Page 55 of Crown of Flame

I have no way of doing anything.

“Now it’s time to take what I’ve learned and help my people.”

It’s a strange concept. What do my people need?

Traversing the bridge back along the deep chasm, I find remnants of the stone structures left behind. I now recognize the tools placed slightly beside them, but they’ve conspicuously been moved.

“Probably just the goblins messing with them.”

I look back toward the cavern, connecting a piece of knowledge that had never occurred to me.

I remember the outpouring of light and the strange feeling that overtook me. I remember the bodies of Serena’s friends, and how much she mourned them when she lost them to the ritual.

The gateway was opened on both sides.

It had to be to form a connection.

“Surely not.”

I don’t know what I’m looking for when I scan the air, smelling the world around me. I look for signs of movement through the area, but I find nothing, short of the dislocated objects I now know to be tools.

“What are you doing over here? It smells weird.”

I recognize the one with the fanciful stories from earlier.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, looking at the stone shelters. “We were going to demolish those. No idea why nobody has yet.”

“Perhaps you could leave them?”

His confusion is unnoted in his features, but prevalent in his pause.

“They are ugly and pointless. They will be demolished.”

I realize that I’m not going to sway him, as he begins to level the structures that so long ago captured my fascination. As simply as a thought, he pushes the black rock back into the cliff, creating unsightly mounds.

“The one I described earlier begged for me to leave this up too,” he says.

“The one with the pointy ears?”

He says nothing, but I take his silence as approval.

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

He hovers away, overlooking the vast abyss below me.

“You have been acting strangely since you returned,” he says. “You come back, covered in strange rock, and you make and admire pointless structures. Where did you go?”

“To another realm,” I say. “I was brought to another world, where many like that one exist, terrorizing creatures like the stone one I created.”

“They are made of stone?”

I shake my head.

“Do you know how I can return to that realm?”

He looks up at me in confusion.

“Why would you want to return there?”