Corvis Eralith
The mining camp sprawled before us like a wound upon the mountain's flesh, its crude timbers and rough-hewn structures an insult to the ancient stone they defiled.
We approached again—Olfred leading, the Twin Horns flanking, and me, small and insignificant, trailing in their shadow like a ghost already half-claimed by the depths ahead.
I stared at the dungeon entrance, and the dungeon stared back.
It was impossible not to see it now—the Djinn architecture beneath the human filth. The elegant lines, the precise proportions, the way the stone seemed to remember having once been beautiful.
All of it suppressed, buried, desecrated by timbers and torches and the crude industry of greed. My eyes traced its contours, but my mind saw something else entirely.
Snap.
The image came unbidden, as it had a thousand times since I woke in that impossible morning. The beak. The twist. My head leaving my shoulders like a rusty screw wrenched from rotting wood.
I gulped, forcing the vision down into the dark pit where I kept all the terrors I could not afford to face. Not now. Not when I was so close.
We walked toward the camp's entrance, and I felt the weight of guards' gazes upon Olfred—assessing, wary, the way one assesses a wolf that has wandered into the sheepfold.
But they knew Helen. They knew the Twin Horns. And so they let us pass, their suspicion transmuted into the currency of professional courtesy.
Drogo should make his debut about... now.
The thought was barely formed when the man himself emerged from between two supply tents, his scarred face locked in conversation with a worker. Not stopping us this time. The universe, for once, seemed to align with my desperate calculations.
"Look who's there!" Helen's voice rang out, pure and warm as she surpassed Olfred and waved with the familiarity of old comrades. "The old Lambert. Decided that Blackbend was too boring for you?"
Drogo turned, his expression shifting from annoyance to that same friendly smirk I remembered from—from before.
"Helen Shard! The Twin Horns are here for the Red Gorge?" He dismissed the worker with a casual wave, giving us his full attention. "It's just that politics don't suit me. Too much talk, not enough action."
Politics and Blackbend. The names clicked into place in my mental map—Blackbend, that strategic city near the triple border between Sapin, Elenoir and Darv, the one that would become a fortress during the war.
Olfred stepped forward, interrupting the handshakes and pleasantries with the subtle grace of a landslide. "We have work to do." His voice was grave, final. He fixed Drogo with that unblinking stare of his. "We are the team funded by Elder Rahdeas Warend."
Drogo studied him, that professional assessment I had seen him direct at Olfred before. "Hiring the Twin Horns? Yeah, wise choice."
His eyes lingered on the dwarven Lance, and I wondered what he saw. A formidable mercenary? A dangerous unknown? Or something else entirely?
Yes, keep talking. The thought was a prayer, a plea to every god who might be listening. Buy me time. Buy us all time. My gaze was fixed on the dungeon entrance, those dozens of meters of open ground between us and the threshold where everything would change.
Remembering Drogo's particular aversion to children in dangerous places, I pressed myself closer to Durden's massive frame, using him as a living shield. The giant conjurer, bless his oblivious kindness, shifted slightly, providing even more coverage. I was a shadow, a ghost, a child-shaped secret hidden from the scarred veteran's notice.
We were so close. So agonizingly close.
Then the universe, which had seemed almost cooperative, remembered its fundamental nature as an instrument of torture.
"I didn't give any permit for outsiders to interrupt my own researches in the dungeon!"
The voice was a shriek, a nail dragged down slate, and it belonged to a man who stormed toward us with the righteous fury of someone who had never been told no. He pointed a trembling finger at Drogo's chest, and Drogo's face tightened with the effort of not breaking that finger into several smaller pieces.
I knew that face. Hollow cheeks, grey hair aged beyond its years, eyes that burned with the particular hunger of someone who believed the universe owed him everything. Sebastian. Court mage of the Glayder Royal House.
In another timeline, in another story, he had tried to steal Sylvie from Arthur, he was demoted and he ran away, becoming a slave merchant during the war. He had schemed and plotted and ultimately found himself encased in magma by the very dwarf who now stood before me.
No. No, no, no.
Sebastian was here and from what I knew about him it was clear that he wanted what I wanted. He wanted it with the same desperation, the same hunger, but without any of the reasons that made my quest necessary. He wanted it because he was greedy.
Why wasn't he here before? Why didn't I see him in my other attempt?
The question was a splinter, but I had no time to extract it.
"Mr. Wykes," Drogo murmured, and the name hit me like a physical blow. Wykes. Sebastian was a member of House Wykes? It made a terrible kind of sense.
"These adventurers have been authorized," Drogo continued, his voice carefully neutral.
"By who?!" Sebastian's spittle flew, landing on Drogo's chest. The scarred veteran's eye twitched. "I am the highest member of House Wykes in the Red Gorge right now! I decide what permits matter!"
Olfred stepped forward.
I felt my blood freeze.
Adam's hand found Olfred's shoulder. "Malaisson—"
Olfred shook it off.
Sebastian turned that scrawny, hateful face toward the dwarf and his lips curled into an expression of such profound, instinctive disgust that I felt it like a slap.
"Oh, what are you going to do?" The words dripped with mockery, with the casual cruelty of someone who had never been made to face consequences. "Beg me to let you enter, dwarf?"
The pause that followed was a held breath. The entire camp seemed to still.
Drogo moved, inserting himself between the court mage and the Lance with the practiced ease of someone who had spent a lifetime preventing disasters.
"Mr. Wykes, Lord Otis approved this expedition himself. Personally." He let that sink in. "If you have concerns, you can take them up with him."
Otis Vayhur Wykes. Sebastian's face cycled through several expressions—fury, calculation, and finally, the particular shade of impotent resentment worn by those who know they've been outranked but will never admit it.
"It was all a misunderstanding," Helen intervened, her voice honey over steel. "Lord Wykes, I am sure we can come to an agreement without unnecessary conflict."
When is the reset coming? The thought was a scream trapped behind my teeth. Now. It should be now. It WAS now, last time. What's different?
I looked at Olfred, really looked at him, and a new possibility crystallized in my mind. In the Relictombs the presence of powerful mages triggered reactions from their defenses. Could the same principle apply here? Was Olfred's white core the catalyst that had awakened the dungeon in my previous attempt?
If so, then the reset would come as soon as Olfred would get inside the dungeon.
"I am feeling very generous today," Sebastian announced, and his tone suggested he believed this statement to be an act of profound charity.
"I will let you enter the dungeon. However—" he raised a finger, that skeletal digit wagging with self-importance, "—everything regarding Phoenix Wyrms is to be given to me. Everything. Their feathers, their talons, their scales, and most importantly, their cores. The Glayders have a standing order, and I intend to fulfill it personally."
Everything regarding Phoenix Wyrms.
The words should have been a death sentence for my mission. But as they hung in the air, something shifted in my understanding.
I needed the Will. The life, not the remains.
Sebastian's "generosity" was actually perfect.
And Olfred, without even glancing back at me—still hidden behind Durden's bulk—seemed to understand this with the same instant clarity. His shoulders, which had been coiled with the tension of barely restrained violence, relaxed a fraction.
"Fine," he said.
The word was a key turning in a lock.
We moved past Sebastian, past Drogo, toward the entrance that gaped like a mouth waiting to swallow us. The Twin Horns followed, their professionalism absolute, their faces revealing nothing of what they thought of this exchange.
But Adam, once we were safely out of earshot, could not contain himself.
"Malaisson, are you out of your mind? Provoking a member of one of the Fiery Houses like that?" He shook his head, a gesture half admiration and half exasperation. "You've got stones, I'll give you that."
"I did nothing." Olfred's reply was flat, utterly unconvincing.
"Fiery Houses?" The question escaped me before I could stop it. This was not in the novel.
Jasmine's voice, barely above a whisper, answered before I could retract my curiosity. "The three Sapinese Noble Houses that have produced the strongest fire mages and most influential nobles within Sapin for centuries."
She did not look at me as she spoke. She did not look at anyone.
"And they are?" I pressed, unable tk restr.
Angela answered, her voice carefully gentle, as if aware of the weight her words carried for Jasmine. "Wykes. Bladeheart. And Flamesworth."
Bladeheart. The name conjured images from the novel—Claire Bladeheart, Arthur's friend at Xyrus Academy and her uncle, Kaspian, the guild master of the Adventurer's Guild in Xyrus.
Flamesworth. Jasmine's own House. The family that had cast her out, that she had fled, that still haunted her every silence and shadow.
Wykes. The most infamous of them all. Bairon Wykes, Lance of Sapin, proud and rigid. Lucas Wykes and Sebastian as I now knew.
The web of power, of fire and blood and ancient privilege, stretched across Sapin like a burning net.
"On another note," Durden's voice rumbled, pulling me from my contemplation, "you two don't intend to actually follow through with his request, right?"
He glanced between me and Olfred, his kindly face creased with concern.
I met his gaze, and for once, I did not have to lie.
"What I need can be hidden."
The Beast Will I needed, if it existed, if I could claim it, would be invisible. Internal. I would have what I came for.
And Sebastian, for all his scheming and his greed and his contemptuous dismissal of a "dwarf," would never even know what he had lost.
The reset was coming. The dungeon would wake, and when it did, all of Sebastian's permits and proclamations would be washed away in chaos.
I followed Olfred toward the entrance, my heart pounding a rhythm that was half terror and half anticipation.
The first room of the Red Gorge's dungeon gaped before me like the throat of a beast I had already traveled twice—once in flesh, once in memory.
The oval walls, the man-made torches flickering with their steady light, the three tunnels branching into darkness like arteries leading to the heart of something ancient and hungry. It was exactly as I remembered. Exactly as it had been when I stood here with Jasmine, eating lemoncandies and waiting for a death I could not foresee.
"Who stays with the kid?" Adam's question was casual, rhetorical—the kind of query one makes when the answer seems obvious.
I saw Jasmine's hand begin to rise. Saw her mouth open to volunteer, to condemn me to another round of helpless waiting while the world moved on without me.
Then the Reset hit.
It was a fist of force slamming into the mountain's gut, a shockwave that threw dust and powder into choking clouds and set the walls trembling like a man in the grip of a crippling fever. The torches guttered, their flames shrinking to terrified pinpricks before surging back with renewed, desperate brightness.
"A Reset?! Really?!" Adam's disbelief was a shout swallowed by the groaning of ancient stone. And beneath it, rising like the tide, came the shrieking.
The snarlers. Hundreds of them, thousands, their cries weaving into a cacophony that promised teeth and claws and the wet, tearing end of things.
I moved.
Not toward safety. Not toward the protective circle of adults who saw me as a burden to be managed. I moved toward the tunnel—my tunnel, the one I had traversed with Jasmine, the one that led to the observatory, to the telescope, to the beak that had—
Durden's massive frame shifted to block me. I ducked under his arm, a move born of desperation and the smallness of my body. I refused. I refused to stand aside. I refused to remain behind, swaddled in the illusion of safety while others fought and died and I waited to be saved.
I had died once. Once was enough to learn that safety was a lie.
Did it matter that I was four years old? That my limbs were short, my muscles underdeveloped, my bones still soft with the weakness of early childhood?
Agrona Vritra would not wait for me to grow. The clock approaching midnight would not pause until I reached a convenient age. The world would end on its own schedule, and I could either meet it standing or be trampled while cowering.
I needed to be like Arthur. Not in power—I could never match his quadra-elemental, beast-willed, asuran-bonded might. But in courage. In the willingness to step forward when every instinct screamed to retreat.
"Leave me!" I shouted—I whined.
"Finn, don't throw a tantrum." Angela's voice was honey coated in patronization, the tone of an aunt humoring a difficult child. "This is a dangerous situation."
As if to prove her point, the dungeon convulsed again. I stumbled, caught myself, and fixed my gaze on the only person here who might—just might—understand.
Olfred.
"I know that!" The words tore from me, raw and defiant. "But I can do this! There are other people here besides us, aren't there? Workers! Miners! We can help them too!"
The argument was sound. It was logical. It was also entirely secondary to the real reason I needed to move, to act, to be in that darkness where my death waited.
But Olfred didn't need to know that.
He looked at me for a long, terrible moment. The dungeon shook. The snarlers shrieked. And somewhere, in the depths, I knew a Phoenix Wyrm was waking.
"Okay."
The word was a stone dropped into still water. The ripples spread outward, catching the Twin Horns in waves of disbelief.
"W-what?" Helen's composure cracked. "Malaisson, Finn is a kid—"
"The kid's a mage." Olfred's voice carried an authority I had never heard him deploy so openly—the authority of a Lance, still invisible and unofficial in this point in time, but absolute nonetheless. "It's better if we go together instead of staying in this room that could crumble on our heads at any moment."
I opened my mouth to protest—not against going, but against the casual dismissal of my agency that his reasoning implied. Then I met his eyes. Whatever I saw there silenced me completely.
Another shockwave. Another shudder. The torches flickered, dimmed, and died, plunging us into darkness that lasted only a heartbeat before Olfred's summoned orbs of magma flared to life, casting everything in tones of blood and ember.
"Let's get going then!" Helen's command cut through the chaos, and suddenly we were moving.
Sebastian Wykes
Damned, damned Otis!
The name was a curse on my lips, a poison I spat into the mountain air as I stomped up the rickety scaffolding that clung to the southern face of the Red Gorge like a parasite.
Each step was a declaration of war against my cousin, against his interference, against the endless, grinding injustice of a world that refused to recognize my rightful place.
It doesn't matter. The thought was a mantra, a prayer, a promise. It didn't matter that Otis continued to obstruct me. It didn't matter that he used his position as Lord Wykes to block my every move. I would prevail. I always prevailed. Mediocrity could scheme, but genius achieved.
I glanced at one of the workers scrambling nearby—a commoner whose name I had never bothered to learn. His face was a blur of sweat and fear, the face of a man who knew his life was worth less than the dirt beneath my boots.
"Are the charges ready?" The question was a whip crack.
"Y-yes, Mr. Wykes—"
"Lord Wykes!" The correction erupted from me with the force of a fireball. "I am Lord Wykes, you insufferable fool! My father was the former Lord of House Wykes, not Otis! Not that usurper who sits in my throne and hoards what should be mine!"
The man flinched and scrambled away, and I let him go. He was beneath me. They were all beneath me.
I had traveled all the way from Etistin—the capital of Sapin—for one purpose and one purpose alone: to claim a Phoenix Wyrm chick. For months I had hunted for their mating grounds. For months I had been thwarted by incompetence, by bad luck, by the invisible hand of my meddlesome cousin.
Then, a week ago, a report: a male and female Phoenix Wyrm had been sighted entering a section of the dungeon's northern reaches with a chick in tow. A chick. Perfect for bonding.
Drogo Lambert's men had proven useless at finding the entrance to that section, whether from outside the mountain or within the dungeon itself. As if something were cloaking it. Hiding it.
Or someone. The thought was a flame that had been growing for days, and now it blazed. Someone like Otis.
Of course. Of course! Otis feared me. He feared my power, my talent, my destiny. He knew that if I bonded with a Phoenix Wyrm, my magical abilities would eclipse even Bairon's. And once I had that power, I would finally take what was rightfully mine.
The lordship of House Wykes. The respect I deserved. The future that had been stolen from me the moment my father died and that pretender seized control.
Brimstone-based explosives, laced with fire mana crystals—the weapons that had made House Wykes the terror of Sapin's enemies since the first war against those elf vermin. They would blast open whatever barrier Otis had erected. They would give me access to my prize.
I raised my hand, ready to order the charges fired, ready to claim my destiny—
And the world trembled.
Not the controlled shudder of explosives. Not the predictable shake of human intervention. Something vast. Something ancient. The entire northern face of the Red Gorge began to writhe like a beast waking from millennia of slumber. Dust and stone cascaded down its slopes. The scraggly flora that clung to its crevices tore loose and tumbled into the abyss. And then—then the towers began to rise.
They emerged from the mountain like corpses clawing free of graves. Structures of impossible architecture, their lines too precise, their proportions too perfect to be natural. They matched the style of every dungeon I had ever seen—the style of the Ancient Mages, those legendary precursors whose works dotted Dicathen.
But these were not ruins. These were whole. Rising from their stone prison as if the mountain had only been a blanket, and they had finally decided to throw it off.
"What's happening?!" The shout tore from me, unanswered. Below, far below, I saw Drogo Lambert's tiny figure gesturing wildly at his men, his orders lost in the growing cacophony.
A Reset. Then I heard it.
The cry of a Phoenix Wyrm.
No—cries. Dozens of them. Twenty, at least. Twenty S-Class mana beasts, their voices weaving together into a symphony of fire and fury that made the very air vibrate. I stumbled backward as the flock erupted from the mountain's newly revealed heights, their wings unleashing clouds of volcanic ash that darkened the sky. They pierced the clouds like living spears, their bodies trails of molten light against the grey.
And leading them—leading them—was a monster among monsters. Larger than the rest, its scales the color of dying suns, its horn a jagged spike of pure sulfur that seemed to drink the light. The flock leader.
A Phoenix Wyrm that had probably been alive since before my great-grandfather's great-grandfather drew his first breath.
My hand trembled. My heart hammered. But beneath the terror, something else stirred. Something hungry.
If I could bond with one of that creatures's chick—if I could claim even a fraction of that power—
"Ignite the explosives! Now!" The command tore from my throat, raw and absolute. I didn't care about the reset. I didn't care about the chaos. I cared about my prize, my destiny, waiting somewhere in that newly revealed labyrinth.
Mana surged from my core—that dark yellow organ in my solar plexus, straining toward the light it so desperately craved. Flaming darts materialized around me, each one aimed at the charges I had so carefully placed during Drogo's absences. I released them with a gesture, and fire rained down upon the mountain.
Hell followed.
The explosives detonated in sequence, a chain of thunder that merged with the dungeon's groaning and the Wyrms' cries into a single, world-ending roar.