Chp.23: Carrion's secret (part 1)

Carrion flew quickly to the ledge; fortunately the clearing where Haku was was large enough to allow his wyvern to land, but not to allow it to remain stable. Therefore, Carrion immediately dismounted and then motioned for the wyvern to go back. Keeping it there would only make things more difficult, and if it turned out to be a trap he could still use his divine power to fly away.

The clearing where Haku stood was a small hollow, no more than fifty feet wide. There was nothing above it but some shrubs and Haku's huge body. "Good, dragon" Carrion greeted him. "You wanted me to come and I came. So what did you want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, many things. But first let me ask you one precise question" Haku replied. "Can I convince you to surrender just by talking?"

Carrion chuckled. "I'm pretty sure that the answer is no"

"As I imagined. You know, I'm surprised by your courage. You know that mine is probably a trap, yet you came anyway"

"Don't make fun of me, I know you expected it. Otherwise you wouldn't have made such a fool of me in front of my men. You, rather... you have a lot of guts to show up here in person. You know I could crush you with a finger?"

"Oh, I know it, but I still chose to take the risk. I could have used an avatar, but I knew you would probably see the deception. Even now you keep checking me and everything around us hoping to find some clues, am I right?"

If Haku had used an avatar, perhaps Carrion wouldn't have been able to tell that it was a fake body... but he certainly would have sensed the invisibility rune, as well as the other legendary levels he and his siblings had encountered up until now. at that moment. If he had, he could have simply destroyed the avatar and proved to everyone that it was fake, and immediately changed the course of the conversation by accusing him of being a coward; with that excuse, he could have escaped the burden of coming to meet him alone. Therefore Haku had decided that he would meet Carrion in person; while that was risky, it was a calculated risk. In doing so Carrion had been forced to do as he wished, on pain of being considered a coward himself and suffering a collapse of his reputation.

Carrion was silent for a moment, then said, "Yeah, you're right. You know, I'm quite surprised to find nothing around here. There are two cases… or are you really only willing to talk and expect me to treat you as an ambassador and therefore let yourself get out of here alive... or you have a very ingenious plan in mind, but I can't see it right now. Which of the two is right?"

"Answer that yourself. How likely is it that you treat me like an ambassador and respect me as such?" Haku asked.

Carrion smiled maliciously. "Ambassadors are people. You aren't"

"I'd say that answers your question, then" Haku replied without batting an eye. "However, if it'll reassure you... for the moment I'm really just going to talk. And now that I see you in person, I'm even more interested. You know, I'm not very good at understanding emotions, especially those of you newcomers. You are so different from dragons... things like religious fanaticism, racial hatred and other such things are almost incomprehensible to me. I wanted to talk to you in hopes of understanding more... but now that you're here in front of me, I'm even more confused. Tell me, what led you to persecute your own race?"

Carrion's smile faded. His face hardened and his eyes narrowed into slits. "What are you saying?"

"Oh, don't play dumb. My nose could sense a person many kilometers away. Do you really think I can't smell you?" Haku replied. "You can disguise yourself as a human, but you can't hide who you really are from a dragon... especially one who has spent a lot of time in the company of lizardmen. So, can you please throw off the mask?"

Carrion was clearly nervous and angry, but he didn't lose his temper. He was silent for a few moments, then the divine power flowed from his body and formed a sort of bubble around them; outside of it, everyone continued to see them as they were until then. As soon as the bubble was complete, Carrion's body shivered as if it were made of water and then completely changed shape. When the transformation finished, there was no longer a human in front of Haku nom.

He was a lizardman, but he was… different from the others. He wore the same armor as Carrion, but now the exposed parts of his body were scaly and green to yellow in color, and a long tail had appeared from the back of his back. However, this tail was not like that of normal lizardmen: it wasn't smooth and tapered, but with several sharp spikes and ended in a sort of rattle. The hands were more like those of normal lizardmen, but had longer fingernails. The head then was rather strange: the face had lengthened becoming more similar to the snout of a lizardman, but it was shorter and more flattened; the teeth had become sharp and two long canines also protruded through the closed lips. The eyes were bright yellow and the pupils were vertical. But it was the back of his head that was the strangest part: above his eyes were two small horns and the scales were all raised up, clearly not naturally, as if someone had taken a hook and turned them ninety degrees once. for a. The end result was an extraordinarily creepy creature, but one that Haku only found interesting. "So I was right. You're a lizardman" he said, even though he already knew his nose couldn't have fooled him.

Carrion made a hissing sound. "I'm a hybrid" he replied. "My mother was a lizardman. My father was a snakeman"

"Mh. Why do you hide?" Haku asked him. "As far as I know, the Jurao Kingdom is a fairly free nation with other races. With your strength you would have still been put in your current position even if the king knew who you really are"

Carrion shook his head. "It's not that" he answered. "Simply, I like being human. Not this... awful shape"

Haku let out a snort. "What's the point of discriminating against yourself?"

"I don't expect you to understand"

"Help me do it"

Carrion let out another hiss, then he said: "Have you ever wished your race would perish? Have you ever hated your lineage so much you wanted to wipe it off the face of the world? Have you ever screamed 'I'll kill that bastard' in your head? Did you ever felt ashamed of what the rest of your race does, or has done?"

Haku felt a bit personally stung by those words. In fact, they weren't too alien feelings for him. "Yes, I did. I've hated my race many times... or rather, the horrible lifestyle they lead. I'm proud to be a dragon, but I don't want to be a dragon like them"

Carrion looked a little surprised by those words. Maybe he didn't expect the dragon to answer in the affirmative. "Well, then you know a part of how I feel every day when I see this hideous face, which reminds me forever that I'm part of this horrible breed of sinners"

Haku clearly heard the hate in Carrion's voice. He wasn't lying, he was sure of it: such anger could not be faked. "Tell me" he said, anxious to know the story of that strange character, who in a few moments had managed to capture his interest.

Carrion seemed to consider whether to reveal certain details or not, but then decided that he could afford to talk to the dragon about those things. "I was born in what used to be a small lizardmen village here, in what used to be the Baudonia City Alliance. My father was a wandering snakeman... it couldn't be otherwise, there are no snakemen here, they're all confined to the west coast. He was a good seducer and managed to persuade my mother to lie down with him, assuring her that he would take care of her. Needless to say, it was all lies. He left her and never saw her again. After some time I was born, and my mother she hated me. Because of her relationship with my father her family had disowned her, but she didn't blame herself or my scoundrel father, she blamed me, and took out her frustration on me. She often didn't give me food and I was forced to leave the house and look for it on my own. The other children were disgusted by my appearance and enjoyed tormenting me. I was weak, I was small; I could do nothing to avoid it. No one stopped them: for their parents that was right. Even when I was almost beaten to death, the authorities didn't do anything either. I was just a hybrid, an outcast, a bastard child, who could I care? I spent half my childhood being tortured... then my mother decided she had had enough of me and sold me into slavery. Under the law of the lizardmen this was allowed, can you believe it?"

Carrion grit his teeth furiously, as if he were chewing iron. "The blacksmith he sold me to… at first he seemed kind. He taught me how to make weapons and fix broken ones. But then, he too revealed his true nature. One day there was a conflict with a neighboring people, the frogmen, and the village where I lived was destroyed. The blacksmith to which I belonged, to save his life, gave me to the leader of the frogmen as an offering. However, this did not help: the lizardmen and the frogmen signed a peace agreement shortly after which predicted that all the inhabitants of my village would be enslaved. It was at that point that something snapped inside me. Maybe it was the fury at being abandoned so many times, or maybe it was something else… the fact is that I took a knife and brutally killed the leader of the frogmen. His soldiers tried to grab me, but I managed to escape. I hid not far away, in a reed bed, and waited until the dust had calmed down. After that I went back, to the blacksmith's shop which was now a ruin, and I forged many weapons. In the following nights I continually made massacres. No matter what precautions the frogmen took, I always killed them. Whether it was with a knife in the sleep, or with a bow from a distance, or with poison in the supplies… I killed them all. None were left. An entire battalion of over three hundred soldiers, taken out by a single little boy. At that point I freed the inhabitants of my village. I expected them to welcome me like a hero, finally show me some affection. They didn't. They looked at me as if I were a plague victim. It didn't matter what I did, to them I was just a monster. The next night, they drugged me and stuffed me in a barrel, and then threw me into a river in hopes I'd drown. It was at that point that I understood something very important"

Carrion clenched his fists so hard he nearly broke his knuckles. "Those people… those lizardmen… they were beyond redemption. No matter what I did, they would never change. They were selfish, narcissistic, and each of them thought only of themselves. And the same was true for all the beastmen. They reasoned only with the law of the strongest, they always fought each other for futile reasons, they didn't care in the least about the lives of others. Even their gods, the gods that I too adored, incited selfishness and war. When I understood this, my anger was enormous. I decided that I would personally take steps to cleanse this land of the sins of its people". His hand moved and he pulled out a very old knife, hidden under his armor. "My first victim was my mother. I made this little knife using makeshift means, and then I went looking for her. It took me some time to track her down, since after selling me the bitch had left my village and had become a rich merchant's whore to make a good living. When I found her, I tortured her for three days and nights, and I would have continued if she hadn't died of pain. It was a decidedly liberating gesture. From her, I learned everything I need to track down my father. I went to look for him, and this time it was a much longer search... and to do so I went to the nations of humans"

His voice suddenly changed in timbre, becoming smoother, more lifted. Haku realized that Carrion had reached a turning point in the story. His attention was caught once again.