Surviving as a Broken Hero

The rope slid off the opposite edge and dangled in the air, only anchored by the point where we were.

Koise hauled the rope up as we watched, our breaths turning to vapor in the frigid air.

We were lucky because of two things that day:

1. By making our infiltration attempt during the middle of the day, as it was around noon by then, we were actually making it when people were on their lowest guard, as nobody would have ever expected something as bold as a daytime break-in.

2. The dragon had called everyone in the city to listen to its announcement, meaning nobody was around to see us in broad daylight through the constantly swirling flecks of ice.

The pillars of light throughout the city continued to shine brightly throughout the city in a yellowish orange under the sunlight.

Our next step was to scale the stone wall. It was easily three heads taller than us, but Koise still had his arrow and rope, and it took much less effort to throw it over the top of the wall, where it latched into the battlements.

The wall was coated in a thin layer of ice and was slippery underfoot. My hands and arms did most of the work that would have been impossible for me to do before Awakening.

At the top of the battlements, Koise pulled in his rope again and put it back into the item bag, and we got a good look at what was waiting for us in the dragon’s fortress.

Silence.

It was eerily quiet.

Where one might have usually imagined guards on patrol over a castle’s battlements and watchfires to keep them warm and give them vision over the walls, we instead saw not a single other living being from our view of the entire outside of the castle.

The path from the gate entrance to the castle doors was paved with smoothly interlocking stone, and dead bushes along the sides of the stone road in the courtyard indicated where flower bushes might have once been planted.

Outside of the straight pathway to the castle doors, hard, frozen dirt packed the ground, and the expansive grounds, easily the size of two professional soccer fields, were littered with bits of debris and dead branches.

We could see the remnants of wooden targets in what must have been an archery field with old arrows still sticking in the targets, which were falling apart and lopsided on the icy ground.

Instead of the normal open windows in old castles or the glass that many such castles had been equipped with in this new world, the castle looked like it had window enchantments placed over small, rectangular openings regularly dotting the castle’s exterior.

The enchantments were easy to spot, spells that lightly obfuscated the interior over the window opening while letting physical matter pass through without letting the warmth escape.

The only actual window was a huge stained-glass depiction of the sun rising, which was located squarely in the top-middle of the castle’s central square tower, reminiscent of a clock face on a huge clock.

Though they didn’t overpower the sunlight, we also saw light stones placed along the central path and around the castle’s main entryway that would shed light over the place during the darkest hours of the night.

Over it all, though, there was something far more foreboding.

Scorch marks ran the entirety of the courtyard and stained the castle’s exterior in places with black soot.

It was evidence that the dragon had not built the castle, maybe not even the city, and had instead liberated it from its previous owners, whoever they might have been.

At least it didn’t look like infiltrating or sneaking past that point would pose much of a problem.

We hopped down from the wall, easily taking the impact of landing with our System-strengthened legs, though I barely managed to not slip on the ice-coated dirt, and Lein fell solidly onto his backside.

Koise, of course, landed as easily as if he had simply jumped from a small ledge.

We elected to run, then, each of us falling into a sprint across the courtyard.

It wasn’t like we were truly pressed for time or running from something, but we never knew when the dragon would be back, and if the dragon came back while we were taking our time to walk through the courtyard, there would have been nowhere to hide.

Finally, we stood in front of the towering wooden doors, reinforced with bands of iron running horizontally along their surface at regular intervals.

Hoping that it wouldn’t be locked, I pushed on the door while Lein caught his breath and Koise looked back over the courtyard, eyes tracking the sky for any sign of the dragon.

The side of the door slowly creaked open, having not been used in quite some time.

Warmth assaulted us almost immediately, and we slipped into the castle and creaked the door shut behind us again.

The castle’s interior was magnificent.

Though it was deteriorating and there was a thin layer of dust over everything, the beauty of its construction was clearly evident, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how it might have once looked.

The plush red carpet covering the entirety of the entry floor, the grand archway leading to other sections of the castle, a white marble floor where the carpet didn’t cover, and lastly, a grand platform in the very center of the entryway marked what had to have been elevators of the finest magical making.

Numerous circular platforms with waist-high railings that sat within indentations in the platform sat unused, waiting for a mana imbuement that would send them upward, where the ceiling had matching holes for the elevator platforms to pass through.

Dust-coated paintings hung along the walls, and the sense of space was immense, each step on the marble floor like a thundering echo in the silent halls.

Then there was the lighting…

Roughly three body lengths above us, about halfway to the ceiling hanging within some sort of magical suspension, crystals of light shed illumination in just the singular direction of the floor so that the ceiling resembled the pitch black of the darkest night, the crystals were shining like stars within.

I had never seen anything like it. The castle back in Karfana had been impressive, yes, but such intricate enchantments to light a single room alone would have probably cost the entirety of what it would have cost to build a castle like the one in Karfana, let alone the multiple-layered enchantments required for each individual elevator platform.

Even Koise paused for a moment to take it in, taken aback.

“Holy shit…”

Lein said what we were all thinking.

‘What a waste…’

How many years had it been since anyone other than the dragon had been down there? Did the dragon even go down there itself?

I also wondered who had built a castle of such intricacy, it couldn’t have been humans, at least. We had only been on the new world since the Merge had occurred six years before that point, after all.

I would have liked to have explored the castle and seen what other wonders it had to offer, but we were still pressed for time and had to find the dragon’s lair before it returned, which we all came to a unanimous, unspoken agreement would be at the highest point in the castle.

That meant we would have to take the elevators.

As we approached them, I realized that I would have to depend on Koise or Lein to supply the mana for the elevator’s enchantments, which I imagined couldn’t have taken much.

The elevators looked like they had been designed for general use by servants, after all.

My worries were unfounded, as the elevator system was even more complexly designed than I had originally thought.

We walked onto one of the platforms through the gaps intended for entry in the railings around the platform with plenty of room to spare, and I saw the buttons inset into the side of the railings, simple up and down arrows indicating their use.

Checking to make sure we were all actually on the elevator, I tentatively pressed the ‘up’ button.

‘…’

I was waiting for some swoosh sound or hum of magic, but the elevator rose so silently that, if I had kept my eyes shut, I wouldn’t have even realized we were moving.

Upwards at a steady pace, we eventually passed the star-like lights and ascended through the darkness, the platform still lit by faint illumination stones near its center.

We silently passed through the hole in the ceiling into what I would learn was the second of the castle’s four floors.

The grand entryway was nearly identical, save for the fact that there was a separate layer of railing around each of the circles the elevators rose through to prevent anyone from falling through.

Also, though the construction of the room and the star-like lights illuminating it were the same, there were tables placed at seemingly random intervals throughout the room, with sofas and comfortable-looking chairs around them and shelves of books that lined the walls.

I could only imagine what the other rooms past the wide archways looked like, but we still didn’t have time, and I almost regretfully pressed the up button again, which continued our smooth ascent.

Then, we reached the third floor, which had a wooden enclosure that rose all the way up to the ceiling around the elevators, with a single exit/entry for people to leave and enter the elevator area.

If I were to guess, that was probably the area where the royal rooms of the castle were located, and guards would have investigated or questioned anyone going to that floor who didn’t belong.

We still weren’t in the castle’s tower yet, but it was pretty clear which elevator would take us there.

Ahead of us, through the exit for the general elevator area, we could see an elaborate platform smaller than the general elevators that looked to have been carved of a single, massive piece of wood.

We exited the elevator area and comfortably got onto that last elevator, there being just enough room for three of us.

I hit the up button one final time.