Chapter 613 — Beacon Fires

A pair of eyes—a pair of bright eyes—flashed through his mind.

Those eyes... somehow familiar.

In that fleeting instant, Belk snapped fully awake.

His heart was pounding, his breath came short, sweat was running down his neck, and a flood of jumbled, fragmented memories was reassembling itself at furious speed inside his mind—yet they refused to settle into any clear impression, and the effort split his head with pain. And within that dreadful state, he suddenly felt a warmth building against his chest, wave upon wave.

Belk instinctively reached inside his garments and found the source—something that kept growing hotter: a small amulet. The War God's amulet.

This talisman, blessed at the highest order, holding within it a host of fixed divine arts and able to awaken the spirit of whoever wore it, was now pouring out an ever greater heat—and with the heat came surge after surging wave of power. Belk held it numbly, feeling his mind scoured and recast by it, and at last his scattered, broken memories began to piece themselves back together, one by one.

He remembered the thick fog of Thorin Fortress, the strange corruption at the Greatwood Pass, and the owner of those eyes.

And at the very end of all those fragments, he heard once more the last word the prince he had sworn himself to had spoken to him:

"Run."

A thunderous roar went off inside his skull, and Belk was utterly awake, understanding at last what had been so wrong with him all these days—

Some fixation had driven him here—but that fixation had not been his own.

Every step of the way he had shunned all human habitation, whether by choice or by compulsion—as though striving to keep anyone from interfering or standing in his way.

He had slipped out of the most heavily contaminated region almost without pursuit at all.

He was being controlled.

Belk hauled hard on the reins and brought the dappled horse to a halt.

He raised his eyes to Boulder Fortress in the distance, and at once felt phantom hopes and urges rise in his mind again—but this time he forced them down, by main strength.

He swung down from the saddle, clutching the War God's amulet so tightly that its keen edge cut into his palm—and as the blood welled out, he saw within it a scattering of glittering specks.

The glint of certain crystalline particles in the sunlight.

In that moment Belk understood at last—he had become a source of infection. A vessel in the body of a high-tier power, disguised utterly as a human being. The most dangerous kind of source there was.

The heat of the War God's amulet began to fade, the power stored within it slowly running dry, and he felt his clear consciousness waver once more, while those alien thoughts he had beaten down tried to seize back mastery of this body.

He lifted his head toward Boulder Fortress far away, and amid his laboring thoughts one single idea stood out with perfect clarity: he had to... give warning.

There was little lucid time left.

Belk looked around him, then drew his ancestral longsword.

He went to a great boulder nearby, raised the blade, and let its point trace across the stone, chips flying—

"The Greatwood Pass lies under plague, Prince Edmond is bound by a curse, the Eastern Legion may be wholly destroyed...

"The main contamination zones are concentrated at...

"Beware plague carriers disguised as humans—their mark is crystal in the blood."

The longsword dropped. Belk looked at the words he had left behind, and a touch of pride rose in his heart.

Dazed as he had been, he had still crossed the Greatwood Pass, and he had still remembered where the crystal giants chiefly gathered. This intelligence... might yet be of use.

That done, he turned and cast one look at the towering walls of Boulder Fortress, then drew his gaze back and smiled faintly at the dappled horse that had borne him through the last stretch of the road—

"Run."

Before the sudden onslaught of that oppressive might, the dappled horse gave a shrill neigh and bolted for the distance.

Belk let out a breath, planted the longsword in the ground to brace himself, and stood straight and tall, facing the east.

"So far away..."

Two seconds later, a colossal pillar of magical flame shot skyward—visible clear as day even from Boulder Fortress—and lit up half the sky.