Part II – The God in Chains
The silence after the scream felt alive. It pressed against their ears, against their hearts, the way deep water presses against the lungs.
Leira didn't know how long she had been lying there. The air still shimmered with heat, but the light had dimmed to a deep crimson, the color of dying embers. Dust floated through the air in thin spirals. Each mote glowed briefly, then went out.
She turned her head. Ariel lay beside her, eyes open, unfocused. For a moment, Leira thought she was gone—but then her sister blinked slowly, her lips moving soundlessly before a whisper found its way out.
"Is it… over?"
Leira tried to answer. Her throat was dry, her voice burned away. All she could do was nod.
Or maybe she hadn't. Maybe she'd only thought she had.
Because Ariel's mind seemed to hear her thought as if it had been spoken aloud.
You're bleeding again.
Leira frowned. "I'm not." Her own voice startled her. It sounded smaller in the cavern than it should have.
Ariel's mouth twitched in something like a smile. "Then I am."
–––
She lifted her hand; red light pulsed faintly through the thin layer of scales on her skin. The glow was weakening. It wasn't supposed to fade.
Around them, the survivors stirred. A handful of warriors—men, elves, and one broken-winged fairy—tried to stand. Their movements were slow, reverent, as though afraid to wake the mountain again.
No one spoke. There was nothing left to say.
Leira reached for her sword out of habit. The blade had melted, the metal curled into a spiral like a dead leaf. She stared at it for a moment, then let it fall.
A distant thrum pulsed through the stone beneath her knees. One heartbeat. Then another. Deep. Faint. Relentless.
Ariel turned toward it. "He's still dreaming."
Leira's jaw tightened. "Then we make the dream deep enough that he can't find the way out."
–––
The fairy limped closer, her bare feet black with soot. "You'll kill yourselves."
Leira looked at her, not unkindly. "We already did."
The fairy didn't argue. She only knelt beside the others and lowered her head. Her body began to tremble; a thin web of light traced itself along her arms and face. The same thing started to happen to the others—tiny cracks of light, bright at first, then cooling to stone-gray.
Ariel saw it before Leira did. "They're becoming part of it," she whispered.
The realization came with a strange peace. The warriors weren't dying—they were binding. Their final breath became the seal itself. Every heartbeat they'd ever had sank into the mountain, one more chain link in the prison.
Leira felt the pull in her own veins, calling her downward, inward. The fire inside her had nowhere left to go. It circled, searching for a place to rest.
"We can hold it," Ariel said. "You and me."
Leira turned to her. Her sister's face was pale beneath the soot, but her eyes were clear. "If we hold it, we'll never wake."
Ariel nodded. "Then let's make sure we never do."
–––
They clasped hands, palm to palm. The heat that passed between them was soft now, steady. The fire recognized itself.
The heartbeat beneath them quickened in protest. A gust of wind rose out of nowhere, swirling the dust into a spiral. Leira felt the chains shift—the links straining, testing the bond. For a heartbeat she thought they would snap.
Ariel leaned close, whispering into the wind. "Sleep."
The word carried. The whole cavern seemed to hear it. The air fell still. The light sank back into the stone. The pulse below slowed again, softer, deeper, fading until even their sharpened senses could barely catch it.
The mountain breathed once, a long exhale through its cracks, and stilled.
–––
Leira's eyes stung. She didn't know if it was from heat or tears. She could feel her body cooling, her blood slowing. The fire that had once roared inside her was turning to ash.
Ariel leaned her head against Leira's shoulder. "Can you see the sky?"
Leira looked up. Through a single split in the cavern roof, a sliver of night showed through—black, endless, scattered with stars. The air that drifted down smelled of rain and distant grass. She hadn't smelled rain in years.
"It's beautiful," Ariel said.
"It's far away," Leira answered.
–––
A shadow moved among the dead. Someone still living crawled closer—a young seer, half her hair burned away, robes turned to tatters. Her eyes were bright, reflecting the faint red glow still pulsing from the seal. She carried a scrap of parchment clutched in her bloody hands.
Leira recognized her. The girl had been one of the watchers, chosen to record the end of the war.
The seer knelt before them. "You did it," she whispered. "You've caged a god."
Leira tried to speak, but her voice broke. Ariel's hand found hers and squeezed once before letting go.
"Tell them," Leira managed. "Tell them to remember what happens when gods are woken."
The seer nodded. She dipped her finger into her own blood and began to write across the scrap of parchment. The letters glowed faintly as they formed:
When the blood of scale is born anew, the night will rise again.
Ariel's breath caught. "That's not remembrance," she murmured. "That's warning."
–––
The girl didn't answer. She kept writing until the parchment filled with crimson lines, then set it on the ground beside the sealed heart. The blood burned into the stone, fusing the prophecy with the mountain itself.
The seer slumped forward, motionless.
Leira's vision dimmed. She could feel her heart slowing to match the one beneath the earth. Her last thought was not of victory, nor of the god below, but of the sound of the rain she would never hear again.
Ariel's fingers tightened once more around hers.
"Sleep," her sister whispered.
The word carried one last time, echoing softly through the dark.
–––
Outside, the storm cleared, and ash fell like snow across a silent world.
A tremor passed through the cavern, gentle now, like a sigh through ribs. The red light that had soaked the stone dulled to embers. Cracks in the walls sealed themselves with a hiss, molten edges cooling to black glass. The heat faded first from the rock, then from the air, and finally from Leira's skin. Every exhale left her colder.
Ariel's hand loosened but didn't fall away. They were no longer two outlines on the ground; the ash that had rained over them gathered, layer by layer, until it shaped a crust of pale gray. The scales beneath that crust still glimmered faintly, as if remembering light.
–––
The seer stirred once more. She looked up from the words she had written and saw that the sisters were already half hidden. Her own hands had begun to fade at the edges, the flesh turning translucent. She smiled, a small, bewildered smile—the look of someone realizing she had survived a miracle but not for long.
"Rest," she whispered, though her voice barely carried. "The world will not forget you. It never forgets what it fears."
She pressed her palms together, drew one last breath, and slumped beside the sisters. Where her body touched the stone, a thin film of light spread outward like frost, sealing the writing she had left. In another heartbeat she was gone, scattered into a faint silver dust that mixed with the ash.
The mountain exhaled.
–––
Above, the crack in the roof narrowed. A single star shone through for an instant before the stone knit itself shut. Darkness took the chamber. The only sound was the slow beat buried deep within the earth—the steady rhythm of a god's sleep.
Seasons began to turn.
Time thinned. What little air remained in the cavern grew still, heavy with memory. Moss took root in cracks that hadn't existed before. Water seeped down from the high snowfields, tracing paths over the sealed heart, singing quietly to itself. The bodies of the warriors hardened until they were statues indistinguishable from the walls. No one who found them later would know they had once breathed.
–––
Centuries layered themselves like dust.
The mountain lost its name first. Then the plains around it. Forests rose, burned, and rose again. A river carved new valleys, its course curving wide around the hill of black stone that had once been the battlefield. Villages came and went along its banks, each one older than the last, each one less sure of the stories their elders told.
The last echoes of fire and blood became legend, and legend became rumor. The sealing of Kareth turned into a fable told to frighten children: "Stay near the hearth at night. The mountain dreams, and it hungers for sound."
–––
Somewhere far below those same villagers, the faintest glow still pulsed within the rock—one heartbeat every thousand years. Each pulse sent a breath of warmth through the sealed veins of the world, and with it the faintest whisper of thought, patient and sure.
Fire forgets nothing.
When at last the mountain's outer slopes cooled enough for grass to grow, rain fell freely again. The earth softened; flowers took root between the cracks of old obsidian. Animals returned. The bones of men and dragons alike dissolved into soil.
Far to the west, where rivers met the sea, the first stones of Westernlight were laid. Walls rose; fields were sown. The age of kings began beneath skies that had long since stopped remembering war. Peace rippled outward, fragile and golden.
–––
And under it all, the mountain slept.
Its heartbeat had slowed almost to silence, but not quite. Once every age it stirred—a single tremor so deep no one on the surface felt it, no one except the dreams of certain children born with scales along their arms. They would wake crying, hearing in their sleep the voice of something older than gods, whispering from beneath stone and time.
Wake. Remember me.
Then the whisper faded, and the night went still again.