“Sure,” Ziel said.
Orthos went on for five more minutes before he began to suspect Ziel wasn’t paying attention. He gripped a fallen section of floor in his mouth and dragged it away—it was at least five times bigger than his body, and he marveled at his own Underlord strength.
The pile of debris shifted, and they both watched to make sure the ceiling didn’t cave in further. As they did, Orthos glanced at Ziel.
“What do you think?” the turtle asked.
“About what?”
Orthos’ mood darkened. So he hadn’t been listening. “About my words. It would serve you well to pay attention to your elders.”
“Gold dragons are tyrants because they ruled unopposed for too long,” Ziel said, with no particular inflection in his voice. “Many Monarch factions end up in a similar state when they have no rivals. Our record of the black dragon rule is too fragmented to know whether they were better rulers, but we know they certainly left more buildings behind than the golds ever constructed, in contrast to their destructive reputation. My own sect recorded the rivalry between the founder of the Path of the Last Oath and the children of Empress Natarianath. They said that the dragons were the ones in the wrong, so I was interested to hear the opposing perspective.”
Ziel’s green horns shifted as he tilted his head to the side. “I think we can make it through now.”
“Oh,” Orthos said.
Orthos had underestimated the human. Or maybe he had underestimated how fascinating his ancestors were.
Probably both.
While the outside of Noroloth’s castle remained intact, the inside had been ravaged by his battle against the Monarch intruder. Many of her scripts remained, silver runes floating in midair, which he suspected only hadn’t dissolved to essence because of the script that had locked the entire area.
They had to proceed slowly, clearing one step at a time, lest they come upon an active script that might kill them or trap them inside. Even now, some of the smaller scripts still had other bubbles of the castle frozen in time…or had reduced everything inside to a spinning vortex of dust.
Every time Ziel came upon any new script, he dutifully noted it down.
They were making good progress into the castle, but their care was scraping away Orthos’ patience. He couldn’t feel the Herald’s Remnant, and this fortress was the size of a city. He wanted to burn his way through the walls in search of it.
He wasn’t capable of that, given that this castle was built to withstand the attacks of Archlords and Heralds, but he wanted to. And they were crawling across the floor slower than a couple of…
Snails, Orthos thought firmly.
They hadn’t gone far past the collapsed hallway when they found another ring of shining silver runes. Ziel stopped to examine them, and Orthos waited patiently. Lindon and Dross had given him their best guess at the castle’s layout, but no one knew what changes the battle had wrought. This might be their best way forward to Noroloth’s Remnant.
“Preservation script,” Ziel said. “It’s another one.”
They could only see half the script. The ring of Forged symbols passed through the walls, and only half of them were visible from Ziel’s side. The circle revolved slowly, one rune passing into the wall and another emerging as it turned.
Ziel waited for half an hour, reading the entire script, as Orthos wandered and snacked on debris. He wanted to explore further, but there was no sense in getting separated now.
Finally, Ziel raised his hammer to his shoulder. It was the first movement he’d made in too long, so Orthos took it as a sign. “Well?”
“This wasn’t meant to hold for years,” Ziel said. “It was Forged quickly, like my techniques.” A green symbol flashed around Ziel’s hand and fizzled out, by way of demonstration. “Look, you can see some essence floating up here and…here.”
“Does that mean we can break it?”
“Yeah. But it suggests to me that Emala intended to come back here. When she sealed the castle with the Grand Oath Array, she must have thought it would preserve these lesser scripts until she could make it back.”
Which she hadn’t, if Orthos understood Lindon’s story correctly. The Rune Queen had left this castle and died soon after.
Ziel looked down to Orthos. “There could be an enemy in there.”
“An enemy of hers should be one of the black dragon Remnants. Let me lead the way.” Though just in case, he added, “…but stay close.”
It was not cowardice to know one’s own limits, it was foolishness to ignore them. Ziel was an Archlord, and Orthos was only an Underlord.