Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

I wanted to say Arachne had planned it all out, but she hadn’t. She’d given me the knowledge and the tools needed, then let me plan out my infiltration.

I had a number of traps in my thinking. My training as a Ranger and a Sentinel, overseeing SERE training, and the general grooves of thinking imparted to me were misleading. My critical analysis of Edhallond had me looking for weaknesses in the walls and structure, places where a team of one to eight people could slip in. Guard tower lines of sight, sewer entrances, weaknesses in the rocks and construction, and diagrams of the runic protections inlaid on the walls.

That was the wrong way to go about it.

“You must think about the people involved.” Arachne lectured, pointing to a pile of notes. “None of this requires breaking the city like an egg. It’s the wrong mindset. People.”

Blah. I didn’t want to work on analyzing people. Leave that to the social butterflies.

At the same time, it’s what I needed to do. I picked up the notes, grabbed my Big Book of Social Rules from memory, and started cross-referencing things, looking for patterns and behaviors.

I started off with the guards, the keys to the city, the bulwark against [Adventurers] running roughshod over everything.

Reading through the notes Arachne had on the various [Guards], I was both impressed and horrified. She knew which ones had rocky marriages, which ones had a gambling problem. The lazy ones who rose to the top, and the hard-working [Guards] who didn’t get properly noticed. The ones who had lost more during the Immortal War, and those whose families were nearly untouched.

Dear gods, what did Arachne need me for if she already had all this? I supposed that was part of the point. Intelligence was built on intelligence, and some of the files had last been updated decades ago. There was no telling if the elf with the rocky marriage was still married or not, for example.