Relics of the Five-Headed Goddess

Bottu enters Histol beneath arching stone gates as crowded streets churn around him. Merchants call, wagons creak, and the mingled scents of bread, rain, and horse sweat fill the air.

From the royal library courtyard, bells peal urgently. Armed guards haul iron-bound chests across the flagstones while a thin elderly woman in blue librarian’s robes searches every passing face, her silver braid pinned with a black quill.

A painted notice hangs beside the library doors: FORBIDDEN SECTION CLOSING BEFORE SUNSET. ACCESS DENIED BY ROYAL DECREE. Beneath it, fresh iron locks gleam on the chests.

The librarian steps nearer, keeping one hand on a leather satchel stuffed with loose parchment. Behind her, a guard watches the street while another tests a chest’s newly fastened hasp.

Another bell tolls. The library doors begin to swing shut, and the bustling street seems briefly to narrow around the waiting librarian, the guarded chests, and Bottu’s unanswered choice.

Seraphine produces a narrow brass key from her satchel and presses it into Bottu’s claw. Her silver braid swings as she turns toward the closing doors.

The guard beside the chests glances sharply toward the key, while the guard at the courtyard gate watches the street and the ringing bells.

Seraphine steps aside, leaving the brass key and her authority between Bottu and the narrowing library entrance. The forbidden section is now within reach.

Seraphine opens her satchel and hands Bottu a folded sheaf of parchment, a slender quill, and a small ink vial. The library doors groan inward.

The supplies settle into Bottu’s grasp, secured before the entrance narrows. Seraphine points toward the dim eastern alcove, while sunset’s deadline becomes harder to ignore.

Bottu slips through the narrowing library doors with the parchment, quill, ink, and brass key secured against his robe. His shoulder scrapes the stone jamb, leaving a sharp sting and a torn thread.

The guard holds the door while Bottu ducks beneath his arm. Beyond the public shelves, a barred inner gate waits in the shadowed passage.

Bottu reaches the inner lock, fits Seraphine’s brass key, and turns it cleanly. The gate opens onto the forbidden section without a cry from its hinges.

Dust veils the eastern alcove. Tall shelves lean over a broad reading table, their dragon histories bound in cracked hide and marked with faded copper sigils.

Bottu steps fully inside and sets the ink beside the parchment. Behind him, the gate settles shut, leaving the muffled bells and the guarded courtyard beyond.

Bottu opens the nearest dragon history and searches its copper-marked contents, tracing references to relics, fragments, and Tiamat through cramped columns of faded script.

The books speak broadly of the ancient war, but their relic passages have been scraped away. Several pages end in torn stubs where names and warnings once stood.

As Bottu compares two damaged volumes, a brittle copper index leaf slips from the binding and lands beside his ink. Its surviving heading reads: Concordance of the Six Fragments.

Most of the entries are illegible, but one line remains clear: transferred under royal seal, eastern archive, seventh shelf below the genealogies.

The histories yield no reliable names, locations, or warnings before Bottu, yet the index offers a precise trail beyond these mutilated volumes and away from repeating the same search.

Dust settles over the abandoned page while sunset bells pulse faintly through the stone. The royal archive now holds the clearest surviving lead.

Bottu searches beyond the damaged histories, checking shelf backs, table cracks, and the shadows beneath the genealogies. Dust yields only splinters and blank scraps.

A second inspection catches a faint copper glimmer behind the seventh shelf. When Bottu shifts the nearest volume, a concealed compartment clicks open, but its parchment has fused into an unreadable blackened block.

He studies the compartment instead of forcing it. A narrow brass impression remains in the wood: a crowned dragon beneath six empty points, with one small inscription around the rim.

The inscription is too worn for a reliable reading, and the blackened parchment crumbles when touched. Bottu cannot recover the relic entries here without destroying what little remains.

Yet the seal gives him a usable path: the eastern archive’s seventh shelf conceals a royal record compartment, and whatever opens it must bear the kingdom’s authority rather than another book search.

Bottu leaves the mutilated relic entries and searches the broader dragon shelves, following intact copper sigils through bestiaries, genealogies, and old accounts of draconic magic.

Most volumes offer anatomy and battlefield history, but one water-stained codex preserves a royal catalog: chromatic dragons were grouped by elemental aspect, and ancient dragon relics were treated as vessels of those same powers.

A surviving marginal note identifies six sacred fragments associated with red, green, blue, black, white, and the unifying chromatic aspect. It warns that their presence draws dragon blood, ambition, and worship toward them.

The knowledge comes at a cost: Bottu spends precious minutes cross-checking contradictory classifications, and sunset bells begin tolling while one crucial marginal sentence remains too abraded to read.

Still, he has the intact catalog’s useful truth: six draconic powers correspond to six fragments, and any search for one should heed its color, element, and call to dragon kind.