Chapter 191: Chapter 191

(Xander's POV)

I followed the man with the Mooncrest Tattoo as we left the Mooncrest Seal chamber. I still couldn't believe what I'd just experienced first hand.

“What is the last quest going to be about?” I asked the man, too eager to keep quiet.

“The first quest granted you a stone, the second quest granted you a key,” he said. “Your final quest is not to find something. It's to remember something and this thing will piece everything together once and for all.”

Remember something? “How can I remember something when I've never been to Black Hollow?”

The man looked at me and slowly, his eyes glowed. He touched my forehead with his palm and slowly, everything went black.

“THE FINAL QUEST: THE GUARDIAN’S MEMORY”

I woke up in a completely different place. Instantly, I knew it was Black Hollow, but it was the one hundreds years ago. The one that had been destroyed by a single mistake.

I was standing in the middle, but yet, not physically there.

I was experiencing the last memories of the final guardian of Black Hollow, seeing everything through his eyes.

I inhaled shakily as goosebumps spread over my skin.

Everyone had been treating Black Hollow like a location, but it simply wasn't a castle, or cave or kingdom, it was a prison.

The archives were wrong.

The Shadow king wasn't originally trapped in Black Hollow, something was imprisoned there, hence the creation of the Horn of Vielor. It was created to keep something from getting out.

“We've been trying to retrieve the Horn without knowing what it was actually protecting,” I muttered to myself.

I saw a man in the distance, dressed in a helmet, and breastplate and armour, holding a sword. He walked toward me, his shoulders were raised with an air of importance.

“Who are you?” I asked as he advanced closer.

“I am Eros,” he said. “The last guardian of Black Hollow and the first bearer of the stone.”

I dug my hand in my pocket, retrieving the small stone with a crescent symbol. “This?”

“Precisely,” he nodded.

“So what changed?” I asked.

“Everything fell apart when the King of the Thrall manipulated me,” he responded. “Before I died, I split the pieces that led to Black Hollow into The Stone, The Ring, and something else which I knew no one unworthy would have the access to, even if they got the other two.”

Now, I got it. He'd hid the pieces in different realms so that the shadow king would never retrieve them. That was why my journey had been leading me through these trails.

“What is the third piece?” I asked.

“My eye,” the guardian said.

I almost sputtered in disbelief as I imagined myself gauging out his eyeballs to get to Black Hollow. “Your what?”

“The Guardian’s eyes is the last quest,” he continued. “It's a small crystal containing my last memories.”

So, not a literal eye. I heaved a sigh of relief. A crystal was the third piece. This quest was finally coming together. A ring plus a stone and the guardian’s memories equaled the key, right?

“I sacrificed my mortal body to turn my final memories to a crystal,” he explained.

So now he was a spirit being?

“So all I need to do is pass the third quest and I will get the key to Black Hollow?”

“The quests give you keys that reveal the true nature of Black Hollow, not just physically unlocking a door,” the guardian said. “That's what makes them really important.”

“So what is the final quest?” I asked.

“To claim what I left behind, you must witness my final memory without doing anything to change it,” he said. “The test I failed, he who is worthy must pass it."

“That's it?” I raised a brow. “I just have to watch?”

No fight. No war. No use of strength? This would be a breeze.

“It's not as easy as you think,” he said, and removing his sword, he let a battle cry and dug the blade into the middle of the ground-the heart of Black Hollow.