Rhelea was an ugly thing, the large town vaguely resembling an irregular six-spoked wheel. Like so many of humanity’s settlements, it was sat astride an intersection where two branches of the ancient Old Roads met. This effectively split the large, walled town into four discrete sections, which were then divided again by the Pollum River that flowed down from the Dragonspines to the west through to the east on its three-thousand-mile journey to reach the ocean. The Pollum’s journey would see it first merge with the Aregium River and pass through the capital city of Helion, long before it entered and exited the neighbouring kingdom of Tolis. 

Sprawling terraces of squat stone buildings sprouted out from around a large town square, where Typhoeus could see taller, grander structures looming over the other comparatively humbler streets surrounding them. From afar, rows upon rows of poorly arranged roads could be seen where houses and shops alike leaned haphazardly towards one another in blatant defiance of sensible urban planning. The streets below were cramped, filled to the brim with the thronging masses as they hurriedly went about their daily duties, the people as diverse in the tones of their skin as they were in the types of clothing they chose to cover themselves with. Rhelea had built itself up rather than out, the large stone walls that ringed the settlement providing a stark barrier between the inner and the outer city.

Inside the walls, every building spanned at least three stories, the dubiously constructed structures rising up to peer out over the thick stone walls where the residents could then look down in judgement upon the outer city where the aesthetic was considerably less impressive. The whole place stank, for one thing, Typhoeus didn't need his skill [Sovereign's Perception] to tell him that. All of those humans living together, shitting, and sweating in such close proximity was by far the most disgusting thing that he had ever witnessed. The city itself lacked any kind of sophisticated drainage system, and while the wide, flowing river running through the town certainly helped, it didn’t do nearly enough to wash away the filth or the smells that lingered cloyingly above the town’s cobbled streets, with the stench of the outer city being offensively unpleasant to Typhoeus’s draconic sensibilities.

As they walked through the outskirts of Rhelea, the quality of the buildings wasn’t much better than the smell, with individual residences and shopfronts looking like they would fall over in the face of a stiff breeze. The materials involved in their construction were clearly scavenged from elsewhere around and below the city as houses were built from a mishmash of ancient bricks and stones, some of which were clearly stolen from the town's stout walls. It wasn’t just the buildings that were the worse for wear; the people who made this part of town their home were also suffering as low-level, gaunt-faced humans formed a dense crowd along the edges of the Old Road leading towards the walls where men, women, and children hurried to follow the small procession of high-level adventurers passing through the slums. Each one of them desperately scrambled for the occasional bronze coin thrown from Caeber’s hand.     

"It's so busy..." Typhoeus said, trailing off, already feeling uncomfortable with the lingering eyes from the gathered crowd that seemed to follow him as he travelled through the outskirts of the city. His inherited memories had shown him what Rhelea had looked like in previous ages, and he had thought they’d prepared him, but this squat, ugly city that was little more than a pale shadow of humanity's long-lost majesty was more than enough to send shivers of anxiety running up his spine. The much-reduced reality so much more overwhelming than the grandeur of the half-faded memories from his distant ancestors.

"I suppose so, if you're used to farming villages, but Rhelea is just a very large adventuring town—a small city like Nauronos or Mushama to the east easily puts Rhelea to shame," Caeber said offhandedly as he walked forwards through the crowd that parted reverently before him.

"I see," Typhoeus said, his eyes blinking with alarm as the big warrior patted him on the back in what was probably meant as a measure of reassurance but instead caused him to startle.

“Sorry," Caeber quickly apologised. “I forgot about the no-touching thing. Are you alright?”

“Yes, I am fine. It’s just more people than I am used to," Typhoeus replied earnestly. His eyes shifted uncomfortably as he compulsively scanned the crowd for potential threats. It was a ridiculous thing to do when he thought about it; the adventurers he was currently travelling with were easily the most significant danger he had ever been exposed to since his exile.

“It’s okay, you’re perfectly safe. Just don’t come through this part of town on your own after dark, not until you have significantly more levels anyway. The people here are desperate and will often resort to violence if they think it will lead to a hot meal," Mara warned, her face contorting into a frown while her eyes moved over the sea of hungry-looking faces.

“Inside the walls ain’t much better either, only difference is the criminals there have the money to bribe the guard to look the other way after they stick you," Riyoul helpfully added, making an exaggerated stabbing motion with a long knife that appeared in his hand seemingly without him needing to draw it.

Typhoeus was growing increasingly nervous by the second, and not because he was afraid of being stabbed by the starving poor. Fooling the five adventurers had been relatively easy, if extremely dangerous, but to fool thousands, well, that was another matter entirely. It would only take one of them to expose him, and [Alternate Form] was his lowest levelled skill by far. Sure, it had rapidly levelled up to 36 during the long week he had spent travelling through the foothills with Caeber’s team, but it was still dangerously low considering how much he was relying on it for his continued safety.

As they made their way through the outskirts of the Rhelea, they continued to pass by various dilapidated shopfronts and peculiar-smelling businesses before they eventually joined a long line of better-dressed humans who were waiting their turn to pass through the thick wooden gates and head into the town proper. The queue shuffled forwards slowly, giving Typhoeus plenty of time to observe his surroundings and the people filling them. The line primarily consisted of other adventurers, presumably returning from their various hunts outside of the settlement; they slowly shuffled forwards towards the gates with their trophies and hard-earned loot in tow. Interspersed throughout the queue were wagons piled high with goods and accompanied by surly-looking guards in well-worn armour who gave Typhoeus the evil eye whenever his gaze lingered on their goods. [Sovereign's Perception] and his draconic instincts quietly insisted he go to extraordinary lengths in order to add several items from the merchant’s wares to his hoard.

Springing up alongside the queue were a variety of food stalls and other opportunistic vendors hoping to earn some coin from the bored members of the line. They were hawking everything from freshly squeezed fruit juice to vaguely defined cubes of meat on a stick, although Typhoeus’s refined nose had no trouble identifying the meat in question as an interesting blend of canis, rodent, and goblin. When it was their turn to pass through the city’s gates, the adventurers with Typhoeus merely flashed a flat bar of runically engraved iron at the guards as they walked through. When Typhoeus tried to follow in their wake, one of the men stopped him with a slanted halberd that blocked his passage along with a gruffly voiced challenge.

"We don't tolerate vagrants in Rhelea. There’s a toll of one chalkoi for entry," the guard announced, more than loud enough for everyone nearby to hear over the background noise of the busy street.

"But they didn't have to pay!" Typhoeus protested, gesturing to Caeber and the others who had until now accompanied him.

"They're iron-plate adventurers, you are not—now hand over a chalkoi or scram, you’re holding up the line," the guard said unsympathetically.

Typhoeus didn't have a chalkoi to his name. The clothes that he had been gifted with, while well made, were clearly far too big for him and he wasn’t hopeful that they contained a hidden stash of wealth that he had missed up until now. It didn’t stop him from patting his pockets in frustration, hoping to find a loose coin that had otherwise escaped his draconic senses.

"Lowry, don't be an ass. She’s obviously with us. Just let her through," Enora said. The mage’s face crinkled up with frustration as she looked back at the altercation from the other side of the gate.

"The law’s the law, and I have a duty to keep the streets of Rhelea clear from vagrants and other… distasteful elements," the guard said, his nose wrinkling. "Your adventurer's plate lets you through, but if you want to take a whore from the slums past these gates, you'll have to pay the council's tax."

Enora opened her mouth to protest further, but then Caeber produced a small, battered coin and flipped it to the guardsman, who deftly snatched it out of the air. 

"It's just a chalkoi. Can we move on already?" Caeber said as he practically pulled Enora away from the gatehouse and Typhoeus was allowed through.

Typhoeus was somewhat bemused by the entire interaction, not quite understanding why anyone would care about anything made from bronze. It was coin whose only use, as far as he could tell, was for padding out the hoards of unscrupulous lesser dragons who were unable to smell metals.

After passing through the narrow gate, the street immediately opened up into a loud and rambunctious thoroughfare. If Typhoeus was nervous about the quantity of humans before, now he was feeling more than just a little overwhelmed. The pressing crowd on all sides of him made him suddenly feel faint and unable to draw a proper breath. He fought against an urgent and unanticipated need to revert back to his true form so that he could fly away as fast as he could, but to do so now in the company of so many adventurers would be tantamount to suicide.

Sensing his mounting panic as he took a small involuntary step backwards away from the crowd, Mara clasped his arm in hers and guided him forwards. His initial displeasure at being touched was replaced by the comfort that he received from the compassionate gesture. This time as they moved through the densely packed streets of inner Rhelea, the town’s occupants neglected to make space for the high-level party. While the adventurers’ levels remained an impressive 120 levels or so above the average citizen on the streets, the attitudes—not to mention the dress sense of the inner residents—was considerably bolder than that of the humans living outside of the town’s stout walls, and the adventurers had to form a rough diamond shape around Typhoeus in order to keep the bustling crowd at bay.

Clutching Mara’s arm tightly in his, he walked down the busy street for what felt like hours, the well-guarded merchant wagons slowing the foot traffic around them to a crawl. The crowd steadily thinned out as they got farther away from the gates until finally, after turning onto a much-quieter side-street, Typhoeus felt like he could breathe normally again. 

"Typh, can you relax your grip on my arm a bit? I can't feel my fingers," Mara said, her usual conciliatory tone tinged with pain. 

"Sorry," he said, immediately relaxing his arm as he mentally chastised himself for nearly breaking his cover. He was supposed to have 0 strength, but in his panic he had forgotten and squeezed her far too tightly; the healer must have a relatively high strength score of her own and a comparably low intelligence, since she hadn’t questioned his abnormally tight grip.

Now that the streets were relatively clearer, Typhoeus could finally see what the town had to offer without overly relying on his perception skill. Shopfronts lined the roads, each one prominently displaying a wooden sign painted in bright primary colours with artistic depictions of the services offered within. The lack of written signage was apparently for the benefit of the largely illiterate population, a group that Typhoeus despairingly realised included him—this era of human’s written language had degenerated far from the written languages of old. 

After even more walking, they eventually came to a quieter part of the town, where the streets were filled with much larger grey stone buildings, each one showcasing ornate carvings, both runic and mundane, that covered the exterior facades. Judging from the sheer amount of gold and silver he could smell wafting out from within these houses, Typhoeus could only assume that they were in the wealthier district of Rhelea, where the more powerful humans had essentially taken the best lairs for themselves. The adventurers came to a stop outside a larger-than-average structure with a sign depicting a foaming flagon superimposed over a comfortable-looking bed. The building smelled substantially worse than all of those surrounding it, with intense scents of smoky incense that desperately tried to cover up the all-too-human stench of sweat, alcohol, and urine. Typhoeus could already hear the loud sounds of human laughter and clattering plates echoing out from inside despite the early hour. The noise only increased as Caeber opened the front door, his posture already relaxed as if anticipating the long-awaited luxuries within.

Typhoeus looked around at the party, with obvious displeasure plainly displayed on his all-too-human face, but much to his dismay, all he could see around him was a mixture of relief and longing in their collective gazes.

"Thank the divines! We're finally home," Myorik said, his words hammering the final nail in the coffin of Typhoeus’s despair as the stout warrior followed Caeber before stopping short to hold the door open for the rest of the party. The small gesture of chivalry went unnoticed and unremarked.

"I could literally kill for a bath!" Enora proudly stated, eyeing Mara accusingly as she entered the tavern. 

"Come on, Typh, we'll get you cleaned up after Enora is finished with the bath. Until then, we can feed you something with spices in it other than salt and paprika," Mara said, her criticism causing Riyoul, the group's unofficial cook, to pipe up loudly in his own defence.

"What! You can't just insult my cooking like that. She loved my cooking, didn't ya, Typh?" Riyoul smiled mockingly.

"It was very pleasant, although I often found it to be a little undercooked," Typhoeus said as he was quickly ushered inside the building by Mara.

“What does she know? She was literally fed by a dragon for a year!” the rogue exclaimed in mock outrage before firmly closing the inn’s doors behind him.

Straight through the sturdy-looking doors, the building opened into a large, open-planned taproom where a row of wide oaken casks dominated the far wall separated from the main floor by a thick wooden bar topped with a polished copper counter. Behind that was a stout-looking man dressed smartly in sombre linens; he was of an average height, with a close-cropped beard that was in the process of turning grey as the white hairs that had sprouted around his temples steadily crept down into his jawline. The hardwood floor had its boards arranged in a pleasant-enough pattern of contrasting dark and light woods, but the genteel aesthetic of the bar was ruined by the jarring presence of the thick, often repaired furniture that had been patched one too many times to maintain the room’s upper-class atmosphere. More-intimate booths lined a sidewall on the left, the red-leather-upholstered-seating area leading to a stone staircase that both ascended and descended from the ground floor.

The room was half full of people, and judging by their classes, this inn catered primarily to adventurers. However, none were close to Caeber and his companions when it came to their level or the quality of their enchanted gear. Their conversations paused briefly as the adventurers entered the tavern, the patrons' eyes tracking their progress across the large hall, but soon enough their eyes were drawn back to their own tables as they resumed their evening.

"This, Typh, is the veritable jewel of Rhelea, ‘The Huntsman's Rest’ is the finest drinking establishment on this side of the Aregium River. The drink is never watered, the food is always hot and most importantly of all, the women are loose and of questionable morals," Riyoul said with a flourish.

"What does he mean by loose and questionable morals?" Typh asked Mara with a raised eyebrow.

"It means he's a lecherous idiot who is volunteering for latrine duty next time we camp out," Caeber interjected. "Don't worry about it. Julian, the innkeeper here, is a good man, and you can trust him not to take advantage. I'm going to talk to him about your circumstances while we get ourselves squirrelled away."

Riyoul had the decency to at least pretend to look embarrassed at Caeber's rebuke, and he quickly excused himself under the pretence of getting drinks, although Typhoeus noticed that this required talking to a rather attractive serving girl rather than approaching the empty bar. Everyone else politely ignored how the rogue then flirted with the woman, the high-level adventurer regaling her with questionable stories about his own exaggerated heroics. Caeber also made himself scarce while he went to talk to Julian behind the bar, and despite Mara trying her best to engage him in small talk, Typhoeus was able to catch snippets of the warrior’s conversation as he described Typhoeus as a deeply traumatised, unstable girl who had been regularly assaulted by a monster for over a year. The warrior briefly returned just as food was finally being served, only to depart minutes later for the Adventurers Guild to, in his own words, ‘sort some things out.’

"So why are you helping me? I thought adventurers were all about killing monsters and stealing their treasure," Typhoeus asked as he fumbled with using his spoon on his bowl of stew for the fourth time.

"Well, I wouldn't say that," Mara said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. "But when we find someone in need, we do our best to help them, especially when it costs us so little to do so."

"Besides, even with the dragon running away with his hoard, we'll still make a pretty good profit from this outing," Myorik said after nodding along to Mara’s words.

"What do you mean?" Typhoeus said with a wavering voice. Panic rose in his throat at the thought of having left behind valuables for the adventurers to find.

"Well, the dragon left behind a small fortune in bronze coins that will keep us in ale for a few months, but more importantly, there was an entire stack of relatively well-preserved grimoires we'll be able to sell," Enora replied cheerfully without looking up from her meal. "It will take me a few days to go through them all and see if there are any that I want to keep for myself, and a bit longer after that to get the rest formally appraised and sold, but all in all, it's quite the haul considering we didn't even have to fight the dragon."

"I see…" Typhoeus said, recalling the large pile of musty books he had discarded as unworthy of joining his trove. The thick leather-bound tomes were all filled with badly drawn runes and a lot of meaningless squiggles he belatedly realised was the written language of this age. There were never any interesting pictures, nor were there any precious metals or gems inlaid in the covers and for the very few ‘grimoires’ that did, well, it had simply made more sense to relieve the shabby leather exteriors of their gemstones and discard the rest.

"That dumb lizard will keep us neck deep in beer and silken sheets for months," Myorik said, chuckling to himself as he reclined deeper into his chair.

"Maybe, but I anticipate that we'll be departing as soon as the grimoires sell. Caeber will want to get back out there to slay that dragon before the week is out," Mara said.

"And Riyoul will surely burn through his share in a couple of days anyway and be clamouring for more work," Enora added, her friendly smile turning sour as she eyed Riyoul, who was still chatting amicably with the overworked barmaid.

There was a collective grunt of agreement from the three adventurers before Myorik broke the silence by yelling across the bar at Riyoul to “Stop flirting and actually get us that round of drinks you promised!” much to Enora and Mara’s amusement. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. He’s like this everywhere we go. If I didn’t needle him, it would be hours before we get served," the bearded warrior continued.

“He’s not that bad,” Enora said, her cheeks tinged pink as she rose to his defence.

“He actually is. I’ll have a word with him later to make sure he doesn’t bother you, Typh," Mara said, her words receiving a short series of solemn-looking nods from Myorik.

“Thank you, I think?” Typhoeus said questioningly, unsure what exactly he was thanking them for.

Eventually, Riyoul returned to the table with a tray of foaming tankards in hand, and the party vigorously set upon them. Typhoeus ignored the beverage placed in front of him as he slowly came to terms with incorrectly appraising the value of items that, in all likelihood, should have been added to his hoard. The only thing that mitigated the sting of his mistake was the fact that they were hideous books, and without access to the human merchants, he would have had no way of converting them into glorious gold. The group carried on their inane conversion that mostly revolved around Riyoul’s colourful love life as Typhoeus dipped in and out, and it continued until Caeber returned several hours later, looking frustrated and annoyed.

“How did it go with the Guild?” Enora asked as the big man sat down at the table, removed his gauntlets and traded his large sword for a heavy mug of beer.

"Not well. I've informed the Guild that the dragon is a snatcher, and the head clerk will petition the king to remove the capture order, but he isn't hopeful," Caeber said, sounding tired as he slumped into his chair. The wood creaked ominously under the weight of his heavy armour until the warrior sighed with exhaustion and braced his legs, reducing the strain on the ailing piece of furniture.

"I could tell ye that the Alchemists Guild wants that dragon, runt or no. If you’re intent on pursuing your oath, you'll be making some powerful enemies, Caeber," Myorik said warningly.

"Why would anyone want to capture the dragon?" Typhoeus asked, his unease mounting at the unexpected prospect of captivity.

"Well, the dragon that took you is a very rare breed. Normally Sovereign Dragons live at the very top of the Dragonspine Mountains and as a result are virtually impossible to reach. Even if you do manage to get there, they are nigh unkillable without a large army of a comparable rank," Enora said as she adopted a scholarly tone. "The dragon that kept you captive for so long is a deformed runt of these truly monstrous dragons. It's about a quarter of the size that it's supposed to be for its age, and that makes it so much easier to kill. The fact that its lair is so close to Rhelea is likely due to it being too weak to claim territory in the peaks. 

“The Royal Alchemists Guild wants the dragon taken alive, likely so they can farm its body for alchemical reagents. Deformed little shit or not, dragon’s blood runs through its veins, and that is powerful stuff. The alchemists likely want to perform routine amputations to harvest bone, muscle, and scale. With enough healing magic, you can keep a captive dragon alive indefinitely; better yet, as a male, it can be used to stud lesser dragon breeds that aren't as difficult to capture and—"

"Enough, Enora, we don't need to hear an academic treatise on dragon captivity," Caeber said, his tone curt. He’d seemed to have noticed the green tinge that was appearing on Typhoeus’s face, although the warrior had likely misinterpreted the source of the dragon’s revulsion.

Typhoeus felt a heady mix of abject terror, nausea, and an incandescent fury bubble up from within him as he struggled to keep the vacant smile upon his human face. With pained difficulty, he asked a single poignant question.

"These royal alchemists, are there any here in Rhelea?"