The Duke is a Mage of great power, it has been known for year that this was his chosen path. The common people think that he is pursuing the magical arts to find a way to bring his father back from the grave to advise him and to seek out his father’s killer and bring the justice of the land upon him. The common people are romantics. The Duke is not a Mage, although he does practise magic, it is not the magic of the wide array of practitioners; he has pursued a darker path. In his youth he practised a form of Devil worship. He had heard of great monsters of the world and he heard about the great Devil Lords that ruled with unquestioned might. As the youngest son of a great lord of a small town beholden to a king that was distant and actually a small fish, the troubled youth sought true power and imagined that with that power he would be free to expand and become a great lord and then a king, an Emperor even. His dreams were big, but his knowledge was small and his resources even smaller. He muddled around trying to find the right way to summon a devil to bring him closer to making a pact to gain great power and defeat all before him. He targeted the things around him that he could reach. Fire Flies and Dragon Cats, Dragon Wolves and Dragon Bears. The Dragon Cats he staked out to catch Dragon Wolves and he trapped and staked these out in turn to catch Dragon Bears and these lastly in turn to sacrifice to Dragons themselves. He prayed, in the manner that he was taught to pray to his Family’s gods, Jard mostly. He prayed by substituting Jard with the name of a Devil Lord. It was good that they never answered, but something did answer and the answer was not what he had expected.
It was a voice that asked why he did this thing? He answered that he was trying to attract the attention of a great power so he could make a deal with them. “Ahh,” it said, “You know nothing, but you intrigue me. I offer you the Power you seek, but first you must complete a task for me. Since you like staking the lives out of the divine creatures of mine, you must remove the hierarchy above you as dragons remove their hierarchy.” It paused for effect and to make sure the young teen was listening. “If you do this, I will grant you some of my power. If you fail, I will send one of mine to rend you into pieces that will be impossible for your father to put together.” The presence lifted of the Boy and he fell to his knees. The Dragon Bear before him was undamaged except for the wounds that he had inflicted cooled to the temperature of the night. He stood, wondering if the scene had happened or if he had dreamt it all. The night sky then darkened, and a strong rush of wind descended, the night sky darkened more, and a great Dragon landed before him, snatched up the offering even though it was smaller than a scale to this beast and it spoke. “Ten of your years, or I shall devour you.” It uttered a final word and pain seared across his body. When he woke, the beast was gone and he sat inside a great hole made by its foot and a mark was left in his eye, a reminder of how many days he had to fulfill his destiny or else meet it.
The days fell away months then years, all the while the numbers that he alone saw everywhere became smaller. He learned a great deal; the numbers were Draconic, and they counted down through his days and nights. He learned a great deal of things other than that, he learned how to lead people, but not as his siblings did from the front of a group in the field of mock battles, he learned to lead others to get the things he needed. He worked on a plan to usurp his family and how dragon work. He learned that the hierarchy he must destroy was his family and the price of success was power, all the power a dragon could command, but not just any dragon the might of the greatest dragons. There were stories: stories of princesses being saved from Dragons by knights and stories of dragons that raised villages with fire, gas, or acid. He learned all he could about their sizes and how the largest dragons ever seen were huge, bigger than a house, with footprints as wide as a man was tall. Every time he compared with what he knew from his one encounter and he knew there were bigger dragons out there. He worked to destroy his hierarchy and win the prize. It was when the number in his eye was reduced to two digits that he stood over the corpses of his family. He had removed the hierarchy over his name, and he had assumed the head of his family that the numbers stopped counting down and vanished.
Power flowed to him that night and it stayed with him for ever more. He only ever saw the outline of his patron in the night sky that it came down to grant him the power. Greysteel, the town of his birthright, was dwarfed by its immensity. All writings of their size invalidated, the power that this avatar of dragon kind held was clearly more terrible than the Devil Lords he sought out as a child. And its desires have been aloof and alien to his mind. He was told to seek out the Golden Rings, a great artifact that was dismembered millennia ago. He was told that he had to search out the oddest of things a purple chicken feather from a farm South of Jarda and when he sent others in his place his powers dimmed until he went in person. His Patron did not care what he did to his populous in his nation if his tasks were completed in a timely fashion. When the artifact was completed, his patron did not care for it, and told him to do what he would with it, it was not his concern, further he told him it would only serve the one who constructed the artifact then it would melt away.
Years past and his power grew but the people that he associated in the past had a great hold over him; they represented a secret that he fought to keep hidden at first because the they knew that he and them had killed his family and removed them for his ascent to power, but that diminished over the years, lastly was the claim that they had not killed every member of his family, that one was being held beyond his power to find, waiting for the time that he will betray them. He assumed that they were far from his reach, they held him with an image that they were linked to the Orc Nation to the North and he quietly readied an invasion with plans to wipe all the Orcs and the people they harboured. He planned to make them pay and to have proof of their treachery to Greysteel. Only, they were closer to where he was, in his own territory, hiding out in a ruin that his Grandfather had destroyed. The hubris, that he missed it and wasted so much time and effort. He would destroy the Orc nation and the nation of Jarda. He had held back for years because of these people that were killed by a group of nobodies that had happened upon his nation on a whim looking for treasure and fame. They found the fame, but at a cost to his own. He felt that he could use their pull to attack his enemies begin his conquest at the late date that it was. They performed beautifully and they invested monies that they had gained in the first major building projects in the realm in years, they pulled people from the decaying Nation of Jarda and they attracted new armies to them. He figured that in a couple of years they would be able to carve out the underside of Jarda and build a legacy for him to rule forever more. He selected a target to bind them to his cause, the Orcish Confederacy. That loose collective of town states would fall apart as his armies crushed their defenders.
His rod, the rod that the Dragon Spirit told him to assemble, told him that, the Dragon Kin hated the orcs, showed him of the slaughtering of a band of Orc Hunters. It showed him that together they fought a solid group of gnollish marauders. It showed him that they could come together and fight dragons, which surprisingly, his patron was completely okay with. They found and rescued his sister from his enemies, even though they did not kill her, but she had gone into retreat, so that mattered little. They were on his side. The rod told him that they were carrying an Emperor’s Ransom to sell to out of region buyers, and were trying to hide it from him, but he did not care. Well he did, but he suspected that some of them would pay their taxes on it and he strongly suspected that they would invest the money in the fortifications and the villages they were building, strengthening His Duchy, soon to be his Kingdom, so that did not matter. They were his people, his by actions and his by their allegiances. So, when the rod showed them going to his Sister and conspiring to overthrow his rule and place his own dear sister as their puppet . . .. It took a day for the servants to clean up the mess, and the stonemason a week to repair the damage. But after that it was clear what he needed to do: begin the conquest of the nations around after first clearing house and showing the people that it was the work of villains from the Orcish Confederacy and the King or Jarda using non-human agents. It was perfect actually, the ‘crimes’ he had thought made them his people, were brought out to light and publicly posted to all the right places, the network of gossipers that he had cultivated over the years. He saw what the bard had claimed in his propaganda campaign and as soon as the words had left his mouth, there were others countering it with doubt and suspicion.
The new towns were always the weak spots, but so was Neloar where they were heroes and then there was Hommlet, that had always been a thorn in his side, never quite accepting his rule, so much that he had to send his aide to keep the people bridled. Still he was going to win, he had the loyalty of Greysteel and that was the lion share of the people and the soldiers. After the troublemakers were dealt with it would all change. First this insurrection, then the world!
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