"You're holding me back."
The words came out sharper than Valen had intended them to be. They sliced through the quiet of the room like a saw against ice.
The room itself wasn't much to look at. It was moderate in size, almost bare. A plain desk with scattered papers laying on top. The faint scent of incense clung to the air, glyphs intertwining within its smoke. On the wall, a handful of portraits in fading frames. Most were of battlefields, others of fellow Exorcists long gone. Only one stood out—an old, dust-flecked picture of Orion himself beside a friend, both smiling, an expression almost foreign on his present-day face.
Orion was a quiet man.
Valen stood with his arms folded. His gaze, locked on Orion's daunting stature, was unfazed and grounded. The weight of the incident still lingered heavy on his chest.
"You saw what happened out there,"
Valen continued, voice low but firm.
"I know who I am," the Sainted continued, "yet I can barely summon a Fourth Circle glyph without faltering. If a subordinate of Lucifer can break our defenses that easily—if the prophecy's marching has already begun—shouldn't you be pushing me harder?"
He flayed his arms in annoyance.
"Right now, I stand no chance against him."
Orion was seated at his desk, arms folded inwards. His expression was unreadable, and his voice was measured.
"You have more talent at your age than most attain in a lifetime," he said. "Everything is moving as it should."
He noted something down.
"When the prophecy unfolds, you will be ready."
Valen shook his head. "No… no, no, no, no, no, you don't get it. I can reassure myself and dwell in the darkness of ignorance all I want, but I'm not the one that needs convincing."
He pointed towards the open window, looking down at the busy street.
"Out there, in the streets, in their prayers—they see me as their one and only hope. I can't even claim the title with honesty."
The bitterness in his words lingered for a heartbeat before twisting into a satirical sound.
"Or is it that you don't want me to be ready?" Valen asked, his tone cooling into something awfully close to mockery. "Maybe you enjoy being 'humanity's only hope' for a little longer."
The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted them. The air in the room tightened, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. Orion's eyes stayed calm, and his mannerisms didn't shift. When he finally spoke— his voice softened with bittersweet gentleness, it only made the weight worse.
"You're overthinking it," Orion said quietly. "Rest. That's an order."
He stood, brushing past Valen without another glance. The door closed with a quiet finality, leaving the Sainted alone in the center of the room.
Valen's fists clenched at his sides. Rage burned in his chest—not at Orion but more so at himself. Shame crept in after it, pooling behind his lowered gaze. He knew that blaming his incompetence on someone else's intentions only made things worse for him psychologically.
He didn't move for a long time, then stormed off to clear his mind.
———————————————————————
Damien sat alone in his room, lost in thought over what he had found at the barrier. The hidden glyphs approaching its broken corners had long since stopped humming with power, their edges flaking away like rusted metal.
But back then, beneath their corrosion, there was rhythm—too deliberate to be random decay. Lines doubled back on themselves. Arcs curled in such a way that, if you looked closely, you could see the faintest trace of a signature.
They felt like a caster's mark.
Whoever had placed them there hadn't expected the glyphs to survive inspection. However, they had underestimated the possibilities. Although it's not every day that you find a third canticle Veyrant amongst the servants of divinity, Damien had always been the exception to order.
He plucked out a page from his notes and sketched the fragments from what he remembered. Someone would recognize it… someone had to.
Before leaving the grounds, he glanced up at the crooked tower looming over the square. Its spire caught the pale light like a shard of bone, and for a moment he wondered if he should approach it this instant. But the windows stared back at him dark and unblinking. Every lamp inside had been put out for the night. If he got caught purposelessly entering an empty chamber he won't be spared from inquiry. He'd have to return in the morning.
By the time Damien had managed to make his way down from his chambers, the tower's gates were already sealed. Not with Solence wards, not with imperial script—just heavy iron chains crossing in an unceremonious knot. There was a wooden sign asking passersby to keep away. It held a quiet, unspoken finality of something the Empire didn't want disturbed.
He stood there for a while, tracing the rows of suspicion through his thoughts. If the tower had been important enough to be chained up, perhaps it holds history they wish to keep buried.
———————————————————————
He left the square and wandered through the arteries of the city. The smell of roasted coffee and boiled wine rolled in from the crowded lanes. Stalls lined both sides of the cobblestone street, their striped awnings sagging under the weight of morning dew. Peddlers called out offers in a dozen tongues; a boy darted between carts with a string of paper charms clutched in his fist.
After a brief lookaround, Damien slipped into the shadow of a tent whose surface had been patched up so very often that it had started to resemble a quilt. Behind the counter, a lean man with brass scales and half-moon spectacles gave him a passing glance.
"Winter's come sooner than what the trees foretold," Damien remarked, leaning in.
The man's eyes flicked to him sharply.
A slow, knowing grin spread across the merchant's face. "Ah, yes. Not the finest fortune tellers are they?"
They moved into the rear of the stall, past crates of rusted trinkets and oilcloth bundles. The merchant rested a hand on one of the tables and spoke low.
"These scripts you've brought—" he tapped Damien's slate, "—they're not Veyrant work. Not even close. They're fractures."
"Infernal though, right?" Damien asked.
The man nodded. "Forged by people who force the Witherflow into themselves. Not the natural awakening. More like… shoving poison down the throat of the soul." His expression tightened, the weight of old disgust behind it.
Then, as if tugged by a loose thread of memory, he murmured, "Although… I once saw something like this before. Patterning nearly identical."
Damien leaned closer. "Who?"
"An exorcist, actually, named Raphael. Last I heard, he died fighting the Calamity they called Dragon's Maw." The merchant gave a small shrug.
Damien stood there stone faced. His gaze stayed fixed on the merchant's counter, as if the name had passed through one ear and out the other. He felt dazed, but not from distraction but rather confusion.
Glyphs identical to the work of a dead man?
The name Raphael lodged itself like a splinter in his thoughts.
———————————————————————
He left without saying much else, just a nod of approval. Weaving back through the market's maze of hanging cloth and clinking brass, by the time he reached the quiet shade of a narrow side street, his thoughts were already circling the corroded glyph patterns in his mind.
He knelt beside a chalked wall in an alley and drew the sigil from memory, studying its geometric rhythm. His eyes followed every intersecting line, tracing each sharp pivot of the form. Then he stopped.
Something known finally came into view.
Hidden beneath the fractured arc was a fourth canticle glyph of Inferno. Its form felt jagged, almost alien to a pure Veyrant such as himself. However, that was not all there was to it. Layered on top of it was another figure entirely. Not a reinforcement. Not a binding. Something stranger.
The two structures did not merge in harmony; they churned against one another, generating an extra arcane loop like a knot pulled too tight. It was the kind of instability that could only happen when two completely different schools of glyphwork were forced together in chaos.
Damien could vaguely put together the framework for the first one, a counter spell used to break down concentrated forces. Even the store-master didn't say much about the other.
To confirm his findings, Damien headed to the academy's archives. If anyone asked, he planned to mask his purpose under the guise of "guild training research."
The archivist barely glanced up as Damien passed by. A faint scent of lamp oil clung to the stale air inside.
Rows of wooden shelves pressed against each other neatly while their shadows loomed deep. Damien scanned brittle scrolls and bound ledgers, fingers brushing over parchment until one fragment caught his eye. The diagram of a battle formation—faded, burned at the edges—labeled in a hand too hasty to be decorative. The heading read: Calamity Records – Dragon's Maw.
And there, near the diagram's heart, was the similar arcane loop he'd seen in the corroded mark.
It was a concept for an offensive lattice. The caster would have to summon a complex layout of Solence inversely, then pair it alongside the barrier glyphs it interacted with. If done right, they can fold inward and turn their energies against each other.
Reverse glyph latticing. A fabled idea. Inverting Solence itself to rewrite and unharmoniously forge together a superimposition of glyphs. It was simply a notion of fantasy.
However, what if one didn't invert the fourth circle?
What if they simply used a concept similar to it.
Suddenly, it hit him.
The same complex layout, that fourth circle framework. If it was to be put together using the infernal flame of wither, it would likely also lead to the same outcome. That is probably what the caster at the academy did. The other more ancient and old work intertwined with it, the one that he couldn't decipher was likely the divine framework of the dome itself. Given its own complexity, they might not have been able to recreate it perfectly.
However, it was enough to create openings. Openings large enough to let in something worse than the entirety of the divine barrier collapsing.
He shut the records close and tried to make his way out of the archives as swiftly as he had entered them.
However, a familiar face was waiting at a table near the front.
"Ah, we meet again."
Sliding his book aside, Valen Seraphiel looked up to meet his gaze.