Chapter 2
Rune
Pain came first.
Rune’s marrow burned. His scales screamed. Essence leaked from his form, unmoored and wasted, until even his thoughts splintered beneath the weight of it. Magic had been cleaved from him, fractured and bleeding into the world like ink spilled into water.
Then came the dark.
He opened his eyes to cold stone and stillness. Not the living dark he commanded, but a suffocating, stagnant void. No air stirred. No shadows answered. This was a pit forgotten by light and sound alike, buried so deep the world itself pressed down upon him.
A brief surge of panic hit Rune when he reached for his shadows and found nothing.
He was bound.
Thick chains of white-gold metal glowed with glyphs that pulsated faintly, each one burning with divine energy. They were fastened deep within the stone beneath his feet, forged with the intent meant to last an eternity.
And they’d trapped him in his dragon form.
Rune snarled and wrenched against the chains. The cavern trembled as metal crashed against stone, but the bindings held. Pain lanced through him, sharp enough to fracture thought itself.
He drew breath and unleashed fire upon them.
The glyphs flared brighter, holy light flooding his vision as the scald rebounded against him, burning down to bone. His guttural roar echoed throughout, reverberating against the walls of a cavern.
Rune stilled.
A cavern…
Moonlight filtered through a narrow crevice high above, pale and distant, illuminating a slice of night sky. The air carried a scent he knew too well.
A voice broke the silence. “You’re awake.”
Rune glanced over his shoulder.
Calla stepped into view, armor scorched. Her tired gaze flicked from the chains then settled on him.
“You should not have challenged your father,” she said quietly.
Smoke curled from Rune’s nostrils with his low growl. All he had ever done was defy Elyōn, and at last the God of Life responded in kind.
But why leave him alive?
Rune projected his thoughts into the link he shared with his Harbingers. Where has he bound me?
“The one place you swore never to return, sire,” said another voice. Deeper and stoic.
Hadeon emerged from the dark, followed by Deimos. His loyal generals, his Harbingers he saw die.
They lived.
Calla crossed her arms. “We are in Argyle.”
The news stole the breath from his lungs.
Alora’s homeland.
Rune lashed his tail against the wall, fractures splintering across it. He returned me to the Hollow Mountain.
Calla’s ram horns caught the edge of the light as she gave a single nod. “Karag D?r.”
This cursed place.
He supposed Elyōn couldn’t pitch him back into the Netherworld. His Gate remained sealed without his bride. Why bother to chain him here? Why not simply destroy him?
Or do worse.
Perhaps this was worse.
Rune’s eyes turned back to the shaft of moonlight above.
This wasn’t merely a prison or divine punishment.
It was torture.
The land breathed her name. It was heavy with memory. Of everything he wanted to forget.
Rune sank back to the hard ground, dust scattered around his massive form.
“How do we remove the chains?” Hadeon asked.
“We cannot,” Calla said. Her eyes lingered on the glyphs etched into the blessed metal. “The manacles, they read ‘Blood of my Blood. Soul of my soul’. Only his bride can unlock his chains.”
With Alora gone, the Heavens chose the perfect thing to subdue him.
A lock without a key.
Rune almost laughed. He had never been free. The Heavens bound him to the dark, and moving through it as he wished had merely been an illusion of freedom.
“The court is here, as well,” Calla said next. “They are further below within the labyrinths of the castle. Karag D?r will wake soon now that you have returned.”
“Your orders, sire?” Hadeon asked.
Rune turned away. He shook out his wings and curled on the ground, shutting his eyes.
Leave me.
Their shock lingered.
Deimos shifted, his tail flicking as he muttered. “The Dominions will sense weakness. They have been waiting for centuries for the moment to challenge you for the throne.”
He didn’t answer.
“Sire.” Calla’s steps carried in the cave as she stepped closer. “The court is confused and in disarray. They need their king. And there is something more—”
Leave me! He snarled, startling her back. Or join the dust at your feet.
She stiffened. After a breath, all three bowed and withdrew, their presence fading into the tunnels below.
Leaving him to the dark.
Time did not move.
It lingered, cruel and stagnant, like the slow rot that followed after death.
It seeped through Rune, eroding him piece by piece.
Time passed by the sun’s touch slicing through the thin gap in the ceiling, marking the hours across his scales.
The thin stream of sunlight was enough to sear, enough to gnaw at his sanity.
Yet he had no will to move from its path.
Days bled together.
Then weeks. Then more.
He didn’t count them. There was no reason to when it was all the same.
At night, Rune raged.
He lashed the chains against the ground until his skin split open and blood hissed beneath divine metal. He roared his flame, rendering his throat raw, until all sound was swallowed by stone.
The walls nor the gods answered.
And the shadows did not rise.
They were dormant or perhaps they, too, had abandoned him.
Eventually, Rune’s strength dulled. His snarls gave way to silence. He lay in a shell of a body too heavy to move. A dragon that had once devoured kings and toppled empires now too weak to rise.
The cold did not bother him. The pain did not break him.
It was the quiet.
The emptiness in his chest where she should have been.
No voices. No warmth. No heartbeat beside his own.
Calla came and went. She brought water. Food. News of a court he no longer heard. Everything had dulled, even the quiet.
Rune no longer opened his eyes. He retreated into his mind and dreamed of Alora instead. Of golden curls brushing his face. The echo of her laugh. Of warmth he could no longer feel. A melodic voice, singing through the trees and calling him home.
When he reached for her, his grasp closed around chains.
He tried to forget her.
Tried to forget the softness of her breath. The way she said his name. Her death.
But then the nights grew longer and colder with the season, and he was plagued by a recurring nightmare of the night she died. Perhaps because it was the end, he remembered every detail.
The fear. Her scream. The light fading from her eyes as her heart gave out.
The hollowness came afterward.
How unbearable it was.
His brother, with the power to pull her soul from the River of the Dead, refused to help him, and Elyōn was deaf to his pleas no matter how much he begged.
Then came a grief poisoned by his ire.
Without his magic to sustain his Shadow Keep, Alora’s body now rotted beneath the rubble. Rune didn’t want to imagine her flesh decaying. So, he let the silence have him. He didn’t move, waiting to wither to stone. Hoping the sun would burn deep enough to render him ash.
Yet even death was a privilege that Elyōn denied him.
Morning arrived with the sun shining brightly through the small opening in the cavern. Rune’s bones ached beneath the echo of pain, though he hardly noticed it anymore.
He was lost to the stillness, until he heard the whisper of a melody.
The cadence of a voice carried on the wind.
A familiar voice he knew better than his own—singing his song.
Rune’s eyes snapped open.
The dust and debris tumbled from his form as he slowly rose onto his haunches, staring up at the opening. The voice grew clearer and the shadows stirred.
Calla! he bellowed down their mental link.
“No need to shout, sire.” She arose from the dark, something glinting in her gaze. “I have been awaiting your summons for when you at last surfaced from your woes to notice where we are.”
He stared at the opening. “You said we are in Argyle.”
“We are.” Her lips curved. “A hundred and fifty years in the past.”