5/16 evening
I noticed that there wasn't actually much food left in my inventory, which was a damn shame and might actually be a problem if it stayed that way. Tony was relying on that food. I told Dremuus to make hunting a priority while he traveled towards the mission beacon, especially since he'd need to call in Abby to raise the dead dwarf once he got there. In the meantime, I also gave Auffrey, Prudence, and Tessa orders to go to any kind of market or provisioner they could find and buy budget produce. The cheap stuff that's about to go bad; the inventory would preserve it long enough to be useful.
While I was eating Redridge Goulash one handed and considering culinary logistics, I checked my map. I had multiple people traveling today. Caledra seemed like she'd be to the Quel'Lithien lodge by tomorrow morning. Tony must have been flying well, because he was already in the mountains on the border between Tirisfal Glades and Silverpine forest. He wasn't moving right now but was in good health. Hopefully that meant that he was just camping for the night on some secluded cliffside. Lividia was doing flyovers of the coast, but apparently hadn't found her prey just yet. Doris was moving quickly towards Feathermoon Stronghold, currently flying over the Thousand Needles. Basically, everything was going alright.
Soon after I finished dinner, Lady Katrana Prestor arrived. I could feel enough of my ass to actually sit up a bit, so I could greet her with a modicum of dignity. The meeting would still be at my sickbed, but she was literally my loveslave; I didn't need to impress her.
"Just the dragon I wanted to see. We have a lot to talk about, big and small. Anywhere you'd like to start, or am I setting the agenda?"
She looked at me fondly, adoringly even. That spell was still going strong. "Well. I think it would be best for me to know what you think is important to address. I can tailor my responses to that."
"Alright. Elephant in the room. Your brother. Do you think you can take him down or get him to wear a necklace?"
"No. He doesn't trust me anywhere near enough for that, and its rare that I speak to him in person. What method did you use to draw me in? It seems to have worked quite well. Could it be repeated?"
I made a so-so gesture. "Yes and no. I used an item which is destroyed when used to get a hold of you. I have a method to get another one, and we might do that, but it will take a while. I'd need to take over a certain Scourge stronghold. It's called Caer Darrow, if that means anything to you."
"It does. Not my specialized area of expertise, but I'm familiar with the Barov family in broad strokes. They were too rich to ignore."
"So yeah. We need to take and hold that island to get another tantric rod, preferably with a member of the family still in control; if that happens, we will also get a rather powerful addition. If we get particularly lucky, we might be offered another rod for a different job, but the higher end missions that offer things like that seem to be getting harder."
"Hmm. So not an immediately actionable plan."
"What do you think our chances would be if we tried to fight him directly? Full force of the Stormwind army behind us, Varian leading from the front, all that jazz." She gave me a confused look at the last part, but it wasn't hard to guess what "all that jazz" meant given the context.
"As we both are now? It would be a slaughter. I've done my job well here; Stormwind's armies are less than a third of what they once were, and more than half of its recruitment pool has gone to the Defias. Further, if a full army were to march upon Blackrock Mountain, my brother has the Blackrock Clan under his sway, and several powerful dragons. In an open field like the Burning Steppes, he'd annihilate your forces with ease."
Ouch. "I mean. We will have Ysondre too, soon."
"Ah. That's how the necklace works? Good. She should be able to defeat one of his lieutenants, but her injuries would be very severe."
"Hey. She almost took you down."
Onyxia sighed. "I'm well aware of that. My brother surrounds himself with specialists. The three idiots he keeps at his side are much smaller than me or Ysondre, but very dangerous. Nefarian has augmented their breath with something he calls shadowflame; he's been coy about the details, but he's been lording over me about how effectively it can destroy most things that are not functionally immune to heat. I am, Ysondre isn't."
"Ouch." I remembered this actually, now that she brought it up. Shadowflame was a special attack a few dragons in Nefarian's raid had which basically melted anyone hit by it, nearly inevitable death unless they had a specific piece of gear equipped. That piece of gear? A cloak made from Onyxia's scales. I was having difficulty thinking of humane ways to harvest those in any meaningful quantity, so I felt inclined to avoid a straight punch up with those dragons. Maybe once I finished living the Emerald Dream, so I could afford a few casualties.
I considered the options. "I'm not seeing any way to get him out of the way short term. I have a few things that could probably remove him from the picture if we could get in close," I was mostly thinking about the Equivalent Exchange, "but it doesn't sound like he's the kind of brother that would let his guard down if you went in for a hug."
That surprised a laugh out of her, an unexpectedly cute one. "No, he'd know I was up to something immediately."
"Shame. So, I guess we change tack. How do we keep him blissfully unaware that you've been subverted? I imagine you will need to be disguised for any fights with the other green dragons."
"Absolutely. I'll need to bring in my body double for those events as well."
"You have a body double?"
"Obviously." She smiled just a bit condescendingly, "I've been at this for more than a decade, Erich, and occasionally I need to do things as myself. I can't always be gone suddenly whenever Onyxia is spotted. I found some nobody, turned her into a dragonspawn, and taught her how to be Katrana well enough to hide my absences when necessary."
"Great. I might actually end up expanding her role so I can use you more. Remind me to come to the castle and extract love confessions from all of your spawn once Lillibeth is done with her assignment. Anyway, I intend to clean up the kingdom of Stormwind. I want the war with the Defias to end, I want to clear out Duskwood, and I want Redridge under control. Can we make that happen without pissing off Nefarian? I suppose more importantly, what will he do if we do end up making an enemy of him?"
"You remember what I said, about him having his own army and his own dragons? He asked me to deal with Stormwind for him, and I agreed to do so as part of our alliance. If he thought I was compromised, he'd probably start acting against us with deadly force. Knowing him, he might be inclined to wait until he has some grand new experiment to unleash, but I have seen enough of his work to know how deadly a prototype would be. I assume you don't want a nearly invulnerable multiheaded dragon attacking Stormwind?"
"You would be right." We stewed in silence for a minute, while I tried to convince martial or communication talent to give me something to work with. I'm quite proud to say that it was my own idea that we went with, though covert talent helped me flesh it out. "What if… you told him all about it?"
She got a thoughtful look. "Feed him some narrative so he thinks it's all according to plan?"
"Exactly. Would he object if you consolidated power instead of destroying Stormwind?"
"He wouldn't like it, but I doubt he'd escalate to violence over it. He just wants to be left alone to play with his toys, when you get right down to it. If he thinks I've got the perimeter handled, he won't look too closely. I'd need to provide him with explanations though."
"Easy. You have put your children, or maybe dragonspawn, in charge of everything. Westfall is easy; you could just claim you used Vanessa to depose her father. Then we reconcile with the Defias by giving them land and legitimacy, installing a bunch of new nobles loyal to you."
She nodded, getting excited, "and in Redridge I installed you. You've been focused mostly on the gnolls so far, right?"
"Right. And to top it off, you are putting a pet necromancer at Raven Hill, replacing Morbent Fel. I'm also working on taking over the Darkshire council. That's most of the major regions of the kingdom under 'your' control."
"It needs work, but the idea has potential. Of course, I'd need to figure out some manner of end goal. He won't believe I've just suddenly started to like playing house with the humans."
"How does your family feel about trolls? The Gurubashi are just to the south."
"We don't really have much of an opinion. They are steeply in decline; not much of a threat to us, but quite entrenched."
"So would Nefarian believe you if you told him you wanted to smash two powerful kingdoms together, destroying both of them?"
"He might. It would also put a distinct endpoint on my time here. Yes, I think I could make that work for six months or so?" Oh that would be easily enough time.
"Let me know if you need any special resources. Necklaces are always in short supply, but I could probably spare some for you and Vanessa if you need to get some loud voices in line for the peace deal. Oh. There was one more thing; a big one. I need to keep the emperor of the dark iron dwarves safe, and eventually destroy their god, Ragnaros. Any thoughts on how to do that without attracting unwanted attention?"
She pinched the bridge of her nose. "You need to destroy the elemental lord of fire?"
"Uh. Probably not actually necessary to kill him. Just drive him away? Liberate the Dark Irons from his control, preferably so they can come under my control."
She gave me a long, hard look. "Lucky for me and unlucky for you, I can't really participate in that without drawing my brother's ire. Opening formal diplomatic channels with Thaurissan would absolutely be acting against my brother's interests. They are at war with one another, at least loosely."
"Really? I thought you just said that he'd trounce us, but he has a whole enemy city right under him?"
"Tunnel fighting does not play to the strengths of dragons. Further, he uses the dwarves as test subjects. If he makes something he's particularly proud of, he will send it down to the depths and track its progress. More importantly, he has a tendency to look at the lesser races as more like pests than foes. If the dwarves pushed him too far, I'm sure he'd wipe them out." She rolled her eyes. "I had to persuade him that the Alliance was a threat worth considering, and when I did his first idea was to just raze Stormwind immediately, on the assumption that it would be easy. I have to admit he's more powerful than I am, and in some ways more intelligent, but he's incredibly dense."
Hearing his sister speak of him that way, I wondered if I had the wrong idea of Nefarian. I'd been thinking of him mostly as some physical, magical, and mental powerhouse. Which probably still applied, to be fair. But more aspects were coming together and painting an odd picture.
He had a flair for the dramatic, having prepared spells and pithy one liners ready just in case he was attacked by adventurers. He was obsessed with his own superiority. He considered the outside world to be an annoying distraction. He spent all his time tinkering with his special interests. I couldn't think of a single thing he ever canonically accomplished outside of the walls of his home, despite his immense power.
I had an involuntary mental image of Nefarian bitching on some kind of hypothetical magical bioengineering message board, ranting about someone else's idiocy, and it fit just a bit too well. He was still dangerous, I still wanted him to ignore me for as long as possible, but he suddenly felt a lot less oppressively scary. I could handle a dragon that I could imagine getting into arguments on Reddit.