The ruins had been badly damaged by the shock waves, with many of the remaining walls reduced to piles of stone. Rhazat’s tower was in ruins, as well, the toll of a thousand years rushing in around it. Although the weathered outer wall was still partially intact, rising in places almost to the full height of what it had been, the roof was gone; a flock of sharp-eyed ravens looked down at them from atop the jagged stonework, croaking at them as if warning them off. The floors inside the tower had rotted away, and the only thing that looked anywhere near sound was a curved stone stairway leading down into the gaping, weed-choked cellar.

Alec pointed up to a gap in the stonework where a window had been. “That’s where I first saw Rhazat.” He looked around. “Over there was the alley where Nhandi showed me the vision of the seal.”

A large stone dislodged by the freshening breeze fell into the cellar, and they heard it shatter on something hard.

“Klia said Rhazat kept prisoners down there,” said Alec.

“Most likely.”

“I want to go down there.”

Seregil tilted his head, eyeing the stairs with concern. “There are likely to be snakes, assuming the stonework doesn’t crumble like sugar.”

“I’ll just have to be careful.”

“What’s this ‘I’ business?”

The stairs were still passable and they made it down into the cellar without encountering any snakes. Stone pillars still stood in the center of the main chamber, which had once held up a floor. Empty doorways led off in two directions.

“What are you looking for, Alec?”

Alec glanced around at the shattered stone and shadows. “Some sign of Sedge and the others, I guess.”

They each took a doorway and Alec found himself in a large room lined with what had probably been cells, though the bars had rusted away to nothing. Inside the first few he found bones and a few skulls, protected from the elements and animals, except perhaps for the ancestors of the ravens perched far above them. Here and there he found names or words scratched into the stone, poignant evidence of desperation. Moving from cell to cell, Alec looked for any relic that might give him a clue about who the prisoners had been. In the last cell there were a few more scattered bones. He was turning to go when he saw something scratched into the wall near the cell door that nearly stopped his heart.

Sedge son of Por of Wyvern Dug
Sakor help us

Captain Sedge had been on his way home to finally reunite with his wife and children. Born in the distant territories, he’d gone a thousand years in the past to die, after all he’d been through.