Ashes & Diamonds
Chapter 1: A Fiery Proposal
Andurax held out his taloned hand, rippling with blue scales, and sighed. He knew that what was coming was inevitable. He knew that with Tyralusa breathing down his neck—literally—that no matter what he wanted, Juna had to die.
(Three days ago)
The underground labyrinths below the streets of the post-cataclysm mega-city of New Arcadia ran for miles and miles, down deeper into the Underdark than even its ancient architects knew. That’s because every city that sprouts upward also sinks deeper. For every affluent elf reclining in their velveteen chaise lounges far up in the actual ivory towers at the heart of New Arcadia, like fingers straining at the heavens—closed off for a millennium—there was an outlaw dragonborn running a black market. Order and lawlessness, inexorably intertwined.
War was tiring, and life below these city streets was evidence of it. It’s what let a grifter like Andurax thrive...at least as long as he was out of sight of humans. He couldn’t trust humans, lap dogs to their elven overlords. Cops and clergy, pious and judgmental. At least, that was what Andurax knew of them. He didn’t venture above the surface much anymore. In his younger days—those bolder and headier ones where he wouldn’t have thought twice of breaking into a poorly guarded storehouse for hot products—he would keep to the alleys while he operated. Or if the take was particularly tempting, pay a shifty gnome for some magical disguise to make him look more like one of those “Kawaka” or “Budofuro” (frog or toadfolk), since his race was outright illegal in New Arcadia. Andurax never fancied himself a historian, but every dragonborn knew why.
Time makes us all wiser, whether we like it or not. Andurax kept to the subterranean avenues of “Black Tartarus”, the secret-in-name-only city below, fleecing foolish surface dwellers who dared descend from up top, looking for something more than they already had. It was not an easy living, since those secret entrances between the two worlds were shrinking in number day by day. Rumor had it that the New Arcadian police recently elected a zealous new chief named Zyland Haubrecht, who ran his campaign on cleaning up the streets—they all did that, though—and treating the city like a titanic ship, where any plug must be filled to prevent it from sinking. “Metaphors,” Andurax thought with a sneer on his scarred snout, “they all use metaphors to make people forget what they’re really talking about.” The wiry dragonborn got what little news of above from hacking into the magical information networks that transmitted information across the city, what the surface dwellers dubbed “the Magicast”.
Andurax was hungry as he approached the darkened entrance to the lair of one of Black Tartarus’s most notorious crimelords in the dragonborn crime empire popularly referred to as “The Scales of Tiamat”, but more informally as “The Scales”. Some like the venerable silver dragonborn emperor of The Scales, Urzumak, fancied this to refer to “the scales of justice”, and how their society was a necessary part of how society functioned, but others like the wrathful Tyralusa—who Andurax had been “invited” to see—preferred violence to submission every time. As Andurax reached out his hand to open the latch into the courtyard of his potential employer, he realized that he would have to choose his words very carefully, or he might just end up an ashen smear on the wall.
Andurax adjusted his borrowed tie and flattened out his crumpled flannel jacket as he walked into the anteroom where an unusually tall and burly bodyguard (or butler, or both) dressed in finery observed Andurax with an expression so neutral as to be ever-so-slightly tinged with derision.
“You are expected,” the deep bass voice stated with authority. Andurax wasn’t used to seeing white dragonborn grow so large, but it was known that Tyralusa relished surrounding herself with things that were unique, valuable...and dangerous.
“So I’ve noticed,” Andurax replied, desperately trying to keep things light. “Which way, boss?”
“Follow me.” The faint booming of each step made two things clear to Andurax. One, don’t mess with “Tiny” here. And two, there was a basement, no doubt where Tyralusa conducted some of her more...unsavory interrogations.
Andurax grew up in Black Tartarus—like all dragonborn in the last few hundred years—and yet he never failed to find the cultivation of bioluminescent fungi to amaze him. Species of mushrooms like the kind which grew all over the undercity was cultivated in such a way that it could illuminate a vast room entirely, which is exactly what Tyralusa’s opulent office contained. Here was a testament to the wealth that being a “duchess” of The Scales could bring. Trophies of all manner adorned the walls—gold, jewels, a veritable treasure hoard. And waiting at an onyx desk as big as a magically automated transportation carriage—or “autocar”, as they were known—was the “Duchess of Incineration” herself: Tyralusa. Smoke plumed from her nostrils.
“Andurax!” With a booming voice and flecks of flame spitting from the corners of her diamond-encrusted maw, the shifty blue dragonborn stopped in his tracks. If nothing else, Andurax had one inherent talent: when others tried to intimidate him, he could produce an air of calm which made it appear that his nerves were far more tempered than most. But like most things about Andurax, that was also a lie.
“You rang, your majesty?” Andurax shoved his rough taloned hands into his coat pocket and smiled as one for whom fear was a distant thought, even if it wasn’t.
Tyralusa bounded from her desk and floated down toward him courtesy of her vestigial wings—a trait that The Scales admired, as they claimed it suggested a deeper draconic heritage; never mind that her’s were magically grafted on. Her fiery countenance mere inches from Andurax, she smiled.
“You were wise to heed my summons, I’ll grant you that, thief. But is this,” she sneered, tearing at his shabby coat, “really the best finery you have to have an audience with me?!” She was cranky—more than usual, that is—and Andurax feared that her hot temper might get the better of her.
“Forgive me, your excellency,” Andurax pleaded with feigned humility. “My intention was to not draw undue attention to someone so famous as yourself by one so lowly as myself. After all, I am truly blessed for you to deign to acknowledge my feeble existence at all, and so would do nothing that might compromise whatever task you set forth for me.”
“Spare me your flattery, knave,” Tyralusa snickered. Despite seeing right through his act, red dragons always put their egos first, and stoking that flame was all too easy for one with the will to try. She released her grip on his coat and fixed herself a drink of vulcanus--a favorite cocktail of fire-resistant creatures that contained strong whiskey and muddled fire peppers. It had to be poured through a complicated decanting apparatus, so it didn’t explode when exposed to air; as it stood, it caught fire when poured into a glass. Tyralusa offered a glass of it to Andurax at his expense, to which he bowed deeply as an apology for not accepting.
“In all seriousness,” Andurax began, “what can I do for you?”
“You mean you don’t know?” Tyralusa teased him. “Such an infamous investigator and dealer of secrets like yourself hasn’t heard the news?” She twirled her glass and eyed him with fiery intensity. She knew something he didn’t, and she was clearly enjoying rubbing his face in it.
“Enlighten me, my queen.”
“Queen! I like that!” Andurax was going to have to be careful. Stroking her ego too much might entice her into keeping him like some kind of toy, and that was not a pleasure he had any interest in experiencing. “But to answer your question, Andurax, I’ll ask you one and see if you can guess.” She sat back in her reclining chair, armrests made of obsidian and ruby. “Who runs New Arcadia?”
“The elves,” Andorax shrugged. “Why?”
“Wrong!” Tyralusa barked as flame sprayed across the room. “Elves like Irion Ciademis own New Arcadia, but they don’t actually run the show. No, they let their humans handle their dirty work.” There was no love lost for humans among The Scales of Tiamat, and the feeling was mutual. Andorax would catch glimpses of some of the “adventure movies” that humans liked to make like “Dragonslayer Druxus”, and all of the sequels, which relied on special effects and plenty of sex scenes to get around its flimsy plot, which was always about some evil dragonborn plot to resurrect an ancient dragon or some such dreck.
“Okay, so humans, like Zyland Haubrecht, yes?”
Tyralusa smiled again, her gemstone teeth gleaming in the bioluminescent chamber. “Very observant, Andorax.” She leaned forward. “And did you know that Haubrecht is what the humans like to call a ‘family man’?”
“How so?” Andorax was beginning to piece together the puzzle, but didn’t want to deprive the deadly Tyralusa from the opportunity of appearing superior.
“He has a daughter. A waif of a thing named Juna. Young, pretty...and missing.”
“Missing? You mean she’s in Black Tartarus?”
“That’s the rumor. Of course, ‘missing’ might be too strong of a word. She’s been identified by a reliable source to be skulking around the Viceworks.” The “Viceworks” was what people called one of the more unsavory dens of iniquity in Black Tartarus, where anyone could buy anything for the right price...or sell anything if one were desperate enough. Andorax was left wondering which one Juna was.
“And so you want me to find her and bring her to you?”
“Exactly.” Tyralusa clasped her long-taloned red fingers together and gripped them hard enough to crush stone between her palms. “I don’t need to explain to you how advantageous of a position that would put me in. And I also don’t need to explain how...grateful I could be for one who could engineer such a thing.”
“Now I’m the one who’s flattered, great Tyralusa,” Andorax replied. “But despite my reputation, I have to ask, ‘why me?’ After all, you have an excellent network of soldiers and spies I gather. Why seek outside consultation?”
“Let me answer,” she growled, “by reminding you that I do not like wasting my time answering questions that you already know!” She slammed her fist into her desk, leaving an impression in more ways than one. “It’s precisely because you are...what do you call it? A ‘free agent’? Yes...a ‘free agent’...that’s why you can go places where my clan cannot. Fame comes with its own burdens, you see. And if someone like Kivirax learns that I’ve been sending my soldiers around the undercity asking about Juna, you can bet that he’ll have his own scummy little army doing the same. How long do you think it will be before war breaks loose?” Kivirax was the most well-known of Tyralusa’s rivals in The Scales, an elder brass dragonborn who liked to pretend that he had green dragon heritage owing to his extensive verdigris skin condition. Known as “The Verdigris Wyrm”, he and his clan were infamous for their stranglehold on smuggling operations throughout Black Tartarus, something Tyralusa had long sought after for herself...along with everything else.
“You have a point there, your ladyship. But how is it that I’m the most qualified for such a mission?”
“You don’t have to try to get me to rattle off your achievements like that, since we both know all about you; otherwise, you would never have gotten within a mile of me. Let me say just one name in reply: ‘Loreas’.”
Damn, Andorax thought. There hasn’t been a day that’s gone by that I haven’t remembered her name. And there hasn’t been a night that I haven’t woken up in a cold sweat because of it. Of course Tyralusa would know about Loreas. My darkest hour.
“So,” Tyralusa concluded, “I know that you’re capable of anything under the right circumstances. And that’s just the kind of man I need...for the moment.” She affixed a lustful gaze at him that made his blood run cold. Not that Tyralusa wasn’t attractive in her way, but he knew that her mates were disposable in ways that made getting an amputation more appealing.
“As you wish, your highness,” Andorax bowed. “Tiny” escorted him out of the chamber and back out into the street with nothing but a name to go on. But that was already more than enough for someone like Andorax. He once had a reputation as the most tenacious of trackers in the undercity of whatever someone wanted: goods, people, favors...you name it. But that all changed with Loreas, and that was some time ago. And here he was with a name: Juna Haubrecht. And a place: The Viceworks. It was going to be a long night—if it actually was night in the city above—and Andorax knew that his hands were going to be more soiled than ever by the time it was all over. It’s just the way things went down in Black Tartarus.
Andurax held out his taloned hand, rippling with blue scales, and sighed. He knew that what was coming was inevitable. He knew that with Tyralusa breathing down his neck—literally—that no matter what he wanted, Juna had to die.
(Three days ago)
The underground labyrinths below the streets of the post-cataclysm mega-city of New Arcadia ran for miles and miles, down deeper into the Underdark than even its ancient architects knew. That’s because every city that sprouts upward also sinks deeper. For every affluent elf reclining in their velveteen chaise lounges far up in the actual ivory towers at the heart of New Arcadia, like fingers straining at the heavens—closed off for a millennium—there was an outlaw dragonborn running a black market. Order and lawlessness, inexorably intertwined.
War was tiring, and life below these city streets was evidence of it. It’s what let a grifter like Andurax thrive...at least as long as he was out of sight of humans. He couldn’t trust humans, lap dogs to their elven overlords. Cops and clergy, pious and judgmental. At least, that was what Andurax knew of them. He didn’t venture above the surface much anymore. In his younger days—those bolder and headier ones where he wouldn’t have thought twice of breaking into a poorly guarded storehouse for hot products—he would keep to the alleys while he operated. Or if the take was particularly tempting, pay a shifty gnome for some magical disguise to make him look more like one of those “Kawaka” or “Budofuro” (frog or toadfolk), since his race was outright illegal in New Arcadia. Andurax never fancied himself a historian, but every dragonborn knew why.
Time makes us all wiser, whether we like it or not. Andurax kept to the subterranean avenues of “Black Tartarus”, the secret-in-name-only city below, fleecing foolish surface dwellers who dared descend from up top, looking for something more than they already had. It was not an easy living, since those secret entrances between the two worlds were shrinking in number day by day. Rumor had it that the New Arcadian police recently elected a zealous new chief named Zyland Haubrecht, who ran his campaign on cleaning up the streets—they all did that, though—and treating the city like a titanic ship, where any plug must be filled to prevent it from sinking. “Metaphors,” Andurax thought with a sneer on his scarred snout, “they all use metaphors to make people forget what they’re really talking about.” The wiry dragonborn got what little news of above from hacking into the magical information networks that transmitted information across the city, what the surface dwellers dubbed “the Magicast”.
Andurax was hungry as he approached the darkened entrance to the lair of one of Black Tartarus’s most notorious crimelords in the dragonborn crime empire popularly referred to as “The Scales of Tiamat”, but more informally as “The Scales”. Some like the venerable silver dragonborn emperor of The Scales, Urzumak, fancied this to refer to “the scales of justice”, and how their society was a necessary part of how society functioned, but others like the wrathful Tyralusa—who Andurax had been “invited” to see—preferred violence to submission every time. As Andurax reached out his hand to open the latch into the courtyard of his potential employer, he realized that he would have to choose his words very carefully, or he might just end up an ashen smear on the wall.
Andurax adjusted his borrowed tie and flattened out his crumpled flannel jacket as he walked into the anteroom where an unusually tall and burly bodyguard (or butler, or both) dressed in finery observed Andurax with an expression so neutral as to be ever-so-slightly tinged with derision.
“You are expected,” the deep bass voice stated with authority. Andurax wasn’t used to seeing white dragonborn grow so large, but it was known that Tyralusa relished surrounding herself with things that were unique, valuable...and dangerous.
“So I’ve noticed,” Andurax replied, desperately trying to keep things light. “Which way, boss?”
“Follow me.” The faint booming of each step made two things clear to Andurax. One, don’t mess with “Tiny” here. And two, there was a basement, no doubt where Tyralusa conducted some of her more...unsavory interrogations.
Andurax grew up in Black Tartarus—like all dragonborn in the last few hundred years—and yet he never failed to find the cultivation of bioluminescent fungi to amaze him. Species of mushrooms like the kind which grew all over the undercity was cultivated in such a way that it could illuminate a vast room entirely, which is exactly what Tyralusa’s opulent office contained. Here was a testament to the wealth that being a “duchess” of The Scales could bring. Trophies of all manner adorned the walls—gold, jewels, a veritable treasure hoard. And waiting at an onyx desk as big as a magically automated transportation carriage—or “autocar”, as they were known—was the “Duchess of Incineration” herself: Tyralusa. Smoke plumed from her nostrils.
“Andurax!” With a booming voice and flecks of flame spitting from the corners of her diamond-encrusted maw, the shifty blue dragonborn stopped in his tracks. If nothing else, Andurax had one inherent talent: when others tried to intimidate him, he could produce an air of calm which made it appear that his nerves were far more tempered than most. But like most things about Andurax, that was also a lie.
“You rang, your majesty?” Andurax shoved his rough taloned hands into his coat pocket and smiled as one for whom fear was a distant thought, even if it wasn’t.
Tyralusa bounded from her desk and floated down toward him courtesy of her vestigial wings—a trait that The Scales admired, as they claimed it suggested a deeper draconic heritage; never mind that her’s were magically grafted on. Her fiery countenance mere inches from Andurax, she smiled.
“You were wise to heed my summons, I’ll grant you that, thief. But is this,” she sneered, tearing at his shabby coat, “really the best finery you have to have an audience with me?!” She was cranky—more than usual, that is—and Andurax feared that her hot temper might get the better of her.
“Forgive me, your excellency,” Andurax pleaded with feigned humility. “My intention was to not draw undue attention to someone so famous as yourself by one so lowly as myself. After all, I am truly blessed for you to deign to acknowledge my feeble existence at all, and so would do nothing that might compromise whatever task you set forth for me.”
“Spare me your flattery, knave,” Tyralusa snickered. Despite seeing right through his act, red dragons always put their egos first, and stoking that flame was all too easy for one with the will to try. She released her grip on his coat and fixed herself a drink of vulcanus--a favorite cocktail of fire-resistant creatures that contained strong whiskey and muddled fire peppers. It had to be poured through a complicated decanting apparatus, so it didn’t explode when exposed to air; as it stood, it caught fire when poured into a glass. Tyralusa offered a glass of it to Andurax at his expense, to which he bowed deeply as an apology for not accepting.
“In all seriousness,” Andurax began, “what can I do for you?”
“You mean you don’t know?” Tyralusa teased him. “Such an infamous investigator and dealer of secrets like yourself hasn’t heard the news?” She twirled her glass and eyed him with fiery intensity. She knew something he didn’t, and she was clearly enjoying rubbing his face in it.
“Enlighten me, my queen.”
“Queen! I like that!” Andurax was going to have to be careful. Stroking her ego too much might entice her into keeping him like some kind of toy, and that was not a pleasure he had any interest in experiencing. “But to answer your question, Andurax, I’ll ask you one and see if you can guess.” She sat back in her reclining chair, armrests made of obsidian and ruby. “Who runs New Arcadia?”
“The elves,” Andorax shrugged. “Why?”
“Wrong!” Tyralusa barked as flame sprayed across the room. “Elves like Irion Ciademis own New Arcadia, but they don’t actually run the show. No, they let their humans handle their dirty work.” There was no love lost for humans among The Scales of Tiamat, and the feeling was mutual. Andorax would catch glimpses of some of the “adventure movies” that humans liked to make like “Dragonslayer Druxus”, and all of the sequels, which relied on special effects and plenty of sex scenes to get around its flimsy plot, which was always about some evil dragonborn plot to resurrect an ancient dragon or some such dreck.
“Okay, so humans, like Zyland Haubrecht, yes?”
Tyralusa smiled again, her gemstone teeth gleaming in the bioluminescent chamber. “Very observant, Andorax.” She leaned forward. “And did you know that Haubrecht is what the humans like to call a ‘family man’?”
“How so?” Andorax was beginning to piece together the puzzle, but didn’t want to deprive the deadly Tyralusa from the opportunity of appearing superior.
“He has a daughter. A waif of a thing named Juna. Young, pretty...and missing.”
“Missing? You mean she’s in Black Tartarus?”
“That’s the rumor. Of course, ‘missing’ might be too strong of a word. She’s been identified by a reliable source to be skulking around the Viceworks.” The “Viceworks” was what people called one of the more unsavory dens of iniquity in Black Tartarus, where anyone could buy anything for the right price...or sell anything if one were desperate enough. Andorax was left wondering which one Juna was.
“And so you want me to find her and bring her to you?”
“Exactly.” Tyralusa clasped her long-taloned red fingers together and gripped them hard enough to crush stone between her palms. “I don’t need to explain to you how advantageous of a position that would put me in. And I also don’t need to explain how...grateful I could be for one who could engineer such a thing.”
“Now I’m the one who’s flattered, great Tyralusa,” Andorax replied. “But despite my reputation, I have to ask, ‘why me?’ After all, you have an excellent network of soldiers and spies I gather. Why seek outside consultation?”
“Let me answer,” she growled, “by reminding you that I do not like wasting my time answering questions that you already know!” She slammed her fist into her desk, leaving an impression in more ways than one. “It’s precisely because you are...what do you call it? A ‘free agent’? Yes...a ‘free agent’...that’s why you can go places where my clan cannot. Fame comes with its own burdens, you see. And if someone like Kivirax learns that I’ve been sending my soldiers around the undercity asking about Juna, you can bet that he’ll have his own scummy little army doing the same. How long do you think it will be before war breaks loose?” Kivirax was the most well-known of Tyralusa’s rivals in The Scales, an elder brass dragonborn who liked to pretend that he had green dragon heritage owing to his extensive verdigris skin condition. Known as “The Verdigris Wyrm”, he and his clan were infamous for their stranglehold on smuggling operations throughout Black Tartarus, something Tyralusa had long sought after for herself...along with everything else.
“You have a point there, your ladyship. But how is it that I’m the most qualified for such a mission?”
“You don’t have to try to get me to rattle off your achievements like that, since we both know all about you; otherwise, you would never have gotten within a mile of me. Let me say just one name in reply: ‘Loreas’.”
Damn, Andorax thought. There hasn’t been a day that’s gone by that I haven’t remembered her name. And there hasn’t been a night that I haven’t woken up in a cold sweat because of it. Of course Tyralusa would know about Loreas. My darkest hour.
“So,” Tyralusa concluded, “I know that you’re capable of anything under the right circumstances. And that’s just the kind of man I need...for the moment.” She affixed a lustful gaze at him that made his blood run cold. Not that Tyralusa wasn’t attractive in her way, but he knew that her mates were disposable in ways that made getting an amputation more appealing.
“As you wish, your highness,” Andorax bowed. “Tiny” escorted him out of the chamber and back out into the street with nothing but a name to go on. But that was already more than enough for someone like Andorax. He once had a reputation as the most tenacious of trackers in the undercity of whatever someone wanted: goods, people, favors...you name it. But that all changed with Loreas, and that was some time ago. And here he was with a name: Juna Haubrecht. And a place: The Viceworks. It was going to be a long night—if it actually was night in the city above—and Andorax knew that his hands were going to be more soiled than ever by the time it was all over. It’s just the way things went down in Black Tartarus.