The Forsaken Hero

I couldn’t find the artifact. I wasn’t smart, clever, or quick enough.

The thought haunted me as Fable raced through hallways, searching for the church’s quarters. Finding those was our best chance, but I was already beginning to doubt. Why would the church’s rooms be on the lower floors of the palace? Would they really allow themselves to reside in the same places as servants and slaves?

The answer was obvious. Father Ithris had chaperoned me around for months, and as well as he knew me, I knew him. He wouldn’t even look at me when I was wearing the plain white slave dress, and he’d never once spoken with a servant without turning his nose up in disdain.

"How couldn’t I see it? Did I want to hope that badly?" I whispered, tears threatening to spill.

Avant had captured the members of the church’s diplomatic party outside of the palace. They couldn’t have been in the sublevels. Whatever building or tower they were staying in was probably rubble now–if enough of it was left to call it that in the first place. The artifact wasn’t destroyed–else the suppression on my soul would have been lifted–but finding it would be impossible. A gust of wind or aura might have hit it, sending it flying hundreds, if not thousands of yards away. It could be in the fires of the battle or lost somewhere in the city below. And that was assuming it was in the palace in the first place.

A low rumble broke into my thoughts. I snapped up, chest seizing, as the entire tunnel shook. Dust rained from the ceiling, and the wall split apart in fissures. There was barely a second to process the glowing orange light behind the wall before it exploded outward, pinging against my wards. I screamed and threw myself down on Fable’s back, covering my head.

A wave of fire rolled through the breach, and I peeked through my arms, sucking in a breath. A section of stone wall thirty feet long was gone, replaced by a gleaming black surface. It was curved, taking up almost half the corridor at the zenith, and covered in large, diametric diamond-shaped sections. Cracks ran across the surface, filled with molten lava. It was...an arm?

I barely registered what I was seeing before the wall started moving. Watching it pull away was like watching the cliff blur by as I fell, giving me a strange sense of vertigo. After almost a full second, the wall abruptly disappeared. I caught a brief glimpse of a titanic clawed digit the size of a small mansion before it was gone, leaving nothing but fire and darkness and an empty space where the inside of a mountain had once been. It was a crater a hundred feet wide, its edge clipping into our tunnel.

The dragon had stepped through the mountain, or maybe it had fallen. Perhaps Elaine had managed a blow and knocked it back down, and it was just trying to catch its balance. Like a toddler pushing into the sand trying to stand up.