Entry 55: Oaths in the Ruins, and a Kobold’s New Road (Session LXV)

In the hours after Durnn’s fall, when the adrenaline bled away and only the cold marrow of the Sunless Citadel remained, we faced a choice I had hoped never to place upon a people already broken by chains. Calcryx—the little deep dragon wyrmling, once the kobolds’ charge and then Durnn’s trophy—could not remain with us. Not safely. Not honestly.
I have read enough, and seen enough, to know what deep dragons become when they are treated as pets, prizes, or convenient weapons. Their bodies grow, yes—but so do their hungers, their cruelties, and their taste for secrets. One day Calcryx will be a problem for someone. Perhaps for many someones. But we looked at our battered company, at our dwindling time, and at the kobolds themselves—who had fought for their freedom with bloodied spears and brave little voices—and we could not name a better path. To drag the wyrmling across Thar like a chained omen would have been madness, and to kill it—after all this talk of liberation—would have been hypocrisy. So we left Calcryx where Calcryx belonged: in the custody of those who once nurtured him, and who now must decide what sort of future they will allow him to have.
We sought out Yusdrayl—Meepo’s former chieftain, restored at last to her people’s side. She carried herself with the weary authority of someone who has been proved right too many times. Jean Marie spoke first, promising that Meepo would not be treated as a servant in our company, but as a student and companion. Meepo, for his part, stood straighter than I have ever seen him, and asked—voice trembling only once—whether he might travel with us, learn from Jean Marie’s discipline and the ways of the wider world, and then return one day to teach what he learned to the kobolds who had survived these halls.
Yusdrayl studied him for a long moment, then gave a single sharp nod. Permission granted—though not without a warning. “Bring him back,” she said, and there was no softness in it. “Or at least bring back the truth of what became of him.” Jean Marie swore it, and in that oath I heard the echo of Savras: revelation is a kind of mercy, even when it hurts.
Then, in a way I did not expect from a place built of traps and dragon-carved stone, the kobolds made a celebration of their survival. It was a strange feast—mushrooms from the gardens, scraps of goblin stores, water drawn from old cisterns—yet it tasted like sunlight compared to the citadel’s usual fare. Yusdrayl’s attendant, a kobold named Erky Timbers, even loaned me one of their braziers so I could perform the proper rites. There, amid smoke and chanting, I re-summoned Uttu. My familiar returned not as the spider he once was, but in the owl-shape Savras has lately favored: bright-eyed, sharp-taloned, and offended—deeply offended—that I had allowed him to be taken as “collateral” earlier in our dealings with goblins. He forgave me in the way owls forgive: by biting my finger and then settling upon my shoulder as if he had never left.
But we did not answer them that night. Not yet. The question of what becomes of defeated foes is the kind that deserves sobriety, not the aftertaste of victory. For now, the goblins remained penned and watched, disarmed and fed just enough to keep desperation from becoming violence. We will decide their fate by daylight—whether to release them with warnings, march them to whatever justice Melvaunt recognizes, or leave them to scatter like ash on the wind. Mercy is easiest to praise when it costs nothing; in these halls it costs vigilance.
Nor could I forget the bodies we dragged from Belak’s underground dark grove: Sir Braziak Natalie in his fine mail, and Shanaria Calaudra with that starfield ring still cold on her finger. Their deaths were not random; they were evidence—of the cult’s reach, of the rot that spreads where no one is watching. Jean Marie has sworn we will bring them north to Melvaunt, so their names are spoken by living tongues and their kin are not left to guess at shadows. And we will do more than deliver the dead. We will report to the Harpers what we found: blight-born alchemy, dragon-cults moving through goblin hands, and the old name Ashardalon lingering like smoke in stone.
Yet even as we speak of duty, another clock ticks—louder than it has any right to in a place without sun. Lady Oleander’s pact with Felonious is not mere parchment and pretty words; Fey bargains are teeth hidden behind a smile. The Quivering Forest waits somewhere north of Phlan, and within it a threshold—some ring of mushrooms, some pool that reflects a sky that is not ours, some door that opens only when the world is watching the moon. If we do not find a Fey portal in time, what then? Does the pact tighten like a noose? Does the Feywild claim its due by force? I do not pretend to know the full grammar of such magic, only that it does not forgive mortal procrastination.
So we held our tongues, banked the fires, and let the kobolds have their moment. In that cramped, half-ruined hall, they sang as if song itself could plaster over the cracks in the world. Meepo laughed—an earnest, startled sound, like a candle catching. Yusdrayl watched her people eat and live, and for the first time since we met her name, her shoulders unclenched. I sat with my back to ancient stone, Uttu heavy on my shoulder, and I wrote these lines by borrowed brazier-light while Savras’s eye looked through me and beyond me, to roads I cannot yet see. Tomorrow we choose what to do with goblins, with bodies, with bargains. Soon we return to Melvaunt and speak to the Harpers plainly—and sooner still, we must see Lady Oleander to a true Fey threshold, a portal into the Quivering Forest’s strange courts, for the pact she made with Felonious is not a thing we can simply ignore until it becomes inconvenient. And then—if the threads permit—perhaps we turn back toward Phlan, toward the Cult of the Dragon’s trail, because the pattern is clear enough now to frighten even a diviner: they will not stop on their own.