the seasons was already ringing in its colder parts, it was clear that they would work through the colossus bringing the surrounding farmland back to a state where they could use it in the next sowing season. But they were confident that they could brave through it. Both spurred on by the allure of better times to come and backed up by the overwhelming masses of human hideaways trickling in from all over the land.

The Commander spent his days during this time helping the Seraph escort workers and deliveries between the city, the sawmills and the quarry. They all feared some grand attack from Lion's Arch and were always making ready in case it happened, but this army of soldiers in Scarlet's service never came.

A single person in her service however did arrive eventually. One morning, when the Commander was still shacked up in his restored cottage at the lake, the Seraph came knocking on his door. "Commander! There's an emergency! You're needed on the road asap!"

The moment he heard this, he finished his preparations for the coming trip back to Divinity's Reach and headed outside. The guard led him south, past the caravan and then east towards the ruins. "We first thought it was an enemy contact, but he insists that he comes in peace and demands to speak with you."

"Who?"

"An Asura, we'll reach him shortly!" And down the road to the east, on the very edge of the forest lay their destination. There, surrounded by several Seraph with their weapons drawn, stood an Asura. A small, two-legged creature with a sickly-looking grey-brownish leathery skin. Sharp teeth jutted out of his broad mouth and his ears hung off the sides of his inhumanly wide head like large, floppy drapes. He wore machine-sewn garments made of an alien fabric and behind him stood several dozen Asuran golems, machines of stone and metal with a more traditional, cloggy but otherwise humanoid design.

When the Asura spotted the approaching Commander, he pointed directly at him. "The man in the robe, is that the Commander?" There was a short and snappy tone to his nasal voice, as it was with almost all Asura the Commander had met. "It's about time. I'm getting sick of having swords pointed at me."

"You asked for me? Who am I talking to?"

"Nebbal, Lionguard. Or Nebb for short." His announcement about being from the Lionguard only set off the Seraph causing them to point their swords at him again. The Asura raised his hands. "Calm down, I already said I come in peace. I'm not attacking you, I just want to talk to the Pact Commander."

To not allow for further mishaps to escalate the situation, the Commander came closer to the Asura until he was a mere three feet away and spoke with a softer tone. "Forgive their caution. Our last encounter with the Lionguard was a little more…hostile. It involved airships bombarding us with cannon fire."

The Asura nodded with an annoyed expression on his face. "Yes, I'm well aware. I hesitantly greenlit the attack and in hindsight, that hesitation was well-founded. Those airships were the only ones we had. If there's another emergency like this somewhere else, all we have on hand are ground troops. All because of you and this 'incident'."

"We had to do what we did, it was either that or letting Anise subject our people to painful and needless suffering. I'm guessing Scarlet Briar didn't take it too well."

The Asura raised his eyebrows. "That is putting it lightly." Nebb pulled a small, disk-shaped device out of his pocket and pressed a button on it.

After a short, high-pitched noise, a circular light above the disk began to flicker and project a small, red-ish shade in the shape of a very angry-looking Sylvari in her familiar, overloaded getup. "What are you doing?" Spoke her voice from the device's loudspeaker.

"Getting ready to escort a wood shipment?"

"I mean with Kryta!"

"We're rebuilding Kryta. That's what the wood is for."

Scarlet's hologram stomped in place like a furious child. "More like destroying everything me and Jennah built! What of the Shining Blade? Where are they? What did you do to them?"

"We had to ally with the Separatists to retake Kryta and when we did, the Separatists killed the Shining Blade and replaced them. They're in charge of the country until we have a new monarch."

The furious sylvari pointed at him, emitted the sounds of muffled anger and continued stomping. "Argh, Commander! Mandi-mandi-mandi-mandi-mander, why? This flies in the face of everything we stand for! You were supposed to pave the way for change in your country, not become an obstacle to it!"

"Anise talked a lot about 'Change' too. It turned out in the end, that the 'Change' she wanted for Kryta was for the humans to die out and the Sylvari to inherit it. She didn't get that idea from you, did she?"

All the strength in Scarlet's stance vanished, she took a step back and waved away this notion with both hands. "Oh no, no, no, no, no, no 'dying out' is such a…stark way of putting it. I was thinking more of enriching Kryta's demographic makeup."

"...by…removing all of its people and replacing them with more of yours?"

"Well - kind of…" She took a moment to pull herself together and point at him once again. "...but that's beside the point! I am very cross with you, Commander. You're on thin ice and if you don't want this to end very badly for you, you had better make amends right now!"

"The last time we met, we parted on friendly terms, yet you sent the Lionguard to kill me anyway. What do I stand to gain from getting on friendly terms with you now?"

"I'll have you know that I am still the head of the Captain's Council! You would not want to make an enemy of Lion's Arch, believe me!"

"Going by the Lionguard's actions, we already did."

"Even so, it's only been a month since you took control! There is no way you've achieved complete autarky this quickly! I know for a fact that you're shipping in goods from somewhere else! This childish defiance of yours may have taken hold of Divinity's Reach, but you must be aware that the other nations are still mature enough to value our good will!"

"I take it that you're threatening to enact trade embargoes."

"Among other things, yes! Let's see where this bigoted mindset of yours gets you when we bleed you dry of much-needed resources!"

The Commander sighed and folded up his arms. "I see. So besides trade embargoes and potentially all-out war later down the line, do you propose an alternative?"

"Yes. You will accept our terms and submit to the policies I issue for you. Your entire ministry will resign and I will send a delegation that handles your legislation instead. Whatever the Separatists call themselves now will step down and Lionguard representatives will be put in charge of enforcing the law. You will learn to accept your intellectual betters for what we are and appreciate and act on our guidance. Then and only then, can we begin to improve relations again."

"I can't read Logan's mind or that of the Piercing Spear, but I can say with confidence that neither will agree to those terms."

"In that case, I don't have much more to say to you! Enjoy your famine!" Scarlet reached towards something outside of the metal disk's bounds and the entire device turned itself off.

For one, the Commander's takeaway from this interaction was that the suspicion going around between him, Logan and Minister Aldryn seemed more correct than before. He could clearly hear the same venomous undertone he knew from Anise surfacing with Scarlet. She even used the same phrases. She didn't outright admit to it, but it became very clear that the Shining Blade's newfound holier-than-thou attitude either originated from Scarlet or was encouraged by her in some way.

The Asura sighed and put the holoprojector away again. "Well I guess this concludes that encounter."

"I'm sorry your trip couldn't have better results. Do you want us to stock you up with provisions for the way back?"

"I brought plenty, but there is another matter I'd rather discuss first. Scarlet was very upset about your queen's assassination. Have you ever found the culprit?"

"I'm afraid not. And Jennah wasn't the only one that died that day, almost a hundred million must have. How did she react to hearing about the searing?"

Nebb shrugged. "Nobody cares, besides maybe the two human captains. But your late queen is what I'm more focused on right now. Among the Lionguard, Lion's Arch's hegemony over Kryta during Jennah's tenure is no secret and it'll be no surprise to you that she was regarded as a great asset to the council."

"I want to know who is responsible for it as much as you do."

"Then you're in luck. I minored in forensics and brought all the instruments I need to perform a medical examination." The Asura gestured for some of the golems to come forward, and five of them went ahead with large crates attached to their arms. "If you can get me her body, I could see whether I find any leftover clues as to who took her out."

The Commander chose an abandoned house as the Asura's abode and instructed several soldiers to keep watch over Nebb in his absence. As soon as he could, he made his way back to the city to bring the news to Logan and Aldryn. Logan welcomed the idea of finding out more about the queen's demise. They could recover the bullets she was shot with and the body was well-preserved inside a coffin in an underground crypt. But any records of what the Shining Blade may have discovered about it had been burned when the Shining Blade set fire to the city.

Minister Aldryn - now calling himself Count Aldryn to further rub in the Separatists' victory over Anise, welcomed the idea to the Commander's surprise and gave orders for the Piercing Spear to supply the Asura with anything he needed for his investigation. They cleared out a little wooden shack not far from Shaemoor and made way for the golems to carry in his equipment.

With metal plates, they improvised an easy-to-clean table to place the body on and sooner than one would think, the Asura had put together a small lab of his own for the sole purpose of studying Jennah's corpse. If it weren't for the Seraph guarding the outside, no-one could have known there was anything of interest in there.

They were lucky that Jennah's body was still intact. The Seraph had to do hard work leveraging their contribution to Kryta's conquest to convince the Separatists not to break Jennah's joints and weave her body into a wheel like they did with Anise. The countess' mangled body still hung above the main square of Salma District.

Within less than a day, the Asura ordered for the Commander to come visit him. When he arrived, the queen's body was still mostly untouched. And yet apparently the Asura was already ready to give a preliminary report. Monochrome pictures of the bullets used in the queen's assassination had been pulled up on screens and a custom mechanism held magnifying glasses of varying sizes around a tray he kept them in. "You arrived sooner than expected. But I still have some first results to show."

"Any clues on who murdered the queen?"

"Not directly just yet but right off the bat, I saw something I didn't expect. That she was taken out by snipers should be obvious just from the distance she was shot from and the lengthy shape of the ammunition used. But I had assumed just going off motive and opportunity, that the Separatists had hired Elonian bounty hunters or brought some of their precision rifles to do the job. But all the ammunition used was of a very crude and slightly modified six-point-five millimeter cartridge that the Elonians don't use."

"Modified how?"

"They all had a fixture of a more solid metal melded to the front. What was on that fixture is gone, so I don't have much to go on for that just yet. For now, the more interesting thing is the general model of the cartridge. An exclusive Iron Legion make. The only known facility - at least to my knowledge - that produces those in large amounts, is in the Black Citadel. That doesn't mean for certain that her killers are Charr. But it does mean that whoever they are, they got their murder weapons and the ammunition from the Black Citadel and a Charr must have at least sold it or handed it over to them."

"Could they have just killed Charr and taken their weapons?"

The Asura shrugged. "It's certainly possible. But the more assumptions you convolute a hypothesis with, the lower the probability of its accuracy. And then there's the safety mechanisms, too. So if we were to go with that, then the killers killed Charr snipers - already narrows things down from within the Charr - took their weapons - which remained perfectly intact - took enough of them to reverse engineer them and learn how to handle them, and then also got enough of their ammunition to custom-make their own with those fixtures. There's so many assumptions right in there it's way safer to assume that a Charr helped them somewhere along the way."

So with this new information, he returned to Divinity's Reach and called for a meeting in the throne room with the heads of the Seraph and the Piercing Spear. Logan immediately understood the angle he was going for. "So if we pinpoint the factory that makes those bullets - or the original model - we could trace how it changed hands and find the culprit."

"That's what I'm thinking, too. It isn't much, but it's a start. It's more than nothing. If I find that factory, if they keep any record of who they make bulk sales to - All I'd have to do is see which ones I can rule out. Whoever is left can lead me to the killers. Or at least one step closer to them. I just have to get there first. It'll be a very long journey over the mountains."

Count Aldryn disagreed when the Commander returned. "Not necessarily. We have brought all the city's waypoints to one place and restricted the public from using them specifically for an occasion like this."

"I was going to ask about those." Rytlock Brimstone, had used his privileges as one of the Charr allowed in the city to listen in on these meetings from a much more crude public bench that had replaced Jennah's throne. Now, it appeared it was time for him to talk. He got up, joined the other three and continued. "Enough time has passed for the legions to pull themselves together and sort out what was going on at the Citadel. But unless I cross the Shiverpeaks, I'm basically stranded here."

The count shrugged. "I don't see why we couldn't afford a second trip. They certainly should be all charged up sufficiently to take both of you all the way to the Citadel. Just remember that waypoints are send-only. The Citadel's waypoints are probably as drained of their power as those in this city were during Jennah's reign. So once you're there, you'll have to come back the long way. And possibly maneuver around the Lionguard at that."

"We'll figure something out by the time that's an issue."

While Aldryn and Rytlock left the throne room to make preparations, the Commander stayed with the captain. "Logan, Scarlet is becoming too much of a problem. I'm not sure if I can handle all this alone. Can't you rally the others from Destiny's Edge? Zojja? Eir? Caithe? Maybe we could undertake future travels together."

Logan was rather bothered by the suggestion. "Destiny's Edge came together, because we had an elder dragon to unite against. But this isn't dragon related, or even a concern to all of Tyria. You can't keep relying on me and them for friends. They all have lives of their own. If you want a group of allies to back you up, you need to make your own."

"My own…you mean like my own guild?"

"That's one way of going about it."

"I wouldn't even know where to start. My own 'Destiny's Edge'...What would we even call ourselves? Fate's Razor?"

"I'm sure you'll think of something. It's not like you've found anyone to bring in yet. You've got plenty of time to figure out a name."

The Waypoints of Divinity's Reach, once spread around the city, were now all together in the outer ring of the upper city and heavily guarded. Both the Commander and Rytlock packed heavy, bringing as much as they could to prepare for anything they might encounter on the other end of the trip.

As the Commander and Rytlock got in position on the designated circles of two waypoints, the Piercing Spear guards posted browsed the holographic map to select the target location, which the Count announced. "To minimize the risk of dropping you in the middle of the Citadel and THEN finding out that the Iron Legion is hostile, we've decided to choose a location just outside of it as your destination. That way if things go haywire from the get-go, you have at least room to retreat, they can't just close the gates and lock you inside."

And so they selected the target destinations and stepped aside, watching as the blue lights emitted by the floating machines prepared to surround the Commander and the Tribune, envelop them in light and send them on their momentary journey, half-way across the continent.