Lineage

The horrendous weather hit us like a lobbed brick. Icy winds and foot-deep snow welcomed us into the green-less terrain with a slap to the face. The horses began to struggle after about a mile into the icelands, to which Luna called out to me to stop so she could equip the poor animals with the winter gear we’d backed for them before they froze to death. I myself wasn’t doing much better as while the leather protected my body brilliantly against the freezing winds, the material didn’t do much in the way of keeping me warm. The occasional glance over to Luna informed me that she was doing more than fine, her sitting position being upright and relaxed, her ability to raise her body temperature keeping her warm and toasty while I was sat freezing my balls off in the frozen-solid leather saddle I sat in.

It was after about two hours of trudging through the snow that Luna looked over to me with a worried expression, guiding her horse in front of mine and bringing us both to a stop. She reached over the side of her mount and into the leather saddlebag, retrieving what looked like an enormous, woven piece of brown cotton. I gave her a questioning look before she stopped her horse directly alongside me and urged me to lean forward. Once I did so she folded the piece of cloth into a large, triangular shape before draping it over my head, swinging it over and tying it into a knot by the side of my head, and then using her thumbs to tuck the loose fabric into a tighter form. The effect was instantaneous as the wind that was getting close to shearing my face off could no longer touch most of it, but my eyes were still stinging pretty painfully.

I gave her a quick thank you nod before inhaling, only noticing the sweet aroma that clung to the item: cherries, much like the perfume she wore while attending formal events, which lead me to think she must’ve stored a bottle in her saddlebag or had it spilled in there previously. She turned her horse back onto the trail, whipping the reins to get him to move before I followed suit, eternally grateful for the new piece of clothing she’d given me, despite the fact I had no idea what the hell it was. There was no conversation between us due to the lack of a willingness to wear our throats out by shouting over the wind, so the terrain we traversed was the only thing to keep my attention. Which it failed to do miserably. There was not a spot of forest, mountain, or frozen lake anywhere in the miles we rode, and the only sight I was greeted with was a vast prairie of frozen flatlands.

I knew from my brief studies of geography that Winter’s Maw itself was a mountainous area, but from the area we were currently riding through, I began to think we hadn’t even reached the borderlands yet. With a weighted sigh, I hunkered down lower into my saddle to try and warm myself up as we rode through the stunningly boring countryside. I began to think back to anything I knew of or had seen before now, such as proper sword care techniques, how to make a saddle out of many different materials, and the best chemical to use to strip limescale from a tiled bathroom. Anything I could think of that would make freezing to death on the back of a horse that had a nice ass than most women I’ve met before just a teensy bit more bearable.

And on top of being bored and cold, I was apparently delusional as I was now getting horny for horse ass. I wanted to call out to Luna to ask how much further we had to ride before we reached the border, but I wasn’t in the mood to waste my time and energy. There was no way she’d be able to hear me and from how she looked, I gathered she was already lost in her own thoughts. Probably not thinking about how nice my horse’s ass wa-

Get a fucking grip, Richter.

I was roused from my disturbing thoughts by Luna once again pulling her horse in front of mine. I looked up at her to see her pointing towards an enormous black cloud looming overhead, no more than a few hundred metres. She made a gesture of the cloud opening before pointing at the snow around us.

Blizzard.

I made the same gestures before giving her a thumbs-up to which she began to scan the horizon, looking for anything out in the distance to help shelter us from the storm. Her eyes wandered for a long moment before they fell onto something in the far distance to the west. She pointed to it, my eyes turning and squinting to be able to just barely make out a snow-laden forest. I turned to her with confusion in my eyes as a forest may help keep some snow off us, but not the cold air. She caught my glance before making a gesture for a bow and arrow.

Hunters.

I cocked an eyebrow for a long second before she made a gesture that involved her snapping her palms together with her fingers bending like teeth, each one intersecting the other.

Bear trap

Hunters?

Bear Hunters?

Bear trappers…

Trappers…

Trapper cabin!

Shelter!

We both simultaneously knew it was a long shot, the forest may have been far away, but it was easy to see it was extremely large once you noticed it on the horizon, and a large area like that would mean a lot of ground to cover in hopes of finding a single shack to wait out the storm in. Still, I’d rather die with hope in my heart than die cold and scared. She whipped the reins again, causing her horse to take off towards the forest, myself following after her as we began to gallop towards the distant area, hoping to get a little ahead of the approaching storm to get more time to search.

It turns out that we were insanely lucky on that hope for a trapper’s cabin, for instead of a single cabin, we came across what looked like an abandoned village. Several buildings were rotten and decayed with skeletons lining the ground after what looked like a bandit raid. Thankfully, the stable was undamaged and completely barren, having been left to rot on its own, the same being said of a two storey building that looked like it may have been the chief’s lodgings while the villagers were alive. The door was locked shut with a chain and a padlock, but Luna made short work of it by balling her fist and punching the lock straight off, snapping the metal mechanism and causing it to fall into the snow with a crunching sound, the chain being removed and slung some distance away.

We entered the building after hitching the horses in the stable and found that it had been completely ransacked during the raid. There were several skeletons, weapons, stray items of clothing, and all other sorts of litter strewn around the room we entered. We moved through the building, seeing more and more signs of brutal murder before Luna clicked her fingers, lighting the torch sconces in the room and breathing a sigh of relief, the wind outside now picking up into a howl as the snowstorm rolled in. The building itself was cold and barren, but it would suffice for a night’s dinner and rest before we headed back to the trail tomorrow. I pulled the weird-scarf-thing down off my head and unwrapped it, turning to Luna as she set down the pack she’d carried on her back the entire trip.

“Hey,” I said to her, getting her attention first. “What exactly is this thing?”

“It’s a shemagh,” she answered, walking over to me and patting me on the cheek as she explained. “It’s a tactical scarf that was invented in the Middle East as a kind of all-terrain, multi-use piece of survival equipment. I’ve taken one with me everywhere ever since they were created. I gave you that one so you’re face didn’t fall off from the cold.”

“Thanks,” I said in a grateful manner. “It worked really well.”

“It needs to,” she said, turning away and looking at me from the corner of her eye with a smirk on her face. “After all, that pretty face of yours is your only asset.”

“Ha,” I said, crossing my arms in an annoyed manner. “D’you write your own jokes or does an eight year old have a contract with you?”

“Ooh,” she chuckled. “Somebody’s grouchy.”

“Eh,” I said, turning away from her, looking out a glass-pane window to see the snowstorm packing down at this point. “Are the horses gonna be okay?”

“It’ll be nippy,” Luna said. “But the stable had a strong door and the clothing they’ve got should prevent them from freezing to death. But we better search around for a few stray blankets to put in a corner for them, the snowstorms out here can hit minus fifty Celsius on a good day.”

“Fucking hell,” I said in a shocked manner.

“Mhmm,” Luna nodded. “Let’s get looking. I’ll take the upstairs of this place, you search down here.”

“Right,” I said. The two of us split up, digging through the rooms and gently moving corpses off the shelves and drawers to try and search through them for anything to keep the horses warm. I managed to find several old hides that had been tucked away and missed by the bandits while I heard Luna make a surprised noise upstairs.

“What?” I asked, not needing to raise my voice much due to the quietness of the cabin.

“We have a bath,” she called back. “Quite a large one, too.”

“I’m guessing we’re gonna have to gather snow outside to fill it up?” I asked.

“Maybe… hold on a second,” she said. There was a loud sound of grinding wood followed by the howling winds and a louder sound of snow falling before another grind of wood finished off the noises. “Wow!”

“What?” I asked.

“There’s a hatch directly over the bath you can open to let all the snow on the roof fall into it,” she explained. “That’s really clever.”

“Huh,” I said, coming across a locked chest on the floor as I continued to look through the rooms on the ground floor. I knelt down and examined the lock; it was a basic pin and tumbler system that would be easy to pick. I stood up and headed back into the room where Luna had dropped her pack. After a brief rummage through the side pocket, I came across a few stray bobby pins thin enough to slip into the lock.

“Now for something to act as a tension wrench…” I said, patting myself down for something to use. The lock itself was quite a large one, as was the chest itself, and as a result, I could use something thicker to slide into the lock. I looked down at my left arm and remembered the blade Luna had given me. I extended the blade with a flick of my wrist and looked at the point. It would be too big to fit in a regular lock, but the size of the chest’s lock would make it more than big enough to fit it inside.

I headed back to the chest, kneeling down and sliding the blade in before reshaping the bobby pin into the proper shape and sliding it into the lock. I slowly turned the hidden blade in the direction the lock went, gently pushing up on the first pin until I heard it click, then turned the blade a little more to get it to lock into place in the specific cut of that pin before moving onto the rest of them. Being quite well-versed in lockpicking, I unlocked the chest after a matter of moments and opened the lid of the chest and peered inside. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see inside the chest, but what I did surprised me quite a lot.

It was a body… well, a skeleton at this point, that had been crammed into the box quite a long time ago. I stared at the mass of bones and decaying armour before deciding I was interested in solving this little mystery. I hefted the body out of the chest, the old bones creaking and being weighed down by the armour. Several stray bones fell out of sockets and back into the chest, but I was able to grab them and reposition where they were meant to be once they were laid out on the floor. I stood up and took a step back, looking over the body in its entirety, noting the type of armour they wore: a strong breastplate; a female’s by the extra room given for the breasts and the thinner waist. From the look of the skeleton, our lady was quite a tall one; over six feet tall at least.

“So, my lady…” I said, kneeling down and looking at the body. “What’s your story?” The first thing I started with was the arms. I looked at the bracers, seeing long, deep cuts in the right one. I slid the arm out and saw that there were indents on the bone from the sheer force of the impact.

“Battleaxe,” I said, adding it together. “And one hell of a swing, too. I wonder…” I crossed the two arms over each other in an “X” fashion and decided on that being correct.

“She’d tried to block it,” I sighed. “Probably an overhead strike, too. Poor girl. She’s lucky it didn’t slice straight through her.” I set the arms back down and looked at the breastplate again, seeing large, circular dents in the ribs and stomach area, about the size of a regular hammer’s head.

“So… besides our one big guy, it looks like our bandits weren’t that well-equipped,” I said, noting the lack of arrow scratch or scuff marks, sword slashes or pierces, and no other kinds of damage. “Still… any basic weapon and a large number of people is sometimes all it takes to kill someone.” I turned my eyes to the legs of the skeleton, using my hidden blade to cut open the insides of the trousers she wore and examine the bones themselves. There was a large fracture in her tibia, an injury that would’ve been extremely painful and would’ve stopped her from running anywhere.

“Looks like she didn’t put up much of a fight,” I said, examining the knuckles of the leather gloves the skeleton wore and noticing that, despite their age, they were in great condition. “Either our bandits weren’t wearing armour… or she didn’t throw a single punch.” I looked around the room again, seeing no signs of a sword that had been knocked aside nor a stray shield, meaning that she was either unarmed or the bandits had robbed her corpse after she’d died.

“But then why leave the armour?” I asked, scratching the back of my head. “Steel’s nowhere near as valuable as silver, but it fetches a good price nonetheless… especially this quality of steel.” So that made me lean more towards her being unarmed the entire time. It was strange to see what appeared to be a spearwoman, judging by the extra-sized arm holes in the breastplate, designed to allow the user to throw a spear with more power and control, unlike the much blockier armour that restricted movement like a knight’s or a pikeman.

“Well… that explains where the weapon went,” I shrugged. “Either lodged in a wall, a bandit, or the floor. Let’s see what regiment she belonged to…” I moved the skull slightly to see the neckline of the armour, examining the symbol branded into the armour: it was a lion standing on its hind legs with a ribbon in its mouth, standing back to back with a horse, both of them standing either side of a checkered shield.

“Huh,” I said, quite surprised at the symbol. “The Albony Legion? This far North? And on her own?” The Albony Legion was originally a group of rag-tag mercenaries that had sworn allegiance to Celestia and Luna during a spat with Spein about four hundred years ago. They were great soldiers during the war and afterwards were accepted as an official regiment in the Equestrian Army and have been used as a foreign invasion force that are specially trained in a mix of close-combat and survivalism in heated terrain. It was the reason why they wore such little armour on their lower and upper bodies: both to allow themselves to keep cool and not cook like pork in the oven in their armour and because it was quite difficult for an enemy to target the upper and lower body while getting the shit kicked out of them at close range.

But not only were they never trained to handle cold weather, they were never sent up North, never mind this far. I’d have to bring this up with Luna whenever she finished her search of the upstairs. I shook my head and went back to my unprofessional autopsy, opening the mouth of the skull and examining the teeth as a way to determine her age.

“Late twenties, from the looks of it,” I said before turning the skull over and seeing an enormous section of it having been smashed in. “And there’s the final blow. So… I’m guessing she fought outside before getting her leg broken, limped in here to hide from them, but they found out where she was. She was attacked by the guy with the battleaxe and tried to block it, then she was attacked by the guys with hammers, and judging from the way the hammer strikes are on the opposite side of her body to her broken leg, it caused her to spin and drop before being killed with a single, extremely hard blow to the back of her head.”

What a way to go. I stood up and dusted off my hand, sighing loudly before looking in the chest once again, noticing a few things that were underneath the body. I reached in and pulled out a leather-bound book, several rolled up pieces of parchment, an empty ink well which I discarded, and finally a yellowed, much thicker piece of parchment.

“What do we have here?” I asked, unclasping the journal and opening the page. It was written in very nice handwriting, definitely a woman’s, and from what I read, it seemed to be a detailed analysis of the eating, sleeping, and hunting patterns of one… Omega Narrowscale.

“You’re fucking kidding me?” I asked in horror, briefly unrolling one of the parchment pieces and seeing several drawings of the dragoness with what I presumed to be accurate measurement of wingspan, height, width, weight, and all other kinds of things. The second parchment piece contained maps and intel on her hunting grounds and sleeping areas. I didn’t even open the third, yellowed parchment before I bolted out of the room and up the stairs, charging into the room Luna had been in, seeing her sitting over the edge of the very large bath tub with her hand stuffed in the snow.

“What are you doing?” I asked, suddenly put off my excitement for a moment.

“Melting the snow,” she answered. “I’m gonna get it to water so I can heat it up for a bath later tonight. What’s the matter?”

“Right,” I said, giving my head a shake. “I just found something in a chest downstairs. I found four documents that have really in depth notes and observations about the Narrowscale.”

“What?” Luna exclaimed in surprise. “From who?”

“One of the members of the Albony Legion,” I answered. “I found her body locked in the same chest downstairs. She’d been attacked and killed by the same bandits that attacked this village.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I took a look at the body. She was a spearwoman who got injured in the fighting outside and retreated into this house, maybe to try and hide the documents on the dragon, but she was chased in and attacked.” I explained. “ She’d lost her spear outside in the fight and didn’t have anything to defend herself with, so they easily overpowered her. There was a guy with a battleaxe and several guys with hammers that overwhelmed her before one of them killed her with a blow to the head.”

Luna looked at me with a cocked eyebrow and smirk on her lips, getting me to ask her what she was grinning about.

“You figured all that out on your own?” she asked.

“Well… yeah,” I nodded. “I guess I did.”

“I’m very impressed, Richter,” she said with a genuine smile. “It's good to see you actually learned something from your schooling.”

“I only paid attention during the interesting stuff,” I shrugged. “I’ve never met Pythagoras. Sure he was a great guy and all, but I don’t give a fuck about how you use a square’s hypotenuse to find the sum of the other square’s sides.”

“You seem to know the theory, are you sure you didn’t learn that?” she asked.

“Yeah, positive. There’s a world of difference between remembering what something is and how to do it as opposed to actually doing it,” I said. “After all, all I need to do is have sex with all my female relatives while they’re in their goddess forms and everything’ll be hunky-dorey.”

“Fair point,” Luna nodded. “Anyway, show me what you’ve found downstairs while I cook us a meal for tonight.”

“Are you sure you don’t wanna read it while I cook?” I asked.

“Sorry, Richter,” she said with a chuckle. “I’m in the mood for something nice and homemade, not a slightly-charred kilogram of venison with salt unevenly spread on it.”

“It gets the job done all the same, Luna,” I said, slightly offended by her remarks about my cooking.

“I know, but sometimes you want something enjoyable, not essential,” Luna countered. “But we’re not discussing that tonight.” With that, she walked out of the room and downstairs, using her magic to hover down a large amount of spare bedsheets, torn curtains, and ruined clothes from the side of the door.

“While I’m cooking, you go out and make a warm bed for the horses,” she said. “It’ll be easier for us both if we get our chores out of the way and can focus on food tonight.”

“Right,” I nodded, hearing the wind pick up again.

It took us both about twenty minutes to finish our jobs and soon Luna was plating up a delicious smelling joint of beef she’d cooked and seasoned herself. My mouth watered at the sight of it and I could barely wait to dig in.

“It’s one of the benefits of being superhumanly strong,” Luna said as she stirred a pot of boiling melted snow to make it safe to drink from. “While other people to carry packs of over forty kilograms for a long time with just the bare essentials, I can carry well over three hundred without breaking a sweat. It usually lets me bring along a lot of things to make the trip easier. Salted meat, herbs, and spices are a few of those things.”

“As well as hair-cleaning products and perfume?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Luna nodded. “Even I can be a little vain at some points. So, are you gonna show me these documents of yours?”

“Yeah,” I nodded, handing them over to her and allowing her to examine them. “I was thinking we should put the body to rest.”

“Mhmm,” Luna nodded. “She did die in a pretty horrible way.”

“And I’m really not in the mood to deal with an angry Sorrow-Wraith right now,” I sighed.

“We’ll bury the body in the morning once the storm’s over,” Luna said. “If it ends tomorrow, that is.”

“How long do these things usually last for?” I asked.

“Normally a day, so we might just ride out the tail end on it,” Luna answered. “If we’re unlucky, and I have a sneaking suspicion we might be, these storms can go for months. And if we get unlucky and it’s a long storm, I’m tethering the horses together and you’re riding in my saddle with me.”

“Why?” I asked in confusion.

“Because you’ll freeze to death if you don’t,” Luna said. “If that storm doesn’t let up, we either stay here and run out of food, or we try to make as much ground as we can on the horses before they freeze to death.”

“So we better be hoping to the high heavens this thing dies during the night?” I asked.

“Mhmm,” she said. “But let’s not worry about that now. Dig in and we can discuss what you found.”

“Right,” I nodded, cutting into the beef and eating a piece, the delicious, well-done meat setting off fireworks in my head. “So… I think a good question to start with is: how big is she?”

Luna unrolled the parchment and examined the sketches, giving a very detailed look of the dragoness down to the shape of her scales. She wasn’t a bulky dragon, like I’d expected her to be. While she was nowhere near as slender as her eastern water counterparts were, she was still a slender being. There were several sketches of her sitting in different positions, sometimes lying on her side, other times sitting like a chicken, or other times picking her teeth with her claws.

I was finally able to see what colour she was now: white and ice blue. She kept the the usual western colour standards: her body and belly being two different colours, with her body being white and the much stronger scales on her stomach being an ice blue. Her eyes were the same piercing ice blue as her stomach with her horns being a sleek, sharp set of weaponry she could use to impale something on. Her paws were quite slender also, long fingers used for gripping and grabbing things, with strong legs, packed with muscle under the scales as she needed them to be strong to handle the impact of landing from flight.

A strange detail I noticed was her tail and the fact it lacked any kind of spike or jagged edge to use as weaponry, and was instead a simple tail that started off quite thick before thinning out and coming to a point. Her wingspan seemed to be quite impressive, the bones and joints visible against the much thinner, canvas-like skin her wings were made of. Her face was decidedly feminine, much smoother, thinner, and cuter than a male’s would’ve been, the scales on her face seeming much smaller and packed tighter together with a crest of on her forehead in the shape of a Y.

“Wow,” Luna said with an impressed nod. “She’s quite the looker, isn’t she?”

“What d’you mean?” I asked.

“Do you not think she’s gorgeous?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “She’s an animal.”

“Oh, such naivety,” Luna chuckled. “If you’re going to take on your princely duties, you’re going to have to start appreciating animals more.”

“Why?”

“Because, as alicorns, we have our special ability to impregnate or carry the child of any species on the planet, remember?” she asked. “And as one of our duties as rulers, we have to keep an eye on the population of certain animals in our kingdom. And once that animal is put on the endangered species list, we often… intervene, for lack of a better word.”

“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I asked in disbelief.

“I wish I was,” she sighed. “As a male, you just need to worry about impregnating an animal, whereas Celestia and I… we have a much more taxing experience with this.”

“Have… have you done it before?” I asked.

“More times than I’d like to admit,” she sighed, resting her head in her hand. “The worst one for me was the Afgallopstan Lake Wolf, as they have a really bad habit of biting the backs of their mate’s necks to keep themselves on. Though Celestia still does hold the record for the hardest one to… withstand.”

“Which was?” I asked.

“That would be the pride of our nation, the Blue Callorian War Horse,” she said. “It was a three thousand pound, eight foot monster of an animal that only Celestia could handle without suffering serious internal injuries.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that.

“On the plus side, she was able to save a species from extinction due to a genetic defect,” Luna said. “And on the negative side… she wasn’t able to sit down properly for at least a week.”

“Huh,” I said, ever thankful that I was both straight and had a dick. “That must’ve sucked.”

“Indeed it did,” she nodded, eating a piece of her beef. “But anyway, back on topic. The Narrowscale, from what I can tell, might be as dangerous as she is beautiful, because she’s a big one.”

“How big are we talking?” I asked in a worried manner.

“From the size measurement in the drawings, from head to toe, she’s about… fifty feet tall, not counting the raised wings,” Luna said. “She’s about seventy feet long when she straightens herself out and is about as wide in terms of wingspan.”

“Great… so I’m guess I’m not gonna be making her day any time soon,” I growled.

“Not entirely,” Luna countered. “More powerful dragons often have the ability to shapeshift into different sizes and forms. So if you do manage to get into her panties, just make sure she shrinks down a lot first.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot they could do that.”

“Indeed,” Luna chuckled. “Right. Hurry up and eat, then we’ll go over these a little more before calling it a night. Hopefully the storm lets up through the night or else we’re in trouble.”