Chapter 88: Chapter 86: The southern dungeon

The fate of heroes is a topic that is often not discussed in the grand stories that we tell of them. Roughly a third of all recorded crises have resulted in the need for a true hero to be summoned from another world, or for one to ascend from within our own, in order to provide direct intervention and to save us from the darkness of calamity.

However, once the crisis has been destroyed and these heroes have served through their finest hour, little awaits them in the future. Many have spent their entire ‘new’ lives in our world hounding after an enemy, yet what happens to the pursuer when the hunt is finally over?

What does a hero do when the threat is no more?

We don’t talk about it.

Most often, they will simply vanish into obscurity. They live out their lives as quiet celebrities, entirely unknown to the newer generations who were born after the end of their mission, their heyday perhaps having been decades ago. The old might remember them, and they receive token allowances and live as nobles in their own right. But the young ignore them, as they would ignore the actors and musicians of their parents’ day and soon, once the threat is gone and the crisis is over, so is the love for the hero.

Them being pivotal to our continued existence is quickly forgotten and what good is a once hero who now has no cause?

Often, these creatures will lose their will to go on and either fall back into the same despair that had plagued them before traveling to our world or they will find a new mission, such as charity. But it simply never has the same bite that it once had when they were young and full of purpose, and it shows.

Of those true heroes who survived their final battle with their crisis, none have succeeded in creating a lasting, multi-generational legacy. Not one.

It is the cruelest irony of the world and the gods, perhaps.

Heroes are disposable.