"I don’t ," she murmured.
"You’re not supposed to," Lindarion replied, voice low.
They landed in the outer courtyard. Weeds the color of dried blood split the cracked flagstones, and bones, animal or otherwise, littered the corners where shadows clung stubbornly to the walls. The silence wasn’t natural; it was too deep, too deliberate.
He stepped down from Ashwing, boots crunching on brittle gravel.
The mana hit him almost immediately. Not raw power, not active, but residue. Ancient, layered, and wrong.
His divine affinity flared instinctively, sifting through the traces like a hunter testing the scent of its prey. Darkness affinity answered next, resonating faintly as if the stone itself remembered pain. And beneath both... a rhythm. Like a heartbeat, slow and far away, buried deep within the earth.
"Nysha," he said without looking back, "don’t touch anything."
She gave a nervous laugh. "That bad?"
He walked through the shattered gates, past the courtyard and into the main hall. The ceiling had collapsed in places, spilling moonlight across the dust-choked floor. His boots disturbed prints, not human footprints, but clawed impressions, some fresh enough to crumble under his weight.
Ashwing stayed close, his reptilian eyes narrowing.
The mana grew thicker as Lindarion moved deeper, as if the fortress was bleeding power into the air. He brushed his palm against one of the walls, the stone was cold, unnaturally so, and the instant his skin touched it, his system whispered at the edge of his mind.
Residual mana: Abyssal. Unstable. Source proximity, unknown.
Abyssal. That word wasn’t common, not even in the oldest scrolls he’d read back in Evernight.
He closed his eyes briefly, letting his affinities stretch outward. The divine light traced the boundaries of the fortress, outlining nothing living within... yet the darkness affinity stirred like a predator catching the scent of an even larger predator.
Somewhere far below, something pulsed again.
Nysha’s voice echoed from behind. "Lindarion... I think there’s writing on the walls."
He turned. She was standing near a collapsed archway, torchlight playing across carvings gouged deep into the stone. The script was jagged, cruel, utterly foreign, yet his system twitched again, catching fragments.
Sealed... return... bloodline... vessel.
He moved closer, tracing the grooves with a fingertip. The mana here was sharper, almost fresh.
"This place isn’t abandoned," he said quietly. "It’s sleeping."
Nysha swallowed hard. "And if it wakes up?"
He didn’t answer. Because he wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted it to, or feared it would.
The pulse in the depths grew louder the further they moved in, guiding Lindarion through a side corridor where the air smelled faintly of scorched iron. The dust here wasn’t as thick. Someone had been through recently.
Ashwing’s claws scraped against the stone behind him, the sound swallowed by the oppressive weight of mana. Nysha stayed close but silent, she could feel it too.
The corridor bent sharply, opening into what must have once been a war room. Broken shelves sagged under the weight of ruined tomes, and the remnants of a long-rotted banner clung to the far wall like dried skin.
And in the center, sitting casually at a desk that looked far too intact for the ruin surrounding it, was Maeven.
The sorcerer was exactly as Lindarion remembered him, elegant, smirking, his pale hair falling neatly over his brow, the faint shimmer of mana radiating from his fingertips like it was second nature.
"Maeven." Lindarion’s voice cut across the room like steel drawn from a sheath.
"Ah," Maeven said, leaning back in the chair, utterly unbothered. "So it is you. I had hoped the stories were exaggerations." His eyes flicked briefly toward Nysha. "And you brought a guide. How quaint."
The divine affinity flared inside Lindarion before he realized he’d moved, one step, two, then the air cracked as mana surged into his limbs. Ashwing hissed, shadows rippling along his scales.
But just as Lindarion’s hand shot forward, reaching for Maeven’s throat, the desk, and the man sitting at it, dissolved into black smoke.
His fingers closed on empty air.
The smoke twisted upward, coiling into the rafters before vanishing completely. Maeven’s voice lingered like a whisper pressed against Lindarion’s ear.
"Too slow, little prince."
The war room fell silent again. Only the faint thrum of abyssal mana remained, deep below.
Nysha exhaled shakily. "What... what was that?"
Lindarion stared at the spot where Maeven had been, jaw tightening until his teeth hurt. "A mistake I won’t make twice."
The smoke vanished, but the mana didn’t.
It pulsed, slow, steady, resonating through the stone like a heartbeat.
Lindarion didn’t move at first. He let it wash over him, narrowing his focus until the lingering irritation at Maeven’s escape burned down to a cold, sharp point. This wasn’t the same mana as before, Maeven’s was slippery, elusive, like oil over water. This... this was heavier. Ancient.
He stepped around the desk, boots crunching over glass, and followed the pull toward a half-collapsed archway in the rear wall.
"A trap?" Nysha asked, glancing at the shadows above.
"If it is, then they should’ve hidden it better."
The archway led into a narrow stairwell, spiraling downward. The deeper they went, the colder the air became. The walls were etched with shallow grooves, the kind carved over centuries by hands that no longer remembered their purpose.
At the bottom, the stairs opened into a small chamber no bigger than a private shrine.
It was empty, except for the pedestal at the center.
Resting on it was a sword.
Even before he stepped closer, Lindarion could feel the thing’s presence gnawing at the air. Its blade was black, not in color alone but in absorption, swallowing the faint light from the broken ceiling above. Thin streaks of crimson pulsed along its fuller, in time with the heartbeat-like mana he’d felt earlier. The hilt was wrapped in leather so old it should’ve crumbled to dust.
Ashwing growled low in his throat, scales bristling. Nysha instinctively stepped back. "That... isn’t normal steel."
"No," Lindarion murmured, reaching out but not yet touching it. His system flickered faintly in his vision, not with words, but with a quiet awareness that this was something significant.
The moment his fingers brushed the leather grip, a rush of mana surged into him, cold and sharp as a blade drawn across skin. For a heartbeat, visions flashed, a battlefield under a black sun, demons kneeling in blood-soaked armor, and a towering figure holding this very sword aloft.