Dragonheart Core

"Um," Nicau said.

Chieftess didn't reply, because she was a touch busy shoving her entire face into the dirt. The dirt of the Overlook, of the outside world—something past the dungeon. Her first taste of Aiqith.

Her first literal taste, because Nicau was pretty sure she'd just licked it.

Overhead, the moon gleamed in a half-crescent between silvertine clouds, an eve of the approaching wet season. Warm air, kissed with a sea-wrung breeze, drifted through the altitude to settle on his shoulders. He inhaled, holding it for as long as he could.

The dungeon gave him every shade of variety, a hundred different paths he could walk down and find a new environment around each corner, but there was something about familiarity that curled between his ribs like a family dog. Comforted, almost.

For her part, Chieftess seemed less comforted and more losing-her-mind. Which. Understandable. If Nicau had been born in the dungeon, he imagined the sight of Calarata would cause something close to a nervous collapse. At least she seemed to be excited rather than frightened of how large the world actually was.

Behind her, the lone kobold warrior hissed, irritation bubbling around his crimson-scarlet scales. Slung over his back was Aedan, nursing closed eyes and a welt the size of a rat upside the head—an homage, in a way, to Chieftess knocking Nicau out when he'd been so lovingly welcomed into the dungeon's fold.

But Aedan was being taken out, dumped in Calarata, never to see the dungeon again. Nicau… honestly couldn't tell who had gotten the better deal between the two of them. Power, yes, and a Name alongside it, as well as the newly minted task to smuggle four kobolds through Calarata, a city more akin to a murderpot than anything with lenient infrastructure, which, well. That was his life.

At least he'd chosen the Overlook for this expressed purpose—it was a maze of switchbacks and limited vantage points, meant to overlook the city without being accessed by the filthy poors, up until the nobles that thought themselves kings had been taken out by an avalanche. He could go down a few layers, dump Aedan, and then go horizontal over the Alómbra Mountains—disappear before Calarata ever got a taste for his existence, which was exactly how he preferred it. Though he trusted Gonçal not to go blabbing about his true power, he also didn't want the Marquesa de Wolf to pop out of the shadows and strike another deal. Once was plenty.