God of Discovery [high fantasy, slow build, mlm]

Arc 3 - 39. God of Fire

D'Argen did not bother to look for any settlements or villages around the skirts of Sky Mountain. He had a direct path in mind and knew exactly where he wanted to go. It was easier to just be fast and avoid looking at any problems that may arise. Though he did not have enough of a path in mind for how to run the mountain, he did find the sparsest forest and only destroyed a dozen trees before the forest finally gave out to rocks and snow.

The lip of the crater he created with his fall was hidden under snow, as was the crater itself. There was no depression in the snow at all. It had all piled up and hidden everything under it. It even looked like a proper new tip of the mountain, save for a few cragged edges higher up.

D'Argen was tempted to run to the tallest of those tips and just try to breathe the thin air so high up. Instead, he focused on his task. His sword should be somewhere here, under all that snow.

Dead centre.

He thought he would have to eyeball it, maybe actually climb that tip to see it, but instead something else caught his attention. The closer he got to the spot, the more he realized what it was. A hole. In the snow. An almost perfect circle that went down and down. With no clouds above his head and the sun high in the sky, D'Argen could actually see the bottom of that hole.

It was empty. There was nothing but more snow.

As much as the thought annoyed him, he jumped down. He landed on the hard-packed snow, surrounded by it on all sides except for above. He looked up, just to make sure he was not closed in. The sight of the sky above made it easier for him to breathe even if the packed snow around him made him claustrophobic. He wondered for a moment if this is what Lilian felt like in their last moments when the avalanche buried them. He ignored the thought and knelt down, burying his hands in the hard snow.

His fingers were cold and numb by the time he reached something other than snow. It was hard and smooth. Finally! Only, when he started digging around and collapsed some snow on himself from one of the walls, he realized it was not his sword that he found. It was a scabbard.

The hole. The scabbard. The missing sword.

Somebody had been here recently.

No.

D'Argen started digging frantically, using the scabbard as a tiny shovel, and only succeeded in collapsing more snow on top of him. No sword. Nowhere. He was starting to get desperate, but nothing still. The more he dug, the more snow fell on him until he was completely soaked and absolutely freezing.

The whole was too perfect a circle and leading straight down. No mortal could have made it. No mortal knew to make it here, in the exact spot. Vain kept records of almost everything in his library. D'Argen pushed himself up the walls and then right back down the mountain and toward Evadia. He did not care for the world fading away to nothing at all, not even when dark black spots appeared in the distance and started growing larger and larger as he approached the castle and the inhabitants he could not run through.

He slowed enough to see the houses and buildings of the city so he could run atop their roofs instead of through them and any mortals residing in them. When he slid to a stop right through the front gates of the castle, he startled the dozen or so mortals gathered there.

There was no time though. He ran to the library.

Only to be stopped barely through an archway by a familiar sword. The blade looked almost like silver, shining and bright, folded too many times with intricate patterns deep into the weave of it that gave it even more depth, even if the blade was so thin. The guard was just as delicate and fine, with the same silver sheen as the blade and delicate metalwork that looked so fragile. Even the grip was silver, except for being wrapped in soft black leather.