part six, page fifteen

The thing is that Dalakhra is only offering Alric a marginally better deal than he can get from Rayana and Kahal, and with worse externalizes.

With Rayana and Kahal, he gets an alliance with al-Rashad. With Dalakhra, he gets an alliance with al-Rashad and whatever crazy magic shit Dalakhra can steal from Boka.

But.

With Rayana and Kahal, al-Rashad is lead by a couple of people who have similar notions of duty, honor, and loyalty as Alric does, and who were already on his side. They have the beginnings of a constructive personal and professional relationship there.

Dalakhra isn’t loyal to shit. And he’s proven that in front of Alric QUITE conclusively.

The fly in the ointment, of course, may be that Dalakhra has the juice to cement his control over al-Rashad in the face of whatever Team Rayana can cobble together. This seems like a well-planned coup. He clearly needs Alric for something (if nothing else, Dalakhra might want for Alric to leave al-Rashad in a way that doesn’t lead to Wulf declaring war on them; I suspect that the reason Boka had Dalakhra use Tanquir to try and kill Alric is it wanted to provoke a war between its next two targets for expansion) but we don’t know WHAT.

So it’s a tough needle to thread. Entertaining Dalakhra’s offer probably leads to Alric getting out alive (if Dalakhra wanted him dead he’d probably be dead right now) but Rayana and Kahal are better long-term for Gundring assuming siding with them doesn’t lead to Alric becoming a corpse and his little brother embroiled in a destructive war.

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This chapter has had an ongoing theme of using people’s faces extremely well and having supremely awesome panel layouts. The ones surrounding Alric’s big speech to Jandal were also pretty awesome.

Also, poor Broah.

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