Chapter 51
Dead Saints and Treasures
The notification burned behind my eyes before I'd even wiped her blood off my hands.
Regalia Received: LadyBomb (Fleeting): A ladybug that sacrifices its own life to create a massive explosion.
A warmth spread through my chest as the Regalia sank into my Sacred Soul, finding its place among my worm world. The sensation faded after a few seconds. The LadyBomb was there. Waiting. A suicide bomber the size of my fist.
Great. Just what I needed. More things that would die for me.
I stood over what was left of Emilia Sourez, and the worms pulled back from her, retreating into the skin of my forearms.
The LadyBomb traps she'd set along the ramp had scorched the stone. Zo's axe marks gouged the walls near the entrance where she'd used the stone for leverage during her charge. A bedroll. A fire pit. Three sealed jars that turned out to hold dried meat, salt, and a foul-smelling medicinal paste.
I took the meat and the salt. Left the paste.
"You done?"
"Yeah." I stepped over Emilia’s broken-down body. "Let's go."
We left the cave, dropped down the ramp, and avoided the remaining mines. The ground was covered with fallen pine needles.
"So… you gonna tell me what you got from her, or do I have to guess?"
I kept walking as I reviewed the fragments of Emilia's memories. One of them had stood out. One memory that was brighter than the rest, because she'd gone back to it over and over again.
"...Maybe," I said.
Zo snorted. "Maybe. Right." She ducked under a low branch, her cyan ponytail swinging behind her. "You killed her pretty damn fast for someone who wasn't interested in what she knew."
Zo was way too sharp, so I didn’t bother deflecting. I just needed a minute to sort through what the memories were before I started talking about them.
Emilia’s Memory: Emilia crouched over a dead man's pack. The dead man was a Dragoon; he wore scale armor and held a horn-sword, the same kind Cedric had.
His throat had been torn out while he slept. She'd gone through his things looking for food and found something better. A journal. Bound in cured dragon underbelly, the pages were covered in handwriting and hand-drawn maps.
The journal described a location. A specific location, deep in the Frostspine range, buried far within its caves and protected by magical barriers. And what waited at the end of those barriers was, if the dead Dragoon's notes were accurate, a treasury.
Not a weapons cache. Not a supply dump like the one that waited under Horns Rest.
A treasury left behind by the Star Saints.
The word treasury connected with an old memory of Cedric’s. Suddenly, the two pieces merged together, giving me a slight headache.
"Emilia didn't desert just because she was scared," I said, breaking the silence. We’d cleared the minefield, but I was still watching where I stepped. "She found a dead Dragoon's journal. Got a location for a treasury in the Frostspines."
Zo scoffed, batting a low pine branch out of her way. "Right. Because people just leave treasuries lying around in the mountains."
"They do if they're dead." I stepped over an exposed root. "And the details overlap with something Cedric knew. Not the exact location, but he knew what it was. And who it belonged to."
Zo stopped walking. She turned, and those beautiful magenta eyes fixed on me with particular intensity.
"And who did it belong to?"
"A group of five Dragoons. The strongest the Covenant of Horns ever produced… They called them the Star Saints."
The trail climbed higher as the trees started to fall away behind us and the mountainside opened up. We could see the Frostspine Mountains rise in a wall of grey and white, their peaks lost in the clouds.
Zo kicked a loose stone, watching it tumble down the steep slope. "Never heard of them."
"Cedric grew up hearing about them like they were some kind of gods," I said, picking my way along a ridge where the footing was loose. "His memories have them as the most powerful Dragoons in Rajkovia's history. Each one killed multiple Elder Dragons. Multiple."
"So they got rich, died, and buried their shit," Zo said, turning back to the climb. She walked the ridge with better balance than I did. "Why hasn't the Covenant dug it up?"
"The thing is. They didn't just die… they planned for it. Each of the five Star Saints built a treasury—a vault, a tomb, whatever you want to call it—and filled it with their Regalia, their weapons, and their accumulated power. Then they sealed it behind trials."
"Trials," Zo said. The word came out with an edge. She'd been through enough of Rajkovia's idea of trials to know what that meant.
"Basically. They wanted true successors, not grave robbers. They didn't want some random idiot stumbling in and blowing themselves up with a Regalia they couldn't handle. The trials are meant to filter out anyone who isn't strong enough."
"Filter out the weak."
"Their words, not mine, Cedric's memories confirm that these treasuries are real."
"So the treasuries are real… sounds like my kind of place."
"Sounds like the kind of place that could get us killed."
The trail dropped down the far side of the ridge into a narrow valley choked with birch. Their peeling white trunks crowded the path, leading down to a stream that cut through the valley floor, shallow and fast, the water clear enough to see the smooth stones at the bottom.
We crossed it without stopping.
"Emilia's dead Dragoon—the one whose journal she found—was looking for one of these treasuries," I said, shaking water from my left boot on the far bank. "His notes were detailed. He'd been researching for months, maybe years."
"And here's what bothers me." I sat on a rock and pulled my boots off, wringing out my socks.
"The dead Dragoon. He wasn't killed by the vault's defenses.
He was killed by some kind of monster in his sleep.
Which means he never made it to the vault.
He died on the way there, and his research ended up in Emilia's hands. "
"And now it's in yours."
"And now it's in mine." The socks went back on, cold and wet.
The boots went back on over them. "Which means we might have this information before anyone else does.
The Dragoon who did the research is dead.
Emilia's dead. The journal is... well, the journal is wherever Emilia stashed it, but what was in them is in my head now. "
Zo stood up from the stream. Water dripped from her chin and ran down her neck. "But?"
She knew me well enough to hear the "but" before I said it. Smart girl.
"But Emilia was a deserter who'd been hiding in a cave rigged with enough explosives to bring down a mountainside.
She was paranoid, desperate, and she'd been out here alone for months.
" I pulled my bootlaces tight. "If she found the journal, other people could have found similar leads.
The dead Dragoon might not have been the only one researching this vault.
If clues about a Star Saints treasury have been circulating among Dragoons…
even just rumors. Then we're not the only ones with this information. "
The wind carried a sound, low and distant, that could have been thunder or something large moving through the mountains. We both went still and listened. It didn't repeat itself.
"Which means," I said, "this could turn into a race. Or worse."