**On the other side of the city...**
In the poorest district, where the streets were narrow and the buildings cramped together, an old abandoned mansion stood silent and dark.
Or it should have been silent.
Inside, in what had once been a grand ballroom, a ritual was taking place.
Five figures stood in a circle, all wearing dark hooded cloaks that concealed their features. Their hands were raised toward the ceiling, fingers spread, mouths moving in soundless chants.
They were witches.
Not healers or herbalists or wise women—these were practitioners of the darkest arts, those who had traded their humanity for power.
Red candles surrounded them in a perfect circle, their flames burning with an unnatural steadiness despite the wind that whistled through the broken windows. And at the center of their formation, drawn in blood on the rotting wooden floor, was a complex ritual circle. Symbols of ancient languages covered every inch of it, words of power that predated the kingdom itself.
At the very center of the blood circle sat a skull.
But it wasn't human.
It was large—nearly the size of a human torso—with a shape that resembled a goat, but wrong in every detail. The horns were too long, spiraling in directions that hurt the eye to follow. The eye sockets were massive, far too large for any natural creature. The teeth were sharp and numerous, filling the elongated jaw.
This was the skull of something that should not exist. Something from beyond.
The witches' chanting grew louder, their voices rising in discordant harmony. The candle flames flickered and danced. The blood circle began to glow with a sickly red light.
And throughout the district, people began to feel it.
Walls trembled in houses blocks away. Windows rattled in their frames. People who had been sleeping peacefully jerked awake with a gasp, their hearts racing, cold sweat on their skin. They felt an inexplicable sense of dread, of wrongness, though they couldn't identify its source.
Mothers clutched their children closer. Old men reached for weapons they hadn't touched in years. Dogs howled in the streets.
Screams echoed through the night—not many, but enough. People who were sensitive to magical energy, those with even a drop of gift in their blood, felt it most acutely. The presence of something evil. Something ancient. Something being *summoned*.
The witches were trying to bring something through. Something terrible.
---
**Back at Silas's home...**
Silas grabbed his staff from behind the door and threw it open, striding into the hallway with purpose.
His glowing blue eyes surveyed the corridor, seeing layers of reality that normal vision couldn't perceive. Threads of magical energy. Ley lines running through the earth beneath the city. Wards and protective enchantments on his home. And darker things—shadows that moved with purpose, malevolent entities drawn by whatever was happening across the city.
"The scent of evil always finds its way here," he said quietly, his voice hard.
He held his staff at an angle, not quite pointing it at anything specific, but ready. Alert.
His eyes flicked to the right, toward one of the pillars supporting his hallway ceiling.
There.
A shadow that was slightly too dark, that moved against the direction of the lamplight. Not a natural shadow.
Without hesitation, Silas pointed his staff directly at the pillar and spoke a single phrase: "All the evil around—purify."
White light exploded from the crystal atop his staff.
A figure was revealed behind the pillar—humanoid but wrong, with impossibly long hair that flowed like water, wearing black robes that seemed to be made of shadow itself. It had no face, just a blank space where features should be.
The moment the light touched it, the creature began to dissolve.
It opened its mouth—or the place where a mouth should be—and released a shriek that made the windows rattle. Not a sound that came from vocal cords, but something more primal, the sound of something being unmade.
Its body evaporated into smoke, dissipating into the air as it writhed in agony. Within seconds, it was completely gone, leaving only the faintest scent of sulfur behind.
Silas watched until the last wisp of smoke faded, then slowly lowered his staff.
The creature hadn't tried to speak. Hadn't attempted to communicate. It couldn't.
But Silas knew why it had been here.
His eyes moved to a small pedestal near the entrance to his study, and the object resting upon it.
A crystal.
Not large—perhaps the size of a human fist—but radiating such pure, brilliant light that it was almost painful to look at directly. Even now, in the middle of the night, it glowed like a captured star.
This was no ordinary magical focus.
This was a Crystal of Light. A Crystal of Eternal Mana.
Such artifacts were gifts from the divine, created at the beginning of the world and scattered across the lands. Only a handful still existed, and each one possessed power that defied comprehension. The mana within was infinite—it could be drawn upon forever and never deplete. A single Crystal of Light held enough power to level a mountain, to raise an army of the dead, to heal a plague-stricken city, to alter the weather for an entire region.
Its power alone was enough to make the dead live and the living die.
The Cult of Evil—the organization those witches likely belonged to—had been trying to steal this crystal for years. They sent assassins, shadow creatures, possessed animals, corrupted nobles offering to "buy" it—anything to get their hands on it.
All attempts had failed.
But they kept trying.
Silas stared at where the shadow creature had been and spoke quietly to himself: "Another failed attempt. But I wonder why..."
His heart grew tighter in his chest as a realization settled over him.
Outside, as if responding to his thoughts, the rain suddenly stopped. The constant drumming on the roof ceased. The wind died down to nothing. The entire city went still, holding its breath.
Silas walked to the nearest window and looked out at the night sky.
The storm clouds remained, but they had stopped moving. The rain had simply... stopped. Not gradually, but all at once, as if someone had closed a valve.
He could feel it now—the magical energy in the air was building toward something. All the dark spirits, the ritual across town, the shadow creature in his home—they were all connected. Part of something larger.
"They haven't used their greatest weapon yet," Silas said, his voice barely above a whisper.
And that terrified him.
Because if the shadow creature and the ritual were just preliminary moves—just tests or distractions—then what was the real attack?
What was coming that made everything else seem like child's play?
Silas's glowing blue eyes stared out at the silent city, and for the first time in years, he felt genuine fear creep into his heart.
Something was coming.