Chapter 99: 99. Into the 2nd Story Dungeon

They left the next day before dawn.

The difference was the send-off.

Sael, Marak and Vorak were there. Elder Moss and Sera from Vashari, standing at the gathering’s edge. The shamans and The Dusk Claw delegate. And the warriors from the Ashplain and narrows.

Sael stood at the front.

She looked at each person. Alfred, who inclined his head in a bow. Odessa, who met Sael’s eyes. Yuki, who met Sael’s gaze with direct calm and held it a moment longer than necessary—two people acknowledging something without words.

Sael moved on without either making it a scene.

She stopped in front of Leah.

She reached up and adjusted the clasp on Leah’s traveling coat, the maternal gesture of fixing something that didn’t need fixing.

“The Auric Pride’s daughter goes on a journey into a remembering with a dragon.” Sael said.

“The Auric Pride’s daughter has been in worse” Leah said. “And came out.”

“So she did.” Sael’s hands dropped.

She stepped back and looked at Owen last.

“The continent will remember this,” she said. Formal now. “The shamans will record it. When this history is written, what happened here will be in it.”

“I hope they’ll leave out the boring parts,” Owen said. “And the ….other parts” he winked.

The corner of Sael’s mouth moved. “Go Already, you rascal” she said.

Then they went.

—

The formation was fifteen kilometers east. They covered it in two hours at walking pace—Owen on the ground with his wings folded.

The formation’s pull was strong at five kilometers. At the boundary it was a physical pressure against the chest—not painful, but present. The shimmer had intensified overnight. The crystallized grass had developed a second layer, the ambient mana output altering the material world by proximity.

The gate was not open yet.

Owen stopped the group fifty meters from the boundary.

“Last call,” he said. “You all can stay, and wait for me. The dungeon’s internal conditions are compromised. The space may be unstable within.”

Odessa looked at him. “Are you genuinely asking?”

“Please…”

“Owen,” she said with patient clarity, “I flew my dragonkin over a canyon during an ambush, almost fought a demon in a hall, and ran the Ashplain at night with eighteen warriors in the grass. What threshold do you think I haven’t crossed?”

“Same question, same answer,” Alfred said. He had his tower shield out and was running a whetstone along the rim.

Yuki said nothing. She gave him a look that communicated she would say something uncharacteristically rude if he asked and they both knew it.

Owen looked at Leah.

“I was in a cell for fourteen months, it was torturous and boring” Leah said. “I am not waiting outside a dungeon.”

“Alright then” Owen said.

Uru pulsed once. Decisive.

Owen turned back to the formation.

The gate was forming now, the shimmer concentrating into a specific point of blue vortex that his Mana Sense read as the boundary between here and the dungeon’s interior.

They stood at the boundary and watched the gate form completely.

The gate opened.

Cold air came through. Not the dry cold of the Ashplain at night. Something much older that tugged at their spines. The cold of a space sealed from the sun for a very long time, developed in absence.

Owen’s scales pulsed in excitement as he began walking towards it.

“Let’s do this” Leah said quietly.

They all stepped forward into the gate vortex and crossed the boundary without resistance. The cold hit deeper as Owen felt the space distort around him, Behind him he heard the others follow—Alfred’s footsteps heavy and deliberate, Odessa’s lighter, Yuki moving and Leah last, her presence closing the group.

The gate was already beginning to close behind them.

The next moment, a darkness enveloped all their senses, like a seizure of their consciousness.

—

Owen’s eyes opened to a different sky.

He pushed himself upright, wings spreading instinctively for balance. The grass beneath his claws was different too—not the crystallized formation grass from outside, but the soft colourfulness of Drak’thar’s fields.

His head snapped around. The Tower of Royals rose in the distance, its surface catching light that came from nowhere and everywhere. Dragons circled overhead—dozens of them, their scales catching the ambient glow. Dragonkin moved through the fields, their voices carrying across the fields in a dozen conversations he couldn’t quite hear clearly.

Drak’thar. Inside the story dungeon.

He had entered another another narrative dungeon. Different classification entirely. And it seemed like just like the first, it will begin with scattering the people that enter to different locations. He only hoped the others had a good starting point too.

“Owen.” His named was called.

He spun.

Chronara stood ten meters behind him, her scales reflecting the sky light, her eyes carrying that same ancient weight he remembered from the first story dungeon. She looked exactly as she had when he’d left—ageless, composed, that faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth like she knew something amusing about the universe’s construction.

Owen’s relief lasted exactly two seconds before his tactical assessment kicked in.

“Do you know Where the others are?”

“Yes and no,” Chronara said.

“Can you bring them here?”

“I can’t. I’m not real, Owen. Now who you knew, I’m just a phantom—a preserved impression of someone who existed in this space during the event the land is remembering.” She tilted her head. “Though given my particular gifts, I retain enough consciousness to understand what I am. Convenient, isn’t it..”

Owen’s claws dug into the grass. Yuki was somewhere in this dungeon alone. So were Alfred, Odessa, Leah. The void erosion had compromised the internal structure, which meant anything might be possible.

“They’re safe,” Chronara said, reading his tension with the same casual accuracy she had always shown. “Uncomfortable, perhaps. Challenged, certainly. As long as they play along with that this rift of the past shows them”

“Show what?”

“What happened here. What the land witnessed and preserved.” She gestured at the bustling Drak’thar around them. “This is a thousand years ago, Owen. The final year of the war between the races. Before Vorthraxx’s defeat. Before the dragons died.”

The weight of that settled into Owen’s chest. He was standing in Drak’thar again but right before it had existed before the extinction. When dragons had filled the sky instead of being legends. When this dimension had been alive instead of an empty memorial.

An idea hit him.

He reached for his dimensional pocket, the authority he had claimed over the empty Drak’thar outside this dungeon. If he could open it here, if he could bridge the connection…

So, he tried to open it, but Nothing happened.

“Worth trying. Too easy to be the right answer.” He sighed

“We exists outside normal space,” Chronara said. “Your dimensional authority doesn’t extend into this historical memory. You can’t take anything from here into the real world just like that. This is the past, preserved but not changeable.”

Owen looked at her. Really looked. The phantom’s eyes held something that wasn’t quite knowledge and wasn’t quite memory—something between the two, like she existed in the moment of understanding what she’d been without being able to alter it.

“you can see fate, right?” Owen said. “You know what I am. What I’m going to do.”

“I know what you might do. Fate is just probability, not certainty. You’re the Dragon King’s successor—that much is clear. Whether you become something worthy of that title or something that repeats Vorthraxx’s mistakes…” She smiled faintly. “That remains to be seen. Even by me.”

She turned, her tail moving in a gesture that clearly meant to follow

“Dominus?” Owen asked.

“Where else?” She glanced back. “Dominus is waiting. Or rather, the memory of him is. And he has something to show you.”

Owen’s system pulsed, not a notification, but a resonance. The Dragon King’s bloodline responding to proximity to something significant.

He fell into step behind Chronara, his wings folding against his back as they moved through the phantom kingdom. Dragons passed them without acknowledgment—they were ghosts to this memory, observers watching history play out on a loop the land had preserved for four millennia.

The Tower of Royals loomed closer. Its doors were already open.

And inside, Owen could feel something waiting. Something with weight. Something that made his bloodline sing with recognition and dread in an equal measure.

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