***** Amandine’s POV 2:25 PM, elsewhere *****

“Master, you called?” I said, prostrating myself on the floor before him. Oh, how I long to be free of this lunatic's chains.

He ignored me for a time, continuing to stare into the magic scrying glass he’d forced my husband to build for him. Oh, how I miss the silly man with his jolly spirit and incessant energy even if he rarely spoke.

Roughly fifteen minutes later, judging by the brief hiss that came from the time-candle every five minutes, Lord Ubaro finally deigned to acknowledge my presence.

“The Prophesized Lord of the Rebellion is sending his Prophesized Army after the so-called 'Dungeon Builder from the Stars' and his two helpers,” Here he paused to throw some sort of metal trinket onto the ground in front of me. “The newly discovered Prophesized Captain-to-be will support the General-who-Dodges-much in leading said army against the Dungeon. Should he fall, she will take command.”

In other words, Lord Ubaro is sending an army after the ones who freed whichever poor soul was bound by his recently shattered crystal. For some reason, he decided that I’m some sort of “Prophesized Captain-to-be” and is sending me to be second in command of said army after his pet rogue general. I spared a thought to pray, hoping that God would answer my prayer and make that everything Lord Ubaro had to say to me for now. It didn’t take a genius to realize that his mind was more cracked today than usual.

Disappointingly, he continued to speak.

“The time has come to assign the newly discovered Prophesized Captain-to-be with her primary task on this mission.”

Oh dear, this can’t be good.

“Above all else, the Dungeon Core must be returned to the Prophesized Lord of the Rebellion intact with all possible haste. To this end, the enchanter going with the army shall supply an emergency teleportation item that can only return one person and their gear to this castle.”

Oh, thank God! If he’s lucid enough to tell me about such a significant detail he hasn’t completely lost it yet! And I get to see my husband to boot!

“Bring me that Dungeon Core undamaged and I will reward you appropriately. Now go!”

“Yes, Master!” I said as I climbed to my feet, grabbing my new captain’s bars off of the floor. Then I left as quickly as I could without running. Prior experience told me that when he used those two words to dismiss you, you had better get out of the room – yesterday.

Once I had the door closed behind me, I started sprinting for my quarters to grab the rest of my gear. If I remember correctly, I only have about five minutes before the army is supposed to leave.

Oh, how I wish he had told me earlier so that I could have planned some way to escape with my husband. Then again, that’s probably why he didn’t. Lord Ubaro might be more than a little wrong in the head, but he is far from stupid.

Since I was already wearing most of my gear, when I got to my room I shut the door behind me, grabbed my ready bag off of the hook by the door and jumped out the window onto the castle wall. From there I dove into the moat.

One of the advantages of being married to Lord Ubaro’s head enchanter is that all of the castle’s protections are just as attuned to me as they are to him. When I dove into the moat, rather than kill me in some horrible fashion, the water instead whisked me around the castle and spat me out onto the wall right next to the teleport room. From there it was a jump, a quick sprint across the courtyard, followed by another jump through a window and I was in my husband’s arms greeting him with a kiss. If I hadn’t been paying such close attention to him I never would have noticed him slipping an object, presumably the emergency teleport thingy, into one of my belt pouches.

Despite the enthusiasm of our greeting, I was still vaguely aware of the furious activity filling the rest of the room.

“She’s here!” yelled one of my husband’s assistants to a chorus of good-natured groans from the rest of the room. Some mostly forgotten shred of memory told me that my troops had been racing to pack up in the time it took me to get over here from clear across the castle.

I still had some tricks up my sleeve after all, I thought, smirking internally.

Wait, how do I know that? I’ve had no contact with these troops as far as I can remember.

“Alright you two, that’s enough greeting. We don’t have time for the two of you to get a room, so give it a rest and get ready to move!” called the general a moment later.

We hesitated slightly, enjoying the brief and annoyingly uncommon chance to see each other, but that was enough to trigger the curse Lord Ubaro had us under. Stumbling backward at the sudden pain, not to mention the invisible force pulling on our spines, we scrambled to obey.

“Cancel order!” the General barked, causing the pain and the force to stop. “Damnit! Sorry about that Sir, Ma’am! Uba didn’t tell me he’d given me that kind of authority over you!”

“Alfonse?” I asked in disbelief as his apology somehow knocked him loose from the shroud that covered so many of my memories. As I searched the room to try and figure out where he was, I was also checking over the troops that were to be under my command, which tore an even larger hole in the shroud. What came through that hole was gave me hope that I hadn’t been expecting, but at the same time scared me to the core of my being.

This wasn’t just some random army that Uba, as Alfonse called him, had thrown together based on the Prophecy.

No, this was my army. With a few exceptions presumably added by Uba, these were the men and women who had sworn their lives to my service. We may have chosen to be mercenaries, but we still had our honor. It may have been dashed all over the floor and scattered to the wind by Uba, but they were still the brothers and sisters in arms. For Lord Ubaro’s curse to cloud my memory enough that I forgot they were also his prisoners, or that they had even existed, that told me the curse went far deeper than I thought.

“It’s not your fault. So what’s the plan, Stan?”

Alfonse’s last name was some gigantic unpronounceable elven monstrosity, Usbonkeronistan or something like that, so his friends tended to call him Stan from time to time, especially when we were poking fun at him.

“Well Ma’am, we don’t have too much in the way of intel on this one. All we got is some second-hand and decidedly obscure ramblings from The Prophesy. We’re off to fight a brand new and supposedly undiscovered dungeon that has somehow acquired a dragon. There was also something about a dryad, but it was unclear as to what her part in this is. The only thing that we know for sure is that her part in this is decidedly brief.”

“So you’re not worried about her then?”

“Not really, no. As for the dungeon itself, there are three paths. Your husband Doskan, his assistants and their usual guards will follow the puzzle rout while the rest of us check out the other two. Again, it was a bit unclear about where we were supposed to go other than not with him.”

“What’s with the alchemist then?”

“Oh, right. He has some sort of anti-dragon potion that I’m going to throw at the dragon, who is presumably somewhere inside of the dungeon because that’s what dungeons do. I don’t know why we were told to drag him along with us beyond ‘Uba said so.’ You got all that?”

“Yup, let’s do this thing.”

“You heard the Lady! Is everybody packed up and in position?”

“1st platoon, all ducks in rows!”

“2nd platoon, ready to romp!”

“3rd platoon, affirmative!”

“4th platoon, prepared to march!”

“5th platoon, ring around the squishies!”

“Great! Ma’am, if you would join 5th platoon at the back of the formation, I’ll trigger the teleporter.”

“Ok, go.”

“Porting in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…” and the world stretched, twisted, and leaped about us for a seemingly eternal moment, and then we were there.

***** Broohn’s POV 2:45 PM *****

They say that no plan survives contact with the enemy because of Murphy’s Law. This time Murphy decided to sucker punch both sides – hard.

At the last possible moment before the teleportation spell arrived I realized that my front half was inside of the arrival zone. Not daring to use my own teleport so close to this one, I reared back onto my hind legs. This allowed me to clear the arrival zone while still guarding Bud’s dungeon.

I didn’t really have a plan for what I’d do after they arrived, what with my torso up in the air at such an odd angle, but I didn’t have time to make one.

As soon as they had finished materializing, while most of them were still getting their bearings, a man about a third of the way back gave a strangled yell and threw a potion at my chest. Normally I do fairly well at reaction time tests, but this time I lost before I even realized that there was something wrong.

As soon as the bottle broke against my chest I knew I was in trouble as my body immediately started shutting down into a draconic healing trance to fight off whatever poison I’d just been hit with. This means that I became completely senseless to the world around me while my internal senses came alive in ways that they never would have otherwise.

The fact that I was already going into a healing trance before the poison made it all the way through my scales told me that this stuff was nasty. In other circumstances, I would have fought the trance and done my best to get somewhere safe, but this time I saw no need to. I may be laying in the middle of a hostile army, but they clearly weren’t expecting to fight me just yet. In fact, I’m fairly certain that their entire plan for fighting me had been “hit him with the poison and try not to let him kill us before he dies.” Besides, they were deep in the heart of Zona’s territory – even if they had the gear to fight her properly, which they most definitely did not, they wouldn’t have enough attention left to do anything to me.

Besides, I am her husband and she is my wife. If I could not trust her to guard my back, especially in situations like this, then I never would have even thought about courting her let alone marrying her.

I mentally shook my head. Come on Broohn! Focus! What is the poison trying to do?

I started examining the section of my chest where the poison entered from the inside, comparing it to the sections where I knew the poison hadn’t reached yet, but what I could see didn’t make sense. Yes, it is most definitely poison, but it’s far too slow to start a healing trance the way it did.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I figure out what this poison is doing? If I can’t even trust me to diagnose myself, how can I trust anything else I’ve ever done? How can I know for sure that she loves me? What if she decides to replace me with a younger and prettier thing? What if she convinces Bud to turn on me? What if–

Wait, what am I thinking? That is NOT who she is. That is not who Bud is. After everything that we have been through together, why should I not trust them?

Because they want to steal your stuff! They want to steal what is yours and turn you into a mockery of a dragon!

What do you mean? I’m far more useful as a friend and ally than I am dead!

No! They want to steal what is mine! They want to steal your life!

Then it dawned on me that I must be arguing with the poison in my veins as it tried to get me to give into my draconic greed and lock the rest of the world out of my heart. That is one of the paths that the dark dragons take, one of the paths that lead them to become monsters in every sense of the word. This is the easiest path for a dragon to find, especially during our younger years.

Fortunately for me, that is not the path that my parents followed, the one that they raised me with. No, the path they raised me on was the path of friendship, love, integrity, honor, and trust. It is most definitely the harder path, but in the end, it is the stronger path simply because you are never alone. Even when you are the only one in the room and they don’t know you are in trouble, knowing that you are fighting for something other than yourself can give you the strength to keep going.

Focus Broohn! Why is it trying to get me to push everyone away?

With this in mind I took a closer look at what the poison was doing and realized that in addition to messing with my head and poisoning me, the potion was also trying to cut me off from all external sources of power. It was slowly building a shield around the core of my magic that would eventually cut me off from all of the power I had stored in my territory. In doing so, it would forcibly sever all the ties I had with my territory, destabilizing my core and hindering my ability to fight the actual poison.

But there were a couple of bonds that it couldn’t touch. One of those was my bond with Bud, with its unique mixture of arcane magics and the oddity that is a dungeon’s magic. That one I wasn’t familiar enough with to reach for, not because of a lack of trust but simply because I didn’t know how it would respond, or even if Bud could send me the aid I needed. The other bond was the most familiar one of all: my marriage bond with Zona.

Rather than let the still forming shield cut off all of my territorial ties I gathered them up and slid them down my marriage bond to Zona just as I had done when I had to leave the SOL system for various reasons. Since she wasn’t a dragon she couldn’t do anything with them other than hold them for me for a time, but if she is holding them then the potion couldn’t hurt me through them. Now that I was intentionally using our marriage bond for something, I could feel the enormity of her anger at the invaders and the depth of her despair for my sake. I could feel the spark of hope that put them on hold when she realized what I had done, that I wasn’t completely out of the fight just yet.

Now that I had her attention, I sent her a wordless request for all the vitality and other healing energies that she thought I could handle. I didn’t bother asking how much she had. She is a dryad in the middle of what is most definitely her rainforest. That she had far more than enough was a foregone conclusion.

Her response was immediate and gratifying, even if it came close to burning me out in the first few instants before she scaled it back. The wave of love and affection that came with it somehow did as much to fight the poison as the healing energy did, and it only took a moment to burn the rest of the potion out of my system.

With that done, I sent her back my own wave of love and affection, not to mention reassurance that I would be fine when I woke up before completely passing out.