Luthe of Clan Castis

This story takes place during the late spring, during the events of A Traitor in Skyhold, following Luthe of Clan Castis, Talia's eldest brother.

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Luthe of Clan Castis was taking his daughter for a walk when the dragon found him.

Yolanda could was at that age where she demanded to be carried everywhere, despite the fact that she could already walk reasonably well on her own. She also absolutely refused to nap unless carried on a walk first.

Luthe knew it would pass sooner or later, he’d helped his parents with most of his siblings.

His sister had been the worst, of course. Luthe had lost track of how many times Talia had bitten him before she could even walk.

The blue dragon circled Luthe a few times before landing, giving Luthe plenty of time to examine her. Small scales, well over sixty feet long, noticeably short horns— adult, but probably hadn’t clutched for the first time yet. None of the needle-like spines of a lightning dragon, or the over-sized chest of a gas-breather, so almost certainly a fire dragon.

Not that any other type was overly likely, nine out of every ten dragons were fire-spitters.

Exactly the time of life when a dragon was most likely to go looking for trouble.

Yolanda smacked him lightly with her stuffed cloth doll, but Luthe kept his eyes focused on the dragon. He was a good quarter-hour walk from Hold Castis— he’d intended to visit the lake up-valley, the one where his younger brother Roland spent so much time fishing. If the dragon really was looking for a fight, though, he doubted either Roland or anyone in the hold would have enough time to get to him.

The dragon descended more gracefully than one would expect from a dragon that young— or any dragon at all. Wind mage, possibly?

Yolanda hit him in the head with her doll a few more times.

The dragon landed downhill of him, so that he didn’t have to crane his neck up to look at her, then wrapped her tail around her legs like a cat. Luthe relaxed a bit at that— both were indicators that the dragon wanted to talk, not fight.

He didn’t relax completely, of course.

Yolanda burbled something incoherent and excited, then waved at the dragon.

“Luthe of Clan Castis?” the dragon asked. Luthe kept his eyes on the dragon’s throat— if it decided to breathe fire, the sides of its neck would expand a bit first.

“I am,” Luthe said.

“I hear you’re something of a dragonslayer,” the dragon said.

Luthe sighed. 

“I suppose,” he said.

“You suppose?” the dragon said. “You seem unusually unenthusiastic about the title.”

Luthe shrugged. “Well, I used to be considerably more enthusiastic about it. These days it’s rather a bother, though.”

“A bother?” the dragon asked.

Yolanda waved her doll at the dragon.

“Well, given how often dragons come by to investigate me whenever the local flight territories shift, it gets a bit aggravating. Did someone finally push old Galtifrax out of his lair?” Luthe said.

The dragon tilted her head at him. “I’m a visitor to these parts, I claim no territory yet.”

Luthe snorted. “Well, fair warning, if you pay a visit to Galtifrax, he can spend entire weeks without shutting up. I’ve never met anyone, human or dragon, who likes the sound of their own voice that much.”

“How many dragons have you killed, Luthe of Clan Castis?” the dragon asked.

“Why don’t you introduce yourself first?” Luthe replied.

The dragon tilted her head the other way and seemed to consider before replying. “I am Granidysa of Sunder Rock.”

“Alright, Granidysa of Sunder Rock, why do you want to know how many dragons I’ve killed?” Luthe asked.

“Call it curiosity,” Granidysa said.

Luthe snorted at that. “Just about every dragon who has hunted me down has either wanted to kill me as an affront to draconic pride, or wanted to hire me to kill another dragon. Which is it?”

“Let’s just say I’m undecided on my purpose here,” the dragon said.

Luthe gave her a long searching look, until Yolanda decided to throw her doll. Luthe bent down to pick it up, taking that opportunity to surreptitiously look down at Hold Castis. There was considerable activity among the stone houses of the Hold— they’d obviously seen the dragon.

“Three,” Luthe said as he straightened and handed back the doll to Yolanda.

“Just three?” Granidysa asked. “From the way I’ve heard you talked about, I’d expected it to be much more.”

“I’ve fought an additional four, all of whom tracked me down like yourself, but all those battles ended up in one or the other of us retreating,” Luthe said.

“Still,” Granidysa said, “I’ve never heard of another fire mage killing more than a single dragon before. I’m interested in hearing the stories.”

Luthe switched Yolanda to his other hip. “The first dragon I killed wasn’t really that interesting. It was about five years ago now. He was a scrawny thirty-footer, decided he wanted to pick a fight with me. My fire spells were obviously not doing anything to his scales, so I cut down a big tree with a flame lance, it fell right on top of him. I had some clever one liner or other to say, it was all quite dramatic.”

Granidysa lifted one scaled brow. “I can’t help but feel you could have told that story a little more dramatically.”

“If you’d caught me a few years ago, I absolutely would have,” Luthe said. “I told it often and loudly. Enough that the story spread to several nearby dragon flights, and one of them decided to make an example of me. I’d only been back from a long trip to the south for a few weeks, escorting my sister to Skyhold. He comes after me in a narrow canyon a few leagues from here. Thousand foot tall sheer cliffs on either side, barely enough room for the dragon to circle. He was bigger and older than you, but clearly far from the wisest dragon ever.”

“And how did you kill this one?” Granidysa asked.

Luthe shrugged. “Night was coming on fast, and cold air was dropping down into the canyon. The dragon set half the canyon floor on fire, and almost lost control several times as the updrafts from the flames started mixing with the downdrafts from above. I strained my affinity senses harder than I ever had before, and managed to get a pretty clear view of the mixing air currents, just by following the heat. I waited for just the right moment, then detonated the biggest fireball I could. Created an updraft he wasn’t expecting just after he got knocked off course by the chaotic winds again. It slammed him against the side of the cliff, he fell down into the river below.”

“Very clever,” Granidysa said. “Again, though, rather poorly told. I’m sure you could have stretched out that story much farther.”

“I used to,” Luthe said. “Told it often and loudly enough that more dragons came after me. I drove a few off, a few more forced me to flee, and my legend got louder and louder. None of the dragons wanting a fight were as foolish as to approach me this close to the Hold Castis, though.”

Granidysa’s eyes narrowed. “Foolish? I had thought Clan Castis to be a clan of fire mages.”

Luthe smiled. “You’re not from near here, are you? I’d never heard of Sundered Rock, so I’d expected as much, but that rather confirms it. There is a rather big difference between a dragon picking a fight with a lone fire mage and a dragon picking a fight with a whole clan of fire mages. The melting point of dragonscale is higher than steel, but not that much higher.”

The tip of Granidysa’s tail twitched a bit.

Maybe nervousness, maybe irritation.

“And the third dragon?” Granidysa asked. “Unless, of course, you were preparing some sort of dramatic one-liner about me being the third dragon you’d killed.”

Luthe snorted. “Honestly, that does sound rather like something I would say, but no, I’d have claimed to have killed four dragons in that case. No, the third dragon was an elder wyrm by the name of Savandas. She’d lived so long that she actually faced the risk of dying of old age.”

“And, what, she sought you out to go out in a blaze of glory, rather than a slow decline?” Granidysa asked.

Luthe shook his head. “She didn’t seek me out, she sent for me. She was the guardian and ruler of a valley farming community on the eastern edge of the Skyreach range, between Highvale and the territories of several powerful clans.”

Yolanda smacked Luthe several more times in the head with her doll. She was clearly starting to get fussy, and seemed to have lost interest in Granidysa. She’d clearly spent too much time around dragons, Luthe had never known another child of Clan Castis to lose interest in a dragon.

“Savandas was one of those dragons who preferred the company of humans to the company of other dragons,” Luthe said. “She’d been a good ruler for her valley— its inhabitants were prosperous, well fed, and were protected from clan raiders, Highvale raiding disguised as tribute for protection, and from other great powers trying to seize control of the village. Savandas might have been fairly unambitious, but no one wanted to cross her. Apart from being almost as big as Heliothrax or Indris, Savandas was a fiber mage.”

Granidysa gave Luthe a puzzled look. “Were they worried she was going to weave a blanket at them?”

Luthe shook his head again. “Not a cloth mage or a thread mage, a proper fiber mage. The structural affinity, like a crystal affinity. She could manipulate any fiber of any sort. She could enhance her own muscle fibers to fly faster and strike harder. She could tangle her foes in great nets of metal wire or plant fiber. She killed more than a few would-be dragonslayers simply by shrinking their clothing until it crushed them.”

Yolanda started flailing her doll again, and Luthe gave it a push with a cantrip at just the exact right moment. The doll flew out of Yolanda’s hands and tumbled down the slope, coming to a rest at Granidysa’s feet.

If Luthe hadn’t been the one to cast the spell, he never would have noticed anything amiss with the fall.

Yolanda started crying, but Luthe ignored her and continued his story. “Savandas was afraid of what would happen to her village, so one year she vanished for months, having secured the aid of a couple friendly clans to guard her village. When she returned, it was with the instructions and supplies to become a lich.”

Both of Granidysa’s brows raised in surprise at that. Of all the sentient races, dragons were among the least likely to transition into lichdom. Even with as territorial and sedentary as most older dragons were, something inside a dragon rebelled viciously at the thought of being trapped in a single demesne for the rest of their existence. 

“She never told me who provided her with the books, enchantments, and alchemical reagents she needed,” Luthe said. “But she wove the bulk of her demesne herself. Great cables buried beneath the valley floors, immense webs of wire and rope stretching between the mountains surrounding her valley, like the work of some impossibly huge spider. At the last moment, however… she disobeyed the books and instructions. She fooled herself into believing that she’d come up with a way to let her avatar roam free of her demesne, something no other lich had ever accomplished.”

Luthe gently rocked Yolanda, trying to soothe her. She was fixated on her doll still, however.

“Her experiment left her in ceaseless, crippling pain, until she craved nothing more than her own death. She’d woven her demesne too well, and she was too weak to destroy it. So she sought out dragonslayers, enchanters, and scholars to help her commit suicide. I was one of the ones she sent for.”

Luthe poked Yolanda with his beard, trying to divert her opinion. 

To his rather mixed relief, she immediately grabbed onto it. On the one hand, this stopped her from crying and pulled attention away from her doll. On the other hand, he now had a toddler trying to yank out his beard.

“It was one of the strangest convocations of mages I’ve ever heard of,” Luthe said. “We spent months and months trying to think of a solution, a way to destroy Savandas’ demesne and free her of her pain. We came up with countless solutions— the only problem was that most of them would have destroyed great chunks of the valley, or poisoned it by releasing many of the alchemical reagents used in the process of becoming a lich, and Savandas would far rather suffer than hurt her precious valley or its inhabitants.”

“That was kind of her,” Granidysa said. Her voice sounded half skeptical, half subdued.

“Yes, it was,” Luthe said. 

He was silent for a few long moments.

“I met my husband Sven during those months,” Luthe finally continued. “He was the village baker, and we became good friends. His wife died giving birth to Yolanda here, even with the attention of several healers that were participating in Savandas’ project. I started stopping in every day to help him with Yolanda here, and one thing led to another, and well…”

“That’s charming, but a bit beside the point,” Granidysa said.

Luthe personally considered it the best part of the story. The only good part, really. He shrugged and continued, though.

“One by one, mages started to abandon the project as pointless,” Luthe said. “We were down to half our original number when I finally proposed my solution.”

“And that was?” Granidysa asked. 

Luthe smiled at that. “I’m a member of Clan Castis. What do you think my solution was?”

“You burned it,” Granidysa said.

“I burned it,” Luthe said. “It was a controlled burn, though. Her demesne’s enchantments were so powerful they would have leveled half the valley if simply destroyed, and regardless of how we took it apart, it was going to leak alchemical reagents. My solution wasn’t clever or original, by any means. It was just the product of months of mind-numbing tedium. I’d pored over every inch of her demesne’s blueprints, and painstakingly mapped out every single mana flow. I figured out exactly which segments of the demesne had to be burned, melted, or just removed, and in what order, to kill Savandas quickly and with as little pain as possible. Some alchemical reagents were unavoidably released during this process, but we had wind and water mages to gather them up, and stone mages to carve holding tanks of impermeable stone deep under the mountains for them. Once Savandas had died, I left, bringing Sven and Yolanda back home with me. Last I’d heard, mages are going to be disassembling the demesne for at least another decade.”

Yolanda was starting to doze off, her fist still wrapped in his beard.

“Unless, of course, some great power decides to take over the valley, or Savandas’ remaining hoard runs out and can’t pay for the mage crews anymore,” Luthe said. “The farmers have already started to leave the valley— no matter how careful the mages are, the reagents just keep leaking out and poisoning the land. Most dead lich demesnes are dangerous places, but in a normal lich demesne, the reagents have been largely absorbed and denatured by the demesne. Between Savandas’ short life as a lich and her ill-advised experiment, she prevented that from happening.”

Luthe smiled at Yolanda as her fist slipped out of his beard, then turned his attention back to Granidysa. “You’re the first dragon to come after me since the story of Savandas spread through these lands. Most of the dragons in the area consider what I did to be a mercy, and quite a few have actively befriended me, even inviting me to their lairs socially. If you were from anywhere near here, you’d know Savandas’ story. More, I’ve never heard of Sundered Rock, and I’ve traveled more of the Skyreach Range than most.”

Granidysa didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she slowly unfurled her wings from her back.

Luthe tensed, and reached his affinity senses out towards Yolanda’s doll at the dragon’s feet, but didn’t react otherwise.

Granidysa planted her wingtips against the ground, then used her wings to push her front legs and upper body off the ground entirely.

Luthe immediately relaxed. The wings were the most powerful part of a dragon’s body, and using them to support the dragon was a display of… not submission, exactly, but more of chosen vulnerability. Body language was far more important with dragons than with any other sapient race Luthe knew of.

Luthe ran his eyes over the dragon’s torso and abdomen, and then he abruptly understood.

“You’re bearing eggs,” he said. “You’re bearing eggs, and you’re not in your own territory. Who are you running from?”

Granidysa lowered herself down again. The ground shook slightly as she did so, and Yolanda murmured restlessly against Luthe’s chest.

“The home of my flight, Sundered Rock, is… was, far to the north of here,” Granidysa said. “It was three day’s flight to the ruins of Louthem.”

“Intet Slew,” Luthe said.

“Intet Slew,” Granidysa agreed. “We thought we were far enough away to avoid her attention. We always kept an eye on her lair in the ruins, but she had ignored us for decades. I have no idea what changed. My appetite had doubled after my mating flight, and I was away hunting when she attacked our lair.”

The dragon fell silent, and Luthe didn’t press her further. There had been dozens of members of Clan Castis visiting Louthem on the day, almost a half century ago, when the demonic-dragon hybrid had clawed her way out of the labyrinth below the mining city. They’d all died just as horribly as everyone else in the city who didn’t manage to flee.

There was a reason Intet Slew was known as the Blood Boiler. 

“I heard your clan mentioned as one of the greatest enemies of Slew, and as the one living farthest away from her,” Granidysa said. “I came here hoping that…”

“I’m no match for her,” Luthe said. “I doubt all of Clan Castis would be. Someday, perhaps, or sooner if we had a few great powers to march alongside us. I can’t avenge your family any more than I can avenge my ancestors who fell to her.”

Granidysa bowed her head, and for the first time, Luthe saw her exhaustion and grief. 

Luthe sighed, and reached out to the concealed candle flames among the trees and rocks around him. He quenched them all with a spell, relit them, then repeated the process twice more, the third time letting them burn for a three count before quenching them.

The hidden members of Clan Castis reignited their candles quickly once, then slowly twice, already moving back towards Hold Castis.

“I can, however, offer you a place to stay for the night,” Luthe said. “We can build a bonfire, roast a few goats and sheep, have a proper night of it.”

“That is kind of you,” Granidysa said. “In the morning, I’ll…”

“In the morning,” Luthe interrupted, “You and I will be heading into the mountains together. Old Galtifax might be a blowhard who enjoys the sound of his own voice entirely too much, but his lair is large enough for an entire flight of dragons, and I’m fairly sure he’s grown quite lonely in his old age. Having a few hatchlings around to tell stories to would do him good.”

Luthe set off walking towards the clan hold. Granidysa, who happened to be directly in his way, awkwardly shuffled out of his way.

“I… I don’t…” Granidysa started.

“And someday,” Luthe interrupted again, “when Clan Castis finally marches against Intet Slew, perhaps you and your hatchlings will join us.”

Luthe snagged Yolanda’s doll off the ground, from where it had rested next to the dragon’s feet.

“I think,” the dragon said, “That I rather like that idea.”

Luthe smiled up at Granidysa.

He was rather happy he didn’t have to kill her. He’d rather lost his taste for dragonslaying after Savandas. For adventuring in general, really.

Still, it didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be prepared, just in case.

There was, after all, one major part of his story he’d left out.

He’d, uh… informally requisitioned a few pieces of Savandas’ demesne when he’d left with Sven and Yolanda. They were demesne stabilizers; alchemically inert pieces of enchantment— Luthe didn’t want anything to do with alchemy if he could help it. They were highly stable enchantments, too, for the most part— you could probably smash one with a sledgehammer without any risk. Most of that, of course, was due to the fact that removed from the demesne, they didn’t have any mana running through them.

Just running a bunch of mana through them wouldn’t do much, either. Without a demesne to stabilize, a demesne stabilizer didn’t actually do anything. If someone who knew how they worked, however, were to run a type of mana they weren’t designed for— like, say, fire mana— in exactly the right pattern through their numerous mana channels…

Well, it would produce a rather disproportionately hot explosion. Not much force, but more than enough heat to melt steel. Exactly the type of explosion a nearby fire mage could easily shield themselves against. The level of heat would, in fact, theoretically be high enough to melt more than just steel. It was almost certainly more than hot enough to melt dragonscale.

Luthe squeezed his daughter’s doll hard enough to feel the hard, oddly shaped object sewn deep inside it, and smiled to himself. He and Yolanda had been safe from the moment it had fallen at Granidysa’s feet, even if she had turned out hostile.

After all, few people— or dragons— were paranoid enough to worry about a child’s doll.