Side Quest 2, The Lost Temple [Male Hero Path]

Moving silently, DEBUG_HERO neared his target. The supposedly abandoned temple, located deep within KINGDOM_TITLE's territory had once been considered a Dragon Ascendency holy site, but hadn't been used in centuries. Or at leasy it was supposed to.

The villagers over at village_69 had reported hearing strange noises coming from within after nightfall, and seeing lights both inside and around the large abandondes structure. Still, walking around the ruins, DEBUG_HERO couldn't help but feel like he was wasting his time. The building looked entirely like a ruin, with not a single sign of recent use or habitation.

Still, the villagers had offered a pretty sizeable bounty to anyone who spent the night at the temple to keep a look-out on what the source of the strange events could be. As such, he had good reason to waste his time and spend the night at the place.

It was clear that is had once been a grand temple, it's ruins nearly matching the splendor of the Grand Cathedral of Drachenklaue. Aside from the massive main building, nearly the size of the cathedral alone, there were a variety of outlying buildings in various states of damage and disrepair. Some had a clear prupose, such as a number of stables, and what looked to have once been a library, but others, especially the more damaged ones were harder to assign a role to.

From what little he could recall of the place's history, it had fallen to an attack by an unidentified enemy, with village_69 housing the only people in the area to be spared, once having been servants of all manners to the temple. It was pretty clear that in the centuries since the mysterious fall, the village had fallen into rather hard times, it's population barely a fraction of what historial records stated it had been long ago, and it wasn't hard to imagine why. With the temple gone, trade routes had shifted away from the village, as had visitors hoping to pray at the temple, and the royal grants that came with the honor of being so close to a holy site and major religious temple. Still, there was nothing he could do about that.

Grunting as he set himself up in one of the abandonded buildings, the sun already tinting the sky reds and oranges, DEBUG_HERO waited for night, the stars appearing on the sky shortly after the sun finally dipped under the horizon. What followed, however, were two hours of absolutely nothing happening as the cold steadily crept in, making his vigil more and more annoying, the broken and cracked walls doing little to stop the night's chilling winds.

Still, just when he was considering heading back to the village, DEBUG_HERO noticed light coming from the opposite side of the abandonded site. After confirming he wasn't seeing things, he quickly grabbed his weaponry and headed towards the light, intent on finding out who was there and why they were at an abandoned temple in the middle of the night.