Jesse James and the Dragon's Egg

Tip Pierce Betrayal

Jesse was surprised to see just how close to Tip Pierce Dloghkrad they had been. He, with Al in his duffle, and the tall man hadn't traveled far, although Jesse had to jog to keep up with the man's casual but, insanely long strides, but it was no more than ten minutes and Tip Pierce Dloghkrad was in sight. Jesse wished it wasn't.

It was a grim place. Grim as if a grim melancholy had come and just sat down here. Jesse stared at a massive, unkempt Victorian style home that just seemed to go on forever. It went up stories and stories and spread out in both directions for as far as he could see in the dim twilight.

Ugly decrepitude was everywhere. Were it not for a dim glow coming from the widows, the place would have appeared completely abandoned. Pealing paint, broken shutters, unattended wounds in walls and roof all made the place look simply derelict.

The grounds were dead. What must have once been grand topiary had become brown, empty impressions of old landscaping. Shrubs had become ugly skeletal structures that promised pain and like all the plant life he had seen in this dark melancholy, they seemed to move at you when you passed, a slow breezeless sway that betrayed either escape or intent. The grass was brown and vaguely slimy. Sculptures that at one time must have been beautiful works of art now seemed tortured and every one of them had been defaced in one way or another.

The duo climbed a never-ending marble stair at the front of the house. At the top of that stair were the front doors to the house. They were even more bizarrely tall than Jesse's guide, stretching some twenty or thirty feet up into the structure. The doors opened with a not unexpected shriek of hinge for the tall man and he and Jesse passed through.

The interior of the place was amazing, a museum of the bizarre decorated by madmen in a steampunk nightmare. Jesse saw every form of creature you could imagine laid out everywhere. They were taxidermied and splayed out in poses of duress, as if even in death the beasts were hounded by some unseen hunter. There were creatures represented here that Jesse had only heard of in movies, great hairy ape looking creatures, bull-headed men, flying creatures with rainbows locked in their feathers, horned horses and horses with majestic wings, incredibly massive beasts that defied description, and dragons.

And interspersed amongst the taxidermied were bones. Some were beautifully reconstructed versions of the beasts they once were. Others were mean attempts, creations that just appeared angry.

As Jesse and the tall man walked on through the massive foyer, he realized the quiet. The place was eerily silent throughout. The only sound, beyond their own footsteps, that he had heard was the soft mumble of the torches burning. Those torches filled the air with the sharp smell of burning tar. But there was something else. Something else here. Jesse could feel them, writhing just behind every corner, squirming in every shadow, moving through the very blood of the place. The Shaddach were here.

He and his fabulously ungainly escort came to a crude stone arch. It was tall and rudely inserted into an otherwise well maintained and papered wall. It too stretched some twenty or thirty feet into the air and it was the mouth of an equally massive hall, a black stone concourse that stretched off into the dimly lit dark. Standing just inside the mouth, appearing fantastically disproportionate to their surroundings, were two very small, very mean-looking men. At least, they might have been men.

Pale, stout, and just generally unpleasant looking, the two had a quality that reminded Jesse of... something. He couldn't quite place his mind on what.

The tall man greeted the two, and they gave only the vaguest of responses. After a brief, stern conversation in a sharp barking sort of language, the tall man turned to Jesse.

"This is Gog and Magog. They are under strict orders not to eat you." He glared sideways at the two of them. "Follow them. And do not tease them."

Without a word and barely taking notice of Jesse, the two odd little creatures waddled off down the hall.