THE LAST KEEPER

Sagiri moved slowly. His senses were sharpened now. He was beginning to realize the whole place was a maze. Why did a place where a chief lived need all the twisted turns? Sagiri made sure to remain invisible by walking mostly inside the archive.

He kept to the walls. Somehow, after a few minutes of walking, he was back to where he had landed. He looked around and sighed. Indeed, the map did not even account for all existing entries, exits, and corridors.

This could only mean one thing. Some dead ends were doors, huh.

Sagiri did not have the time for that.

Sagiri abandoned the looping chamber immediately. The Archive unfolded beneath his feet and swallowed him whole before the strange room could pull him back into another circle. He moved downward through the fortress instead, slipping through layers of stone and darkness. The middle levels offered no resistance. Just empty corridors, forgotten chambers, and silent passages buried deep within the mountain. Sagiri crossed them quickly.

After several minutes, he stepped out into an empty chamber deep beneath the fortress. The room was vast and bare, its stone floor untouched and its walls lost in darkness. Sagiri paused in the center. He could feel time slipping away. Every instinct told him that wandering blindly any longer would be pointless.

Time to read your history and make a clear map myself.

Slowly, the black markings covering parts of his body began to move. They crawled across his skin like living ink, flowing along his arm toward his hand. The darkness gathered there, thickening around his fingers until the markings seemed almost alive. Sagiri lowered himself into a crouch. Then he placed his hand flat against the stone floor and pushed the Archive outward.

The moment the Archive spread through the stone, Sagiri felt his awareness sink beneath the fortress itself. Suddenly, he was no longer standing in an empty chamber. Time swallowed him whole. The mountain around him stripped away, and he found himself watching the fortress being born. Countless hands carved the first foundations from raw stone. Workers hauled blocks through tunnels lit by oil lamps while master builders marked walls that did not yet exist.

Years flowed past in seconds. Corridors appeared where solid rock had been. Towers rose. Chambers were carved. Generations of builders came and went. Sagiri watched armies march through gates that were not yet ancient, saw chiefs arrive and be buried, saw council halls expanded, secret passages hidden, defensive walls reinforced, and entire sections of the fortress torn down and rebuilt. The vision accelerated until centuries passed like breaths.

Thousands upon thousands of lives moved through the mountain around him. warriors, servants, rulers, children, craftsmen, traitors, and heroes. all leaving their mark upon the fortress before vanishing into history. Yet amid the endless change, something caught his attention.

One place remained constant. While walls shifted, towers rose and fell, and whole wings of the fortress changed with the passing ages, this single section never altered. The memory returned to it again and again as though the mountain itself were guiding his gaze toward it. Through all the centuries, through every expansion and reconstruction, it remained untouched and unchanged.

Not even the map N’varu had gotten quite captured the memory of the ancient structure.

So this is how you came to be all these decades. Sagiri’s hands bear marks similar to the ones on his body. All the thirteen markings from the thirteen clans, touched by the archive and added with its markings. His tribe’s history ran through these walls. Some of the stones he stood on had been laid down by them...

A similar stone to that used in the shadow colonnade in Galka. Deep beneath where sagiri stood, he could hear whatever had been humming and creaming to him. Far, far beneath the fortress. Buried at its core near the foundation of the building.

The flood of memories continued racing past Sagiri until the most recent centuries began to appear. The fortress had nearly become the one he knew today when something suddenly caught his eye. A shape. Familiar enough to make him focus. His attention snapped toward a procession moving through one of the lower levels. At first, his heart lurched.

Myama.

The creature looked so much like Myama that for a moment, he was certain it was him. Then he looked closer. No. It wasn’t Myama. It was something larger. A beast bearing the same bloodline, perhaps, dragged through the fortress by chains thicker than a man’s arm. Dozens of warriors surrounded it as it fought against its restraints, its roars shaking the memory itself. The memory should have passed.

Instead, it lingered. Sagiri frowned. Then his eyes shifted beyond the beast. There was another prisoner. A man. Shackled. Bound from neck to ankle in heavy chains. His head was lowered beneath the weight of them. Something about him felt familiar. Sagiri focused harder.

The man slowly raised his head. Sagiri froze. He knew that face. Not from the fortress. Not from the South. The man in chains was the very person who had taken him North all those years ago. The realization struck him like a physical blow. The memory trembled around him. His pulse quickened. For days, he had believed the call drawing him toward this fortress belonged to that man. Yet the moment he saw him, Sagiri understood.

The man was not trying to fight. Even his beast was not trying to fight, but was in pain at watching how the man had given up.

koru.

His mother’s sandshade looked like he had lost the will to live. This had to be like ten years ago. He, just N’varu, had been hiding his presence. It was as if he did not want to be found.

Sagiri stared at the fading memory before he finally came down. It had only been a few seconds, but it felt as if he had lived through entire lifetimes. He wished he could go back in time and see more of his clan, but he had a feeling he could see them better when he returned to Nkara.

Now then. He had a sound map. Time to move.