Cressida

The Diabase Demesne is not the first Earth clan Cressida settled with. Once, she was a knight errant of the Order of the Cabochon. The Order holds a fortress in the northeastern mountains beyond the Pillar of the World, where jagged basaltic peaks rake the cloudy sky and conceal a host of ferocious monsters and vicious outcasts driven away from the cradle of draconic civilization to craggy ravines and breathless heights.

There are few honest clans there, most of them stout miners delving for fresh lodes of rare and valuable ores. Scattered and scarce as they are, they are at all times vulnerable to attack by the mountain marauders. It is the self-appointed duty of the Order of the Cabochon to defend these clans. They hold themselves to a strict code of honorable conduct, most significantly pledging to never abandon those who in need, forbidding the use of any falsehoods or duplicitous methods in combat against sentient enemies, and acting only in defense.

For years Cressida served ardently and obediently. In all of her time as a Knight of the Cabochon, her dedication to the dragons in her protection never wavered. Neither did her loyalty to the Order- no matter what others may say.

It was when the Cabochon fortress was in the cruel grasp of a particularly fierce northern winter that her perspective changed. Many of the outcasts, who fled north to escape just punishment for horrible crimes, were banding together against the Order. The bandits coveted the knights' shelter and stockpile of supplies, while they starved in the cold and were thwarted at every turn when they tried to raid smaller settlements for food. Therefore, after a month of defeats, the bandits decided to attack their problem at its source: The Order's fortress.

The bandits of the mountains joined forces and laid siege to the fortress, penning up most of the Order inside. The few knights who were away were busy defending others, and unable to help their fellows. Cressida was one such knight. When she heard the news from a courier, she was distressed, but remained at her station and distracted herself by hunting down every monster she could find. A month went by, and the situation of the Order had not improved. Another month, and Cressida heard the fortress might be breached before a third was out, and she could no longer stand to wait and listen. She had to help her comrades of the Order that took her in, so she instructed her charges to lay low and left in a hurry.

When she reached the fortress, it was more made of barricades and hurried patchwork than the original stone, with many half-repaired rends in the once-mighty walls. Bandits prowled the grounds and scouted the skies ceaselessly. Cressida's Shadow instincts told her the only way she could hope to save her comrades was through great cunning.

For weeks, Cressida used every trick she could think of to thwart the bandits. But by their sheer numbers they were too much for one dragon, no matter how clever, to overcome with diversion and sabotage or even the loss of several of their leaders. She also had to contend with the constant threat of discovery, and more often than not her cunning was bent solely to getting her own food and shelter. Desperation for herself and her comrades began to eat away at her, and she turned to a more dire solution.

She abandoned her sabotage and a sought the seeds of a plant which most would avoid like a Wyrmwound plague, a hardy mountain variant of the Cerbera tree. When she had enough, she found the source of the bandits' water, and dumped ground-up seeds into it. In a night, the besieging bandits began falling ill, and Cressida safely re-entered her fortress home.

Her comrades were astonished and horrified at their enemies' suffering, who were dead or swiftly dying. It took time for the knights to coax the full story out of Cressida, who was greatly rattled by her ordeal. When they did they were not grateful, but outraged. Where she saw the only way of saving her trapped compatriots, the Order saw an unjustifiably cruel and vindictive massacre. Cressida had abandoned the dragons in her charge, stooped to the most dishonorable and dishonest means of dealing with dragons, and acted with the intent of killing as many bandits as possible without employing the patience or sympathy to find another solution. She was stripped of all honor and cast out of the order she had tried to save.

Cressida accepted her punishment for violating so many tenets of her oaths and left the mountains swiftly. But she was angry at her former comrades for not trying to understand her desperation, or that she was solely motivated by the desire to save them. This anger was eclipsed by anger for her own disgraceful deeds. She filled her time between her exile and her arrival at the Demesne as she had when she first learned of her comrades' plight: Throwing herself into fights with monsters and raiders harrying innocent folk. It was the only way of life she knew, and perhaps she was hoping to atone for what she'd done.

Cressida is a grim dragon, solemn and aloof with a relentlessly pessimistic outlook. Her internal conflict roils on to this day, for she loathes to speak of her past and keeps to herself. Those who recognize what she was most charitably call her a washed-up knight. She is still torn between her conviction that she had no other choice and the inescapable fact that what she did was terrible. Perhaps unwilling to allow her own apparently flawed moral compass to guide her any longer, she follows Rasa's orders to the letter, and prefers to let her new colleagues handle draconic problems, while she tackles monstrous ones.

To those who do not know her past, her epithet Baneblade may appear to signify that her prowess in battle is the bane of the Demense's enemies. To her and her former comrades, however, it is a permanent testament, however oblique, to her poisonous past.


Art my me