She looks you up and down, eyes flicking from your shadow to the shadows and wisps of smoke clinging to you. "Fascinating. You humans really do take every scrap of magical knowledge you get your hands on and wring it to the last morsel, don't you? A pity the usurpers got to you before we did, who knows what you might have accomplished with better instruction."
"And what would have been the price of that tutoring?" you ask, in a voice that could technically be considered polite.
Looking at what Nagash managed with some Dark Elf knowledge, I'd imagine the price could well be the world. Right dodged a bullet there.
"Have you ever been to sea?" he asks, in a voice with only the most battered shred of hope remaining in it. You get the impression he's asked that question quite a lot already, and received the same answer every time.
You open your mouth to dash his hopes, then remember something. "Once, technically. Over the Frozen Sea."
"Oh? Visiting the Fire Dwarves?"
"Not that time. I was coming back from an expedition into the Chaos Wastes and cut across the Frozen Sea to reach Kislev via Norsca."
He looks baffled and impressed in equal measure. "Why would you go into the Chaos Wastes?"
"To see what was there."
He stares at you a while longer, then grabs a glass from someone nearby to thrust into your hand so he can clink his against it. "That's the only sensible thing I've heard in four thousand miles of rough seas. Tell me about it all."
...my first impression is this is a guy who was meant to be born over in Onepiece and somehow his soul got jumped a few genres tonal shifts over into Naggaroth. Bloody hell, Boney making all the interesting, surprising characters.
"By Mathlann, you're wasted here on land. Join my ship and I'll pay you a Sorceress' share and you'll have a cabin all to yourself."
You take a moment to entertain the possibility before shaking your head. "My current job isn't one that can be just walked away from."
...Elfcation option 2? Bloody hell. Again. I dunno if it's gonna be an actual option and it's never gonna be picked, but this is not what I was expecting.
Dammit, I think I
almost like this guy. Have to keep reminding myself he's Druchii.
"So I figured, but I had to try. Say, you ever encountered the other kind of Dwarves? The Stone Dwarves?"
Little did he suspect, he was speaking to one.
"The First Sorceress sends her regards, Prince Harathi," she says in a voice only slightly quavering with nervousness.
"Only her regards? Nothing else this time? No poisons, no kidnappers, no assassins? A shame. I've had quite some time to hone my skills since her last offering to me. Tell me, does she still teach the quarter-spinwards turn on her vortices?"
There's a moment of hesitation.
Oh damn, I like this turn around, again not what I was expecting. Boney's really doing a good job throwing preconceptions of Druchii for a loop, with the hopelessness in the captains eyes and the perceived vulnerability of the sorceress. The only Druchii as expected is the Dreadlord, and even she's 'reasonable'.
"I have not had the honour of being personally taught by the First Sorceress, but-"
"Because if she is, she's playing the same games with you that she did with Sapherion. It gets you to the point of being able to cast a little faster, but it prevents any real mastery until you spend more time unlearning it than it saved you in the first place." The Sorceress does not react, but her lack of reaction instead of reacting with any sort of confusion or denial is apparently enough for Lord Harathi. "So she is. Well, to be fair to her, she might not be outright sabotaging the Dark Convent, she just may not have had the time to teach you properly among all of her other distractions. She's only had six or seven millennia to do so, after all. Hardly any time at all to a woman with as many little hobbies on the side as she has."
I love this. Intercontinental owning of Morathi's plots, and I love how he calls her Auntie Rathi. Really loving the worldbuilding this is displaying too.
Also, Morathi Quest AP hell is absolutely unreal. Six to seven millennia, jeez. Definitely the take away from this.
"My point? My point is that you owe so much to a single precocious youth sharing the tattered scraps of the pale shadow of the past that is the White Tower. Imagine what you could achieve with just a few secrets from my ageless mistress."
I will have you know we are entirely ready to go Second Coming of Nagash all on our own, thank you very much.
...though as a hypothetical, Dark Elf Sorceress tutelage/knowledge exchanging is probably one of the few ways to get Mathilde potentially scarier right now when it comes to Dark Magic.
I also notice I'm using '...' quite a bit in these comments. Probably because all of the second thoughts this chapter is giving me. Fantastic writing, am I gushing a lot? I love fun villains, what can I say.
She grins in a way that is difficult to describe as unpleasant, even though it is thick with smug savagery. "Should such a relationship be established, we could do more for your hopes of a revanched shoreline than merely promise not to prey upon them. Your errant subject has benefited greatly from the patronage of our oldest enemy, and we would welcome an opportunity to demonstrate both the limitations of Ulthuan's beneficence and the depths of Naggaroth's maleficence. The contrast between them, I assure you, would be quite staggering."
You try not to be tempted. You try not to think of a sunken steamship, of Dwarven corpses floating in black water. Of obscenely wealthy families threatening to starve the Empire for the crime of building canals on the other side of the continent simply because they might slow their acquisition of even more wealth. "I have no doubt."
Riiight there with you Mathilde. The temptation is real. Empire Naval doctrine point 1. Fuck Marienburg.
I would just like to compliment Boney on the writing of these characters, it would have been so easy to write the Dark Elves as Stupid Evil. But evil isn't scary when it's stupid, it's scary when it's smart, and reasonable, and potentially even relatable, and writing such blatantly evil characters, or characters within blatantly evil factions this way is not only in my opinion very effective, I imagine it's also difficult, and in this day and age it's also bold, for reasons related to the very important disclaimer at the end of the chapter, but also maybe even important to do, to explore. Don't wanna go far down that conversation, so I'll just say yeah, excellent stuff.
