The dragon's harem

Claug walked out of Arad’s room and headed toward her private quarters. Tonight, she had suddenly gotten a lot of work to deal with. Alchemy itself wasn’t easy and took a lot of time, especially when dealing with someone like Poppy.

While most of the wives got a single massive room with a bathroom linked to it, Claug got an entire floor with countless locked rooms, labs, and even an expansive garden where she grows her ingredients.

As she walked into one of her labs, she wasn’t alone. Arad, one of his incarnations, was already waiting for her there. He sat by the main desk and was playing with a small doll. The doll was none other than Aisha, and she didn’t seem to hate playing the doll’s role.

“Aella’s ceremony is done, so before the next one starts, we should finish our preparations.” Claug walked toward the closet, took her robe off, and put on a pale green leather coat. “Since we don’t know what Poppy will use, we should make a general plan.”

“Like what?” Aisha jumped out of Arad’s hands, landed on the table, and then sat down. “This isn’t magic, so we can’t just put a barrier and be done with it.”

“We’ll create a general solvent and get it ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. If Poppy poisoned our water, we need to dilute that poison until it’s ineffective. For that, we need two things.” She looked at Arad. “This is where you come into play. We need a bunch of divine water, not holy water, divine water. I’m talking about that entire lake you found, which Vorvadoss was sealed under.”

Arad reached into his stomach and pulled a wooden bucket full of divine water. “Here is it. What now?”

“Divine water can be easily infused with a divine property, like healing, curing diseases, or even divine smites. It’s why some holy water can be thrown at the undead to damage them.”

The divine water Arad had didn’t have any property assigned to it besides pure divine energy. It burned anything non-holy to ash, but didn’t heal or bless anything. Arad understood the assignment; they had to infuse this divine water with a property and spread it around the entire Capital of Orion.

“How should we infuse it?”

Claug smiled. “Usually, you’d have to take the water to a church, pay the priests there to perform a ritual, and hope the gods hear it. But here, we have access to many divine beings.” She looked at Arad with a smile. “I’ll get the alchemy part done; you go and get Amaterasu and Eris to both bless the water. We need two properties. One that prevents murder, and one that neutralizes poisons and diseases.”

Eris was going to be easy, but Amaterasu is a problem. Would she even listen to him? If he asks nicely, she’ll bless the water, but what if she refuses?

“Why Amaterasu, can’t we just use Cerilla or Mira? I bet Kali would do.”

Claug shook her head. “Cerilla and Mira don’t have enough power to do it, and even if they did, it’ll be extremely exhausting. Kali, on the other hand, is a goddess of destruction, so I don’t know how much healing she can provide. Her orphanage portfolio might help, so ask her anyway.”

“So, Amaterasu is less work overall. I’ll go pay her a visit.” Arad left the lab with a single void step, and Aisha was left alone with Claug to prepare.

Aisha looked at the door for a long while, then shifted her gaze to Claug. “You won’t tell him that Poppy is more likely to strike during a ceremony?”

“That would only get him more worried and agitated. He might even cancel the entire ceremony or delay it until he captures Poppy, and we can’t have that. As cruel as it may sound, the other wives can take a hit or two.” She reached to her table, pulled several crystal orbs, and used one of them to scry the entire empire.

Using her vision, she looked through all of the villages one by one, the nobles’ houses, bandit camps, and hidden bogs. Claug didn’t need to locate Poppy; she just needed to locate places that she might be able to use to perform the attack.

Eventually, Claug stopped at one large noble house, Duchaton. “Wine, interesting. Those large insulated leather bags are used to preserve bloodmare’s root, and that’s an awful lot of them. They are even hiding them at the roof.” Claug smiled. “We got a decent candidate here.”

Aisha looked with her and frowned. “You think that Poppy might use them to poison our wine? Who’s going next? Mira? If that’s the case, should we inspect all of our coming shipments?”

“We should do that, but I’m certain the wine itself would be fine, or at least during our inspection. If I were in her place, I would use a dormant poison that only activates under specific conditions. Like touching glass, being hit by sunlight, or even adding water.” She turned around and walked into her closet, where she had over a hundred poison bottles.

“While there are poisons that kill instantly and with less than a drop, those are considered the worst and most useless. A good poison has to be subtle, silent, and slow-acting. If you wanted to poison a king, then you don’t want him to drop dead immediately after taking a sip. You’ll want him to stay fine for days so they won’t track it back to you.” She smiled and pulled a tiny bottle.

“You speak as if you’ve got experience.” Aisha stared at her with a grin, and Claug smiled. “It was a side hustle of mine.”

Aisha looked at the poison she had. “This isn’t even a poison, it’s Grom Fruit extract.”

“A slow but powerful laxative. It even causes symptoms similar to diarrhea. Tasteless, odorless, manaless, and all natural. It’ll be hard to detect if Poppy used this, and I bet you no normal person would survive the moment this kicks in.” She smiled. “Now, if I wanted to kill Arad with poison, I’ll use this, but make it a thousand times stronger and then watch him shits his entire stomach out.”

Aisha could imagine the entire world Arad has inside his stomach getting out, crushing the mortal world quickly. This world might not survive Arad’s trip to the bathroom if Poppy pulls this off.

“But that all depends on Arad digesting the wine he drinks. You know that everything he eats just sits inside his stomach until he consciously decides to digest it. His digestive system is also unlike anything this poison can act on. Arad can even break matter to energy.” She jumped in, looked through the bottles, and found a new one.

“How about this? She doesn’t need to kill Arad or anyone, just ruin his life. This one is a powerful aphrodisiac. If she managed to get into the city, it would turn the entire place into something even more disgusting than Abel’s entertainment district.”

Claug nodded. “You’re right, what about this one?”

As the two continued to look through the bottles, a rugged face appeared on the crystal orb, smoking as he called out to them. “Oi! Stepmom! Is this working?” Aether took a puff then growled at them once more. “Don’t ignore me!”

Claug turned around, looked at the crystal orb, and lifted an eyebrow. “You are …Aether? So that’s how you look. For a moment, I thought some wizard intercepted my signal.” Sometimes, wizards managed to intercept Claug’s signals and try to blackmail her, but granted, they all end up dead soon enough.

“Listen, we time dragons can’t interfere too much since that might derail things into chaos, but I’ll give you a warning. If you were in Poppy’s tight shoes and had to confront Arad, what would you do? Think about it well. This isn’t about you, Arad, or this empire. It is all about Poppy, and Poppy alone.” He took a second puff. “She isn’t stupid, she is smart. Don’t underestimate her. This is all I can say, but I’ve warned you, stepmom.”

As Aether left the crystal orb, Aisha sighed. “For… how did he get into that crystal? I thought he was supposed to be just a soul.”

“What would I do…” Claug started thinking for a few seconds, and then her eyes opened wide. “Poppy won’t attack; she’ll come to Arad directly. There is only one place where one can be safe from Arad, and it is by his side.”

Aisha’s eyes opened wide. “Was he saying that Poppy would try to side with Arad instead of fighting him? She’ll make her entrance soon and try to win his favor. But he said Alcott and that werewolf Pollo are hunting her because she went crazy.”

“Crazy is subjective. We still don’t know what is wrong with her mind yet.” Now, Claug had to prepare for not just an attack, but for possible subterfuge. She did want some drama among Arad’s wives, but this wasn’t the way she wanted it to start. Hopefully, Poppy won’t do something that cannot be fixed.