The moment the dragons appeared, Alabeth, standing amid ten thousand troops, knew the situation had completely slipped beyond her control. She simply gave up resisting, not even attempting to flee. Instead, she began gathering the equally terrified and despairing remnants of her troops, looking utterly barefaced about it.
But only she herself knew the true circumstances. Alabeth, who had once served as Luskan's intelligence agent in the south, could hardly fail to recognize the tome in Aijiasun's hands. It was the Book of Dragons that had once plunged the entire Northlands into the upheaval of dragon madness.
Since even Aijiasun, armed with such aid, had failed to escape unscathed beneath the assault of those Metal Dragons, what new tricks could a fresh-fledged Legend like her possibly struggle up with?
Before an irresistible force, she could accept defeat—but death was the one thing she could not accept. At least, not yet!
Her past life had taught her that even if one were driven into the mud, there was still a chance to rise again. But once dead, there would truly be no redemption for all eternity.
Though an Arcanist, she did not particularly worship the Goddess of Magic, and she understood deeply that after her death, the most likely outcome, carried along by the inertia of the rules, would be for her soul to return to the Lower Plane.
Though in a sense, in Coriel, death was merely the beginning of life in another form:
If a soul followed the River Styx through the Fugue Plane and was not fished out, it would wind onward as it flowed into the Lower Plane.
Some streams merged into Avernus, the highest layer of the Nine Hells;
Others poured into the Abyss—the famed Plain of Infinite Layers.
Thus, which plane the dead fell into