Moonlight spilled silver through the frost-fogged windows of the Baron's hall, touching the obsidian base with the triple-inscription and Black-Iron basin—an artifact steeped in old magic.
The manor was asleep. No servants stirred. There were no sentries to walk the grounds. Caelan Gravenhart moved in silence, barefoot over cold stone.
He had waited for this night—the night of the twin moon's crossing. A rare moment said to thin the veil between the world and the arcane. It was the only time the Rite could be safely begun.
He placed the ingredients on the altar.
The Beast Oathbone, harvested from the ancient corpse of a Gravemaw Tyrant. It had taken weeks of inquiries and gems for the Kyrrhyn trader to obtain it. With this bone, he would take on the affinity of gravity itself—the most persistent and absolute of all forces. Even without a core, even without a pulse of mana in his blood, Caelan understood gravity better than any sorcerer. He had lived under its metaphor all his life—pulled down, crushed low. Now he would wield it.
Beside the basin sat Mirrorbloom Petals, silver in color, gathered quietly from a forgotten shrine northeast of the village. Their shimmer was faint but constant, as though reflecting starlight from another world. They would act as a focus, filtering ambient mana into something pliable.
Then came the Ashbark Resin, a rare alchemical substance harvested from trees scorched by spectral flame. The resin secreted only during the tree's death throes and needed to be stabilized quickly with saltpeter or it would dissolve into ash. It was believed to carry a binding property that would help anchor the erratic nature of foreign mana.
Nearby, lay the Soulroot Shard, a rare root known to grow in mana-drenched regions where magic stone veins once intersected. The root was brittle, dark violet, and said to amplify the user's capacity to store foreign mana.
And then, the Powdered Starglass, a crystalline mineral said to have fallen from ancient celestial bodies, said to fall every two centuries, which when ground fine, acted as a conduit for ambient mana in the absence of a core.
The Runestone of Veritas hovered above the basin, faintly glowing.
Caelan had cleaned and prepared everything personally. The trader had delivered the items without asking questions—just precious gemstones.
He shed his tunic. Pale skin met cold air. Then he took the resin and set it alight in a small brass burner. The room filled with the scent of ash and spice. His limbs grew heavy, his breath deepened.
"Let this be the end of silence."
He sat cross-legged, drawing the Black-Iron basin close. Into it he placed the Bone, the Petals, the Resin, the Shard, and the Powder, each layered in precise ritual order.
The Black-Iron basin was no ordinary vessel; it was valued not only for its resistance to magical corrosion but also for its conductivity of ritual essence. The basin, forged in the dying embers of Kyrrhyn's volcanic forges, had once been used in rites to tether souls to vessels and bind familiars to bloodlines.
The obsidian base beneath the Black-Iron basin, triple-inscribed with overlapping scripts of three ancient magical schools, shimmered faintly in response to the ignition. It was a relic rarely seen, even in Kyrrhyn black markets—used historically in Kyrrhyn imperial war rites and high thaumaturgic binding at Magic Towers. The triple inscriptions bounds ambient mana, suppresses magical backlash, and harmonize unstable energies in a balanced ritual field. It was the only such a base that could anchor the chaos of arcane resonance without destroying its bearer outright. The triple inscriptions etched into its obsidian base represented three ancient magical schools—Binding, Suppression and Harmonization —designed to stabilize volatile energies and draw arcane resonance from ambient sources. It was said that only such relics could withstand the fury of rites that tampered with the boundary between soul and body, or life and death.
Such tools were rarely seen outside the Kyrrhyn black markets or Imperial warlock vaults, marking this ritual not only as forbidden—but as something older than the Empire itself.
No one in Gravenreach knew what the Baron was doing, nor would they understand.
And at last, the Runestone.
It pulsed—once, then again. Slowly, it began to spin.
Caelan's eyes fluttered shut as he began the invocation. Not of divine tongues or ancient chants, but of memory. He had read the method once in a side story—an obscure passage in the High Sovereign's journals within the novel. Few readers noticed it.
But Caelan had remembered.
He spoke the names of the ingredients aloud, their purpose, their cost. As each was named, the basin shimmered. Then, the runes flared to life—three concentric circles, each bearing language not of man but of something older.
The Runestone cracked.
Light spilled upward.
Pain struck like a knife driven through his chest.
He screamed.
The stone burst apart in midair, its shards slicing toward his bare torso. They didn't cut—they sank in, molten and jagged. His chest tore open beneath the force, muscle parting like cloth as the runes carved into his very heart.
Blood gushed, bright and steaming.
The pain was unspeakable.
He thrashed, his hands clawing the stone floor as the runes etched deeper, spiraling around his heart, weaving through his flesh in patterns too complex for thought. It was not magic. It was something more primal.
And then something expected happened.
The affinity within the Beast Oathbone—the echo of the Gravemaw Tyrant—reached for him.
It did not move into a core.
Because there was none.
Unexpectedly, it latched onto the runes themselves—drawn to the new vessel forming around his heart. Like a beast seeking a home, it wrapped itself around the swirling symbols, binding in a symbiotic seal.
A final pulse struck through his ribcage. His body arched. His mouth opened, and no sound came out.
Then silence.
Caelan collapsed backward, blood pooling beneath him, steam rising from his skin. The runes had cooled to a faint silver, gleaming where flesh had knitted around them. They circled his heart like a crown of scars.
He would not know yet what the Gravemaw Tyrant's affinity had become—how it lived within him now, subtly shaping his weight, his pull, his presence.
But in time, it would awaken.
For now, he slept.
The Runestone of Veritas was gone.
But its truth remained.
Etched not into stone—
—but into the beating heart of a boy the world had already buried.