This took longer than I expected. Dude was monologuing.
“This is all your fault,” said the so-called “Kragnor the Ambitious” – on second thought: drop the “so-called.” The epithet was accurate enough and I don’t blame a mage for wanting to swap out their birth name for something a little less embarrassing. I mean, I’m walking around with the name “Mildred” hung around my neck. I absolutely understand the urge for a little reinvention.
In person Kragnor wasn’t as good-looking as he thought he was. Oh, the face was regular and the body was muscular, but I could still tell that he wasn’t born that way. But I didn’t have him pegged as somebody who had been really deformed, or just ugly: transform one of them, and they’re just too damned happy to be “fixed” that they don’t sweat the small stuff. Kragnor had the air of somebody who was never satisfied. Which, I guess, explained the “Ambitious” part.
But I, as they say, digress. Kragnor also had the look of a monologuer, God bless him: “You technology-worshiping idiots are all the same. You constantly underestimate us. ‘Ooh!’” he said, in a high falsetto that was completely slanderous towards me, “’He’s expecting me to come in from the north, so I’ll come from the south, instead! He doesn’t have one of those pho-to-graphs of me, so I can sneak in!’”
Kragnor laughed, in a credibly nasty voice. “Because, of course, a stupid mage like me could never think to make a magical image of you and burn it into all of my guards’ brains. They recognized you on sight, Ms. Deckard. If you had come ten years from now, they still would have recognized you. You never had a chance.”