The Quality of Mercy (with Whitebrand)

[MasterGryph]

"Well, I wasn't really," she responded, "Just a tagalong. But that was why I stopped wanting adventures for a while..."

"I can trust you to protect me from that sort of thing," she decided.

[Whitebrand]

The dragon looked relieved. Clearly the taste for adventure hadn’t taken hold on her like it had him. He knew the risks and costs very well. He wouldn’t have to work terribly hard to defend her unless his home was invaded.

“I’m honored by your trust,” Brand said. “Anything you might like as decor for your room? Style, art, books...?”

[MasterGryph]

"Well, some wooden bookshelves wouldn't go wrong," she responded casually, "But I'm no expert in decoration."

[Whitebrand]

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Brand said, flipping over on to his back in the water again...accidentally sending up a bit of a splash in the process. “I have books and spells to help. I think you’ll be pleased.”

Indeed, when she returned to her room several hours later it had undergone a bit of a transformation. There were dark oak frames set in the walls now, with matching bookshelves. On the shelves were a handful of adventure tales and copies of travel journals written by famed explorers she might have heard of.The furniture had been subtly changed into a more rustic, relaxed country style. While the bed was still lovely, the bed frame that supported the curtains had been changed to carved hickory wood.

There was another addition too...a large tank had been set into the wall above her desk. More than a dozen fish were swimming around inside it among the slowly weaving water plants and rock sculptures. Bubbles regularly emerged from a spot in the sand on the bottom, keeping the water saturated with air for the fish.Two of the fish in particular very much resembled her beloved pets.

Brand had gone out of his way to make her room more personal for her.

[MasterGryph]

Brie's jaw dropped and her eyes sparkled when she saw how her room had been redecorated. She couldn't imagine a better place to live.

She did hope the others could be as happy here as she was, but life wasn't always that simple. In the meantime, she planned to relax and enjoy herself.

[Whitebrand]

Brand would continue in this vein with the others, coaxing information about themselves from them and adjusting their living spaces to match. He used that as a springboard to get them used to his presence in their lives, and turned up the charm the more comfortable they got.

The kitsune was a bit of a different story though. He treated her as a guest rather than someone to woo.

[MasterGryph]

Maurice had asked for silk curtains and such fancy decorations, though she wouldn't be upset if they turned out to be beyond his resources. Conversations with her tended to be about noble courts and who had official jurasdiction where - with a few stories about how various families got on each other's nerves. As she asked about places the dragon had been, he might get the sense that she was probing how far his sphere of influence extended.

Bianca, on the other hand, didn't have any suggestions about how to adjust her room (aside from some soft carpeting). In conversations about her pet theories, she'd explain that they weren't so much about insisting that there was a malevolent conspiracy behind everything that went wrong, rather about making sense of things for which the explanations were difficult to find. Not every adventurer whose actions shook the world bothered to explain what happened afterwards, and more than one genuine evil mastermind was killed in a crossfire - leaving half-finished plans trudging forward unknowing of what the point or goal was supposed to be.

The harpy's culture was used to making deals and trades with more powerful entities, and she saw this as just more of the same. Some appropriate plant materials were enough to appease her for now.

---

But that night, the kitsune started weaving a spell. Currently, there was only one person in the lair who she could speak with - and for various reasons, she wasn't satisfied with that. Thus, she intended to infiltrate one of the other girls' dreams. The peculiar logic of the dream realm would allow them to bypass the language barrier. Rather an extreme method, but she had to work with the tools she had.

On the other hand, there were the dragon's safeguards to consider. While she didn't have any evil intentions, this was still the sort of thing the magic wards might already be set to counter. But she wasn't familiar enough with his brand of magic to figure that out for sure, except by trying...

[Whitebrand]

Mayu would see the wards in astral space before she came up against them. They'd been designed to be clear warnings to postential hostile spirits instead of hidden traps like many shamans might use. Fair warning to those intelligent enough to perceive them.

That said there were ways for the water-like Eastern magic to get around the solid rocks of western. It would take some probing...and possibly a few unpleasant shocks, but her lack of malice worked for her here. It helped that she was already inside the strongest wards' area of influence. Eventually she would be able to work her way into the dreams of the others.

[MasterGryph]

As Mayu probed the wards for weaknesses, she considered whether this was really worthwhile.

At the moment, being stuck with only one person she could communicate with gave that person - Whitebrand - a kind of power over her. While he'd backed away from pursuing her as a lover (for now, anyway), that adolescent lust she'd sensed in him was still a factor in his actions. On top of that, she was currently far from a match for him if he decided to turn on her.

But in that case, why had she opened up to him? She'd confided in him her feelings about her past because... she needed that release. There was surely no way they could be used to break her down in a way that would be worse than the strain of holding them inside would have. But she was less comfortable explaining her full views on him, or the other girls, or future plans...

Not that she had many of those even now. What would she have done if she'd escaped at the start? Live as an ordinary animal for a while until she picked up the modern tongues - or fell to a hunter's fang or arrow. If he'd never tracked down the cult... she might have been tempted to play along with the cult a little, but she wouldn't have been happy lording over anyone. She'd had quite enough of the entire domination paradigm.

That was the core of the matter. Whitebrand could help to comfort her - and he did seem to have a mind to now - but he had too many advantages in this situation to be the equal she really wanted.

...

Morning was still far away, but slipping around the safeguards had taken time and effort. She'd even lost track of which person's dreams she planned to enter...

[Whitebrand]

She'd definitely slipped into someone's dreams. The first thing she realized was that the whole experience had a very male flavor to it.

Flashes of images shot past her, some felt like memories, others like fantasies or dreads, all mixed together in a confusing stew. Soaring over wide plains hunting down buffalo. Sitting on a throne surrounded by dozens of adoring females. In vicious battle against a horde of faceless humans. Devouring a giant snake. Making love to a beautiful woman. Singing under a bright moon. A haunting image if a beautiful dark elf calling for him. A ring of stones by a river...

[MasterGryph]

Mayu's eyes widened as she realized where she'd ended up. Whitebrand's chambers must be closer than she'd realized. Quickly her mind raced to find excuses to give when he realized what she'd done.

But soon her focus shifted to interpreting the images surrounding her. Most of them seemed to be scenes from his past - likely ones that he enjoyed and had repeated similarly many times in his life so far, though a few might have been ones that stuck in his memory despite only happening once or not at all. The dark elf was likely to be a single individual he'd known (though she didn't seem to be present now in reality. Perhaps she was a product of his imagination instead?). The ring of stones was unusual in that she couldn't see what significance it held for him. She reminded herself that this mixture couldn't give a complete picture, that there could easily be things which slipped his mind even now.

The thoughts and images had yet to coalesce into a full scenario. That meant there were fewer signs that could show whether she'd been noticed or not. If she wanted to leave, now would be the time...

[Whitebrand]

She saw a scene set in the winter, where a teenaged girl was carrying a tiny silver dragon through the snow towards a small farmhouse. The little dragon was too small to navigate the snow drifts so she carried him...inside her shirt tucked against her chest.

Her younger brother opened the door.

“You’re going to mess up his head if you carry him like that,” he said cynically as he let her in. “Lizards don’t have boobs. Of course neither do you..,”

The girl swatted her brother in the head.

Mayu sensed that something unseen was stirring. The image became sharper as the girl extracted the little dragon and set him in front of the fire.

“I think he was trying to imitate us,” she said as she shook the snow off her cloak. “I found him trying to drag the alfalfa bags around. Silly thing.”

The scene abruptly faded to black, leaving only the startled looking girl.

“Who’s there?” She demanded of the darkness around her.

[MasterGryph]

It seemed she'd been spotted. Although that sudden shift...that couldn't have been part of the memory, could it?

"Sorry to intrude," the kitsune responded, "I seem to have gotten lost." This cognition wasn't a threat herself, and might even be a helpful intermediary.

That memory had fit exactly into what Whitebrand had already explained about his past, and filled in a few details. She felt a twinge of envy despite herself - at least he'd had a happy family life at some point.

[Whitebrand]

“I’m Hannah,” the girl said with a clumsy curtsy. “And you...don’t belong here. Somehow. You don’t live on the farm...”. She tilted her head curiously. “How strange. You’re very pretty though. My father would try to marry my little brother to you, I think.”

Somewhere in the darkness something stirred. Mayu could feel it. Hannah, however, looked undisturbed.

[MasterGryph]

Somehow, she doubted that, though it was a funny thought. "I think I'm a bit old for him. It's nice to meet you, Hannah. But you're right. I don't belong on the farm. I should leave you to that. Oh, and take care of your scaly friend." She said, keeping a smile up.

Something seemed off. It was most likely that the stirring in the shadows was some piece of Whitebrand - his conscious mind stirring back to attention. But what if it wasn't?
The dream of a frozen starscape came back to her...

Mayu's kind had modified themselves into predators of the soul, capable of trapping the souls of their prey. To trap something so ephemeral, one needed to be able to perceive it.

Was there someone else nearby, besides the Dragon and extensions of him?

[Whitebrand]

“I will,” Hannah said cheerfully. She skipped away into the darkness and vanished, presumably to the farm of Brand’s memories .

There was something...just a tiny hint of something under the surface, like thin strands of seaweed that she could feel but not see. Stands than vanished when she tried to look closer. Whatever it was it’s presence was very weak, it’s influence—if any—was tiny.

Like the sting of a sea anemone the world suddenly shifted. She was surrounded by at least three dozen men looking the very personification of crude cruelty and viciousness. Their faces were ugly phantoms, with few distinctive features. They surrounded her, leering, pawing at her yukata and her tails.

Without warning there was a burst of terrible violence at the rear of the crowd of me. As one they turned on the source, ignoring Mayu to face the threat. A young but still large Brand in his human-dragon hybrid form wearing scaled armor and carrying a sword, leaped into the men and started slashing and tearing at them. The scene turned bloody very quickly, with the dragon cruelly wounding the men and deliberately leaving them to bleed out. Some he lopped limbs from, others he hideously tore into with his claws. Mayu could see the pain that had turned into rage in his eyes as he ravaged the humans around him. His heart so broken that hate and vengeance were all that he had left...hate that he vented on these men with unbridled cruelty. He was making their last moments full of pain and fear.

The event became a blur around her before refocusing again. The men were spread all around, dead, and the broken dragon stood before her, glaring at her. His eyes were still filled with the deep pain and sorrow that came with terrible loss, and they were focused on her.

“You do not belong here,” He rumbled in a trembling voice, as his hands twitched from the effort it took to not put them around her neck. “Why. Tell me WHY you have come to this place!”

[MasterGryph]

"If you insist." This seemed to be a side of him he tried not to let show on the surface. When she first woke up, she could sense that he'd done a lot of good and evil in his life so far.

"I was trying to find someone else to talk to - which I can't do in reality. Entering your memories was unintentional. No, I got lost on my way into someone else's dreams. It can happen when the user of such spells lacks a clear goal," She explained.

"But since entering the dreamscape, I've made no effort to influence it. Not leaving immediately was a mistake, a crime even. Perhaps even starting this was. But I didn't pull this," she gestured to the carnage, "Up to the surface. I wasn't looking for it." She tried to understand what she found herself seeing, but hadn't gone out of her way to find weaknesses in the dragon.

Whitebrand was dreaming of his past because it had been the topic of discussion recently, and his subconscious had latched onto that topic in particular and was going onto tangent after tangent - as it often did. At least, that was her best guess as to what was happening.

She waited for the memory - the avatar of his past rage - to react to her explanation. If it became violent (as was likely, considering what it represented), then she'd take the reigns of her spell to depart the dragon's mind.

[Whitebrand]

"Why don't I feel better?" the dragon demanded of the sky. "WHY? Justice has been done so WHY?"

Instead of attacking he collapsed into a sitting position and, nearly exhausted, began to weep.

"Monster...I'm a monster..."

The past Brand faded as did the rest of the scene. The shadows around her coalesced and formed into a massive draconian shape with glowing gold eyes. His consciousness had become fully aware of her at last.

"I'm sorry you saw that," the dragon shape said. His voice now sounded much more like the current Brand did in the real world. "I understand. You were reaching out for company and perhaps communication. Does that come as a surprise to you? I've done some growing up since those days."

[MasterGryph]

"There's no reason for you to apologize. That wasn't intended for others to see in the first place." Mayu thought aloud, "Thinking back, it's lucky I didn't see events that you didn't already mention earlier."

"You were a cute hatching though. Happy lives like that shouldn't be interrupted."

"I had planned on making contact with someone I couldn't already speak to in the waking world," She explained, "But I got lost, as I said."

[Whitebrand]

The dark shape that was Brands mind actually looked embarrassed.

“Yes, well...thank you. Please refrain from my mind again if you can,” he said. “I learned a lot of hard lessons in a few short years. Some of them I don’t need dredged up.”

The great head tilted a bit.

“What...uh...else did you see?”