Dragon Harem Quest - Or: Saying You Were Gay Wasn't The Conversation-Ender You Hoped For

Hmmmm... not Jun-ho. You don't really want to wake him up on the off-chance he actually cares about this treasure-hunting business - you've mentioned it multiple times before and he hardly leapt on it. Belial seems like he'd be more interested in having a nap and talking about how things were back in his day (must be damn old to be an incubus that doesn't look like a stunningly beautiful twentysomething) and Issachar might waste your time whining about how whatever's in the tower 'belongs to someone' and that would be 'stealing' which is 'wrong'. Which, of course, leaves only one option - your trusty djinn.

Who is not trusty at all but you feel like you should be bringing someone.

You stuff the map back into its protective tube, stuff it and Makram's lamp into the leather bag that once held every magical doodad you brought from Söfnun then wing your way out the cavern mouth high on the south wall. You circle around and land again in the grass just north of it, retrieving the lamp and eyeing it speculatively. Do you just open it again? Is holding it enough? Can he hear you?

You settle on giving it an insistent jiggle and saying "Wakey-wakey Makram."

The door pops open and a swirling tongue of golden flame snakes forth, thankfully less explosively than the first time. It grows as it twists, as it snips itself off at the root with the closing door, man-sized and man-shaped until with a flash of heat and rush of air Makram stands beside you. Well, 'stands'. He seems allergic to touching the same ground your claws have sullied unless absolutely necessary. He takes a languid look around, eyes lingering only briefly on the bag with the map in it before alighting on you.

"Well now," he says. "A master that deigns to use my name? You had to learn it second-hand but progress is progress I suppose~"

"Oh shush you, m'still angry about my gold," you scowl.

"Then why, dear master, would you summon a wretch like me? For another wish perhaps?" He adjusts his pose. You grimace.

"Stop that. It's discomforting."

"What is, master~?"

"You know damn well 'what' you golden asshole," you grumble. "Just call me 'Eldingar', everyone else clamouring to squat in my home seems to so we might as well be consistent about this."

"That sounds awfully informal. Rude, almost." Makram's lying centrefold again, cheek on a half-curled fist. "Your dear mother had a much more grandiose and fitting title for you when she introduced you and the long one to each other, why not mandate the use of that?"

"You were lis-? Of course you were don't even answer that," you grumble, again. "Those were our style names. You pick one when you leave home and make it longer and longer as you get older and do more shit. Mother's is a couple sentences and Nana Illvithri's is more or less a novel by this point. S'been so long since I've needed to use it it just felt weird to hear it out loud." You pause awkwardly. "So what I'm saying is just 'Eldingar' is fine, no need to be a shit about it."

"Very well, Master Eldingar."

"Mmmmhmmmmmovingon." You stuff the lamp back in the bag and withdraw the map instead, popping the cap with a thumb-talon and unfurling it for Makram to see. "This here is the map I used to find you. It probably points to six other treasures of equal value all over the continent and I'm heading off to find one of them today - and you should probably help me since it's your fault in the first place I'm in such desperate need of more treasure."

"So you wish for me to accompany you as penance?"

"Ye-" you cut yourself off, snapping your jaw shut like a trap, and scowl at him to the fullest extent a draconic snout can allow. He barely suppresses his laughter at your pantomime puppet face and waves his hand as if to clear the air.

"This may prove entertaining. So long as you understand that without a wish I am under absolutely no obligation to help you in any way, I will deign to accompany you."

"Who said I needed any help from you?" you retort.

"You did. Several seconds ago."

" 'Need'? Hah! Pfhah! Haha!" You're really not as good at the regal scoffing thing as he is. "I'm a dragon! I don't 'need' anything, I want what I want and I take what I want! No I will deign to let you accompany me out of a sense of guilty obligation because you almost ruined my life."

"Of course, of course," Makram replies with a knowing smirk. "Master."

You roll the map back up all at once and shove it back in the tube very forcefully. "Yeah well you saw the tower and I've got your lamp so follow me or don't I don't (fuckin' care, stupid)" You loop the strap of the bag around one talon and grow, shifting up into your true form until it's 'shrunk' down around it like a very cheap mortal's wedding band. You don't bother looking back because Makram'd probably derive some sort of satisfaction or victory from it, instead kicking off into the air and soaring away south.

You remember why you don't go flying more often. It's very boring when it's a long trip and you're all alone. There's not even worrying about whether or not you're on-course to break up the tedium, you've got a compass in your head and even you can't fuck up your bearing. There's a brief semi-literal jolt of excitement as clouds form overhead and you barrel-roll to catch a bolt of lightning directly in your mouth like a snowflake, but that's relatively early in your many, many, manymanymany-hour journey.

You glide along, wings outstretched like the great leathery sails of some nightmare bat. Nightmare bat - does Belial have wings? Plenty of the illustrations you saw gave incubi leather wings. Among... other things. Is that real? You should ask him sometime. Unless that's rude by incubus standards or something. But then how does he get in and out of your cave? He told you he can use dreams like interdimensional corridors but that doesn't explain him not being around while you're awake. Does he climb?

Gods you're bored. You hang your head and stare at the landscape as it slips by below you, flapping your wings intermittently to maintain altitude. It's all so muscle-memorised that you could practically fall asleep like this. But even you don't succumb to the temptation because you do not want to plough headfirst into a mountain and have to live with the fact that you did for the rest of your life. Grasslands... farmland, a few terrified peasants running for cover... road... grasslands... forest... old witch's hut... lake... fjord... rocky place, herd of goats (hungry, ehn, not hungry enough)... more farmland... looks like a quarry or a mine or something...

Ugh. At least Jun-ho would've been someone to talk to. Belial and Issachar might've been too, but they can't fly so you might've had to put them on your back and that's just a nightmare and a half to imagine. Hm. You glance down speculatively at your empty foreclaw. If you were extra careful maybe you could just carry them? That'd be more dignified. You've got a gentle grip, you're sure they'd get off with just some minor bruising. Maybe a lot of chafing in Belial's case, the near-nudist fuck. Is that a cultural thing or do incubi have some excuse like hyper-sensitive skin or something? You should ask when you get back, too.

Gods end this pain now.

A few hours later, with the sun past its zenith and you reduced to humming One Hundred Bags Of Gold On The Wall, you finally catch sight of it. It looks to be a tall minaret, growing from the side of the mountain as if the entire thing were just one grand temple to one of the gods - which one you have no idea, you don't pay a lot of attention to mortal religions, just that there are multiple and it's just kind of automatic to say 'oh gods' to stuff. You notice what looks like a well nestled in the shadows behind the tower, long since capped and sealed tight - they get water this high up? Well, wizard.

In all honesty you expected something more local, architecture-wise, when you heard about an 'old' wizard's tower - but when you think about it a little more you concede that you and mortals have very different conceptions of what 'old' is, and the Tanin-Arosa wars did end while you were a teenager. Frankly if a dragon owned it anything under a century is still 'he just popped out for some business' territory. In any case it's of Tanin make, a glorious edifice of sandstone and brass inlay that catches the sun just so to make the whole thing glow as brilliantly as any treasure. It must be absolutely glorious at sunrise or sunset - the Sultanate has good taste.

You touch down by the front door, shifting down to bipedal form as you go. Looks like it's mostly sheer cliffs on all sides, any paths that might've led up to it conventionally either worn away or deliberately broken. No wonder nobody's checked it out before, you'd need to fly or teleport to get here at all. While you wait for your interminable asshole of a companion to do the latter you retrieve the map to give it one more once-over. The compass points straight at the front door, just as you hoped - magnificent. You're not quite at the point of salivating again yet, but there is a certain hungry leer on your face as you stow the map away. If you don't stop imagining what might be inside you'll drive yourself to distraction.

Makram materialises beside you in a flash of smokeless golden flame. "So, knocked yet?" he asks.

"Dragons do not knock," you sniff. "We go where we please."

"Then please, lead on."

You wait for him to add 'master'. He does too. It takes you several seconds to realise what he's doing and you grumble angrily under your breath, stomping up to the door in question and trying the handle. To your surprise, it actually opens, and you step inside.

To somewhat less surprise, the interior of the tower makes use of a soupçon of impossible space. The entrance chamber takes up what from the outside would appear to be the entire ground floor, yet there's a great set of brass double-doors on the other side of the wall that would just lead to a solid cliff face and some dirt if that's all it was. No, you can smell the magic in the air just as easily as you could smell if an entire family of deer that all happened to be bleeding had passed through the area. The tower wants something of you, as anything worth doing does.

To pay more attention to your immediate surroundings than 'mmmm, magic...' you stop in the centre of the room and turn in a slow circle. It's round even though the tower was square from the outside, cool and gloomy despite the sun-soaked precipice on which it stands, surrounded on all sides by neat channels cut into the marble floor. Water flows endlessly through the conduits from some unseen source, dark as ink in the gloom, and yet in all these years it doesn't seem to have eroded the stone at all. The conduits fork at many points, perhaps intending to drain elsewhere at some point, but the alternate paths seem magically sealed, turning the water away with barriers of thin air. Instead it all just flows right back to the start, an endless, pointless loop. The brass double doors are flanked by a pair of cloaked constructs, whatever weapons they may wield hidden beneath the gold-embroidered fabric, their near-featureless brass skulls staring straight ahead.

Makram floats in on his golden dust-cloud, radiating light like a torch in his own right. The glow seems to be coming from his half-molten jewellery, which you're increasingly starting to think is just a part of his body.

"Well then? Ask the nice men if they'll let you in," he says.

You shoot him a look, but don't bother protesting out loud. Instead you walk forward with long, measured, deliberately-chosen strides, watching the constructs all the while. The second you get ten paces from the door they each take one step inward to block it with their bodies and come to attention with a synchronised metallic crash of armoured feet on stone.

"None may pass until the riddle is answered," they answer in unison, their voices hollow, brassy and booming. Their jaws don't move, lipless mouths sealed tight as the sound just seems to emanate from their general direction.

"Riddles," you hiss. "Why are wizards like this?"

"They're basically history's greatest monsters," Makram agrees wholeheartedly.

You double-take, but shake your head and turn your attention back to the guards instead. "Alright. Tell us the riddle then."

The constructs respond in unison once more. "I kill in droves, I raze whole cities. I devour mountains and scour the land clean. And yet I am praised, even worshipped. I absolve your sins but carry them with me, and so persist in the dark, festering, unforgotten. What am I?"

Silence falls. You scratch your scaly chin.

"I feel like I'm missing some cultural context here," you mutter.

"It didn't even rhyme," Makram adds, faintly offended. "What sort of riddle doesn't rhyme?"

"Probably translated from Elvish," you say offhand. "Give the locals a fair shot, ruin the structure of it all. Damn shame."

"Well then," he says. "Any ideas? I'm sure a glorious superior being such as yourself should be able to easily trounce any mortal's idea of an intellectual challenge~"

"Shush you," you snap. "I'm thinking."

Thinking thinking thinking. Hm. Being weird and obtuse about it unless you already know the gist of where it's coming from is kind of the idea, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating or unfair. How were you supposed to know that caring about the world outside your spire was going to come in handy someday? Mrgh, nothing for it, you might just be stuck making a bunch of educated guesses and hoping. And er, hoping too many wrong guesses doesn't make the guards freak out and attack you. Or... hrm...

[ ] Answer the riddle yourself.
--[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Try to trick Makram into solving it by playing on his ego. It's clear the only thing he loves more than putting people down is puffing himself up, and you're such an easy target he might just take the bare hook, let alone bait.
[ ] Just wish to be inside the tower where all the best treasure is. You really have no patience for this puzzle shit, and Makram does still owe you two wishes.
[ ] Brute-force it.
--[ ] Go outside, shift up, and batter the fuck out of the tower until you make your own door.
--[ ] Just fight the guards and force the door. They're just a pair of constructs, absolutely no match for a dragon and an ifrit.
[ ] Go outside and inspect that sealed well. Maybe this while puzzle room is just a diversion and there's really a secret passage through there to the true lair underground? Or it could actually be a sealed well and you'll waste time and Makram will laugh at you.