Calcified

The tunnels were damp and cold, but not as cold as they should have been. The frigid glacier that had served as their entrapment and their destiny was growing weaker by the day. The tunnels continued to collapse, soon their solitude would ensure their resolution remained true to the very end. The cave she traveled down was far too moist, the water forming small canyons across the floor and digging into the walls of the cave. This tunnel was compromised but she had to ensure the shades imprisoned deeper into this branch would never find their freedom. If it where necessary she would use the last of her magic to entrap them in a prison of her own life force. The further she endured the more the droplets fell and the deeper the puddles grew. Soaked to the skin she continued on. Yet her struggles and her sacrifice were for naught. When she finally reached her destination she found that the cave holding the captive shadows was already rubble. The beasts were long gone. There was nothing she could do to fix this, now all she had to do was survive the trip back. Turning to begin her return to the main caverns she heard the sound of a great crash echo through the ice walls. Horror fell over her. This was the consequence of her failure, wasn't it? She didn't have to look to know that the only way back to her only hope of salvation was long gone. He knew her crime, this was to be her sentence for her failure. Her damnation was the ice-cold will of the warden himself. It would be within this section of the caves that she remained for the rest of her eternity, surviving as best she could upon her magic reserves. Attempting to hibernate but incapable of entering a deep enough slumber to truly keep herself alive. Each time she drifted into a strong enough sleep the collapse of a neighboring cave would tear this final desperate attempt at survival away. It was here that she died. The next few centuries she would spend slowly rotting, the color would fade from her thick coat and algae would feast upon her exposed bones. She would be consumed by the very land that she once called home. A place she had been willing to give up everything to protect, who had in turn taken everything from her.

It wouldn't be until a completely new and foreign era that she is finally found. Her kind had long ago escaped the caves that had become her grave. They now thrived among these younger species of dragons, no longer bound by the call of the ice warden. A group of arcane dragons had gained permission to search the collapsed caves of the ancient Gaolers, using their magic to probe deep below the ice. Waves of magic poring through every crack in the ice to discover long forgotten caverns, an ever-expanding map of the lost centuries hidden beneath now solid ice. Within this lay the corpse of an ancient punished without trial or a chance at redemption. Her corpse now frozen, fur turned black with age, her bones stained by the algae that once fed upon her. The waves of magic washed over her. Within her, it found a story of devotion and betrayal like it had never seen before. Purple light filled her and feasted upon this story, this long lost knowledge returning from a time long before even the arcane itself was truly born. And it rewarded her for this, she awoke crusted with the ice of her punishment and filled with the glowing light of another's absolve. It gifted her with knowledge she would have never dreamed of, the story of a future and a present beyond even her strangest of dreams. The caller of the shade had reawoken its last true warden. And she knew of everything that she had missed. A beast of ice had discovered a new meaning to her life, but this could not change her nature.

She hissed to her new god, "I am a living contradiction. A beasts whose suffering is only being cruelly prolonged."

Through her, he whispered back, "Yes, but at least now you are mine."