“There are few magics powerful enough to affect the passage of time. Most are banned or forgotten. The circuit surrounding the castle, cutting it off from the flow of time in its surroundings, is one of the oldest and most complex such circuits in existence. Jack Weiss is among those still trying to unravel its secrets today.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

Daylight still holds the world in its misty embrace. Time enough has passed for the dark clouds to rid themselves of their lightning threads, though still the snow falls, on and on into the endless hours of false winter. The wolf slinks from the cover of the trees and stops in the gray haze of a great shadow, ears laid flat against her skull. There is a dark and cloying aura to this place. The wind carries with it only the scent of damp and cold stone. Nothing lives here, not even moss.

Not in the shadow of the Castle of Divides.

Dark with thought, the wolf’s emerald gaze is filled by the sprawling castle, its towers tall and dark and foreboding. In places, neither snow nor years appear to have touched its thick stone. The rains have not washed away the intricate detail etched into its obscurities, and the crenelations look crisp and level as the day they were mortared. Yet in other places, it crumbles, eroded by the long years.

After a time, Silver comes to stand behind her and stare in silence. Tall, arched windows set with pale keystones hang above them, forbidding apertures with nothing to offer but greater obscurity. Arrow slits line the towers, and metal spikes form bony deterrents along the walls, too slick to offer hold but sharp enough to repel even the most determined climber. Towering, grotesquely fashioned rods rise from the towers, broken in places or splintered, in others bent out of alignment, but always with their tips scraping the skyline.

Beneath the wolf’s scrutiny, the girl sweeps her hair back deftly with a gloved hand and shivers. By itself, the castle is intimidating. Perhaps it is the chill pervading the land around it that makes it so, giving it the sense of a despairing refugee, stony-faced and cold, that has surveyed an untold number of centuries without anyone stepping foot into its heart. Or perhaps it is the sense that the castle is alive; its walls pulse like the skin of a living thing, and it watches them even now. The heavy limestone of its battlements may have been laid down by the toil of hundreds, or through the use of a magic so powerful and ancient as to have been lost…either way, it has been given a soul of sorts.

Her ears swivel at the sound of Bek’s footsteps in the snow and she looks solemnly in his direction. The wolf can see in his eyes that he is does not like this place even as he watches Silver pass them both, headed towards the great doors of the castle. There was more stone around those doors once, but it is only rubble now, washed away till only great stony scars remain. Fire has rendered the doors themselves charred and splintered, held together by rusted, molten metal.

The wolf growls a warning as Silver reaches to touch the doors. Even now, the fur along her hackles rises with the scent of the Zara. Itoru had come to them briefly, screeching tales of the shadow beast and setting them straight on their path through the deepwood. Terrified, the little bat had nonetheless remained with them for a few hours, looking for signs that any of the other Zara were near, before turning back towards the caverns to inform Zien of their near arrival and the Zaras’ schemes. The wolf had not doubted him, but is sure now that all of his tales were true.

“That place is brimming with magic,” Bek cautions from behind them both, “anything could happen in there.”

“What was this place?” Silver asks, peering upward. The wolf sees her jump when suddenly a crow barks laughter from the surrounding trees. Looking up, Elorian sees no sign of the creature, and the girl frowns at both her and the crimson hatchling, who mews unhappily.

“I already told you everything I know,” Bek responds, crossing his arms as he comes to join them.

“Uhuh,” Silver muttered.

“The Zara’s scent is heavy here,” the wolf rumbles, eyes still raking the trees searchingly.

“Well then…” The crimson hatchling turns to blink lazily at them all from Silver’s shoulders as she sets a palm on the hard surface of the door. It opens as if of its own accord, swinging smoothly inward. Silver glances back. “You guys coming?”

The wolf wonders if she alone hears the tremor in the girl’s voice, and knows that only the dragons can smell the sour scent of human fear like she can. But her paws carry her forward with the easy, silent step of her kind, unerringly on into the darkness where the light of the outdoors fades away.

And fade it does. Within the castle walls, the only light is cast by a few large windows set high in the dark stone of the walls, and it falls on a double staircase that curls up and up to a higher floor shrouded in obscurity. As the wolf paces forward, her claws click ominously on the hardwood floor. She turns her head this way and that, emerald eyes luminous, as another scent fills her nose, one that she knows in every primitive sinew of her body…

With a vibrating thud, the heavy doors slam shut behind them. The wolf looks towards the source of the noise as a cloud of black dust rises before her eyes. There is a sharp intake of breath to her left as Silver also turns, and the wolf ducks and whirls away as a suffocating wave of ash chokes her lungs and muffles her ears. The strange scent is of burnt and charred wood. An old fire, long since extinguished.

Beneath them all, the ground is coated in a layer of fine black ash.

After a few seconds, the dust and ash begin to settle. The wolf’s body is wracked by sneezes that send more waves of ash scattering ahead of her, until finally she opens her watering green eyes to fix them on the others, and finds her gaze instead ensnared by a flash of gold and red. Painted on the hardwood floor is a golden dragon, every scale painstakingly shadowed, each ebony talon unquestionably perfect. Its body is arched around in a great circle, flame spitting from its open jaws to the tip of its golden tail. A symbol she knows, from long, long ago. A symbol that makes even the heart of a wolf beat a little faster.