The Red Ring Mountains stood like rusted teeth against the sky, their jagged crowns hidden beneath clouds that refused to move. The path narrowed as Kalious and Malious ascended, winding through stone corridors once shaped by ancient hands.
They reached the watchtower just before dusk.
It was barely a skeleton of what it once had been. Half-collapsed, overtaken by moss and vine, the tower leaned at an impossible angle over the cliff's edge. One wall had shattered completely, leaving the interior exposed like an open wound. Stone fragments littered the ground like the bones of a forgotten beast.
Kalious stepped inside first, his boots crunching softly over dust and gravel. The air was thick with age. Symbols adorned the inner walls, some etched deep into stone, others scorched as if carved by fire. He paused before one spiral of markings that mirrored the engravings on their relic fragment.
"They match," Kalious whispered. "This is Sovereign-made."
Malious scanned the shadows before nodding once. "No one's been here in years. Maybe decades."
As the last light of day filtered in through the broken ceiling, it caught something in the far wall, a circular altar, half-buried in rubble. Kalious knelt and brushed the debris aside. At the center was a depression in the stone, the exact size and shape of the broken relic.
"Help me," he said.
Together, they cleared the remaining rubble, revealing a ring of text surrounding the altar in an archaic tongue neither could read. But as Kalious placed the relic piece into the depression, the runes ignited dimly at first, then brighter, pulsing with a steady rhythm.
The tower rumbled.
Stone shifted overhead. Dust poured from the ceiling like rain. A low hum built in the air, not sound, but vibration, resonating in their bones.
Then, from behind the altar, a mechanism snapped open. A staircase revealed itself, descending into blackness.
Malious drew his blade. "Another ruin."
Kalious gripped the relic. "Another test."
They exchanged a glance, brothers not just by blood, but by oath—and stepped into the dark below, the light of the relic their only guide.
Whatever the Sovereigns had left behind, it waited in silence.
And it had not forgotten them.