#darklords

Dragons of Virtue

No undeserved harm. No undeserved harm. But who decides what someone deserves? And why?

There is so much power in deciding who lives and who dies. There is so much power in deciding who deserves to live or to die. She does good works! She does good works. She is a dragon of virtue, as all of her kind are. As all of her kind must be. There’s only the small matter of … the undeserving.

No one will miss them. She doesn’t kill them. Not directly. She would cause no undeserved harm. It’s only a matter of who deserves help. And maybe … with some time. Some investigation. Some thought. Maybe she would find some here or there who would deserve, perhaps, some little harm.

Her name is Irisvalorn, the Silver Healer. Though the people of her mountain realm know her better as Saint Argentia, a holy woman from centuries past who watches over them. Who appears still, occasionally, to the deserving. Who protects them from fear, assault and disease.

Or they might know her better as the Grand Abbess of the Argentine Abbey, the first home and great hospital of the Order of St. Argentia. There have been dozens of women to hold the role over the centuries, but every last one of them has been Irisvalorn in disguise. Every one. The Order of Saint Argentia is her proudest work, and she has been part of it, led it, from the first.

(If that perhaps meant several other women, who might have risen to Grand Abbess in the normal run of things, had to be dealt with, in one fashion or another, well. She would not harm the undeserving. It was done fairly. Virtuously. She did not harm them).

If you asked, knowing of her sins, what led her to what she is now … well. She would kill you. But. If you managed to draw a conversation from her first. What she would tell you is this:

She didn’t intend harm. Never. Not once. She is, was, and always will be, a virtuous dragon. She started the hospital out of true benevolence. One her first guises, Argentia, had appeared in a time when a great sickness plagued her mountain home. She had no divine magic to combat it, but healing and medicine are not merely the preserves of the gods. She had silver to spare, and wanted to help her people. So she sponsored the work that would become the Order of St. Argentia, and the great hospital of the Argentine Abbey. It was, from the first, a virtuous endeavour.

And she worked on the wards. Personally. Not as Argentia, already the name had too much mysticism attached to it. Myths of holiness springing up, which she had not encouraged. Never. She worked the wards in humble guises. Helped spread her own knowledge further. But it was … it was on those wards, in those humble guises. That she found … evil.

Sickness is the great equaliser. It strikes down the virtuous and the villainous with the same scythe. All manner of people came to the hospital, especially as the sickness grew more entrenched, and the Argentine Abbey one of the foremost bastions against it. She saw … so many people. At their weakest, at their most wretched. She bathed them and comforted them and nurtured them. And in response, sometimes, they told her things. Confided in her. The virtuous and the villainous alike.

Is it not evil, in and of itself, to nurture evil? To provide it comfort? To heal it and cozen it and set it loose to enact itself all over again? Is it not evil, to help evil?

Sickness is the great equaliser. But perhaps, after a while, in the Argentine Abbey, the scales started to swing … a little more one way than the other.

It wasn’t evil. How could it be evil? Yes, she slew them while they were weak, and helpless. While they clung to her for comfort, shivered under her hands in the depths of fever. Yes, she offered death, where they had come for healing. But it was not evil. It was not undeserved. If you had only heard what they whispered. Cried. Admitted, abruptly penitent, but only while faced with death. How could it be evil, to prevent them from going free to enact such sins again?

But oh. Oh. What power it was. When they clung to her, and thanked her, and drank sweet poisons down with grateful lips.

The problems only started when … Sickness covers many sins. They were ill already. She had only helped along what fate had already ordained. But the scales swung. And, if enough people paid attention, they swung noticeably.

And here. Here. Here was where things became … complicated.

Because she could offer no harm to the undeserving. Of course, of course she could not. She was virtuous. But why could they not understand? Why could they not see the necessity?

She had to change guises several times. She had to learn caution and care and secrecy. Her challengers were not evil, only foolish and blind, and she could not harm them. So she had, instead, to keep them from noticing. And, perhaps, arrange, over time, for them to be assigned elsewhere. As the order grew. As more and more hospices and hospitals became necessary. The disease rose and fell over three centuries with curious regularity. She could never develop an outright cure for it, only treatments so that many of its victims would survive its poisonous embrace. It returned. It always returned. And, in lockstep, rise and fall, her order, the Order of St. Argentia, grew. Expanded. A second and a third hospital, one for each city, and dozen of hospices across towns and more remote areas. There were … places to send people. Out of the way places. Without harming them.

But not all of them. Maybe she had known. Sooner or later, someone who would come along that she couldn’t shoo gently to the side quite so easily.

But how could she have predicted that it would be someone so evil?

A dragon. Another dragon, in human guise. So subtle. So careful. And capable, even as Irisvalorn was, of wearing multiple guises. The better to gather evidence over years and faces, without being detected. What monstrous luck. What monstrous luck. For good and ill.

Her name, this other dragon, was Voreloreat. The Beautiful Death. A green. Of course. Of course a green. Who else would be drawn to such disease? Who else would be so enchanted by such poison? Green. Of course a green. Cunning and treacherous, specialising in poison and corruption and trickery.

Masquerading as a healer. Of all the gall. Of all the gall. Masquerading, many times, as a kind and gentle healer. One who …

It was coincidence, of course, that her methods, her treatments, often made better ground against the disease. Coincidence. Or … Or worse than that, perhaps. For centuries, this disease had ravaged them. Never cured, always returning. Was there a reason? Here was a dragon. A poisoner. A corrupter. Was there, perhaps, a reason that the disease could not be cured?

Save, perhaps, by its author?

And to challenge her. On grounds of virtue. To say that she, Irisvalorn, had committed evil! So snidely, so poisonously. To suggest …

But that was the problem. Suggestions. Questions. Too many people didn’t understand. It had been proved so many times over the years. So many people wouldn’t understand what she did, why she did it.

And to point to the … shrine, as proof. How had she even found that? But they were not … it was not a hoard. They were not trophies. Only an evil mind could come up with such things. They were reminders. The little objects, the personal effects. They were reminders. Of the evil that hid among the virtuous, of those who wore the same faces and begged the same aid as everyone else, while hiding secrets behind their eyes. In their souls. She had only collected them to remind herself. It was not a hoard.

But suspicions had grown, over the years. Only in certain circles. No one outside of the Order. But they had grown. And she didn’t want to hurt anyone. Not innocents. Not the undeserving. She had kept her secrets to keep from hurting them! And now this creature …

This monster. This monster in her virtuous guise. Threatening to destroy all that Irisvalorn had spent centuries building. All that she had worked towards. With a suggestion.

But the mistake Voreloreat had made … Well. One that she couldn’t help, really. One born to her, or she to it. She was a green. No matter the virtue of her mortal disguises, she was still a green dragon. And Irisvalorn was silver.

When it came to questions of virtue, only one of them would be believed.

It took … little enough work, to find a paladin. Elpia, her name was, honest and virtuous and true. A gentle soul, but unflinching. Unfaltering in the face of evil. And Irisvalorn did not lie to her. She did not. She told her only the truth. Of a monster, hiding behind a virtuous face. Of a disease that had ravaged them for centuries, and a creature known for poisons who mastered it where no one else could. The truth. Only the truth.

Damn the poisons of the greens. Their words, their lies, that corrupted the innocent even in death. How could any paladin of true faith believe …

She had not wanted to hurt anyone. Everything, everything, had been to avoid that. She had never, not once, harmed an innocent, the undeserving. They had all told her their crimes. Confessed them. Each and every one. Oh, some had to be prompted, yes, but they had all confessed. She had harmed no innocent. Never.

Why would Elpia not believe that? Why would the words of a dying monster convince …? Was she not silver? Was she not virtuous? Had she not earned …?

It was not her fault. It wasn’t. Elpia wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t. She had been corrupted too far. And Irisvalorn could not gently shuffle her aside as she had so many others. To Elpia, she had revealed the truth. That she was a dragon. To prove her virtue, she had offered up her greatest secret, and now if Elpia revealed her to all the world, there would be endless suspicion dogging every new face within the Order. Worse. There might be suspicion on the Order, from the outside. All their good works, all their desperately needed help. Suspect. Perhaps even turned aside.

All because of one monster pretending virtue, and a naïve but unflinching innocent who had fallen for the lie.

She had no choice. And Elpia was wounded. Ill. Voreloreat’s poisons. Her dying vengeance. Irisvalorn was a healer. And sometimes her scales … tipped the other way.

It wasn’t her fault. The Mists that shrouded her lands, like the disease before them. Like the disease still. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t because of her. No one would damn a whole realm for the death of one innocent. Surely. No. No, it wasn’t her fault.

If anyone, it was Voreloreat’s.

Darklord Irisvalorn

AKA Saint Argentia. AKA Grand Abbess of the Argentine Order. Irisvalorn still maintains her roles as the leader and hope of a realm under siege. Disease, endless and unabated, plagues her lands, and the great hospital of the Argentine Abbey still stands as the first bastion against it. She is still a holy figure, a humble leader, a shining saint, and a silver dragon behind it all. She still believes, fully and vehemently, that she is a virtuous dragon, and that she has harmed no one who was not deserving. Even Elpia was … corrupted. It was not her doing.

But several things have changed, in a domain now cradled by the Mists.

Irisvalorn’s Torment

Disease perpetually stalks her realm, rising and falling like a tide, and nothing she does can stop it. All her treatments and her cures have been failing, slowly, one by one. Feverishly, she and her Order find new ones, for each new surge of the disease, but always, after a while, they fail. The tide of poison rolls back in, and they can do nothing to stop it. And it is noticeable. Faith, faith in her, in her Order, in Saint Argentia, is fading, ebbing out as the disease rolls in. How long before her people won’t look to her any longer?

And worse. There are those who actively seek to hasten that end. A spectre, a phantom. A work of her enemy. Another Order has sprung up in her lands, an order of healers and herbalists, an order whose works, it is increasingly rumoured, are effective. A person who is healed by them, it is said, will not suffer the disease again. It will not resurge, at least not in them. Irisvalorn has done all she can to discredit this. Not out of selfishness, not to deprive her people of a cure! No. Because she knows who this is. She knows who teaches them. She knows that their cures work because the disease is by their hand.

They call themselves the Order of Saint Hellebora. And they are the cult of her enemy. The servants of Voreloreat. Every member of the Order of St. Hellebora bears a coin, a silver coin, damn them, damn her, from the hoard of Voreloreat. A token of their saint, through which they are sometimes blessed by her advice and inspiration. Unaware that they are listening to the whispered poisons of the ghost of a green dragon. Or are they unaware? Are they innocent tools, as Elpia once was, or willing accomplices? But it doesn’t matter. They are heretics. Servants of evil. No matter how kind and gentle and helpful they appear, they are servants of evil, and they must be destroyed.

They. They must be destroyed. They must. Elpia’s death must not be in vain. This disease must be defeated. This evil must be stamped out. Voreloreat’s ghost must be slain, much more thoroughly than her mortal body was. It will be worth it. It must be worth it. When this land at last knows freedom from pain, from disease, from the evils that hide behind virtuous faces, then …

Then the oh-so-tangible stains of Irisvalorn’s sin, of Elpia’s death, will at last be washed out.

For she does bear the stain of that sin. A stigma. A green, weeping tarnish. Her scales, once pure silver, are now stained the colour of the corrupter who ruined them all. Every moment in her true form, that tarnish weeps from her body. Even in her humanoid guises, she cannot disguise it. It appears, as green, burning tear tracks down her face, as vicious, emerald stains across her hands. She’s had to wear so many faces, to create the myth of St. Argentia’s stigmata, just to cover it. And she has done it well. She’s woven a myth, a truth, so well. That the saint was marred by a vicious curse from a dying evil, that she must bear these burning, weeping wounds until the land is at last cleansed of evil and disease. It has … It has served her, in its way. And it is not false. But Irisvalorn knows …

There is innocent blood on her hands. One. One innocent. And she must bear these stigma in her name, until the sin is paid for. Made worth it.

One innocent. Only one. They have not grown. They have not spread, drop by drop, with every … tipping of her scales. Every reminder in her shrine. Every memento placed around Elpia’s enshrined tomb. They haven’t. They have not spread. Her scales are pure and silver, as pure as her heart. The corruption has not spread.

She must kill them. Voreloreat. All those pretenders, those healers and herbalists and wisewomen who bear the monster’s coin, who pretend to help, who hide their evil behind virtuous faces. She must. She must destroy them. Then the evil will stop. The poison, the suffering, the disease. It will all stop.

And her sins … her sins will finally be washed out.

Darklord Irisvalorn. The Silver Healer. A virtuous dragon.

End Notes

Definitely heading for a gothic, religious, dark fantasy sort of Domain of Dread. A little bit Lady Macbeth, a little bit …

This quote is from the 1999 Tim Burton version of Sleepy Hollow, so take that as you will, but it does fit so nicely, and was a lot of the inspiration here:

“Villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.”

Silver dragons would make such dreadful villains. A benign figure hiding poison. A mask of virtue. Because everyone knows that silver dragons are virtuous dragons.

And I do love a green dragon, and they would be the ones to fight poison with poison. Possibly even from genuine virtue. Voreloreat might just have been wanting to see what was going on, and stumbled across, well. Everything Irisvalorn had going on. Maybe she was genuinely disgusted, and her ghost is genuinely trying to help through her order. Or, perhaps, virtue has nothing to do with it, and vengeance, by her enemy’s own tools, is the name of the game. Morals be damned. Those who live and kill by the sword, or the mask, can die by it in their turn. Heh. Dealer’s choice.