The raptor was still there when he descended from his tower. She growled at his approach. "You again?" he asked.
He stared at her while he mended his arm after their now-familiar scuffle. "You again," he repeated. "And again and again and again. Even though you die, you show up again after I die too. Why are we linked?" With his wounds closed, he placed his scaled talon on her snout. "What are you?" She only growled at him, and he sighed. "Syn!" he shouted, but no response came. "Bah," he said, then shrugged. "Worth trying." He slid his hand under her jaw and lifted her gaze to his. "I never had a pet. Especially not a pet raptor."
"Skree?" she asked.
Sai's eyes lost their focus. "Anitle doesn't count," he said. "He wasn't a pet. And if he were, he was Drang's pet, not mine. So why is Syn giving me a pet now?" The raptor cocked her head at him, shaking loose Sai's hand. The motion pulled him from his thoughts. "Don't cock your head at me like that," he told her.
"Chirp!" she said.
"I can break you," Sai told her. "Don't even tempt me. I can shatter your brain with the snap of my fingers." He demonstrated his ability to snap his fingers.
"Grrr…" she said.
"Fine," said Sai, tossing up his hands. "Fine! Let's get moving. There has to be another way out of this place."
Sai took them to the ground floor first. The northern wing there seemed to once have been servants' quarters, the rooms packed with decaying beds and ransacked dressers, but now only Syn's children lived there. One hallway along the northern wall of the citadel got Sai's hopes up, but the room at the end had been converted into some sort of washroom, with empty wardrobes and dry basins all along the walls. What had once been windows and an exit were bricked over with the same bruised stone as the rest of the citadel. The raptor growled at the shape of the door in the wall. Sai sighed. "Let's keep looking," he said.
There was nothing else in the entire wing that gave any indication of being an exit. In one storage room towards the back of the area, though, sat an ornate chest, trimmed in gold and crimson. Unlike the crates and barrels along the walls around it, the chest was entirely free of dust and cobwebs. Sai considered it from the door. "That's a trap," he said. Then he sighed, walked up to the chest, and popped open the lid.
A shadow flew out of the chest. Sai cried out and tripped over backwards. The raptor was by his side before he hit the ground. The shadow darted towards his face, and Sai held up a hand to stop it. The shadow stopped, spinning instead in erratic orbits around Sai's outstretched hand. "What is this?" Sai asked.
"An errant fragment," came Syn's voice from the corners. "Pay it no mind."
"A fragment of…?" Sai began, but then he felt a familiar thrilling chill emanating from the fleeting shadow. "Oh. It's a bit of you." Sai brought his hand closer to his face and watched the shadow swirl. The raptor sniffed at it, and Sai batted her gently away. "There was a time when I was your chosen one. I could command your children. Summon nightmares."
"You were an excellent conduit for bringing monsters and destruction onto the Eldritch One's pitiful world," Syn agreed. "And for your loyal service, I have brought you to your eternal reward."
"But you've taken everything," Sai said. "I no longer speak with your voice. I've lost your shadows. So why would you give one back?"
"Hope is a powerful motivator," Syn replied. "A beckoning light flickering amidst the darkness. And so delicious to snuff."
Sai sighed. Then, as the shadow darted across his palm, Sai clenched his fist and caught it. "I can make something out of this," he said. "And I will use it to help break free of you."
Syn laughed. "Delicious," it repeated. This time, Sai could tell when the god had departed. He scowled at his clenched fist. He had never joined the Cult of the Shadow. What would have been the point? He had been chosen by Syn directly, and he knew how to work with the Eternal Nightmare's shadows. If Syn was going to give him tools, he was going to use them.
His resolve began to fade when he realized he didn't actually have anything into which he could infuse the shadow, and he could feel it fading within his grasp. In a brief moment of panic, he clapped the shadow to his stomach, hoping he could trap at least some of its essence within his tattered tunic. Instead, it flowed into the belt he'd scavenged. Though the belt's physical appearance did not change, its golden velvet felt black when Sai looked at it.
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Sai looked at his raptor, and she looked back at him. "I could have planned that better," he told her.
"Grrr…" she said.
"My cudgel is right there," Sai said. "But no. I had to shove the only loose fragment of Syn's power I'm like to ever see again into my belt."
"Chirp!" said the raptor.
"It's not even my belt," he went on. "It's a curtain tie that I pulled off a wall." Sai shook his head. "Doesn't matter. It's done." He pushed himself to his feet. "Let's check the south wing next."
The south wing had even less in the way of potential exits. The small rooms and tight hallways were crammed full of desks and tables and workstations. Sai assumed the area must have been used as workshops of some sort, though he held out little hope of finding anything of use. So finding an alchemical formula in a book about keeping a clean castle came as quite the surprise. "Is this for a tool cleaner?" he asked the raptor while she guarded the door of the tiny library.
"Skree?" she asked.
"Yeah, I don't know that I'd use turpentine for that either," Sai said.
The next surprise came in the form of a second ornate chest in an empty alcove. It sat, as the other had, alone in the center of the floor. Sai shook his head. "This is getting ridiculous," he said, opening the chest. Inside was a single glass vial full of thick, red blood. He gasped. "This is wyrmsblood." He lifted the vial from the chest with his talon and swirled its contents. He could feel the power of it thrumming up through his scaled arm. "This is what gave me my power. What I used to give myself the mental strength of the dragons." His grip tightened. "And what corrupted my arm."
Sai tucked the vial into his backpack, wrapping it in a scrap of fabric he'd torn from the robe of one of the shadow cultists. "I wonder if there's a research lab in this place," he mused to his raptor. "Even just a small alchemy station. I could probably further enhance the draconic traits with more wyrmsblood." He chuckled. "Before I always thought the risk wasn't worth it, but what could be worse than being stuck forever as a prisoner of the Eternal Nightmare?"
"Grrr…" the raptor said.
Sai winced. "Note to self," he said. "Don't say things like that."
It ended up being on the north side of the second floor of the citadel that Sai noticed a narrow side passage whose portcullis had been raised. "This looks promising," he muttered, but at the back was a staircase leading up to the floor above. Sai shook his head, sighed, and shrugged before climbing the stairs. At the top, a long hallway stretched farther north. Sai frowned. "Where can that possibly go?" he wondered. "That must go past the north wall of the citadel." He blinked. "It has to lead out of the citadel!"
The raptor raced ahead of him as he charged down the corridor. At the far end, another stairwell led down into what gave every impression of being a kitchen. Beyond another open doorway was a large sleeping room with multiple beds. Nice ones too, with clean bedspreads and carved headboards. "It's a guest house," Sai said. He peeked through another doorway into a drawing room, complete with tables and chairs and bookshelves. Everything felt clean and warm and inviting. Even the torches there cast real shadows, and the in the light the walls took their true deep gray shade. But what most caught his attention was the open doorway at the far end of the room. Or rather, the grass outside the doorway. He laughed and hurried to the exit, the raptor chirping behind him.
But he stopped as soon as he stepped outside. "Whoa!" he cried, more for the raptor than himself. There was grass outside the door, but not much else. The ground dropped off into a gaping abyss less than two meters from the wall of the guest house. A narrow, grassy ledge hugged the wall for a while, but it too disappeared before it even reached the corner of the building. Sai crept along the wall to the edge of the cliff and looked down. Below was the black of the Void. As much as it disconcerted Sai to see the Void below rather than in the night sky above, even more worrisome were the lights in the darkness. The Void below was marred as the Void above by the uncountable pinpricks of light that were the hallmarks of the Eternal Nightmare.
"Those lights…" Sai said. "This place really is Syn's." He looked up into the sky, studying the lights there. "It's like the stories Coatl-ome used to tell about the sitlali," he told the raptor. Sai smiled. "She would get so mad when I corrupted the Draconic word into a Trotzen derivation. 'Stars.'" He sighed, his smile fading. "Lights like that don't belong in the sky. The Void should be black. Empty. Nothing good can come where there are lights in the darkness."
The Void within the canyon laughed.
Sai stepped back from the edge, staring down into the starry black. Then he looked out. The corridor they'd taken through the citadel had been a bridge across a canyon that stretched east and west as far as Sai could see. It had taken them from the citadel proper to the north rim of the canyon. Beyond the citadel to the south lay what appeared to be farmland, and beyond that was desert. Farther south still were the steep faces and snowless peaks of void mountains. Sai craned his head around; the void mountains loomed in every direction. "What did Syn call this place?" he asked.
"Skree?" the raptor said.
"The Shadowed Vale," Sai answered. "Shadowed Vale," he said again, clutching for a scrap of memory. He'd heard that name somewhere. Or had he read it? "No," he whispered, a fragment of melody finally returning to him:
And so did Nilamaak raise up the plains
Unto the coldest reaches of the Void,
Thus trapping the Eternal Nightmare there
Forevermore within the Shadowed Vale.
"Belasolu sang about this place," Sai whispered. "The citadel isn't the prison. The Vale is." Sai stood, staring into nothing, for some time. His thoughts rolled, but they too were dark. It took the raptor chirping at him to free him. He shook his head. "We should keep moving," he said, heading back into the guest house. "There must be a front door somewhere."