Isadora Pendragon

​“Another round!” cried Isadora as she thumped her now empty tankard onto the bar, much to the enthusiasm of the drunk patrons about her. This would be the fourth round she had bought for the tavern, and the ninth she had bought for herself. After nodding to his serving lads and lasses to begin pulling pints from the row of barrels alongside the back wall of the bar, the tavern owner walked over with a soft smile to deliver her ale himself. She liked Wulric, a barrel of a man in his early seventies, potbellied and still strong for his age with graying hair receding with all the speed of the tide rushing out to sea. He was a much kinder soul than Fallow usually allowed a person to be.Setting her ale down in front of her and collecting her empty mug, he flashed her a smile with more teeth missing than present and said, “My, oh my, finally old enough to see over the bar, and now here you are buying rounds for all.” His grin widened as he continued, “Can’t imagine what the Old Ox thinks of that.”

​Isadora grimaced into her newly full mug and swirled the golden ale within. “Not much I do that he does like, eh?” She looked up and met his eyes with her own smile. “Might as well enjoy myself is he’s going to be furious with me anyhow.Besides,” she turned around in her seat, so her back was to the bar and she faced the tavern’s crowd who had raised their voices in a bawdy song about a promiscuous lass from Ironwood. “He’s all the way in Kaer Raden. Who gives a shite what the old man thinks tonight?” She heard Wulric’s warm chuckle and his fading words as he moved down the bar and began to serve other customers, “I told him, I told old Pendragon from day one, ‘You think Persephone’s trouble, wait until she has a little spawn of her own,’ I told him.” Isadora smiled at the old man’s chatter before hopping off the stool she was seated upon.

She carried her ale over to an empty chair at a table next to the hearth where a trio of men were playing Night Hand, a simple card game invented by Sanctuary members to pass the time while on watch. There was a large pile of coins in the center of the table, as well as several promissory notes which had to have been added by the youth who looked as if he was about to vomit from nerves. He looked to be of an age with her, somewhere close to her nineteen years, The other two gamblers,seeming to have nigh on twenty years on the lad, looked well pleased with themselves. All three were dressed in the manner of the bog walkers, the individuals responsible for harvesting the peat from Fenmire that fuels the trains connecting all the walled cities. “Evening gents,” she said cheerfully as she pulled out the empty chair. “Mind dealing a lass in?”

​The young lad looked up from his cards to meet her deep purple eyes and opened his mouth as if to say something but was quickly cut off by one of the other gamblers who spoke with the slow drawl common in Fenmire Keep. “We would be most grateful for your company, Lady Pendragon. Would you like us to explain the rules?” Isadora wasn’t surprised they already knew who she was. She did not wear any crests or sigils of her station, but she was exceedingly easy to recognize with her blue and white split dye that intertwined in a thick braid that fell to the small of her back. She threw herself down in the empty chair and leaned forward, making her best impression of a naïve girl with more coin than sense. “Talk me through it, if you don’t mind. I’ve never played before,” she said, adding an innocent smile to help sell the lie. The young man looked crestfallen as the other two men grinned wolfishly and began to explain the rules.

​Nearly half an hour later, Isadora was standing outside the tavern with the young man, tearing up a stack of promissory notes after handing him a bulging sack of coin. He was in the middle of his fourth profession of undying gratitude and servicewhen she cut him off. “Enough, you don’t owe me any kind of debt. Certainly not one you’d need to pay off by putting yourself in danger following me around. Just don’t swim with snakes in the future, eh? No one wants to play cards with someone half their age unless they think they can fleece ‘em.” The young man looked dejected, though whether it was due to her turning down his service or her chiding of his actions, she could not say. It may even be that he harbored hope of courting her up until this moment, as nearly all men available to marry attempted when they met her. Even if she had not been exceedingly beautiful, suitors would still have flocked to her in hopes of producing an heir that would inherit her station of Bull Exorcist. He professed his gratitude once more before turning away from her and heading down one of the many rope bridges, vanishing withinFemire’s ever present fog.

​Isadora thought about calling after him, immediately feeling guilty for not choosing her words more gently, but the cloud of ale in her head prevented her from finding the words.To hell with it, she thought to herself. Better to be disappointed than hauled up on tribunal for outstanding debts. Resolving that she had done the lad a favor, she turned and began to head down another swaying rope bridge, the echo of her boots on the smooth wooden planks drowned out by the cacophony of strange creatures that dwelled in the bog beneath the city. Fenmire Keep was a city constructed with no plan, built within a murky swamp upon great stilts lined with all manner of nasty runes designed to repel the various beasts of the bog. The numerous platforms were then connected by a veritable spiderweb of rope bridges. Most members of Sanctuary hated coming here due to the clouds of blood sucking insects that call the marsh home, as well as the sweltering humidity, but these things never bothered Isadora. Especially not when Fenmire had the best ale of all the citadels.

​Nearly halfway back to her quarters and unbuttoning the top button of her doublet to feel the slight breeze on more of her skin, she stopped abruptly as the faint sound of a child crying reached her. Cocking her head in the direction of the sound, she heard it again. Louder this time, it carried with it a singlewhimpered word that froze her blood in her veins: “Help.” Her feet moved faster than her mind, shaking the rickety bridge as her boots pounded up it in a dead sprint towards the child’s cries. Buildings blurred past her as she sprinted through one of Fenmire’s shantytowns searching for the source of the sounds. Boots skidding on the pine boards beneath her boots, she came around a corner and found the cries to be originating from a roofless home in a neighborhood square consisting of several houses still under construction. Barreling past a temporary construction forge, she hurtled into the door shoulder firstwithout breaking stride and tumbled inside as the door was unlatched and she met no resistance. The room inside was bare aside from a newly built hearth, within which huddled a small girl of about five or six years. Her knees were drawn up into her night shift with her arms wrapped around them as she rocked back and forth and cried.

​Isadora covered the distance to the girl and kneeled downin front of her, holding her hands up in a gesture of peace before speaking softly, “Hello, young lady. Shouldn’t you be in bed right now?” The girl looked up at her with scared brown eyes and tearstained cheeks, nodding wordlessly. “We’re going to go somewhere safe now, okay? I need you to come with me,” she said as she began to scan the room for threats. The clicks and clacks of many chitinous feet upon wood reached her as soon as the thought occurred to her. Stupid, she thought to herself through her drunken fog. I should’ve looked around before coming in.

Crouched in the doorway on a dozen spindly legs and closing off her only clear avenue of escape was a nasty creature known as a bogling, abominations with the lower halves and claws of crayfish with the torso and head being that of a bullfrogwith a great python’s fangs. It was not that large at only about four feet from nose to tail, but a bogling’s danger lied in its speed, stealth, and highly lethal venom. Its massive wet eyes regarded her in the moonlight as it cocked its head from one side to the other. Isadora called over her shoulder to the little girl behind her, “Just stay right there and close your eyes. This’ll be over before you know it.”

​Despite the confidence of her words, however, she did not feel that this was going to be an easy fight. Her armor had been left in her quarters for the night as well as most of her weapons. What need did she have of it within one of their impenetrable cities? Monsters were an ever-present plague outside of the walls, but within they were simply the subjects of stories. In her turquoise doublet equipped with only a dagger better suited for decorating her belt than ending a life, she was starting this battle at a disadvantage. Add to this the fuzziness in her head from a night of merriment and she was in for a rough go of it. She scanned the tools within the room for potential weapons as she dropped low into a fighting stance. Settling on a stonemason’s hammer lying next to the hearth, she scooped it up from the ground. She would have preferred the much larger hammer she saw leaning against the temporary forge outside, but this would have to do. She pivoted as she was standing, spinning and creating momentum to draw and throw her dagger in one fluid motion with her off hand. The bogling was already in motion, its many spindly legs beating out a staccato on the wood below as it scurried low across the floor, and her dagger buried itself in the far wall with a thunk as she misjudged the throw.

​With a wordless bellow of rage, Isadora ran at the monster. As they were about to collide in the center of the room, she pivoted and spun to the monster’s right side narrowly avoiding a pincer snapping closed with an audible snick that would have crushed her throat. Coming out of the spin, she brought the hammer down hard on the claw and heard a satisfying crackfollowed by a spray of tar black ichor upon the floor. Without raising the hammer, she pivoted her wrist ninety degrees and drove the hammer into the center of the bogling’s bulbous head.It flailed backward on its many legs, one pincer wildly snapping through the air while the other made feeble attempts to do the same. She backpedaled, using the brief moment to assess the situation. That’s a good start, she thought to herself, but nothing that’s going to put it down. How do you kill these bastards again?

​As much as she hated to admit it, she had a much harder time than an exorcist should remembering the strengths and weaknesses of every single horror that’s been documented in Fallow. That tends to happen when you spend more of your time in taverns and on the practice field rather than classrooms. The information proved even harder to grasp through the river of ale coursing through her mind, so she began reciting facts at random, hoping to clear her head and perhaps stumble intoremembering how to put this beast down. First and foremost, bogling skin secretes a paralytic neurotoxin absorbed through skin contact. Don’t let it touch you, she thought to herself as the monstrosity skittered across the floor towards her. Second, boglings live deep within the swamps and marshes where they ambush unwary travelers that stray into the wetlands. What’s this one doing in the middle of a citadel? Light on the balls of her feet, Isadora began to dance backwards as her hammer came from all directions, striking the beast’s claws with loud cracks every time they lashed out. Third, she remembered with growing trepidation, boglings always hunt in mated pairs.

​Changing direction so that she began to circle the boglingas she parried and retreated, she scanned the room as she attempted to angle her back towards the doorway, intent on moving the battle outside. You thrice damned idiot, she snarled at herself for forgetting that there was always more than one. Though her thoughts were becoming clearer and sharper, the alestill dulled her senses, and the knowledge of how to kill this monster still evaded her. Furiously wracking her brain and fending off the bogling’s advance, she was momentarily distracted as the little girl ran as fast her little legs would allow for the open door. Fuck! Fuck, I told you to stay put! Isadora swore to herself as she stopped moving towards the door, now intent on standing her ground to give the girl time to get out. She found herself unable to do so, pushed back as the bogling’sclaws lashed out again and again.

​The information came crashing back to her just as her back met the wall. Boglings have two organs that pump ichor through their bodies, one just behind the eyes and one in the center of their bellies. I need my fucking dagger. Isadora spared a glance to the doorframe where her dagger still quivered. Too far. She tried to resume her circling, but the bogling was having none of it. Left or right, it did not matter. Whichever direction she chose she was harried in the opposite. As if she was being penned in.

​She once again cursed herself for a fool as she recalled the final part of the missing information. Attacking in pairs, one bogling will engage and harry from below, driving the prey into an ideal location where the second may fall upon it from its hiding place in the branches above to deliver the killing blow.She glanced up to the ceiling just in time to see the second bogling fall from the rafters with fangs bared and pincers extended. With no option left to her, she planted her boots against the wall and launched into the bogling in front of her, feeling the sticky toxin burn her skin as the two of them crashed to the floor. Flailing in a mass of limbs, Isadora disentangled and rolled to her feet. She could already feel the numbness set in as she sprinted through the open door with the quick, clacking steps of the second bogling hot on her heels.  

​Clasping her hand around the dagger as she passed through the threshold, she spun away from it as her grip closed, using the momentum to wrench the dagger free and keep running. A sharp snap resounded through the air at the same time she felt the dagger cease resisting. That didn’t sound like wood, she thought to herself as her momentum carried her to the center of the square where the forge resided. Wheeling around and dropping low into a fighting stance with dagger low and hammer high, she could feel her fingertips beginning to lose sensation as the toxin seeped in through her pores. If she did not end this quickly, the boglings would. To her great annoyance she noticed that the dagger had snapped in half, leaving her with only about three and a half inches of steel to work with. She smiled grimly to herself. Enough to reach a heart, at least.

​The clacking of spindly, chitinous legs echoed through the fog as the boglings emerged. Bulbous and unblinking amphibian eyes locked onto her as the two monsters emerged, cocking their heads from side to side as they assessed their prey. With pincers gnashing and closing on empty air, the creatures began to advance on Isadora. To her extreme horror, the unsettling sounds of the boglings began to emanate from behind her as well. Turning sideways so that the original pair of boglings resided on her left, an additional bogling was emerging from an empty house without a door while another still was cresting over the peak of the homes shingled roof. Isadora’s hands fell limply at her side in defeat. I’m dead, she thought to herself. One bogling? No sweat. Two? A taller order, but one she could fill, even while drunk. But four? She would have had a hard time of it sober. There was no chance with her senses dulled and the poison setting in. All her talent, all her training, all her bluster: all of it was for not. She was going to die in the worst citadel of them all with no one around to write songs of her final stand. They would find her body in the morning and wonder what horrible monster could have slain one of the great exorcists.

​Sod that, she thought to herself. No one’s gonna have to wonder because their bodies will lie beside mine. There’s something freeing in accepting your own death that Isadora had never felt before, so fiercely had she clung to life. A reckless abandon that takes over you as you cease to be afraid of the greatest fear of all. The hardest part about killing boglings was destroying their hearts without becoming poisoned. Something Isadora needn’t worry about now. Focusing her assault on the one whose claw she had already cracked, she threw her mason’s hammer as she began to run towards the creature. It ducked the hammer as it arced end over end through the air, just as she had anticipated. Closing the distance, she drove her knee into the side of the crouched monster’s head with all the force that her momentum could generate. Her broken dagger was already rising and falling as it toppled back, four, five, six stabs in quick succession by the time it hit the planks, its eyes and chest a black ruin of wounds.

​Throwing herself flat on top of the now lifeless but still twitching body of the bogling, she heard the snick of a closing pincer where her head had just been. More of her skin began to burn as most of her body now made contact with the paralytic toxin. Too late to be worried about that now. Rolling off of the corpse and onto her back, she found herself staring up at the second bogling that had just tried to behead her. Howling with wordless battle rage, Isadora shot up just enough to wrap a hand around one of the bogling’s two large fangs and yanked down with as much strength as she could muster, which was failing fast. The yellow fangs buried into the planks below where the bogling began to flail in rage attempting to free itself. Before it could, Isadora flung herself onto its back. Grabbing the claw of the body next to them, Isadora jammed the pincer around the neck of the pinned bogling before raising the point of her elbow high, drawing up all of her weight with it. Dropping down as hard and fast as her body would allow, she slammed her elbow onto the claw and felt one side meet the other with a satisfying snick as the second bogling’s head rolled away. The body underneath her still jerked and flailed wildly, but was no longer the threat that the remaining two were.

​Rather than standing where she was and being an immobile target, she somersaulted forward and used the momentum to roll to her feet coming up next to the forge. Whipping around to face the remaining threats, she felt her head swim and nearly dropped her dagger as more strength left her hands. I’m running out of time. The front of her doublet and trousers was entirely drenched in bogling poison. How much time did she have left? Minutes? Seconds? The remaining two boglings were circling to either side of her as she sheathed her dagger and lifted the oversizedsmithing hammer next to her with both hands. Turning it in her hands, she felt the smooth grain of the meter long mangrove haft. Spinning it in her grip, she hefted the weight of the heavy iron hammer head fastened securely to the end. It wasn’t quite as heavy as her maul, and not nearly as wieldy, but it would have to do. Setting her feet wide and holding the hammer diagonally across her chest, she bellowed a hoarse roar in challenge through a rapidly closing throat at the two monstrosities.

​The boglings charged at her, responding in kind with horrible high-pitched screeching. Before they could close the gap, Isadora ran to her right. She intercepted the charging bogling with a straight thrust of the hammer, catching it full on in the center of its bulbous head. Satisfied that she had bought herself a second or two, she turned towards where she believed the second creature to  be closing on her, swinging the hammer with both hands as she did so. She misjudged slightly, the poison slowing her reflexes, and she caught the monster with the haft rather than the hammer. Even still, it sent it sprawling backwards struggling to get its many legs back underneath it. Isadora drew her dagger and began to descend upon it, but then a pain like she had never felt before erupted in her shoulder. The boglingbehind her had latched its toothy maw onto her, and the venom siphoning through its fangs felt like molten metal in her veins. Screaming, she plunged her dagger backwards directly between its large wet eyes. As the dagger found its mark, the jaws loosened just enough for her to wrench free. She felt something tear in her shoulder as she did so. Her left hand went slack, and the hammer thumped to the floor. Still howling and gripping the dagger with her other hand, she wheeled on the bogling and began plunging the dagger into its chest with strength she didn’t know she had left. The dagger was torn from her grasp as the final bogling collided into her side. Rolling across the bloody boards Isadora came to rest in the worst position possible; on her back with the bogling above her, maw open wide and dripping with venom. She did the only thing she could think to do as the swollen head darted forward with the intent of sinking those fangs into her throat. She lifted her left forearm with its now useless hand and jammed it between its jaws like a bridle on a horse.

Isadora went mad with pain as the fangs sank into her armand another dose of toxin was pumped into her veins. Her vision was beginning to flicker in and out, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe as her airways continued to swell. Flailing beneath this monster of the murk, her good hand scrambled for something to use as a weapon. The bogling began to pull its head backward as if it was going to rip her arm off, and she could feel tendons beginning to tear. Reaching out in one final grasp at survival, she felt her palm meet the smooth haft of the smithing hammer. Gripping and swinging desperately with all her strength, the hammer crashed into the bogling’slarge head. Releasing its bite to let loose a pained screech, Isadora used the gap created and brought her legs up to slam her feet into its abdomen. They connected with bone jarring impact and sent the monster tumbling off her. She managed to get up to her knees before it was on her again. She punched the head of the hammer upwards as they collided, smashing it into the bottom of the monster’s dripping maw. She had not been able to hit it hard enough to stun however, and a vice-like claw snapped shut around the handle. It snapped the top of the hammer off just above her hand, leaving her holding a jagged stake roughly two feet in length. Without hesitating, because every exorcist knows hesitation equals death, she slid her hand down the haft and attempted to drive the stake into the center of the creature’s chest. She did not have enough strength left to stab it fully through, so she did the only thing she could think of. Howling with a mixture of otherworldly pain and fierce battle rage, she launched herself into the bogling with all her weight, knocking them both to the floor and driving the stake deeper. Scrambling to her feet as fast as her poison-filled body would allow, Isadora grabbed the hammer head by it’s remaining foot of handle and raised it toward the heavens. Dropping all her weight into what might have been her last swing, the hammer crashed into the stake and drove it fully through the creature and four inches into the wood below. The bogling screeched and thrashed as it struggled to free itself. Isadora slowly limped around it in a circle until she came to stand above its head just out of reach of the snapping claws. She considered it for just a moment. Truly an ugly creature if she’d ever seen one. Shame a pack of them killed me. Then the hammer descended one final time upon the brow of the monster, and the night became silent.

Isadora fell backwards like a great felled tree, not even feeling the impact as the back of her head collided with the boards that were under her feet only moments ago. She found herself gazing up at the crooked yellow moon that, along with its red counterpart, delineated day from night in this hellish place with no sun. A thought came to her unbidden that forced a wheezing chuckle from her nearly closed lungs. The council is gonna be pissed I didn’t choose an heir. With the last bit of air fleeing her body in a dying laugh, Isadora lost consciousness.

She awoke to several unpleasant sensations at once. Between the toxins still turning her blood to magma, the alchemist inserting large needles and IVs into various veins, and the throbbing behind her eyes, it was hard to decide which was the worst. She tried to look about to gather her surroundings only to have her forehead pressed back down by the white cloaked alchemist. “Please do not move, Lady Pendradon,” came the muffled voice from within his expressionless roundwicker mask. They always gave Isadora the impression of talking to the bottom of a basket. “You should not even be alive right now, let alone awake and moving around,” he fussed as he prepared a vial of what she could only assume to be some type of antidote.

The ever-present rumble that set her head to pounding must mean that she was on a train. Panic began to set in at the edges of the pain. She couldn’t be on a train right now. Fenmire was the last stop on its track, which meant she would be heading away from the citadel that she needed to lock down and launch an inquisition in. Forcing the word out with tears pooling in her eyes from the pain, she croaked out a single word. “Fenmire.”

“Ser Ryu has already initiated lockdown and awaits Lord Ambrose on the first train in from Riventoll. None of which is your concern right now, and if you try to speak again, I’ll sedate you and deal with the bull’s fury later.” He continued about his grim work as Isadora’s head slumped back against the medical bunk she lay on. Sedation doesn’t sound bad actually, shethought to herself. It would certainly be preferable to stayingawake for the headache and jabs of needles. Besides, she had one last thing to ask. “The girl?” It came out more a whisper than anything else. The alchemist readied a syringe of sedative as he replied, “Safe and with her father,” but it would not be needed. Isadora had passed out before he had finished speaking.