That small mercy lasted until we reached Beregost.
The moment we passed beneath the settlement’s outer edge, the air changed.
Not dramatically. Not in a way mortals would notice and start screaming about. It was subtler than that, a pressure beneath the skin, a wrongness dressed as normalcy. The town felt as if it were holding its breath so long that everyone inside had forgotten breathing was an option.
The unsettling part was not the tension.
It was that no one seemed to feel it but me.
Darian walked at my side, calm and watchful. Mira lounged on the back of the gnomish auto-carriage like she owned the damn thing, still smug from earlier and entirely unbothered by the cold thread running down my spine.
“You feel that?” I asked.
Darian glanced at me. “Feel what?”
Mira leaned forward. “If this is about the carriage, I refuse to apologize for comfort.”
“It isn’t the carriage.”
“Then no.”
Of course not.
Whatever coiled around Beregost was quiet enough to slip past two ancient dragons, which made the whole situation infinitely worse.
We stopped at the first inn that looked capable of housing armed strangers without asking too many questions. A hanging sign swung above the door, painted with a laughing mask and a dagger hidden behind it.
The Perfect Ruse.
A little on the nose.
Inside, the common room was crowded with old steel and older bones. Retired adventurers, mostly. Men and women in the last years of their legend, scarred, gray, broad-bellied, sharp-eyed, and restless in the way old warriors become when the world starts making noise again. Tiamat’s return had brought new requests to every board, every temple, every desperate town hall. Monsters on roads. Cultists in mines. Dragons spotted where no dragon had nested for centuries.
One last hoorah, they called it.
Mortals had a strange relationship with death. They named it adventure whenever they wanted to pretend they had chosen it.
I secured our accommodations.
Two bedrooms.
Two.
For peace, sanity, and the preservation of whatever patience I still had left.
Mira gave me a look when I returned with the keys. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Darian, traitor that he was, looked relieved.
Mira scoffed. “Cowards, both of you.”
“Sleep deprivation is a form of torture,” I said.
“You’re immortal.”
“I can still suffer.”
“Good.”
While I arranged payment, Mira had already wandered into conversation with a local band of veterans calling themselves Beregost’s Paragons. Apparently, they had defended the town for most of their lives. Goblin raids. bandits. undead. cult scares. A troll incident they told three different ways, none of which agreed with the others. At one point, they had even governed the town temporarily until proper officials were appointed by Duke Baldurian.
They told their stories with the indulgent exaggeration of people who had survived long enough to edit themselves into myth.
I barely listened to the heroics.
I listened to the geography.
A cave system east of town. A waterfall with a hidden alcove. A small gorge to the north, with an old ritual pit beside it. That last one caught my attention like a hook under the ribs.
I leaned forward. “The gorge. Tell me about that.”
An old woman with a scar across one milky eye grinned around her pipe. “Now there’s a story.”
A man beside her snorted. “A story, aye. Whether it happened is another thing.”
“It happened,” I said.
The table looked at me.
I gave them a smile that encouraged them not to ask why I sounded so certain.
The old woman continued more carefully. “They say, hundreds of years ago, before Beregost became what it is, the first folk here witnessed a battle between Asmodeus and the Dawn Father. Right there north of town. The sky split. The earth burned. People prayed to whichever one they thought might spare them.”
“Practical,” Mira murmured.
Darian gave her a sideways look. “Terrified.”
“Both can be true.”
The veteran nodded. “Some prayed to Asmodeus, and he used what power they gave him to strike harder. More prayed to the Dawn Father. Enough that he raised his axe and brought it down into the earth. Split the land open, drew a line the Lord of Hell could not cross.”
Another adventurer waved his mug. “And every year, the town prays there. Hold the line, they say. Hold the line against all evil.”
For reasons I did not care to examine, that eased something in me.
An old rite. A communal prayer. Mortals remembering that evil was not always defeated by steel alone, but by gathering together and asking the light to remain where it had once stood.
It was a good story.
True or not.
Though, in that case, true.
Darian found a man with a regional map and asked the Paragons to mark the caves, the gorge, the ritual pit, and the waterfall.
“What for?” one of them asked.
Darian did not hesitate. “I want to take my wife to see the local sights before we leave for Candlekeep.”
Mira froze.
I stared at him.
Wife.
News to me. News to the world. Though, given how loudly Mira had been invoking his name every night, perhaps the world had already drawn its own conclusions.
The table erupted with congratulations.
Mira recovered quickly, because Mira was a menace and a liar when it amused her. She slipped an arm through Darian’s and smiled sweetly enough to make him regret every choice that had led him there.
“Yes,” she said. “My husband is very thoughtful.”
Darian’s ears turned red again.
I stood before my face betrayed me. “Thank you for the company.”
“Leaving already?” Mira asked, eyes gleaming.
“Yes. Before I am forced to toast your imaginary domestic bliss.”
“It could be real domestic bliss.”
“Gods forbid.”
I left them to the laughter and found my room.
It was small, plain, and blessedly on the far side of the building from theirs. A narrow bed. A wash basin. One trunk. A window overlooking the alley. Nothing grand, nothing soft, nothing likely to carry sound from Mira and Darian’s room unless they decided to start a full military campaign.
When the noise downstairs finally thinned and curfew settled over Beregost, I opened the window and slipped into the alley.
The night air was cool, damp, and full of the faint stink of hearth smoke. Patrols moved along the main roads. Not just guards either. Adventurers had joined the perimeter watches, hands on hilts, eyes scanning rooftops and alley mouths. The town was trying very hard to keep itself safe.
That should have comforted me.
It didn’t.
I had barely crossed two streets before I knew I was being followed.
Two shadows. Familiar steps. One far too disciplined, the other incapable of patience.
I took a turn, then another, then cut through a dark gap between buildings and doubled back behind them.
“Boo.”
Mira yelped.
Darian clapped a hand over her mouth before the sound could carry.
For half a heartbeat, she looked annoyed.
Then a wicked grin spread beneath his palm.
Darian’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t.”
She licked his hand.
He recoiled instantly. “Gods, Mira.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and smiled at him. “We’ve tried that before. It doesn’t work, dear.”
The sound that left me was pure disgust.
“I regret asking no questions.”
“You didn’t ask any,” Darian muttered.
“Exactly. And somehow I still know too much.”
I turned on my heel and pushed toward the darker edge of town. They followed, because of course they did. We slipped around patrols, avoided wandering adventurers, and moved into the forest beyond the outer perimeter where the road became a pale scar beneath the moon.
Darian glanced back at the guarded settlement. “They really are trying to keep Beregost safe.”
“It looks that way,” I said.
“But?”
“But something is wrong here, and I can’t put a name to it.”
Mira gave me one of those looks again. The kind that said she was trying to decide whether I was sensing danger or unraveling.
I scoffed. “Don’t start.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You thought loudly.”
“I always think loudly.”
“Tragically true.”
We followed the marked trail to the first cave.
Nothing.
Then the second.
Still nothing.
By the fourth, I was starting to feel like the town itself was mocking me. We found animals, old bones, wet stone, abandoned campfires, and one badger with more courage than judgment. No treasure. No cult chamber. No hidden brood-lair. No scent of emerald blood or Tiamat’s corruption.
Just emptiness.
As morning approached, we reached the last marked site.
The waterfall.
It fell from a low stone shelf into a dark pool, silver in the thinning night. Behind the curtain of water, half-hidden by mist and moss, was the alcove.
The moment I stepped through, the world sharpened.
The air changed.
Clean power touched my skin.
Not Tiamat.
Tamara.
I knew her before I saw the words.
Celestial script had been etched into the stone, each line glowing faintly beneath the damp. The writing was elegant, patient, and cruel in the way only mercy can be cruel when it believes itself correct.
I read it.
And with every sentence, something inside me went still.
Lendys,
You have gone too far.
You seek to extinguish the last line of emerald dragons because of their curiosities, when patience and guidance might have shown them a better way to live, to serve, and to become useful to the good Faerûn still needs. You drove them from us. You pushed them into Tiamat’s hands.
My jaw tightened.
Curiosities.
That was what she called it.
Children melted in acid. Mortals opened and remade. Souls bent toward draconic instinct until the body broke.
Curiosities.
Darian said my name softly behind me.
I kept reading.
Do not worry. Sense can still be spoken into them. While you slept, I bargained. You will not find them easily again. I have hidden what remains and urged them toward nobler paths within their fields of study. Until you recover from this madness, I have revoked your access to the gates of Starlight. Do not come home until you understand that what you have done was never justice. It was not peace. It was your own selfish desire wearing a holy mask.
Something cold and precise slid through my chest.
Not pain.
Not yet.
Worse.
Recognition.
Even Bahamut is ashamed of you. Still, he has taken time to visit and aid the companions you left recovering in the Cloud Peaks.
Mira stepped closer. “Lendys…”
I raised a hand.
Not now.
Not yet.
The final lines burned brighter as I read them, as though the message had waited for my eyes specifically.
By the time you read this, your companions will have received a different message. The council and I have decided isolation is the gentlest medicine left to offer you. They will be urged to leave you, to choose the peace you have denied yourself, and Kereska’s magic will ease that decision into something kind. A pleasant thought. A reasonable future. A family, perhaps.
Wish them well.
The last signature appeared beneath it, shining silver-white.
Your Better,
Tamara
For a long moment, the waterfall was the only sound.
Then Mira swore under her breath.
Darian moved first, turning sharply toward the entrance. “We need to go.”
“No,” I said.
Both of them looked at me.
I could feel the magic now, threaded past the alcove, already hunting for them. Not coercion in the crude sense. Nothing so simple as domination. Kereska had always preferred elegance. A suggestion nested inside reason. A soft nudge disguised as an idea you were already having.
Leave him.
Be happy.
Build something clean before his war consumes you too.
Mira’s face changed.
Just slightly.
Her eyes flicked toward Darian.
Then away.
Darian’s hand tightened on his sword hilt, though there was no enemy in front of him to cut.
“Lendys,” he said carefully, “we can fight this.”
I almost laughed.
Could they?
Maybe.
For a time.
But Tamara had not written those words for me alone. She had written them like a blade with three edges, and one of them was already pressing into the soft place beneath my ribs.
Isolation is the gentlest medicine.
I stared at the glowing signature.
Your Better.
The arrogance of it.
The intimacy.
The wound.
A part of me wanted to tear the alcove apart, bring the mountain down over the message, burn every trace of her light until even memory choked on the smoke.
Another part of me heard Seraphine’s voice in the Cloud Peaks.
Darian’s laughter on the road.
Mira’s sharp little smile before she mouthed that she would kill me later.
I had already dragged them far enough.
And Tamara, damn her, knew exactly where to press.
“She’s wrong,” Mira said suddenly.
I looked at her.
Her jaw was clenched. Her eyes were too bright. “Whatever that says, whatever she thinks she’s doing, she’s wrong.”
Darian nodded once. “We make our own choices.”
The magic shimmered faintly between us.
Beautiful.
Subtle.
Merciless.
I wanted to believe them.
Gods, I wanted it.
But wanting has never made a thing safe.
I turned from the inscription and stepped back through the waterfall, letting cold water soak my hair, my armor, my ruined pride.
Behind me, Tamara’s words still glowed against the stone.
In front of me, the dawn spread over Beregost like nothing terrible had happened at all.
And I understood then that Seravain had not been the end of whatever had broken in me.
She had only been the beginning.