Chapter 2 (Part II): You Never Really Go Home Again

Watching Kingstown in the waning days of the old kingdom was like watching an old sick man in hospice. You knew what was coming, yet you were still sort of surprised when it finally happened.

-          Magister Hamelin, telling his modern history class about his childhood in Kingstown

As Azraea and Kaira traveled to Kingstown, they felt the crushing weight of despair in the atmosphere. It went beyond the general pessimism that had been ubiquitous when they left, to feeling almost like the area had been subjected to some sort of real curse. Whether reflective of this miasma or a contributor to it, a number of businesses on the road into Kingstown were permanently closed, and traffic in and out of town was generally lighter than they expected – it was like the capital was already dying – Meingen’s weapon would have just put it out of its misery.

They dismounted as they neared the gates, and Kaira arranged for their horses to be stabled while Azraea tried to approach a few different people to talk about the state of the city. No one did more than exchange a few curt pleasantries with her, however, and one man forewent the pleasantries and spat at her with an especially obscene comment about her Arbarii bloodline.

This proved to be the true breaking point for Azraea’s nice-girl self, the point at which she finally let the ‘new’ her fully off its leash. Azraea daintily wiped the sputum from her face as Kaira stepped toward the man with her hand on one of the two long knives Vinny had given her before they left Defiance. As he looked anxiously at the elf warrior, Azraea surprised them both by grabbing the man's collar and driving her knee into his crotch, dropping him to the ground.

“Next time,” she said, “I expect you to kneel before I talk to you. Not after. Do you understand?” The man started to protest, but Azraea set one foot on his nearest hand and leaned closer to hear what he had to say, “I’m sorry, what was that?” He finally whimpered an apology, as the bones in his hand cracked, sharp edges dragging against nerves. He promised to be more courteous in the future, and she released him to hurry along his way.
"Too much?" Azraea asked Kaira.

“Well, that was pretty frightening,” Kaira said, “but also pretty bad-ass.”

“I used to think people would only treat you as well as you treated them, but I think, actually, that people will only treat you as well as you treat yourself,” Azraea observed.

“I think there’s some truth in that,” Kaira agreed, “Though I think Thrakaduhl’s father learned that treating people badly will eventually get you killed.”

Azraea smiled as they resumed their walk into town, “Yes that is true. Confidence and resolve should not be allowed to rot into selfishness and cruelty. But maybe, sometimes, people need to be shown the error of their ways in the most common language; force.”

“Hm,” Kaira mimicked the facetious academic tone Ochsner sometimes adopted, “Perhaps I should be more proactive in applying corrective violence to problems of social injustice.”

“Well, that’s the idea,” Azraea paused and looked at the castle that was visible above the outer wall even as they approached the east gate.

“You realize what we’ve been talking about is treason, right?” Kaira muttered as they neared one of the gate guards.

“That fat wyrm sitting on our kingdom’s wealth while our people starve, that’s treason.”

The guard suddenly reached out and pressed a hand to Azraea’s shoulder, halting her with gentle pressure, “Be careful where you go talking like that miss,” The man said, “The world’s not what it used to be.”

“Magister Schroeder?” Kaira had avoided the man’s gaze before but now recognized the weathered face and pale blue eyes under the helmet. “What are you doing pulling bottom rung guard duty? Why aren’t you teaching polearm basics or something at the University?”

Schroeder looked slightly embarrassed to have one of his former students see him like this, but it was clearly something that he’d experienced quite a lot. He turned to the other guard and waved, “Friends of mine; mind if I take ten?”

“Well gee, Roy, how can I possibly survive alone against this overwhelming hostile incursion,” the guard waved at the practically empty road, “Bring me something to drink and I’ll appreciate it.”

“Got it,” Schroeder gave him a thumbs-up and stashed his halberd and helmet in the small wooden shack that served as their guard station. He walked them into town and led them over to a familiar café with tables and benches outside. They sat down while he got his drinks. Situated so close to Kingstown’s main gate, the café had always managed good business, but it seemed that the past couple of weeks had taken a considerable toll on the place. It was much quieter than Azraea remembered it ever being, and dirtier as well.

In fact, as Azraea looked about, everything seemed to be remarkably dirty. Trash and debris littered the edges of the buildings and the streets were rife with manure, as if basic sanitation services had been cut back, or outright suspended. If that were the case, Azraea realized, it really wouldn’t have taken Kingstown long to get into this state. The capital was more densely populated than any other city in Caelia, with few ways in and out. Everything, people and buildings alike, were tightly packed within its walls; any waste that couldn’t be carried out through the ancient dwarven sewer system had to be gathered up and carted out by civil servants. Of course, none of that explained the other signs of decay – everywhere she looked there were broken windows, damaged signs and lamp fixtures – it reminded her of what Defiance looked like after years of subjugation by Thrakaduhl’s father.

Azraea immediately wondered if the entire city were in this state. Despite the fact that everything was sort of piled upon everything else, there were still very clearly defined areas within the city. 

Map of Kingstown before Azraea's reign. The castle sits at the south end in grey, and the royal manor is just northwest of it,  marked in blue. 

Kingstown sloped downhill from its south end to its north end, and so did the economic status of its residents. At the extreme south end of the city, the old castle was dug into what had once been a low mountain peak. High Street zig-zagged down from the castle to Kingstown’s wealthiest neighborhoods; aside from the dragon, the wealthiest individuals in the kingdom lived on estates out in the countryside, but there were exceptions; mostly individuals whose purse-strings were somehow tied to the dragon. Among them, the royal family was doubtlessly the most prominent; just below the castle, King Hylas lived in one of a handful of manors within Kingstown, homes that stood apart from the crush of buildings, separated from the cityscape by high wrought iron fences that enclosed open areas filled with green lawns and carefully tended gardens.

The area just north of the High End was considered ‘Uptown’; it was home to many of Caelia’s government buildings. Most of Caelia’s more prestigious businesses also had their main offices there, and packed around them were upper middle class residences – what Ochsner called the ‘shwanky’ apartments. North of Uptown was Gate Street; Gate Street bisected Kingstown, running directly from the eastern gate to the western gate, which had been permanently sealed decades ago. The university had been established around the western gate, and had been effectively cut into two campuses by the sealing of the gate.

Azraea had seldom had cause to go more than a few blocks south of the University. Aside from fairly frequent trips to the public library, she’d only gone up town for the few of her celebrations, honors ceremonies, concerts, and such that had taken place there. Like most faculty or long term students, half of Azraea’s adult life had been lived in ‘Downtown’ Kingstown, within a couple of blocks of Gate Street. She’d studied and worked at the university, shopped at Kingstown’s main market to its east, and lived among the lower to middle class apartments to its north. Given that the sight of Gate Street was so well engrained in her mind, it surprised Azraea that she didn’t immediately notice what was missing.

It was Kaira, leaning back in her chair and looking west, who finally pointed it out; the small clock tower that marked the eastern edge of the university campus was entirely absent. As they sat, they realized that even on the extreme east end of Gate Street, they should see other college buildings from where they were, but they did not. Knots tied in the women’s stomachs as they started to have an inkling of how bad it had become here.

 “I cannot believe how much they charge for these,” Schroeder said as he sat down with his drinks, “That’s an hour’s work, right there.”

Kaira looked at Schroeder and pointed down the street, “What the hell?”

“Yeah, that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about," Schroeder pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, the furrowing of his brow emphasizing his long forehead and the prominent widow's peak his graying blonde hair formed at the middle. He relaxed his brow and took a sip of his drink, "I got laid off with a lot of faculty members due to budget cuts at the beginning of the summer. Awful situation all around; few other jobs to be had and you know what people say when you’ve been teaching for twenty years? No job experience. Apparently teaching other people to do something doesn’t count as actually doing it.” He mixed some dried honey into his drink, “But I got lucky. Not too long ago, something happened. Supposedly, someone tried to kill our landlord up there. Hard to imagine they could have come close, but I guess it was enough to unsettle her. Or maybe the idea of someone believing they could do it just offended her.”

“What did they try to do?” Kaira dug for more details.

“No idea,” the former professor said, “You can fish around for rumors – the heralds have spread quite a few. Poison is the most credible, I think. The one about lighting her on fire is just foolish. All of it is speculation though. Anyway, there was a lot of investigating, a lot of questions asked, a lot of fingers pointed, and eventually it came down on a group of foreign kids studying at the college. Seemed like a stretch, I mean the ‘motivation’ these kids were supposed to have for doing it was pretty flimsy, so a bunch of the students and remaining faculty members that knew the kids tried to intercede. Organized big sit down protests in the streets between here and the high end. Practically shut the whole town down.”

“Why?” Kaira asked. For her, non-violent protest was an oxymoron.

“Said they wanted to create awareness of the problem,” Schroeder continued, “I thought everyone in this kingdom was pretty aware it’s gone to shit, but I guess not. Anyway, there’ve been a lot of bad feelings towards the college this summer, so the inconvenience wasn’t really taken well by the rest of the town. The king ordered the guard to disperse the crowd in order to prevent violence. For Captain Cyphus, that meant taking a handful of guards up Gate Street near the university, where the biggest crowd was, and shouting, ‘disperse’ at the protesters a few times. Given both of his children were in the crowd, Cyphus was going to be pretty light handed.”

“I remember Cyphus,” Kaira said, “Not the most progressive man in the world, but not a bad guy, really.”

“Well, not being a bad guy meant the end of his career and, through logic I still don’t really understand, losing his pension. So then we got a new Captain, Medes. A lot of people don’t realize it, but there are actually people in this town who suck up to the dragon so enthusiastically it might be taken for genuine loyalty.”

“I take it Captain Medes is one of them?” Azraea commented.

Schroeder grunted as he sipped his drink, “Captain Medes, he takes us out in force, eager to show people how he thinks things should be done. Full armor, shields, and even swords. The only kindness is we bring training sticks, and keep our swords sheathed. Not that wooden clubs are especially kind when the other guy is unarmored, of course.” Shroeder shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe the story he was recalling, “Captain Medes shouted for the crowd to disperse, but threw in a few other colorful things as well. Got them good and whipped up, like he was actually trying to start something. He pushed them as much as you could without physically shoving someone. And then his personal guard did just that. What we’d call a shielded shoulder charge.”

“En masse?” Kaira asked.

“He had his own little retinue at the center of things, twenty men or so, with the rest of us hemming the crowd in at the edges. But those guys, man, when they moved, they moved. It was like a landslide of metal. I didn’t even know anyone drilled for that. When do you use that? You don’t use it on a battlefield, or on some random bandits. The only thing it’s good for his plowing into a crowd of unarmed, unarmored people, and leaving a lot of them with broken bones and split skulls. Well, despite being pretty intimidating, anyone who wasn’t trampled by his guard, which was most of the crowd, pushed back. After that it wasn’t long before there were bottles being thrown at us and kids being beaten in the street. The city went mad. While we were tied up turning a peaceful demonstration into a bloodbath, people in the surrounding blocks started looting, vandalizing anything they could get their hands on. Some of them claimed they were doing it in revenge for the college kids who were dying and some of them claimed they were doing it to get revenge on the college kids that ruined their businesses. I didn’t follow the logic in either case.”

“That’s terrible,” Kaira abandoned her usual stoicism.

“But it gets worse,” Azraea guessed.

“Yeah, I’m afraid it does,” Schroeder took another drink, “So, the dragon’s been watching all of this chaos the entire time, right? From up in the castle, I guess the dragon decides there’s just too much noise, or maybe she decides that the situation is just not quite awful enough. When the guard gets most of the mob confined to the west end of Gate Street, she just comes swooping down and vomits a belly full of fire onto the rioting mob. I’d never seen dragon fire before that day. I always thought it would just… vaporize someone. Reduce them to dust. But it doesn’t. It’s not as hot as you’d think. At least it wasn’t that day. It burned slow, see? But it stuck to those poor people like honey. Cyphus’s kids were on the other side of my shield when they got hit. In the end, all I could do was draw my sword and put them out of their misery.”

“And the university?” Azraea asked.

“It burned down that day. Fire brigades couldn’t be organized because of the rioters. We were told it was destroyed by fires the students started. Of course, people argued over whether the rioters set the fire deliberately, but I always figured it was collateral from the dragon burning the mob. I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, though. I thought the university was a cash cow for her. All that tuition had to go somewhere, right? And it wasn’t to the magisters.”

“So that’s it then? The university’s just, gone…” Kaira was more upset than she would have expected. Ochsner would be devastated.

“Most of it,” Schroeder said, “a few buildings on the edges survived, but the university is indefinitely shut down.”

“Well, don’t get too excited,” Azraea said, “I’m sure we’ll still have to pay back our loans.”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Schroeder said, “but I thought you kids deserved to know what’s going on.”

“How exactly did people take to the dragon just deciding to murder dozens of people in the street?” Kaira asked. The dragon had, supposedly, played things pretty straight for over a century. There were the occasional accusations and scandals, but nothing as blatant as this.

“Oh, people flipped out over it, you can be sure,” Schroeder said, “But the king issued her a commendation for taking swift, decisive action to maintain the safety and security of the realm.”

“And people bought into that?” Kaira asked.

“I imagine the people who were happy to see the students and faculty burned to death did,” Azraea said.

“Exactly, and there’s a lot of them on the streets now,” Schroeder said, “A lot of people who want them avenged too, though. The anger in this city is full up like a flooded lake, and the dam could break any day. I don’t know what business you have here but if I were you girls, with all due respect, I wouldn’t stay any longer than I absolutely have to.” Schroeder wished them the best of luck and took the drinks back to his post at the gate.