the Truth

"Sorry, toots!" said Fred. "All I know about you is that you are a woman, you were chained to some wall, disrobed, and left for all the world and their nephews to gaze upon your melons! You don't look like any Allarian girl I've ever known, but How am I really gonna know if you're telling me the truth about Aqualaria or not? Besides, it doesn't matter, toots... I'm here for one thing, one thing alone - to kill the Dragon. If I have to protect you, get you out of situations that damsels always seem to find themselves, well, I just won't get my job done. So, toots, take it easy, see ya round, goodbye."

The Aqualarian just stood there, stunned. Fred turned to leave. Then she shook her head and said: "Hey, wait. Let me at least give you something to remember me by."

Fred turned expectantly, he even pursed his lips in expectation. It was then that Astra belted him, full in the face! "You no-good, chauvenistic, narrow-minded ...Man!" Then she kicked him in his shins. "And don't you call me 'toots'!" With that she stormed off.

Fred limped down an earthen corridor buttressed with wooden pillars and strewn with mining equipment. He wondered where that dog-boy had gotten himself, it was he- after all - who had gotten him into this situation! But, no matter... Fred was a knight, a trained hunter and killer. He knew everything there was to know about dragons... his Intructors had taught him and had told him so. Unfortunately, the Instructors had gotten it wrong.

What the Allarians call the Southern Caves is in truth a multi-reality construct of higher dimensions. It's a maze of tunnels and caverns and caves and monuments. It has levels that rise to the heights of the Shreken Mountains and levels that dive deep into the underside of the planet itself, far lower than the roots of the Shreken, far deeper than the shifting mantle of the planet.

This maze, this convulsion of corridors, this region of light and dark, of earth and water, of pepsi and coke, is held together and formed by the Dragon, the Drache, the Deltumnimos. This is the creature that holds all within its clutches, it is the Power, the Strength, the Mind which has conceived of and brings to bear what most within simply call the Dominion or the Dragon's Demesyne.

As to the monster that flies the skies burning Allarian fields and scraping the roofs off of orphan asylums, that is simply one of many minions. As to the monster that leaps jungle cover spitting acid down upon Aqualarian hot water spas and stealing away virgins, that too is only a minion. The true Dragon is unknown to the humans of the north or the south, unknown in the east or the west. What humans know of dragons is false, it is simply their observations of lizards and komodos, of worms and vipers. Yes, when a worm reaches fifty meters in length, it is rightfully considered a beast! But for humans to think that it is the Beast is a sad misunderstanding.

1. Follow the resurrected Jake as he fights in Round Three with the Enchanter as his new ring-side manager...
2. Fred makes the choice to go down tunnel number three - he hears the sound of clanking and grinding, sorta like the grain mill back home...
3. Fred chooses corridor number two - he smells what he considers something delightful, and he never did get to grab a bag of popped corn from the Pit...
4. Fred walks deliberately down the first earthen pathway he spies - its dark, its creepy, and its full of bat guano... but his mother told him there'd be days like this!

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