Upon returning to the Academy grounds, Damien felt uneasy. Lanterns swayed from their hooks along the main path to the guild halls, their light catching in shallow pools left by last night's rain. He walked past them quietly, hands buried deep in his coat, his pace measured and mathematical. He should've gone straight to his quarters—or at least to the guild hall. Instead, his feet took the detour.
The Chained Tower loomed in the corner of the compound, a column of blackened stone girded with iron bands as thick as a man's torso. However, the gloom within it was no more. A faint glow burned at its windows, and the low murmur of voices drifted down the slope toward Damien. Soldiers patrolled in slow arcs, their armor clicking against each other in the stillness of the night.
He slowed his pace to think.
The tower had been sealed for months now. It would take days, maybe weeks even, for the investigators to pick up on the Witherflow's faint residue using Solence alone—yet here they were, working and unshackling the tower that the infernal glyphs were summoned from.
Who could have analyzed it so fast?
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The patrols here weren't just idle. They moved in sweeps, always keeping the base of the tower in their sight, their gazes lingering not on the ground but the door. And the door was open.
When he reached the slope, he found a few of the guards gone from the premises—off to find supper by the sound of it. Only two remained, slouched against the wall, their spears leaning forgotten at their sides. One's head bobbed dangerously close to sleep.
He lingered in the shadow of the wall. Getting in wouldn't be hard. He just needed their attention elsewhere.
Damien quietly summoned a thread of solence between his fingers, whispering a faint chant into its spiralling edge. The glyph swelled to a pulse, then a circle—and then a sound resembling the snapping of an oak branch. It wasn't particularly loud but the sound echoed off the far wall of the courtyard.
The guards startled.
"Oi, what was that?" one muttered, pushing himself upright.
"Pro'lly a rat again, no?" the other guard yawned, "Leave it."
"But what if it wasn't? Think about what he will say…"
"Alright, fine," he complied angrily, "we can take a peek."
They both shuffled toward the noise to avoid any suspicion, leaving the door unguarded.
Damien sneaked in stealthily. Silent as the air between bells, he slipped through the doorway and into the tower.
The lower floors smelled of damp stone and rain. Narrow corridors branched into study halls, worn out and rusty between their bars, empty. The air inside was dead.
He climbed the spiral stairs, each step placed carefully on the creaking steps.
By the time he reached the top floor, a faint acrid tang stung his nose. He stepped into the circular chamber and stopped.
The stone in the center bore the faintest ripple of Witherflow. It bore a dark, shifting sheen visible only when the light hit at the right angle. But streaks ran across it, thin and deliberate, as though someone had scrubbed the floor in patches. Damien crouched.
At first, he thought it might have been a sloppy effort at tracing the witherflow to collect as evidence. Then his fingers brushed the grooves—tiny, controlled incisions across the stone's surface. They weren't random. Someone had carved just deep enough to sever the bonds that held the Witherflow trace to the physical world.
He leaned in, closer, tracing one line at a time, following it to a point where it ended mid-arc. There, a faint shimmer still clung to the untouched stone. A few more lines like this and it would have been gone entirely.
This wasn't an investigation. This was containment—erasure. Whoever was here wasn't trying to study the scene; they were dismantling it before anyone else could. The way the cuts curved told him something else: they were made by a sanctified blade, one attuned to Solence's Fourth Circle, cancelling out the Witherflow that played inversely to it. It was overkill.
Damien rose, a chill settling in his spine. The Exorcist Order didn't want the Witherflow here to be seen. The thought wrapped itself around his mind, heavy and certain.
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Somewhere below, the sound of footsteps climbed the stairs.
Damien scaled down the shadowed side of the tower, slipping between its iron hinges placed on its surface until his boots landed in the silent courtyard. No guards, only faint voices entering the tower in a hurry. No watching eyes followed him and he could breathe a sigh of relief.
He hurried to the guild hall and sat back down on his chair in the study. He pulled a small cloth-wrapped bundle from beneath his bedframe and scattered the notes on it across his table. There were ink-smudged diagrams of battle lines, hastily copied glyph patterns, and scribbled remarks from hours of cross-checking records. Tonight, he needed one of those threads to lead straight to Raphael. He couldn't wait any longer.
His eyes drifted over the latest page, following the looping lines of the Dragon's Maw formation sketch. Something felt wrong about it.
Front line—twenty-seven exorcists. Notable low circle levels. Mostly initiates. He frowned.
That's backwards.
In every other raid he'd studied—the Moltown Siege, the Ashen Empire's Defense, and even the famously unconventional Rainsham Breach—the formation put the strongest at the front, holding the tide so the weaker could survive long enough to channel from safety. But here, the weakest were thrown forward, and the most seasoned glyphcasters held the rear.
Damien leaned back, tapping the quill against his knee. The front couldn't be breached if the point was to win.
Unless…
He traced the diagram again, his finger pausing at the back ranks. The formation left an open ring in the center, oddly precise in its spacing. A deliberate gap. Not for defense. Not for offense.
His pulse quickened. He flipped to another page, pulling up the fragmented accounts of survivors. No mention of pressing the dragon into retreat. No account of breaking its defenses. Only that the beast roared, the ground split, and light engulfed the battlefield. Then—darkness.
He remembered Loric's words. They weren't the ramblings of a lunatic. They were recounts of what took place at the raid.
"The wings had folded, but the fire wasn't out.", the high ranking exorcists in that raid, with strength comparable to the angels themselves, never left their position to fight despite the numerous casualties.
"The bell tolled twice, but the third never rang", they got the orders to fight, but they were never told to retreat even at the face of inevitable death.
Damien's grip on the page tightened. The front line hadn't been meant to hold the dragon—they were there to die loud enough to buy the rear the time to finish the deal. The Order hadn't risked them; they had spent them.
And somewhere, in the space between that final roar and the silence that followed, Raphael had slipped away. When he returned, he carried Witherflow like a second heartbeat
Shoving his chair back, he gathered his notes and hurried out of his dorm. The sound of his boots echoed against the narrow stone hallways as he made for the archives.
Damien set his notes beside the shelves of bound war annals, pulling down the volumes covering the raids that took place in the same decade as the Dragon's Maw raid. One by one, he flipped through diagrams, comparing troop layouts.
His pulse quickened. The same decade's raids followed an unbroken logic: strongest in the front, ranged and ritual casters in the back.
Except for one.
The Dragon's Maw.
Its formation was deliberate—wrong in a way that wasn't a mistake. The weaker front was bait. Their deaths, inevitable. And the rear? Not just stronger—specialized. Every last one trained in ritual casting.
But why? What could've been the reason behind such precisely implemented troops?
Then it hit him. An impossible idea that one couldn't even fathom as a Veyrant-born abyss caster.
What if they weren't trying to kill it at all?
Maybe the reason the Exorcist Order is trying to hide traces of the Witherflow... is because they had a hand in it being there in the first place. The glyphwork that needed witherflow to insure its functionality. The weird battle formations.
What if that day... they managed to capture the Dragon's Maw instead?
And as a result, found a way to harness its witherflow?
With this new, unfathomable discovery in mind, Damien finally noticed a name sticking out of his notes like a sore thumb.
Nostradi Santos. One of the only people capable of orchestrating such a divine yet hellish feat.
The academy's greatest Seal caster.
Damien had to find out what secrets lay behind him.