Renard was already sprinting when the fire came behind him. He dove through the doorway, ahead of a spurt of flame, and there were golden doors there, open and hanging back against the wall. Renard slammed them, hearing the click of yet another lock. It didnt matter; he wasnt getting out that way. He heard the dragons claws scrape against the door, but it held.

Renard breathed a sigh of relief, and dared to look around the room. It was smaller than the one beyond, but it seemed that every surface was gilded, or painted, or both. Scene after scene showed dragons, intertwining, fighting, flying. Where there must have been a hundred tombs in the room beyond, here, there was only one, standing at the center of the room, the figure of a man in full armor worked into its surface with its hands clasped over its chest.

Those hands held something, and instantly, Renard knew that it was what the Hidden had sent him to find. It was an octagonal amulet, small enough that it could have fit into the palm of his hand, if only barely. There were runes around the edges, each one filled in with a different color of gemstone. The amulets heart was a single scale, and Renard could guess from the scratching on the door what kind of animal it had come from.

He reached for the amulet, and stopped, but there seemed to be no traps here, no tricks or threats. There was only the amulet, to take if he wished.

Renard lifted it, and the moment he did, he felt two things at once. The first was almost overwhelming. He felt the dragon outside the room, felt a connection to it that he could have reached out and touched easily. He felt… inexplicably, he knew that it was young, grown impossibly quickly on the magic of the world, filled with power. A name came into his head: Alith. More threads of connection reached out, stretching into the far distance. Renard could see now why the Hidden had wanted this: with something like this, they could reach out to a dragon, control it, use it.

That thought was almost enough to make him drop it, and not just because the knowledge of it seemed to fall into his head almost like a stone falling into a pool. Renard was a man who was used to flickers of memory coming out of nowhere, but that usually had to do with remembering the day after too much drink. This… the sheer enormity of what it represented was too much, the things a man might do too great.