That waiting followed us down.
The main chamber waited for us exactly like that.
Empty.
Not abandoned. Not forgotten. Empty in the deliberate way a room becomes when someone has stripped it clean before anyone arrives. No scrolls. No shackles. No bloodied tables. No half-finished ritual circles. Nothing but pale stone, dead bells, and scrape marks where furniture had been dragged away in a hurry.
Darian moved left with his sword raised. Mira went right, shoulders loose, eyes narrowed. Ilyon crossed the center with the controlled grace of a blade being drawn. Seraphine stayed near me, light gathered in one hand and suspicion in the other.
“This was occupied recently,” Ilyon said, crouching beside a shallow groove in the floor. “Heavy tables. Iron-footed. Removed, not destroyed.”
Mira glanced around the barren chamber. “So they cleaned up before the company came. How polite.”
“Not polite,” Darian muttered. “Prepared.”
I touched the nearest wall. The stone was cold, but not dormant. Something had moved through it. Magic, pressure, command. The temple was not empty because Othalyss had fled.
It was empty because she wanted us looking at the wrong absence.
We spread through the adjoining rooms anyway.
Carefully.
Every door was opened like it might scream. Every chamber was cleared as if it might breathe. We found sleeping cells with no bedding. Storage rooms without crates. Prayer alcoves stripped of icons. An infirmary with shelves swept bare except for a cracked clay bowl and one stained strip of linen no one had bothered to take.
After the fifth empty room, Mira kicked a loose stone hard enough to send it skittering down the hall.
“Are we being fucked with?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That was rhetorical.”
“Then ask better questions.”
She gave me a look that would have wounded a softer man.
Darian pushed open another door. Empty. Again.
“Nothing,” he growled. “No guards. No supplies. No captives. Just that welcoming party outside and a godsdamned hollow temple.”
Seraphine stepped into the room behind him, her eyes passing over the bare walls. “They left the half-dragons to slow us. Not stop us.”
Ilyon’s jaw tightened. “Or to study us.”
That landed badly.
We searched the entire visible temple before accepting what none of us wanted to say aloud. The House of the Silver Chimes had been gutted. Whatever research Othalyss kept there, whatever horrors she had been refining, had been moved somewhere deeper.
Or hidden.
Ilyon finally lost patience in one of the side chambers. He kicked a pile of discarded material—broken straps, splintered wood, scraps too useless for their retreat—and the sound cracked through the temple like a curse.
“What the fuck is this?”
No one answered immediately.
Because we all had the same question.
Why leave guardians if the lair was gone? Why abandon the visible temple but sacrifice eight matured half-dragons on the steps? Othalyss was cruel, not wasteful. Liliana’s brood did not spend resources without purpose.
Mira dropped onto a broken pillar, crossing one leg over the other. “Maybe Othalyss and her little monsters are cowards. Ran so fast they left the front door open for the next dragon to move in.”
Darian frowned. “Doesn’t feel like cowardice.”
“No,” Seraphine said softly. “It feels like concealment.”
I looked at the bare walls again, the too-clean floors, the dead chimes hanging above us. “They’re still here.”
Darian’s gaze sharpened. “Under us?”
“Beside us,” Ilyon said. “Behind something. Through something.”
Mira perked up slightly. “Oh, are we guessing? I want to guess.”
Seraphine sighed. “Must we turn every ominous magical investigation into a wager?”
“Yes,” Mira said at once.
Darian lowered his sword just enough to look amused. “Hatch beneath the altar.”
Ilyon shook his head. “Too mundane. Keystone. Likely embedded in one of the chimes.”
Seraphine studied the ceiling. “Portal hidden by resonance. The chimes may be anchors.”
Mira pointed at Seraphine. “That was my guess.”
“You had not guessed yet.”
“I was spiritually about to.”
I looked toward the central aisle, where the light fell wrong across the empty floor. “Portal.”
Mira scowled. “You cannot choose a portal after Seraphine says portal.”
“I can, because I am correct.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I am observant.”
“You’re smug.”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“Also correct.”
It took us the better part of an hour to prove it.
The entrance was not in the altar, though Darian searched for it with the stubborn thoroughness of a man who wanted to win a bet more than he wanted to admit. It was not in the chimes either, though Ilyon found three separate resonance runes carved along the inner rims, clever and vestigial, meant to mislead anyone competent enough to look up.
The true threshold sat beneath a patch of unremarkable stone near the west transept. No seam. No handle. No visible mark. Just a faint distortion when Seraphine cast light across it and the barest pulse of conjuration when I pressed my palm to the floor.
Mira threw both hands up. “The obvious choice should not have been a fucking option, Lendys.”
I gave her a smile sharp enough to be irritating on purpose. “Too bad. Now stop acting like a hatchling and ready yourself.”
She muttered something uncharitable about gods and cheating.
We gathered around the portal.
No one joked then.
Darian rolled his shoulders and tightened his grip on his sword. Ilyon whispered a spell under his breath, silver light threading briefly through his eyes and ears. Seraphine’s hand brushed the symbol at her throat. Mira bounced once on the balls of her feet, then went still.
I took one breath.
So did they.
Then we stepped through.
For a moment, there was only black.
Not darkness. Black. Absolute and suffocating, like the world had forgotten how to make distance.
Then the cave woke up.
Mushrooms along the walls began to glow in our presence, one cluster after another, spilling green-blue light down wet stone. The tunnel ahead curved and dipped, ribbed with mineral veins and old roots that had grown through the rock like fingers. It should have slowed us.
Ilyon had other ideas.
He surged forward before any of us could stop him, magic burning in his eyes, his hearing stretched beyond mortal limits as he tried to read every echo, every breath, every tremor in the deep.
Hlal’s desecrated temple had cut deeper into Ilyon than he had allowed us to see. Every broken carving, every mocked hymn, every stolen chamber pulled another thread loose from his restraint.
“Ilyon!” Seraphine snapped.
He did not stop.
“Damn it,” Mira said, already running.
We chased him into the cave system, but the tunnels fractured almost immediately. One passage became three. Three became seven. The sound of Ilyon’s boots bounced strangely through the stone, multiplying until he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once.
Darian swore. “Which way?”
Seraphine lifted a hand. “We are not splitting up.”
Mira shot her a look. “He could be walking straight into a trap.”
“He can handle himself long enough for us to avoid making this worse,” Seraphine said. Her voice was tight, but certain. “Pick a tunnel. We follow each other.”
She was right.
I hated that she was right.
I chose the third passage from the left, where the air tasted faintly of iron and wet ash. “This one.”
Mira took off first.
Darian followed half a step behind her, because of course he did. Seraphine and I ran after them, the glowing fungi smearing into streaks along the walls as the tunnel narrowed, then opened into a broad chamber full of bunks.
Not cells.
Bunks.
Rows of them.
Large frames reinforced with iron, each one sized for bodies larger than human but not fully draconic. Training marks scarred the floor. Hooks lined the walls. There were feeding troughs in one corner, and beside them, racks of restraints arranged with nauseating care.
Successful creations, then.
Not prisoners.
Stock.
The half-dragons inside were not as mature as the ones above. They matched us in height and mass, or nearly did, but there was something unfinished in them. Youth in the proportions. Rawness in the movement. Still huge. Still dangerous. Still made for violence before they had ever been given a chance to be anything else.
They attacked without a word.
We put them down quickly, but not cleanly. One opened Darian’s forearm before he crushed its throat. Another slammed Mira into a bunk hard enough to fold the frame around her before she drove her heel through its knee and finished it on the floor. Seraphine burned one back with radiant fire, then sealed a gash across my side before I had time to tell her not to waste the magic.
The commotion brought the real guards.
Not all born cleanly. Not all made the same way. Some were true dragons, some half-shaped things dragged close enough to draconic power that the distinction mattered less in the dark.
The chamber erupted.
Darian and Mira shifted first, bronze bodies tearing through mortal shape in a roar of scale, wing, and fury. The ceiling cracked as Darian’s full weight hit the stone. Mira struck the nearest green dragon head-on, lightning crawling between her teeth before she released it point-blank into its chest.
I stayed in mortal form.
Not by preference.
The half-dragons came for me in a wave, and I met them with steel. Judgment sang in my hands, bright but restrained, cutting through armor, scale, and manufactured flesh while Seraphine kept me standing with clipped bursts of healing from the edge of the fight.
The dragons made the room too small.
Which I used.
I drove one half-dragon backward into Mira’s fight just as she slammed her opponent into the wall. The body burst between dragon-scale and stone, blood spraying hot across my armor. Another lunged for my throat, and I ducked under the strike, hooked its leg, and kicked it into the sweep of Darian’s tail.
He smashed it across the chamber and into two others.
The stone cracked.
Bone followed.
The air became wet with blood and smoke.
Seraphine took a hit meant for Darian and staggered, spitting red onto the floor before forcing another shield into place. “A little room would be appreciated!”
Mira answered by pinning her green dragon beneath both claws and wrenching until its neck snapped with a sound like a tree splitting in winter.
If I had been an ordinary dragon, she might have scared me.
As it stood, I was simply grateful she was on my side.
Darian finished his opponent differently. He caught the green dragon by both jaws, forced them wide, and unleashed fire straight down its throat. The creature convulsed beneath him, burning from the inside out until its struggles stopped.
Then, because Darian and Mira apparently mistook battlefields for courtship halls, he dropped back into humanoid form and went straight to her.
She shifted down to meet him halfway.
The kiss was immediate, bruising, and entirely too long for a chamber full of corpses.
Seraphine stared at them for three full seconds. “Are you serious?”
Mira did not pull away.
Darian made a vague gesture that could have meant apology or victory.
Seraphine wiped blood from her mouth and snapped, “Enough. Press on before I make you both explain this to Ilyon.”
That worked.
Mostly.
They separated, though Mira looked smug and Darian looked disgustingly pleased with himself.
We ran again.
The deeper tunnels trembled around us. Somewhere ahead, something massive slammed into stone. Then came the unmistakable roar of a silver dragon, followed by the collapse of what sounded like half a cavern.
Ilyon.
“He’s going to bring the entire lair down if he keeps this up,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at Seraphine as we ran. “You may need to calm him when we find him.”
For one moment, she said nothing.
Then her expression settled into something resolute and luminous and a little terrifying.
“I’ll bring him under control,” she said. “Just find him first, Lendys.”
So we ran harder, chasing the tremors through Othalyss’s buried hell while the mountain shook around us.