“For the crime of blasphemy against the Golden God, Karivar III of the house of Del is hereby sentenced to death. Execution by frost will take place at midnight.”
Karivar hadn’t even been able to integrate with other misfits. The Disciples were the most accepting community he’d ever discovered. As long as you followed their faith, they would welcome in all creeds. He didn’t know much about his heritage, only that it behoved him to hide it. Necessity drove his powers to develop in childhood, and the glamer that concealed his flaming skin under the guise of an indeterminate humanoid’s had aged up as he did, growing in sophistication from the primitive disguise he was able to don as a child.
“For the crime of blasphemy against the Golden God, Karivar III of the house of Del is hereby—”
“Mr. Var? I’m tired.”
Karivar’s thoughts were interrupted once again. He looked down at the child keeping step with him on the road. Its face and clothes were grubby and its eyes were sunken, dark, and haunted. But there was its complaint, same as any other child’s might be. He knelt after a second’s hesitation and lifted the child easily, carrying it on his hip with one arm. He’d found it by tracking a small group of adventurers through Pleias. He suspected them of having made off with a handful of his possessions he’d mislaid one night… in retrospect, he figured, he shouldn’t have been drinking so much. They seemed like nice enough folk so he hoped he could get back what they’d probably mistakenly picked up. Instead of finding them, though, he’d found this orphan. The staff at the orphanage had let the group inside to read stories to the children and this one in particular had paid close attention. Karivar was hungover, tired, and in agony from the mistreatment in the Pleias prisons when he’d met them the first time and was constantly on the verge of losing their trail. He didn’t even have reliable descriptions of most of them. But this child did. He talked his way into adopting the child in the hopes that he could use it to track them down.
If not, thought Karivar, then there are alternatives. The child was overflowing with arcane talent. It probably had some aberrant heritage as well, and he was already starting to feel a strange bond with this human. It too knew the pain of exclusion and the bitter relief of solitude. But, stranger than that, it already seemed to know what was going on. It had a bag packed when Karivar arrived at the orphanage. It asked no questions and freely gave the information Karivar asked of it. He’d have to interrogate the child more thoroughly at some point, but right now he needed to get back his possessions.
He’d told the group he was off travelling on a mission from his Order. It was only partly false; he did eventually plan to return to the canyon where his disciple brethren turned on him so rapidly and cast him out of the only home he’d ever known. But he would return as the sole true disciple. He’d return with dragons, with an army. He’d return to prove that their steadfast and unchanging dogma was what prevented their discovering the means to summon back the Golden Overlord. He’d show them that it is not wrong to question, because questioning always finds the truth.
To do all this, though, he needed money. The objects themselves were meaningless, but they were his only assets. He would not stoop to thievery or manual labour, these things did not befit dragonkind. He would, however, fight to reclaim his possessions, if this pack of sneaks did not relinquish them. The child was asleep now, its head resting on Karivar’s shoulder. He himself was flagging; the cross-country trek had not been easy. The climate was colder here and he needed to rest often.
“For the crime of blasphemy against the Golden God, Karivar III of the house of Del is hereby sentenced to death…”
The child perched on a rock, sleepily watching Karivar construct a shelter. He alternated between hauling huge rocks into place and scoring out huge clumps of earth. The result was a kind of dirt and rock igloo which he fused into shape with a blast of white-hot dragonbreath. There was space inside for them both. Karivar spread his travelling cloak on the ground inside for the child to sleep upon, and set light to the bundle of fallen branches in the centre of the shelter.
A whispered word of magic put a long, intricately-carved wooden flute in his hands. It produced a discordant whistle as he swung it around to his lips. The child sat upright, now fully awake, and stared at Karivar across the glow of the campfire. Karivar began to alternately play and sing to the child in a language it did not recognise, the haunting melody a tale of sorrow for the damned souls trapped eternally in the lakes of hellfire in the world beneath the world. The macabre story disguised by a lulling tune, the child soon descended again into sleep.
“For the crime of blasphemy against the Golden God, Karivar III of the house of Del is hereby sentenced to death.”
Karivar played softly until the sun came up.