Title: Sojourn
Fandom: Forgotten Realms
Rating: PG-ish
Length: ~600
Content notes: canon-level violence
Summary: In which a black dragon reads some trashy Volo novels.




News is slow to reach Chult in the best of times, and slower still to filter through the saurian-infested jungle into the heart of the swamp. To be honest, it's only by a serendipitous series of coincidences - that the latest foolish thieves to fight through to his lair were Volothamp fans to the last man, and that defeating and consuming them didn't damage the more delicate of their possessions - that Mergandevinasander finds himself in possession of news at all, in the form of a large satchel of notably unmagical books.

At first he's inclined to discard them as useless clutter, but it takes a depressingly small amount of time to arrange his new treasure to his liking; the adventurers have been poorer and poorer lately, it seems, and he spits into his back-door pool in annoyance. The water is already fouled enough there that it doesn't even sizzle pleasingly.

Faced with a choice between going out and killing something (he's already feeling uncomfortably full with far more fatty red meat than he usually gets in a year, and as usual, reminded too late of why he always swears never to eat the whole party) or staying in and relaxing, he chooses the latter, foul mood or no.

He remembers the rest of the spoils, then, and reaches out to snare the sack of books with a claw, dragging them to him and spilling them out on top of the spread of coin beneath him. The world outside of his island hasn't been of immediate interest to him in a long time - it's too far from Chult to the mainland to leave his hoard without a great deal of bother - but knowledge is always useful in itself. Even ridiculous, overblown tales of mortal champions who he will likely never encounter could hold some information as to new tactics the ones he might end up dining on someday will use.

And that's when, flipping through the unlikely tale of a drearily heroic outcast with delicate flicks of his talons, he spots his own name where it has no right to be. He reads the remainder of that book and the rest in a frenzy, then rereads the earlier ones before dashing them - along with half his bed - against the wall of his cave in a crashing, clattering mess. This is really just as well, because he's so angry that stray droplets of acid are sizzling into the rock beneath him, pitting the floor in deep, angry pocks. Mergandevinasander may have left the world outside Chult to itself, but it seems the world was not content to leave him be.

Forcing his rage back as unseemly, he focuses his mind on the meticulous task of repair: a fresh coat of swamp muck laid to protect the metals from the remnants of his breath, replacing every last coin in its spot, scooping the books to the side where he can keep an eye on them properly.

By the time he's finished, his usual calculating calm is back. There is more work to be done; first he will trap his lair thoroughly enough that he can leave it long enough to travel. Then - well. It has been a long time since he bothered with the spell for taking a mortal form, and when he last had, it had been a human's shape, the easier to go undetected on the island.

But Mergandevinasander has no doubt that with time, practice, and will - all of which he has in plenty - he will make a more than credible dark elf.