A Benevolent Evil Dragon

As the girl leaves his office, Baron Jan Glozko furrows his brow. He gets up and steps over to the window, waiting to see the girl step out and walk over to the inn he recommended. He tapped his ring, sparks coming off each time his nail hit the silvery metal.

"The girl is full of shit." Finally, it was his loyal friend that broke the silence. He too knew exactly how Jan felt.

"Crude, but true. She's a decent actress, I'll give her that. But even with her resilience and the incredible courage she showed against us, some things you can't fake." He stepped away and rang a bell, a servant rushing in to bring in drinks for the two men. "She's young too, so I'd say she's lived a rough life to be able to look us in the eye while lying so boldly. She might be useful even if she's not what we'd hoped."

The captain of the guard and his personal knight took his glass, drinking it dry before shaking his head. "Girl's dangerous. Lech wasn't a pushover. Even if taken by surprise, she would need a lot of power to kill him. He killed a proper knight before, after all. Not the best in magic, but a good swordsman and tactician, with innate advantage against her thanks to his element. Either that ball she made was the least she could do, or she has some secrets stashed away."

"For now we don't need to worry about daggers under pillows. That's tomorrow talk. Though speaking of her deception, I have to ask, what tipped you off on the girl? I think this serves as a good exercise of the mind to see your perspective." Glozko took his own glass, a lot more restrained in his drinking. His body did many things fast, and sadly for him, that also included the stages of drunkenness.

"Main thing, her hands. Her right hand was pristine, without blemish, but her left was filled with scrapes and calluses. The way she walked and the fact that her body was tempered unevenly makes it clear she's no noble girl, I would say she's some commoner witch more than anything. Those monsters are the definition of rushed asymmetry." The man almost spat the words by the end of it, shaking his head. True, compared to the grueling training of a lowborn squire like Michal once was, being a witch seems like a sacrilege that spits in the face of his hard work.

"Calm, friend. Girl was probably forced into the role and then abandoned when her talent revealed itself to be combat. Don't curse her for taking the path of a beast when she's barely of marital age." The knight grumbled something in reply, but it was clearly in jest, so the baron let it slide, shaking his head while tapping the old knight's head. "If you care for it, I had a few different things strike me as faults." His friend filled a second glass and drank, but made sign to go ahead.

"The girl was polite enough and did speak up when I tried to deceive her, but she seemed to have no clue that the bounty on the men alone was thirty coins. Add in a songstress, one of the hardest monsters to properly deal with, and you have well over eighty coins and some gems. She had good instinct but no knowledge. Additionally, she just went to an inn instead of demanding she be received properly as a foreign noblewoman. Though, even before all her faults and strange details, before her tale of how she ended up stranded here, there is one thing that made me immediately call her story a lie. Care to guess? Fifty if you're right." The man had a mischievous smile that made Michal grimace and think he had no chance at all. Still, as always, the knight humored his lord.

"Is it… the wild eyes? How little presence she has? The fact that she didn't demand she take a bath and dress up before the meeting?" Despite his best efforts, the knight failed in all his choices.

"Something much more simple my friend. What sort of child says "from the south" when talking about their parent's estate? All empire nobles, especially those with insignificant positions in obscure, border villages act like everyone in the whole wide world should have heard of their town's name and should revere them for it. None of them would say something as humble as her." The man laughed as he finished the glass, almost instantly being hit by the numbness of the liquor.

The caravan had stopped. Despite the fact that they were already behind from having to wait for Roland and his group, they still needed to rest. Rushing to catch up with the schedule only to be hit by some other bandit gang would ruin things completely, while for now they just had to pay with some trust in the merchants and some prestige of the lord under whom this whole group had formed.

Evidently, despite not being in a position of great authority and responsibility, Roland was going to be the one to suffer most as a scapegoat. Coming back with two severely wounded sorcerers that he was in charge of as well as two soldiers vehement on not seeking reparations from the witch, being robbed of most things they owned, making the caravan be late and having absolutely nothing to show for all that cost? He was fucked.

"We should've slit her throat instead of wasting time threatening her into giving up that artifact…" Spat Kasia, louder than she likely intended. Roland was a great many things, but he was not a healer, so her ears still sucked even if he at least made sure she won't permanently lose them.

"They would've killed us all, sister… That earth mage followed us without any of us even noticing." said her brother while nursing his own wounds.

Sadly, Roland's mediocre healing could not save Jakub's eye. Case in point, the bandage was bleeding again. He frowned and helped him change it, uttering a simple prayer in hopes that it would help do what he never properly trained to accomplish. As much as people told him that nature was part of life and had the ability to heal, he could not grasp how control over plants translated into healing flesh. The only thing he barely managed to grasp, and even that was with great difficulty, was seeing the nature of people's mana. It was in the name, so it somewhat fit, but unlike a better mage he could see little more than a rough approximation and grayscale colors. That was the main reason he did not expect the witch girl to have a chaos based curse in her arm.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"They could have killed us five times over. A sound mage that can burst people's ears without anyone else being affected and an earth mage that can strike from across a clearing? We weren't even able to see where the stones came from and they were so fast I couldn't even cast a spell. Let's just… forget about them." sighed the uninjured man, clearly annoyed at the subject even being brought up.

Roland was at peace with what was going to happen to him once this caravan reached the city. He had to be. He was put in charge of his cousins, told to teach them the ropes and help them gain some glory so they wouldn't lose their position as minor nobles. Yet here he was, ready to deliver both of them crippled. An eye lost could be made up for, but the girl having her knee blown up and patched together badly meant she might never be able to run or even walk without pain. By the time they would reach a capable healer it would be far too late for her.

"Of course you're fine forgetting, you barely got a headache! Those peasants took my leg and ear! My brother lost his eye and will be forced into being a knight! We had a shot at being proper sorcerers and some unknown mercenaries from nowhere, one of which is some nobody witch ended up almost killing us! We need to get our price in blood…" As Kasia raged, Roland could only sigh. As far as he was concerned, whoever said that earth sorcerers were stubborn while wind ones were easy going and fleeting, was full of shit.

"The girl did nothing. All she did was light up a tree on fire, she didn't even hurt us. Her companions however, those weren't witches. They must have been strong sorcerers, and who knows how many actually were there? Are you going to ask your father to find a party while only knowing how one of them looks? Just… don't dig the hole deeper… We might end up not getting all shunned for dishonoring the family if we at least behave." Roland was just about ready to beat the girl into silence, even his patience eroding away. Thankfully, before she could retort, her brother dealt with it.

Before Roland could enjoy the silence, a soldier he had yet to properly interact with came to him, bearing a serious frown. The man only needed a moment to look at the siblings as they rode in the back of one wagon, before making sign for Roland to follow him to the side. He did as instructed, but before being able to speak up he was stopped with a single sign.

"The count wants you to tell him more about the encounter and especially the details only a sorcerer would notice. Blondie already gave his report, but he knows next to nothing on magic. You didn't hear this from me, but if things go right, you might not end up being disowned. That witch sounds like the kind of oddity the lord enjoys."

Roland was stunned. Certainly he knew that the higher someone was on the totem pole, the more they were prone to excentricisms, but still. To think the count would give him a free pass in exchange for something as simple as information on the girl.. He had a complicated expression as he imagined Kasia getting what she wanted, even if it was in a roundabout way. He just hoped they would not be made to handle the whole thing themselves.

In a different place, yet at the same time, whispers of a witch filled the muddy streets. The army disbanded rather quickly, considering how devastating the loss of life was. Now, only a skeleton crew of Duke Arkros remained to try and keep the peace now that two centuries of status quo went up in flames. That all meant nobody was capable of sparing the men necessary to deal with the "vengeful witch" as people came to call Meredith.

Contrary to the quickly forming legend, she was not here to punish the men for hanging every single man, woman and child that had any sign of being a witch. She still shambled like a corpse, still wheezed and stank of rot, but she was no revenant. Instead she was as alive as could be while looking at her family's legacy burning in front of her. Her father was one of the people executed for "worshipping the dragon". The mere fact that her family was on good enough terms with the monster to not be murdered for coming and going was enough to brand them as heretics.

She could only spit on the fire, because there was nothing else she could do. She was already numb after killing a few soldiers in some misguided revenge for all she had to suffer. All she wanted now was to find a way to fix her self inflicted wound and somehow be normal again. She knew she would never stop being a witch, she was too far gone, but at least she wanted to speak again and that required a great priest… which would sooner smite her than aid her.

It took her a few minutes to weave in and out of alleys, passing by a soldier that didn't dare point his spear her way after noticing the eyes and gaping hole in her neck. Her disgusting visage had some benefits, but not enough to offset her self hatred.

Back at the inn whose owner she managed to bully into giving her a room and staying silent about it, she stared into the glass of the window, half focused on her own appearance, half looking out at Tranquil River… soon to be renamed into something else. The river stopped flowing. The mana was draining. Many will die in the winter, no longer kept safe from the worst of it by the dragoness. Unlike many, she had seen how the empire was like. The villages that could end up wiped out by a particularly bad snow storm. The hunger that plagued villages that weren't lucky enough to have a mana rich river nearby. She knew most faces she looked at will end up rotting soon, and there was nothing she could do about it, because she was rotting too.

She wheezed out a laugh as an errant thought passed by. Her near death turned from a terrifying trauma to a morbid comedy at some point, because she realized the reason she survived was one she would have never expected. Shadows were meant for wicked people to hide in, poisons were meant for weaklings to kill shrewdly, that was the common sense she learnt in her life. Then that child used poison to heal another. The chaos mana that always pools near the ground when death is aplenty, the memory of what that dragon did with chaos and poison, that was how she stopped the bleeding by poisoning herself. The after effects were ugly, but still…

She coughed out, blackened ooze dripping from the wound. She hadn't healed herself that day, just managed to survive on borrowed time. It was clear that no priest would help her, and she doubted any normal apothecary would even be able, let alone willing to save her life… That only left one option. An option that she did not know what to think about.

The one that inspired her, the one that saved her life by proxy, he was probably still alive. She heard the men whisper about how he managed to slip away from a goddess and the duke himself. She didn't know where he escaped to, didn't know if he would even help her… but her entire family was dead, her legacy was in ruin, her name was wiped from any sort of documents, she was dead in all but flesh.

Her eyes wandered lower as she looked out the window, seeing the soldiers gather. It seemed that they got sick of letting her do her thing. Her fingers tapped against the glass, her own shadow growing behind her. Maybe she would visit her original father in law before leaving. He just barely managed to evade hanging by virtue of his valuable trade with the empire and continued payment of taxes, nevermind that her father was the one that even made that possible in the first place.

Maybe she should get a little gift for the dragon, if she is to see him again.