The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Three

After a moment Quara realized that she'd let the buckets drop and land next to her feet, and with a start she bent and picked them up and began to hurry down towards the Silver Gate, before pausing again to admire a dragon that always caught her eye when she walked this hall by herself. It was neither the largest or the smallest of the dragons in the piece of art, but its eyes peered out keen and bright and it always took her a few moments to tear her eyes away from the little figure.

Before her loomed the Silver Gate. It was the second most massive of the Beautiful Gates, that is to say it was the second of the aptly named gates within the Dome itself that one came to when approaching from the outside world. The outer gates were larger, of course, but they were made to fit into place, flush with the rock wall, completely hidden from sight even when the onlooker was very close to discovering the way in, so they didn't really count. They were the most ordinary things in the world and the Beautiful Gates were some of the most extraordinary.

The Beautiful Gates, like the corridor that Quara had just come down, had been made with a very specific purpose in mind. These grand hallways had been built to impress visiting dignitaries and royalty and the fabulously wealthy who had once come to buy their jewels and see the marvelous cities within the rocks from which the gems were pulled.

The Silver Gate depicted as fantastic a scene as the hallway beyond it. The door showed a griffin, like the one in the hallway, but on a much larger scale. Unlike the griffin in the painting, which was sitting peacefully on a nest, this griffin looked as though it were about to launch itself into the sky. Something about the look in its eye made Quara think that it was about to go to war. Ignoring the guards she reached out and ran her hand over the raised carvings of the griffin, feeling oddly drawn to the fierce looking creature.

Drawing back her hand she turned her thoughts to the odd fact that the Caverns had remained hidden all these centuries, which had always seemed somewhat unlikely to Quara when she paged through the histories, since she knew that there had once been a time when the gates stood open day and night and foreigners and the people of the nearby countryside, along with the citizens who lived within the Caverns, came and went as they wished.

Sometimes Quara couldn't believe that the world outside had really forgotten that they existed. Oh there were certainly rumors and stories that the sky scrapping granite outcropping, deep in the heart of the mountains was more than just a collection of gigantic spires scraping against the sky. Some very likely remembered stories, handed down through families, and some had read histories from books that had managed to survive the great wars that claimed that the mountain was hollow and that people came the world over to bring back great treasures that had been wrested from deep down within the planet's secret places.

She reasoned that so many generations had passed since any contact had been made that no one could really tell if any of the stories were anything more than a fantastic legend from a time that had been idealized in the hearts and minds of a shackled people, or if they were something more.

The children in the Walemont Caverns were taught from the time that they were very small that they were the only people in the entire world that were still truly free. They may not seem free, locked away in their mountain home, but the life that people led above ground was not to be preferred and hadn't been for many, many long years, if it ever had been at all. The True King was gone and on his throne a usurper had sat for hundreds of years.

Quara held both buckets in one hand while she ran her finger lightly over the raised gold line that made up a delicate dancing golden dragon, before tearing herself away from her thoughts to finish her descent into the Hall of the Masters.

Before stepping out of the doorway she paused and set the buckets to one side, casting a glance up the hallway to make sure she was alone, before smoothing her skirts and running a hand over her unruly blonde tresses, which she had carefully plaited and bound as she'd sat before the mirror after rising that morning.