Was it worth it?
The question haunts me like an echo in a hollow cavern, ringing through every waking moment. I am Dragonborn—Amethyst by blood, forged for strength, for war, for the defense of a dying people. Yet I chose the arcane. I chose the unseen.
And for that, I was called a fool.
The slap still burns across my cheek when I remember it.
"You must stop at once!" Emese Mother's voice thundered through the chamber hall. "An Amethyst Dragonborn practicing the mystic arts? Have you lost your mind?"
I tasted iron where my fangs cut into my lip. "What I study is not trivial. I am trying to awaken what already lies within us—our amethyst bloodline's dormant power!"
"Our strength is our body. Our claws. Our breath!" she barked. "Not your schizophrenic whispers of the void."
"Our bloodline is dying!" I roared back. "We are down to our last settlement. Everyone else is dead or scattered. You cling to tradition while extinction claws at our door!
Her eyes hardened into polished stone.
"Well then," she said coldly, "I condemn your practices."
"And I condemn your blindness!" I lashed out, my voice shaking. "If it means protecting my wife—my daughter—I would sell my soul!"
"Begone."
That single word severed me from my people.
I abandoned the path of the warrior and locked myself inside my study. Stone walls, ink-stained tables, scrolls upon scrolls of forbidden theory. The connection between our kind and the Void—an ever-present force watching from behind the veil of thought.
Divvy pleaded at first.
"Jarel… please. Come to bed."
Then she grew angry.
"You haven't eaten. You haven't slept properly in days."
"Open this door!" she screamed, pounding her fists against the wood. "I swear I'll break it down!"
But I was so close. So close to enlightenment. Candles flickered violently. Runes carved into the stone floor glowed with violet light. My body trembled, but my mind—my mind was standing at the edge of something vast. I could feel it.
The Void.
Watching.
Waiting.
Then—
Something clicked.
Not a sound, but a shift. Like a key turning in a lock inside my skull. The world shattered into silence.
And I fell.
That same night I fought with Emese Mother, that's when it happened.
A splash.
Cold.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
"JAREL!"
The voice was distant, muffled through water.
Where am I?I opened my eyes. I was drowning. But not as the man I had become.
As a child. Small. Weak. Thrashing in a lake beneath a starless sky. Water filled my lungs. Panic clawed at my throat.
And then—
I saw it. Beneath the surface, something shimmered. Not light. Not reflection. Stars.
A cluster of constellations swirling in the shape of a wound in reality itself. I reached for it. My fingers brushed the impossible. And the water vanished. The Mind's Eye. My inner consciousness. A terrain without horizon. The ground was fractured crystal, floating islands of memory suspended in an endless cosmic abyss. Above me, galaxies spiraled like thoughts half-formed. Time did not exist here. Or perhaps it did, but not as I understood it.
I was alone. At first.
Then the Void spoke not in words, but in pressure. In presence. In the sensation of being studied.
Ten years passed.
Or perhaps ten seconds.
I practiced sorcery every day within that mental expanse. I shaped starlight into sigils. I bent gravity into spirals. I learned the inner workings of my mind.
I relived every memory of my life in the mind's eye, every argument, every smile Divvy gave me, every time Cerces wrapped her tiny claws around my finger.
"Let me go," I begged the endless dark. "I understand now. I see you. I accept you. But let me go."
Silence.
Then—
The scene shifted. I was a child again. The exact moment my small hand touched the star beneath the lake. The instant before awakening. The Void pulsed. And I was pulled backward—violently, mercilessly—through memory, through time, through myself.
I gasped. Air burned in my lungs. My study.
The candles had exploded outward. The rune circle was cracked. Smoke coiled from the walls. For five seconds, Time seemed frozen.
I observed. The broken door. The dust in the air. The distant echo of shouting. My wife's angry face I was back. I was truly back.
——
The door burst inward completely, splintering across the stone floor. Divvy stood there, tears streaking down her face from anger.
"Jarel!"
I ran to her. Wrapped my arms around her as if I had been drowning for centuries.
"I'm sorry," I whispered hoarsely. "I'm here."
She trembled in my grasp as if she was afraid of something. I could feel her heartbeat. Real. Warm. Alive.
Cerces cried from the next room.
I rushed to her cradle, lifting my daughter gently, pressing my forehead against hers.
"I will protect you," I swore.
⸻
The explosion had drawn the entire settlement. Dragonborn gathered outside our home, weapons drawn, eyes filled with suspicion. Emese Mother stepped forward.
And then I saw their faces. Horror. Fear. Not anger. Fear.
"Jarel…" Divvy whispered.
Her hands touched my cheek—and recoiled.
I staggered toward a shattered mirror hanging crooked on the wall.
My reflection stared back.
My body remained. My horns. My scales.
But my face—
Gone.
Where my features should have been, there was only swirling cosmic darkness. A living window into the Void. Stars drifting where eyes once rested. The Void had not merely touched me. It had claimed me.
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
"He is cursed."
"He has become it."
"Abomination."
Emese Mother's voice cut through them all.
"You have abandoned our ways," she said, her tone heavy with something almost like sorrow. "And now you have brought the abyss into our home."
I reached for Divvy. She hesitated.
That hesitation shattered something inside me. "I did this for you," I whispered.
But fear is louder than love when it grips a community on the brink of extinction.
"I sought power to protect us," I replied steadily. She studied me for a long moment.
Then Emese Mother made her decision.
"You will not be executed," she said. "But neither will you remain among us."
"A suicide mission, Sciled asked of us. You will go there," Emese Mother continued.
The meaning was clear.
A mission from which no Dragonborn could possibly survive.
Divvy's grip tightened around my hand.
"This is exile," I said quietly.
"This," Emese Mother corrected, "is your chance to justify your defiance."
A suicide mission. I knelt before Divvy and Cerces.
"I will come back," I promised, my voice steady despite the storm within me. "And when I do, I will prove her wrong. I will show them that what I carry is not a curse."
Divvy pressed her forehead against the swirling void where mine once had been.
"I know you will," she said without fear.
Cerces reached toward the drifting stars of my face and laughed softly.
The verdict was swift. Banished.
Not executed—perhaps because once, I had been theirs.
I walked away from the only settlement my bloodline had left.
A sorcerer.
A husband.
A father.
A Dragonborn with the Void where his face once was. I'll prove them wrong.
And still, as the wind howled across the empty plains, the question followed me.
Was it worth it?