CHAPTER 97: CAVE

Ah, but even gods forget where they first bled.

The temple was one such wound, a hollow carved into the cliffs by centuries of reverence and ruin. It loomed above the encampment like a ghost half remembered, its arches black with soot, its statues eyeless and bowed as if in mourning.

The air itself was wrong here, too still, too reverent, as though the stones were holding their breath.

The procession had stopped to rest, unaware that history was about to wake beneath their boots.

The knights dismounted with ritual precision, checking weapons, tending to weary horses that snorted clouds of steam into the arid air.

Diplomats gathered under broken columns, whispering about alliances and harvest routes, their words thin against the silence of the cliffs.

And there, in the middle of it all, Soren, ever the emperor of discipline, stood with Ryse and Lord Venrick, maps unfurled, voices low. Every gesture of his was control sculpted into human shape.

No one noticed when Eris slipped away.

She moved like smoke through the scattered groups, her cloak blending with shadow, her footsteps silent against stone.

The soldiers were too focused on food and rest. The knights too busy watching the tree line. Soren too deep in conversation to sense her absence.

They were used to giving her distance. Used to the way she carried solitude around her like armor.

So when she drifted toward the temple ruins, no one called out. No one followed.

And Eris... Eris didn’t choose to go.

She was pulled.

It started as a whisper at the edge of her mind. Not words, something older than language. A knowing that bypassed thought entirely and sank straight into her bones.

Her feet moved without her permission, carrying her toward the largest of the temple entrances, a gaping maw carved into the cliff face, its edges worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain and something else.

Her hand reached out, fingers brushing the stone.

The carvings shifted.

Not visibly. Not in any way she could name. But she felt them move, felt them respond to her touch like living things recognizing kin.

The symbols glowed faintly, so faint she might have imagined it, pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.

Or the dragon’s.

She should have turned back. Should have called for Soren, for the guards, for anyone.

Instead, she stepped inside.

The temple swallowed her whole.

Darkness closed around her like a fist, thick and absolute. The air was cold, impossibly cold for a place carved into Solmire’s burning heart. Her breath misted in front of her face, and the heat that always lived beneath her skin, the constant simmer of the dragon’s presence, flickered and dimmed as though something here suppressed it.

She should have been afraid.

She wasn’t.

Instead,

She was remembering.

Fragments at first. Flashes of images that didn’t belong to her but were hers all the same. Her father’s face, younger but just as cold, staring down at something small and broken. The smell of incense and blood. The sound of chanting in a language she didn’t know but somehow understood.

Her feet carried her deeper.

The corridor twisted downward, spiraling into the earth like a throat swallowing prey.

The walls pressed closer with each step, the ceiling lowering until she had to duck her head, until the stone scraped against her shoulders. The carvings grew denser here, more frantic, overlapping each other in desperate layers as though whoever had carved them had been racing against time.

Or sanity.

She recognized some of the symbols now. Suppression runes. Binding spells. Wards meant to contain something that should never have been contained.

Her hand trailed along the wall, and the stone was warm under her palm. Not the warmth of sunlight or fire, but the warmth of a body. Of something alive, trapped, screaming in silence for centuries.

The corridor opened.

The chamber was vast.

Not large, vast. The kind of space that shouldn’t exist underground, that defied all man-made creations and sense. The ceiling arched high overhead, disappearing into shadow so thick it felt solid. Columns as wide as ancient trees held up nothing, their surfaces covered in carvings that seemed to move when she wasn’t looking directly at them.

And at the center, bathed in the faint glow of dying magic, stood the altar.

It was a slab of black stone, smooth and cold, its surface stained with something that might have been rust or might have been worse. Chains hung from its corners, their links carved with runes that still pulsed faintly with power. The floor around it was scorched, the stone melted and reformed into strange, twisted shapes that looked almost organic.

Almost like bones.

Eris moved toward it without thinking, her body operating on autopilot, her mind already half-gone into the pull of knowing. The symbols carved into every surface, walls, floor, ceiling were the same ones from her visions. The same ones she’d seen in flashes and nightmares and moments when the dragon stirred and she caught glimpses of its memories.

Her memories.

Her hand reached out.

Touched the stone.

And

The world cracked.

Sound fractured, color dissolved. She was falling, no, burning, but without flame. The air around her filled with the roar of wings and the taste of ash.

Light burst through the cracks in the chamber walls, searing white, then gold, then blood-red.

And in the heart of it, she saw them.

Dragons.

Two of them, spiraling through a sky of fire and ice. The first one roared, it’s scales shimmered like molten jewels and the other like crystals; their roars were hymns.

She saw temples alive with worship. Priests bowing before altars identical to the one she touched. She saw her ancestors, hands outstretched, faces alight with both awe and terror, binding dragons in blood and flame, promising protection, demanding obedience.

Then, she saw herself.

Not as she was now, but as something far more terrible.

A woman crowned in light and ruin. Scales glinting faintly across her arms. Eyes like open furnaces. Her lips moving in a language the world had long forgotten.

And the earth, the entire earth, bowed.

But behind her stood another.

Tall, cloaked in frost and shadow. His eyes glacial blue. His hand resting at her shoulder like the weight of destiny itself.

Together they faced the horizon, where something vast and formless was stirring, a storm neither fire nor ice could conquer alone.

The image shuddered. Fractured.

And then,

Eris staggered backward, breath shattering in her throat.

The altar had gone dark. Smoke curled from her palm, faint but acrid, the mark of a brand that wasn’t there a moment ago, an ancient sigil, glowing faintly before fading into her skin. Her chest heaved. The chamber pulsed around her, as if still breathing with her heartbeat.

For a long moment, she stood in the quiet aftermath, a queen stripped of every certainty, every illusion.

Then from far above, faintly, muffled by the weight of stone, she heard her name.

A voice.

Calm, but urgent.

Calling her back.

And somewhere deep within her bones, the dragon stirred, awake now, watching, whispering.

"Not yet," it said. "There’s more to remember."