Chapter 1213: Some Answers
Amid a sudden whirlwind of dizziness and a thunderous roar echoing in his mind, Modir felt his soul abruptly ripped free, drifting aimlessly in a vast, empty void. Time lost all meaning as he seemed to traverse an unfathomable distance beyond mortal comprehension—then, like a tattered rag, his shattered soul was roughly shoved back into his body.
Moments later, the old mage slowly regained consciousness. Instinctively, the moment awareness returned, he assumed a defensive stance—one hand grasping his battle staff, the other reaching for his enchanted dagger. A flurry of protective spells followed in an instant. He clearly remembered going through this exact routine not long ago.
But this time, he did not awaken in that bleak, monochrome world. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in his familiar adventurer’s single dormitory. Everything around him was vivid and normal, bathed in natural color. From outside the window came the lively sounds of the adventurer’s camp, bustling with energy. A dim, twilight glow—typical of the endless night—filtered softly through the cracks in the window frame.
“This is downright bizarre…” Modir muttered, his mind still sharp and alert. He quickly scanned every detail of the room, confirming that everything matched his memories. Then he moved to the window, brushing his fingers over the fine layer of dust on the sill.
He had touched the same spot in that faded black-and-white world, but here, the dust showed no sign of having been disturbed.
Leaning closer, Modir cracked the window open a bit. Under the faint streetlamp and the weak twilight, he saw the adventurer’s camp alive with people coming and going. Another group had apparently just finished clearing or exploring nearby, and the jubilant adventurers were heading off to the tavern, the casino, and other places of leisure. A dragonborn, still in human form but with scales visible on his face and arms, passed by. He caught sight of Modir and greeted him with a friendly smile.
Modir smiled back and nodded, then retreated to the desk beside his bed. His expression quickly grew serious as he sat in the sturdy wooden chair, frowning deeply while trying to piece together the events that had just transpired. Waves of dizziness still surged through his mind, disrupting his thoughts and memories. He had to cast several calming spells on himself before his head felt steady enough to sift through the fragments of that strange “dream.”
Suddenly, as if recalling something, he gestured toward a direction. A thick sheepskin-bound tome silently floated into his hand. Setting down his dagger, Modir flipped to the latter half of the notebook, his eyes shifting subtly.
New handwriting had appeared on the pages—words he had written in that black-and-white, faded world. From the moment he awoke from the dream, his notes about the desolate dust plains and the towering female deity were clearly inscribed on the parchment. Looking closely, the ink was still wet.
“Did the dream affect reality? Or did I unconsciously record these notes while asleep? Or was that experience real, and I was caught between layers of reality and illusion? Or is it some kind of shadow realm influence bleeding into the real world…?”
Modir muttered various theories under his breath, running his finger slowly over the text, searching for clues. Suddenly, his finger stopped.
He was reading the part where the colossal female deity and the unseen “storytelling adventurer” discussed his dream. But the section describing the deity’s dream had somehow become a chaotic blur of ink spots and tangled lines—like incoherent murmurs in a half-remembered nightmare, utterly illegible.
Immediately, Modir tried to recall the corresponding memory in his mind. Cold sweat began to bead on his forehead. He realized a chunk of that memory was missing—and it felt as if the blankness had just appeared moments ago. He could distinctly sense the hollow, discordant void in his mind. Then, after a few seconds, the feeling faded, and the memory of what the deity’s dream had been about was gone for good.
The old mage took a slow breath, steadying his racing heart. With a determined air, he flipped to the very end of the notes. There, he saw the deity rising to face some indescribable, terrifying monster. That part of the record remained intact. He also saw the final words describing how, after she stood, the backrest of her throne displayed a starry sky… and then the record abruptly ended.
“Starry sky… starry sky…” Modir closed the notebook slowly, tapping his forehead lightly with his staff. “I definitely saw that starry sky on the throne’s backrest, but I can’t recall what it looked like at all… This shouldn’t be. With a mage’s mind, I should remember something… Is my memory failing again? Or is this some powerful mental block?”
He stopped tapping, frowning deeply. “No, I can’t keep thinking about this. There’s a risk of contamination. I need to pause.”
His hard-earned experience in flirting with danger without dying kicked in. Modir stepped back from the edge of peril, took several deep breaths to calm his heart and mind, then carefully put away his notes. He planned to get some fresh air first, then head to the adventurer’s tavern for a drink.
But just as he reached the door, a familiar presence entered his senses. He stopped, and moments later, polite knocking came from outside, followed by a young woman’s voice: “Master Modir, are you awake?”
Opening the door, Modir saw a young woman dressed in black with dark hair standing before him.
He recognized her—he had met her once near the hill piled with crystal clusters. Though she appeared gentle and delicate, her true form was that of a black dragon, and she was the personal envoy of Heragor, the dragon clan leader.
“I hope I’m not disturbing your rest, Master Modir,” the black dragon maiden bowed slightly, a faint smile on her lips. “I apologize for the sudden visit on your day off. I bring an invitation.”
“No trouble at all. I just woke up,” Modir raised an eyebrow, not surprised. “Has Lord Heragor summoned me again?”
She nodded. “The leader requests your presence at the inner city council hall. Are you available now?”
“Nothing inconvenient,” Modir replied casually, gesturing to the nearby coat rack. His robe and hat flew over and settled on him neatly. “I don’t have plans today anyway, and there are some matters I want to discuss with your leader—he seems a man of great knowledge… a dragon.”
As he spoke, he began to step outside, then suddenly paused, giving the black dragon maiden a strange look. “By the way, I suppose I don’t need to fly to get to the inner city, right? If necessary, I can fly myself…”
He was recalling the last time she had carried him on her claw to the mountaintop—a decidedly uncomfortable mode of transport.
“Of course not,” the black dragon maiden chuckled, clearly amused by the thought. “The council hall isn’t far. We’ll get there quickly on foot.”
In the inner city of New Agondor, inside a council hall rebuilt and repurposed from a half-collapsed old factory, a reception room glowed with warm, soft light. Modir followed the black dragon maiden inside, where the dragon clan leader—an ancient being with knowledge beyond human imagining—had been waiting for some time.
As Modir entered, the black dragon maiden silently slipped away. He straightened his mage’s robe and approached the golden dragon in human form. The leader looked up from the desk, his pale gold vertical pupils fixing on the black-hatted adventurer.
“Lord Heragor, you summoned me because…”
Modir’s words were cut off as Heragor’s expression suddenly shifted. The golden dragon leader rose abruptly, leaning forward, his gaze piercing as if trying to peer into Modir’s very soul.
“Master Modir, where has your soul been?”
Modir swallowed the rest of his sentence, startled for less than a second before realizing that this powerful golden dragon had seen something amiss within him. Immediately, he connected it to the bizarre experience in that shadowy, black-and-white realm. His expression turned grave.
“Lord Heragor, have you discovered something?”
“Your soul bears a very distinct… foreign aura,” Heragor said, his golden eyes reflecting Modir’s figure—and alongside it, a pale, indistinct spirit. “A force not of this world has left a deep mark on your soul… but it’s fading quickly. Had you come any later, even I might not have detected it.”
“Really?” Modir looked shocked and skeptical. “That can’t be… How could I not sense something wrong with my own soul?”
“Perhaps that mark also interfered with your perception. Or the power behind it is too strange, hiding in the ‘blind spots’ of your mind,” Heragor’s expression remained stern. “Master Modir, what exactly happened?”
“I had a dream—though maybe it wasn’t a dream. As you said, my soul might have briefly slipped into some shadowy otherworld,” Modir considered carefully. He saw no reason to hide the truth from the dragon leader, and he hoped to glean some answers. So he recounted the strange experience in full.
“It happened just a few hours ago. I awoke from sleep to find myself in a desolate wasteland of gray-white dust and shattered boulders, with ruins of a black, broken city that seemed forever out of reach…
“I saw a colossal figure, as tall as a mountain, seated on a crumbling throne made of an unknown gray-white material that seemed fused with the surrounding dust. The lower part of the throne resembled some kind of religious altar. The figure appeared to be a woman, wearing a black gown with no discernible style or fabric, with shifting gray-white cracks or lines like overlapping shadows across her form. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I could hear her voice…
“I also heard my own voice, but I couldn’t see where it came from…”
In an effort to get as much help as possible, Modir recounted everything he could remember in painstaking detail. He even added the brief “dream” he had aboard the ship. Hragor listened intently the entire time, never interrupting. Only when Modir finally finished did the dragon leader let out a soft sigh, his expression grave as he asked, “Before boarding that mechanical vessel from Northport, you’d never experienced anything like this before, correct?”
“That’s right,” Modir replied, sensing what was coming next. “You could say this phenomenon only began after I got close to Talrond.”
“Like a shadow realm’s black-and-white void, an endless gray-white desert, massive stones… and a black city in ruins that seems forever out of reach…” Hragor frowned, muttering to himself, “A colossal throne collapsing into decay, and an altar structure beneath it…”
“Do you know what that place is?” Modir couldn’t help but ask. “You’ve lived nearly two million years—surely there’s nothing in this world you don’t know.”
Hragor shook his head. “There is no true all-knower in this world. Even the eyes of the gods have limits. I have no memory of the place you describe—neither in the physical world nor the Shadow Realm, nor in any of the strange elemental or spiritual planes. Nothing matches it exactly…”
Modir’s disappointment showed plainly on his face. “Is that so… Even you don’t know.”
Hragor continued shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you there. But I agree with your assessment—the environment you described is very close to the Shadow Realm. Though many contradictions remain unexplained, it’s definitely deeply connected to it. And…”
The golden dragon suddenly stopped mid-sentence, his expression turning strange—tinged with caution, suspicion, and a growing tension.
He lifted his head and fixed Modir with an unprecedentedly serious gaze. “Can you describe again what that towering ‘lady’ looked like?”
“Of course,” Modir nodded immediately, then recounted once more the image of the goddess-like figure he’d seen in the ‘dream.’ Suddenly, he remembered something else and added, “Oh, and I recall that when she faced that terrifying, blasphemous monster, she held a weapon—a scepter formed from the gray-white fissures that ran across her body. It was half black, half white, and had an incredibly strong presence. I could barely tear my eyes away from it…”
“A half black, half white scepter!?” Hragor’s eyes widened instantly, as if a vague suspicion he’d harbored had just been confirmed. The dragon leader sprang to his feet, only to realize a few seconds later that he’d lost his composure, and slowly sat back down.
“Looks like you know who that ‘lady’ is,” Modir said, reading the reaction.
“What you saw was…” Hragor began.
“Just as you suspected, Master Modir—a deity,” Hragor exhaled softly. “But not a god of this age… She’s been missing for over 1.8 million years.”
(End of chapter)