They carried the table into the room, placing it just before the firepit that sat in the center, giving off flickering light that played with our shadows across the walls. When they had placed the table down, the group other than Felix and Ophelia left the way they’d come in, closing the door behind them. Ophelia shot me a look—probably because I was sitting in her chair—and then crossed her arms and let out a huff.
“So, you’ve made a decision, then?” Felix asked, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his worn trousers. The mop of hair on his head fell down into his eyes, but he seemed to ignore it as he looked at Aurelion.
“We have,” Aurelion said, motioning to the table. “And now we have work to do.”
He stood and crossed to the table, moving some of the papers that hadn’t been nailed down out of the way. I joined him without a word, looking down at what they’d laid out for me to see.
The maps were pretty standard maps of the city. They showed streets and gates, as well as important locations like The Temple of the Seven, which was dedicated to the seven gods said to inhabit each of the moons that filled our night sky throughout the evening.
It was an old place—almost as old as the city itself—and the religion that it preached had never caused trouble for my kind. So we’d let it be. In fact, in recent centuries, the priests of The Temple of the Seven had even begun to preach that dragons had been sent by the Seven to protect and care for the people of the land. It was an easy enough story for humans to believe. But nobody had sent dragons to this place. Nobody but ourselves.
“We’re planning to make a statement,” Aurelion said as Felix and Ophelia took up places on the opposite side of the table. “And in doing so, we’re going to make some enemies. However, I feel that you’re the type that understands what it’s like to have enemies in powerful places.”
His eyes found mine, those cat-like pupils still made my body want to shudder. It was almost like a part of me was responding to his gaze with fear, even though that fear didn’t seem to permeate the greater part of me. It was strange, but I’d had to deal with many strange things since my awakening. I brushed it away and refocused my attention on the maps.
One of them had one of the city’s many strongholds circled. I recognized the place. It belonged to one of the imperial families that called the city home. Though they were considered part of the broader imperial family, they didn’t actually have any dragons in their bloodlines. Just humans with longstanding loyalty to my family.
“Ah, I see you’ve found our target,” Aurelion’s voice pulled me back to the conversation.
“The Segrids? That’s who you plan to go after?” I supposed it made sense. They had been one of the families that had turned against us. But how much of that did Aurelion know?
“Why them?” I asked before he could respond to my previous question.
I heard the smile in his voice. “They have business exporting certain things outside of the city. Things that I would like to get my hands on.” The way he said it made me feel like he was insinuating I should want to get my hands on them, too.
“What kinds of things? Let’s assume I don’t have any information on the city’s underworld.” It wasn’t a lie—I didn’t. But, if I could make them think I did, but that I wanted to see what they knew, then maybe I could keep myself from falling into even more of a disadvantage.
Ophelia scoffed across the table. “You’re kidding me, right, Leo? She’s clueless.”
So much for that thought. I found the girl staring at me, and offered her a smile. “I know more than you think—though some of the details are hazy.”
Hopefully that was enough explanation. Aurelion took the conversation over once more.
“She knows enough. She’s working with us now, Ophelia. Respect that decision, and trust me when I say she isn’t someone you should piss off.”
That earned a few eyebrow raises from both her and Felix.
I ignored them and focused back on the circled stronghold. “Okay, so we want what the Segrids have. Which is what, exactly?”
“Weapons. We’ve gathered information that they’re moving crossbows and iron out of the city by caravan.”
“Swords and spears, or raw material?” I asked, probing deeper.
Iron was a very broad description. It could mean anything from raw iron, to swords or spears. Many of the empire’s finest weapons were made with the material. It was also used in an assortment of different devices and contraptions that had absolutely nothing to do with war.
“A mix of both. Best we can tell, they want to equip whoever they’re selling it to with the weapons they need to get started, as well as materials for anything else they might decide they want.”
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I nodded slowly.
“We do not have all the information yet. We are expecting another report by tomorrow evening,” Felix chimed in.
It was the first time he’d truly spoken during the entire exchange beyond his initial greeting. It also didn’t give me anything to go on, about how he felt about all of this.
“Okay, so we break in, we take what? One shipment? Two?”
Aurelion shook his head. “Their whole manifest.”
He rifled through some of the papers to his left and pulled out one particular piece of parchment. It had a royal seal at the top. My seal. Bits of the conversation I'd overheard lingered at the back of my mind and my eyes lingered on the raised lettering. The image of the dragon that rose from the center of the seal.
A lump of longing filled my throat. My eyes glanced around the room, at the waterstained walls, the boarded up windows. It was such a far cry from the beautiful palace rooms I had once called my home.
“The empire knows about this?” The words left my lips before I realized what I’d asked. Confusion and then suspicion filled Ophelia’s eyes. Felix’s demeanor didn’t change.
“Parts of the Imperial Office, yes, it does appear so. At least, based on the seals we have seen from some of the shipping manifests. Based on this particular one here, the Segrids are supposed to be moving all of their shipping items out of the city to a singular location for pickup. The buyer isn’t expected to be ready for the items for at least another four months, so we should have time to get in, grab the information on where these shipments are being stored, and then get there to claim them for ourselves.”
Four months from now… That was the Southern Uprising. The pieces began to click into place. Like the pins in a lock when you inserted the correct key.
I cringed inwardly as I thought about that particular scuffle. It hadn’t lasted long—it hadn’t needed to. Four nations in the south had risen up, threatening to secede from the Empire. I hadn’t allowed it to happen, but it had cost me the lives of several thousand soldiers. Not to mention the countless civilians killed in the burning of the capital cities of each nation—cities I had personally burned down to ensure my lesson was understood.
It had been one of the bloodiest uprisings in recent history. And yet, it had helped us all grow stronger, come together. Then those nations had been the first to turn on us when the [Hero] arrived. The first to call us tyrants.
To call for my death.
Heat grew within my chest, like the first sparking embers of a wildfire before it caught. We had given so much. I had given so much. And they spit in my face. Turned their backs on everything we had built together. Everything my father had given his life for.
How could I forgive that? How could I still want to help them? To save them? I should burn them all, just the way I had burned those cities. Those people… those… children.
The heat faded, washed away by the regrets that tainted my past. My future. I had led them down this path. I could blame them, and part of me did. But they had only followed in the footprints that I had left behind for them.
But what if it was too late to stop it? Would anything I did now change things six years from now?
Would claiming those weapons and goods for ourselves here and now change the chances of that uprising being successful? Could we truly affect the future in such a way? To stop them from having reasons to abandon us when they needed us most?
I took the parchment with the royal seal from Aurelion’s hands as the questions boiled through my mind. I inspected it, reading over the contents of the message until the words began to blur together.
It all backed up what he’d been saying. Four months from now, the buyers would be ready. They would arrive to collect their shipments, and then they would be on their way. The revelation that the Segrids had played a part in that uprising made sense when I looked at how quickly they’d turned on us when the [Hero] began his crusade.
But it also worried me, because people within my own empire had dared to work against me. They had plotted behind my back… It only made the worry about who might be masquerading as my true self gnaw harder at the pit in my stomach.
I never would have known any of this if the System hadn’t sent me back in time… And now someone was likely masquerading as me because of that. A double-edged sword.
Perhaps that was the scariest thing about all of this: I had spent so much time blinded to the true troubles around me. The [Hero] had called me a tyrant, and based on everything I had seen so far, I didn’t see any reason why people shouldn’t have believed him.
Yes, we protected them. But why? Dragons didn’t walk among humans, not like we had in ages past. They didn’t think about us like their peers.
We were distant now. Distant like the gods. Something you believed in, perhaps even prayed to for protection… but we were not something you truly followed or remained loyal to. Only those who had worked alongside me, personally, had remained truly loyal until the end.
I must have been lost in my own thoughts for some time, as Aurelion eventually took the paper from me, gently. When I looked up, Ophelia and Felix were no longer in the room.
I blinked several times. Had I really let myself get so lost in my own head?
My eyes found Aurelion’s, the understanding that peered back at me in those amber orbs unflinching and unexpected.
“The entire world as you knew it is gone,” he said, his voice gentle but firm. “I know what that feels like, because I’ve been there before. But you have to think of it like a game… Every person in your empire is a piece on the board—a piece that the [Hero] can and will turn against you. But he isn’t here yet. That means we can get rid of all the pieces that he could use against you. We can rig the game.”
I nodded, not wholly listening. I was still lost in the growing pit that filled my stomach. That deep-seated feeling of betrayal that had seeped so deep into my bones. His logic was sound. I knew that. But it was still so damned hard to think of anyone betraying what we had built for them.
What we as two races had built together.
But, I suppose that is the problem with human lifespans being so short. The ones that knew us… that truly understood the battles we had to face together were gone. Forgotten to time. All that remained now were the insolent fools that were willing to throw everything away, chasing after the misguided belief that they could stand up to the cosmos alone.
If I truly wanted to show them that they couldn’t, then I’d need to tear down the empire around them—destroy the safety net that I had built for them.
Gold flashed in the corner of my vision and I focused on it, letting the window expand to fill my vision. Its golden text flashed like lightning bugs as it appeared before me.
New Quest: The First Piece.
Quest Objective: Help Aurelion, Ophelia, and Felix disrupt the Segrid’s shipping business and take control of their weapons and armor trade.