The Lord of Arra (3/6)

However… the Felkin girl at the back goes wide-eyed and thinks to herself. 'Since the pipes all converge to the same place, that means father will know where we are when he comes looking for us! We can't blindly swim to the exit! We'll get caught!'

She then looks ahead as she slowly lingers further and further behind. Two of her brothers notice her lagging behind, and they scrunch up their eyebrows with questions in their eyes.

Since they're underwater, they can't talk conventionally with their vocal cords. Instead, one of the brothers weaves his finger and draws magical letters in the water. "What's wrong?" his letters say.

The little princess writes back, "I'm tired... I can't keep up!"

Of course, this is a lie. She doesn't have time to explain all her fears, and she's afraid that if one of the brothers gets caught, then he'll tell Father about her new escape plan…

One of the brothers just snorts disdainfully and speeds on ahead without her, while the other lingers behind and offers to carry her on his back.

The princess panics and writes, "Go on ahead! You can't risk losing your chance at escape just for me!"

The brother puts on a hard look and writes back angrily, "NO! Siblings don't leave each other behind. GET ON MY BACK NOW!"

Grr. Why's he so persistent?

There's a simple reason why. He and she are only 100 years apart, so this brother in particular is quite close with her. He'd feel terrible leaving her behind. That's all.

The princess accidentally lets some of her air escape her lungs as she panics. "LET ME GO!" she wants to shout at him as he grabs her by the waist and tries pulling her into his arms.

In full panic mode now, the princess pokes her kind brother, and she writes in magical letters, "SLOW DOWN!! Ugh. Listen, I'm not actually tired. This is how it goes…"

"You see," she explains, "Father would have known by our scent that we went into the sewage pipes. Since he knows the layout of the palace better than anyone, he must also know where the pipes converge. After all, unlike the air vents, which have many exits, the sewage only has one.

"Since Father also knows where the pipes converge, he must also be waiting there for the rest of us siblings to show up. Everyone who went ahead will certainly be caught."

After explaining her new escape plan and her reasoning for doing so, her elder brother has a smile creep up on his face. He pulls her in close, hugs her, and thinks gleefully, "You're so smart! I'll stick with you!"

The boy looks at his sister with puppy dog eyes and writes, "What now?"

"We need to linger in the pipe system as long as possible. Better yet, instead of just waiting here, we should swim upstream and find some dead end and hope father doesn't find us."

"Would that work?"

"Of course," the Felkin princess nods confidently. "Since all the pipes only converge, then the entire sewage system is built like a giant tree. All the twigs in the tree connect with various parts of Father's palace, and as they all connect together, it eventually combines into a large trunk, which is the exit Father is waiting at."

She looks down another path and adds, "If we swim upstream, we'll find another entrance to the pipe system somewhere else in the palace. The palace is so big that even if Father realized we're still missing and followed us down here, he'd never find us; the water flow is constantly carrying our scent away, and his palace is too big."

"How long will we wait?" the 1 horned brother asks.

"We'll stay in the pipes for a few weeks, until we can no longer go without food," she answers with a calm face.

Despite her demeanor, her heart is beating furiously at the chance of pulling off her own plan. She's never really felt clever until now – especially with all her brothers and sisters overshadowing her most of her life.

The brother smiles and writes back, "Yeah! By then, father will have assumed we escaped, then he'll stop looking for us!"

"Exactly!" she thinks excitedly as she high-fives her brother. She then uses her alchemy to unbind some of the water into hydrogen and oxygen, making pockets of air the two of them can breathe.

(Of course, a human would have died with these pockets of air, since real air has a very low oxygen content. However, this brother and sister pair aren't human. As long as there's oxygen, it doesn't really matter if there's too much.)

With all their preparations completed, they slowly creep up a random pipe – their absence completely unnoticed by all but one of the siblings.

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All the remaining brothers and sisters are swimming through the waterway so frantically that some of them are even forgetting that they're not supposed to use too much magic. The water heats to a boil, and the current churns with their passing.

They're losing their good sense the further they go, since they only feel their Father's terrible presence only getting closer.

The siblings in the back are confused when they see their brothers in front suddenly turn around and try swimming back up the pipes. It only takes them a moment to see why.

There, standing with his arms crossed and stern spirit in his eyes, is Lord Fheldin. The dragon lord's skin is so hot that the water is glowing and boiling around him. The upward flow from the heat is pulling his long hair up – fully revealing the plethora of scars and burn marks on his face… as well the glowing red anger in his eyes.

"AAAAHHH!" one of the youngest boys tries shrieking. Instead of a terrified shriek, only his mouth hangs open, and a "glub glub" sound comes out as a burst of bubbles escapes his mouth.

With a sweep of his hand, all the fleeing Felkin and Drakin are slowly yanked towards their father; Fheldin could've just yanked them all out mercilessly, but he's given them this one chance to give up and return obediently.

One of the sons morphs his hands into claws, and as he's dragged along the floor, he leaves deep gashes in the floor as he's pulled towards the red-eyed monster. 'HEEeeeelllp…!' "Glub glub gluuuuuub!"

Of course, since this poor boy is underwater, his mournful plea only turns into a trail of bubbles left in his wake.

Similar scenes occur as all of Fheldin's children are mercilessly ripped out of the tunnel and carried away by the elementals back to their rooms in the east wing.

Of course, the dragon lord is in such a hurry that he doesn't stop to ask his children if they know of any stragglers in the pipes. He'd already counted them, so he thinks he knows what he needs to know.

"Hmm…," he mutters as he emerges from the water, "7 more to go!"

Of course, Haalfrin only took 4 youngsters with him, meaning that the father dragon never did find the pair of brother and sister who were biding their time in the drainage pipes, nor did he find Fhulk, who has escaped into the forest. He just assumes that the third and final trail has 7 children behind it.

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Lord Fheldin is tearing his way through the palace again. Upon getting back to the East Wing, he takes another good sniff, then follows the third trail – Haalfrin's trail.

Since this trail goes down the main hall, there are many more scents mixed in here, so he has to proceed more slowly and carefully; he can't just launch past at supersonic speeds like he was before.

Along the way, Fheldin sees that the previously straight path veers to the side. He follows the deviation, and he finds a pigeon man in charge of the post office.

Fheldin sniffs around the post office counter, and he finds that the scent is slightly stronger here. The escapees must've stopped and stood here for a bit. What kind of business would they have at the post office?

"Oi you!" Fheldin demands while slightly flexing his Intimidation Aura at the pigeon man. "Did you see a crowd of youngsters talk to you late last night? Any Drakin or Fhelkin mixed up with them?

The pigeon man, of course, recognizes the lord of the palace. His body freezes stiff, and he squawks fearfully, "Y-yes sir! They came last night and sent a gift box away!"

"Did they say what the box was for? How large was the box?"

The dragon lord was thinking that perhaps they put some of the children in large boxes and shipped them away.

Instead of confirming his guess, the courier pigeon says, "Oh, the box was as big as maybe my two fists? They said it was a gift for Princess Talia – alchemic ingredients sent by the mistress."

Thoughts race through the dragon's head. 'Why would they send a gift to Talia?' He frowns and starts tapping his foot in deep thought. 'Sure, she's one of my escaped daughters… What's the meaning of this?'

In the end, Fheldin assumes that Talia had helped the others escape somehow and that this box was payment for her trouble. 'Yes, that's it. Talia wouldn't help someone unless they paid her. She's very transactional, like her mother.'

Fheldin was so close to realizing the truth about the mailed gift…. But, in the end, he didn't think of the possibility that one of his daughters had turned into ash and mailed herself in a box.

Felkin have never been ones to care about death; to them, "death" is just a state of being, and no state of being can't be undone. All they have to do is have a sufficient understanding of their own body to revive themselves at any time.

Fheldin truly thinks that his own remaining daughters couldn't have turned themselves into ashes for a very simple reason; he's very involved in all his children's education, and he knows that none of his remaining daughters who live with him know how to reconstitute themselves from their own ashes at will.

Of course, he can't think of EVERYTHING, so he didn't think of the fact that they could just mail their ashes off to someone who COULD revive them – like Talia.