Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
We spin around to find ourselves facing a petite woman in faded red robes. Her hands are clasped together as if in prayer, and several of her fingers are wrapped in bandages.
“Inaccessible?” Briar repeats.
The woman’s expression is smooth, unreadable as she steps closer, keeping her hands pressed together.
“Everyone who has tried to open that sealed door over the past decades has died a horrific death.” She tilts her head, giving us a little smile that borders on unsettling.
“But I would be honored to give you a tour of the rest of this temple, if you'd like?” She finally pulls her hands apart, waving for us to follow her. Even her mundane movements are oddly graceful, as if they’re part of a dance she’s been eager to perform for someone. “Come along, won't you?”
Briar slowly moves to follow her, but my gaze is already drifting back to that sealed red door; I can't seem to look away from it for very long.
“What are you doing?” Briar whispers, grabbing the sleeve of my cloak as I start to step toward the door again. “Did you not hear what she said about horrific death?”
I let her pull me away. But the heaviness remains. My heart feels like it’s sinking underneath the weight, making it difficult to focus on anything else.
Distractedly, I follow Briar and the woman through the temple's main hall. The offer of a proper tour is genuine, it turns out; the woman directs us toward specific carved reliefs and faded tapestries, explaining them with the quiet authority of someone who has given this tour many times before.
“I am Lady Sylvane, by the way,” she tells us, once we’ve circled back into the main room.
“One of the few remaining Acolytes of the Flame.” She touches a small medallion at her throat—one featuring a torch, rendered in worn bronze.
“There were dozens of us, once upon a time, when our fire still burned.”
“How long ago was that?” Briar asks, studying the woman's face, which seems like an odd combination of weathered and youthful.
She lifts her gaze to the glass ceiling. “Nearly a century and a half, now.”
“Wait…” I stop walking, finally focusing my full attention on her. “How old are you, then?”
She gives me a small, enigmatic smile. “That isn't a very polite question.”
I press on, nonetheless. “Did you actually tend that last flame?”
“Divine dragon fire has a way of enabling endurance,” she says with a little shrug. “Of melting away the strain of the years as easily as it melts iron.” There's loneliness in her voice, I think. A longing in the way her gaze drifts toward that empty altar at the center of the room.
I don't know what kind of magic has kept her alive for so long, but I wonder if she would have agreed to it if she'd known she wouldn't always have a flame to tend. Or if she even truly agreed in the first place. Enslaving people to keep this flame burning sounds like exactly the kind of thing Mouren’s rulers would have done during the height of their brutal conquests.
Lady Sylvane’s dark eyes are still shining with emotion as she grips the medallion she wears, and Briar and I exchange a look, knowing we can likely use her nostalgic feelings to get her to spill stories—and potentially useful information.
“Can you tell me more about that flame you once tended?” I ask.
Predictably, she lights up at the chance.
“It was the most extraordinary thing in this world,” she says, stepping closer to the empty basin. “A fire that couldn’t be imitated by anything humans made. It didn't consume or destroy. It only illuminated. Everything it touched seemed more alive, more beautiful.”
“What made it go out?”
“As the four kingdoms fell into conflict—wars, failed bonds, increasingly messy dragon relations—the Flame began to flicker. Little disturbances at first. Then came more powerful winds that threatened to extinguish it entirely; moments where we held our breath to see if the embers would properly catch again. Our own illustrious rulers, of course, did what they could to keep it burning, and to give our kingdom the light and power to sustain itself. But eventually…” She hangs her head.
“Did what they could?” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
Her jaw tightens. She doesn't reply, just circles the pedestal, her hands clasped prayerfully together once more. We've already come to a line that not even nostalgia can make her cross, apparently.
Another dead end.
Instead of giving up, I try finding another way in. “Do you know more about the conflicts that made the Mouren Flame falter? About the increasingly messy dragon relations, for example?”
She considers the question for a long moment before angling her face toward us. “You know about the hierarchy of dragons, of course?”
“Refresh our memories,” Briar says.
She wanders toward a wide mural to our right, weathered with time but still brimming with detail, and she recites the story depicted by this art.
“In the beginning, the four great gods shaped four divine dragons and sent them to this empire to guide it.
Each chose a human to bond with, and those humans became the kingdoms' first rulers.”
“Heldra, Zara, Morrigan, and Isolde,” I recall.
“Correct. Once those queens passed, their dragons returned to the heavens, believing the foundation for a successful empire had been laid. The gods soon realized, however, that this world needed far more guidance than they originally thought. Humans can be very foolish, it turns out.”
“Understatement,” says Briar.
“So the gods sent the dragons back?” I ask, keeping us on track.
“Reincarnations of them. Not as powerful, but still immensely impressive beasts. And this cycle continued throughout history. Each incarnation was slightly less powerful than the last—the idea being that, eventually, humans would have to rely only on their own power.”
I move to another, smaller mural, which features more dragons than I can easily count. Dozens of them in all different shapes and sizes, some enormous and feathered, others sleek and scaled, radiating outward from four central divine figures like tributaries from a river. “And lesser dragons…”
“Were born of magic wielded by divine dragons, with occasional input from their human bonds,” she explains. “Shaped by their own claws, aided by their influence over different elements—usually one specific element per creation. An ode to the gods who had shaped the originals…that's how it started.”
“And those dragons made more dragons?” Briar says.
“Through the more common, beastly method of procreation, yes.”
Which explains the dragons that hatch from eggs and the nesting spots that I'm more familiar with, as well as all the different variations of the creatures I've encountered over the years.
“The dragons that Mouren’s royal family used to fight their wars…they were lesser, more common beasts, but in great numbers, correct?”
She’s slow to answer, seemingly choosing her response very carefully before she nods. “Yes, though our great kings and queens never called them lesser. And they always properly acknowledged their sacrifices.”
“Sacrifices?” It strikes me as an odd word choice.
Her eyes seem to darken as they fix on me. “All magic has a price, of course.”
My mouth goes dry, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
But Sylvane’s expression quickly settles once more into something pleasant and neutral.
She’s had over a century to practice her lines, and something tells me she isn’t going to betray any secrets, no matter how excited she might be to have a willing audience.
Briar is starting to look nervous, casting regular glances at the morning light starting to bleed through the glass ceiling; we need to get back to the palace before anyone notices we're missing and raises the alarm.
But I still want to know what's behind that sealed door on the other side of the room.
Why did it give me such an awful, crushing feeling? Does it have anything to do with what Mouren's illustrious rulers did, how they kept their flame burning bright when the rest of the empire began to crumble?
I have a growing suspicion that it's all a tightly woven conspiracy.
I just don't know how I'm going to unravel it, or what I'm going to do once I have the frayed, separated threads in my hands.
“Well…thank you for your generosity,” Briar says, warmly, then urges me toward the door with a pointed look.
“Yes…” I tear my gaze from the sealed door one last time. “I'm afraid we have to go, but thank you.”
Sylvane gives a low bow. “An honor to enlighten the King's Favored One.”
I force myself not to outwardly cringe at being called that, even though I’m the one who said it first. Reave's favor toward me may or may not be genuine, but either way, I don't want this entire city reducing me to such titles.
“Until next time,” Lady Sylvane calls after us.
I don't look back, keeping my gaze straight ahead until we're back on the abandoned royal road and the temple is swallowed by the distance behind us. Only then do I try to make sense of what we just encountered.
“Did you feel something strange while we were in there?”
Briar pulls her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “It was eerie, I suppose. And Lady Sylvane seems like she could stand to get out more. What do you mean by strange?”
“Like something was pressing down on my chest every time I got close to the Flame’s empty vessel. Something about that door beneath it…”
She gives me a quizzical look.
“It was…never mind.” I exhale slowly.
We walk in silence for a minute.
“Where is Sesca?” Briar wonders, shielding her eyes from the rising sun as she looks up.
I don't see the dragon either, and she doesn't immediately answer when I reach for her through our bond.
A hint of panic begins to needle at me, but it doesn't have time to settle before I catch a glimpse of her tail flicking out of the clouds, followed by the rest of her as she flips and dives toward us.
“You were supposed to be serving as a lookout for us,” I call softly—but loud enough that her supernatural hearing will have no problem picking it up.
Something dark and heavy hovers around that temple, she replies, turning a few more flips before climbing higher once more. I didn't like it there.
So I wasn't imagining that terrible heaviness. And maybe this is proof of our growing bond, that I can sense such things the way a dragon might. Something that should cast a positive light on this unsettling trip—though I don't feel as if I've accomplished much at all.
Sesca continues her acrobatics as we move back toward the palace. She seems restless, like she's trying to shake the feeling of that temple off with every hard twist and violent change in direction she makes.
Briar and I don't speak much. Partly because our cloaks are drawn so tightly around our faces, helping to hide our identities and muffling any speech, but mostly because I can't get out of my own head long enough to hold a conversation.
Weeks ago, I swore I would tear this kingdom down from the inside out.
A simple enough goal when I started, I thought. I didn't expect to find so many layers to its king and its history. Didn't expect to find myself caring about the hows and whys of what it's become.
But now I find myself wondering if the core is already rotten—if Mouren has been unraveling from the inside out since long before I arrived.
Is that why Sesca reads sorrow in the soul of its king?
Sorrow.
The word strikes like a lit match. Because all at once I realize: That's what I felt when I looked at the sealed door. A deep, gut-wrenching grief. One powerful enough that it nearly stops my heart, even now, just from recalling it.
Chills race across my skin. They still haven't settled by the time we make it back to the palace.
Briar and I make plans to discuss the morning's events later on, after we've had time to catch up on our sleep.
She curses me one last time for making her get up so early, then shuffles off in the direction of her bed, promising consequences if I interrupt her rest.
I should follow her lead, I know.
Instead, I find myself following Sesca as she soars in wide, restless circles overhead. I watch her arc and bank and level out, her great wings catching the morning light in an increasingly mesmerizing display.
Eventually, she lands before me, fixing me with a look that rivals the stern ones Marta used to give me.
You're tired.
“Exhausted,” I agree. “But before I rest, I have a question.”
She settles her wings against her body and waits, her tail curling tightly around herself, the tip of it thumping with continued agitation.
“The darkness hovering around the Flame Temple…” I begin, uncertainly. “It felt…sad, didn't it? Like a crushing, bottomless grief.”
Her tail goes still.
“Is it the same thing you sense when you look at the King of Mouren? The same one you said permeates the arena where the royal family once held their performances and demonstrations?”
She hesitates, lifting her gaze toward that distant arena, just barely visible above the hills separating us from it.
I wait, forcing myself to breathe steadily.
Yes, she says.