Daxon, the naive adventurer

While Grizzly's stoicism would probably be more tolerable than Lyra's babbling or Daxon's awkward advances, I would have felt guilty leaving Lyra and Daxon together. Setting aside the fact that those two are probably the weak links in this party, Daxon could be well be too distracted by Lyra's body to properly deal with any dragon attacks. And Lyra was probably just too distracted in general.

Between the two, I ultimately had to go with Daxon. For one thing, I didn't really feel comfortable leaving him alone with Grizzly, given their previous animosity. For another, despite my complaining, Daxon could probably be relied upon to defend me if the dragon really did show up. Fool though he may have been, he was certainly built well enough to be useful in a fight. Ultimately, though, I just felt more at ease around him than the incessantly chatty Lyra. He was a known quantity.

All in all, Daxon didn't slow me down as much as I had feared. I managed to convince him that since the plan was to avoid a fight for now he could leave the plate armor behind. It did surprise me somewhat how quick he was to let me take the lead. Then again, he was following closely enough behind me that it's quite possible his main goal was to admire me from behind - a thought I found not entirely unwelcome. Given his unearned cockiness, it was strangely satisfying, and even a bit arousing, to see how much power I apparently had over him just by being a woman.

Despite my reaction the night before, he clearly hadn't given up on trying to seduce me. In fact, I'm not sure he would be capable of giving up. He's probably never interacted with a woman without flirting, save his own family. I decided to humor him a bit this time around, savoring the thrill of being so clearly wanted. I learned more about him, not that there was much to learn: he chose adventuring over a life on his family's farm, as many young men do. Mostly, though, I felt sorry for him, increasingly coming to agree with Grizzly's dismissive conclusion. Hopefully he'll learn something from this adventure about how dangerous the world can really be - and hopefully he won't have to learn his lesson the hard way.

I began to notice signs that the dragon had been in the area, mostly in the form of trees broken by the dragon's descent and occasional blood splatters in the areas where it had caught a deer or some other wild animal. I genuinely suspect Daxon would have overlooked most of these things entirely had I not pointed them out to him. At one point we came across a pile of what I suppose was dragon scat, and he was almost sick from the stench of it. It seemed we were on the right track, but...