Chapter 59: The Surname ‘Dracontis’
The next morning, Ethan walked out of his rented quarters with a black card held loosely between two fingers.
Carrying large quantities of gold coin was impractical at the volume his work had started producing. White Tower had solved that problem the same way they solved most logistical problems, with something purpose built and issued to members as a matter of course.
The black card functioned similarly to a storage ring but narrower in scope, holding exclusively coin within it while displaying a running account balance that updated with each transaction. Clean, simple, and considerably easier to manage than a ring loaded with several thousand individual pieces of gold.
The balance sitting inside his right now read one hundred thousand gold coins.
Fifty thousand from the monthly stipend, arriving on schedule as promised. The remaining fifty from the materials haul processed at the exchange desk, the accumulated result of several weeks in the mountain range and the Rock Drake clearing bonus factored on top. Both figures together in a single account, visible at a glance.
To say he wasn’t well off would have been dishonest. Even among White Tower members at his rank, that number sat comfortably above the average.
He walked through the main road of Tona Town toward the designated boarding point, the town moving around him with its new energy, the noise and activity of a settlement that had found its footing and was running hard with it.
A White Tower official was waiting at the base of a small battleship positioned near the center of the road, a clipboard in hand, eyes moving between the document and the approaching figure.
"Mister Algar? Code name Blood Bat?"
"That is me."
Ethan nodded once, his gaze already moving past the official and settling on the vessel itself.
It was smaller than the warships deployed out of Windgrave, built for short range troop transport rather than extended operations, its frame compact and purposeful in the way of things designed to do one thing efficiently rather than several things impressively. Still expensive to deploy by any reasonable measure. When the team had moved from Windgrave to Tona Town in the first place, they had come by carriage. Sending a battleship for a return trip of this distance said something about who else was on the passenger list.
’There’s probably some big shot in there.’
He boarded without dwelling on it.
Rich people moved through regions that had recently become interesting, and a mountain range now associated with dragons and a freshly emerging hunting ground was exactly the kind of interesting that attracted them. Tourism wasn’t a surprising development. It was the predictable result of the situation the team had created by resolving it.
The interior of the battleship was shaped like a train, the passenger space running in a single long configuration with seating arranged along both sides. Ethan found his seat, settled into it, and pulled a piece of cloth over his head, his body angling toward rest before the vessel had finished boarding.
He would have recognized several of the faces coming through the entrance after him.
He didn’t look up to find out.
The noise reached him first.
"Master Lorn, you will make a great summoner very soon and bring glory to the Dracontis family."
"A truly impressive performance, sire. The Lady will be most proud of the dragon head."
"Even the Dragon Mancer herself did not claim her first dragon until she was nineteen."
The voices were layered and close together, the particular sound of a group of people concentrated around a single focal point, each one adjusting the content and the register of what they said to fit the function they were performing. Flattery had a recognizable texture when it came in volume.
The crowd moved through the battleship and arranged itself around a young man at its center, their collective attention directed inward toward him in the way that entourages arranged themselves around the person they had decided mattered most in any given space.
A member of the Dracontis family, by the sound of it.
Among the noble warrior families of the kingdom of Bark, the Dracontis name sat at or near the pinnacle. Having one present in a region was considered, in the circles that tracked such things, something closer to a blessing than an ordinary occurrence.
"Enough flattering."
The young man’s voice carried a composed authority that sat a level above the people surrounding him, the kind of tone that didn’t need volume to establish itself.
His eyes moved briefly toward a specific corner of the passenger space.
"Especially you." He let it land for a moment before continuing. "I’ve been told the person sent to collect us is connected to the Dragon Mancer herself. We keep a cordial relationship when we arrive."
He said it with a smile that was genuinely diplomatic rather than decorative.
The person he was referring to could, in the honest accounting of the family tree, only be described as his aunt. The fact that they were effectively the same age was simply one of those outcomes that certain bloodlines and cultivation timelines produced, a generational gap that existed on paper in ways that didn’t map cleanly onto the reality of standing next to someone and talking to them.
But the strength gap was entirely real.
If he walked into Windgrave having said the wrong thing to the wrong person, the quality of his time there would reflect it without ambiguity.
Diplomatic, then.
"So noisy."
The voice arrived directly beside Ethan’s covered head, close and familiar, pitched for him specifically rather than the room.
"What do you think?"
He recognized it without needing to move the cloth.
He cleared his throat.
Said nothing.
He kept his position and waited for the vessel to start moving, his only active preference at this particular moment being that the journey begin sooner rather than later and deposit him somewhere with fewer variables than the current seating arrangement suggested.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Meanwhile, back at White Tower headquarters in Windgrave.
A group of young nobles arrived one after another, their entrance carrying the particular quality of people who had decided in advance that wherever they were going deserved to be impressed by them.
They moved through the space the way visitors moved through a museum, their eyes tracing the architecture, their hands finding surfaces to touch and approve of, their expressions performing a settled pride that said they found everything more or less acceptable and were generously declining to say otherwise.
Every guard they passed received a smile.
And wherever they moved, the people around them already knew the appropriate way to address them.
Dracontis.
The name preceded them through every corridor, arriving slightly before they did, adjusting the atmosphere of each space by the time they entered it.
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