The carriage vanished into the forest shadows, leaving behind only the hiss of wheels on gravel and the uncomfortable silence of a consummated crime. At the northeast exit of Sephira, the air was heavy; it was a suffocating mixture of dust and the metallic scent of old armor.
"Why didn't you warn me that a carriage crossed the gate, you worm?!" The shout was more than just a question; it was a whip-crack that made the air vibrate.
The commander was an imposing figure in deep blue. The golden details on the chest of his armor gleamed like the eyes of a predator lying in wait. His voice carried the weight of decades of command, but there was something rotten in it—an authority that had putrefied from within long ago. Before him, the recruit seemed to have shrunken. He was only a seventeen-year-old boy, far too small for the worn leather he wore, his knees buckling.
The young man's face was a map of confusion and dread. His mind tried desperately to connect the dots: minutes before, that very same man—with an almost imperceptible nod and a whispered order—had commanded him to keep the gate open.
"But... sir... you gave the ord—"
The blow came swift and dry. The officer's gloved fist met the boy's face with the brutality of a hammer shattering stone. The youth's world spun. The warm taste of blood flooded his mouth, and for a second, the loudest sound he heard was the clack of something solid bouncing on the ground. It was one of his teeth.
"Don't you dare spit lies at me!" the old man growled, his face contorted in theatrical hatred. "I would never give such an order!"
The boy recoiled, crawling across the packed earth, his hands fumbling at the soil as blood stained his collar. His eyes burned. It wasn't just the pain of the broken bone; it was the icy shock of realizing he was being sacrificed in a game he didn't even know existed.
The officer did not hesitate. The sound of the sword clearing the scabbard was the final verdict. He pointed the blade at the lad's trembling chest.
That was when the magic awakened.
The gems on the weapon's hilt began to pulse with a sickly, almost feverish blue. The energy serpentined through the metal, causing the surrounding air to emit a low hum that vibrated in the boy's teeth. A sudden wind, cold as a dead man's breath, began to swirl, kicking up eddies of dust.
I am going to die. The thought came with a piercing clarity.
The youth was not lying. He remembered the commander's voice perfectly, authorizing the passage. What he could not imagine was that the voice was nothing more than an echo. The command had not come from the man standing before him, but from Onir.
Perhaps you wonder how he managed to deceive the boy's senses without being present. The answer lies in the soul of this world: the flow of the four branches of power.
There, at that gate, destiny was sealed by the clash between the physical and the spiritual. The old knight was a practitioner of Arcane Magic. Like every swordsman of his lineage, he used energy to transcend human limits—brute strength, lynx-like reflexes, and sometimes, the elemental touch of ice that now chilled the recruit's skin.
Onir, however, played a different game. He followed the path of Spiritual Magic. Though he didn't have half the officer's physical strength, he possessed something more dangerous: contracts. Onir served a medium-grade entity, a spirit that did not bend steel, but bent the mind. He didn't need a sword when he could simply whisper into a boy's soul and make him hear the voice of whoever he wished.
It was this creature, this bodiless shadow, that Onir had dispatched to plant the lie in the recruit's mind. The illusion was flawless; it was surgical. And the reason was cruelly simple: the boy was a "normal." Without a drop of magical energy to shield his own consciousness, he was as defenseless against Onir's mental invasion as he was now, fallen on the gravel, before his superior's blade.
The tip of the sword was already tensioning the fabric of the tunic, a breath away from tearing through flesh and bone, when a third presence cut through the scene.
"Stop right now, Knight Lucius."
The voice was feminine and calm, yet it carried an icy authority far more dangerous than the old man's shouting. Lucius froze. The blade stalled millimeters from the boy's heart. He turned his neck slowly, the fury on his face transmuting into something bordering on apprehension as he faced the owner of that order.
"Lady Beatrix... why the order?" Lucius's tone was sharp, an audacity that scratched the limits of insubordination.
Inside, Lucius felt the blood throbbing in his temples. Since his youth, death had been his only vice, his private spectacle; nothing made him feel as alive as the gleam of supplication in the eyes of a commoner about to be discarded. He savored the exact second when hope died. And Beatrix had just stolen his peak.
The commander, however, was unfazed. She ignored the venom in his voice with an indifference that irritated Lucius more than any war cry.
"Because I am your commander," she replied, her voice light as a breeze but sharp as a glass shard. "And I will not tolerate a senseless murder in my presence."
Lucius riddled her with his gaze. His jaw tightened, teeth grinding in a dry rasp. You are only commander because you are a count's daughter, he snarled in thought, while pulling the sword away from the boy's chest with a sudden movement, almost a spasm of disappointment.
Lucius's resentment was an old, festering wound. Beatrix, at twenty-seven, was a prodigy, the heir to a count who was a vassal of Duke Hoffman. He, on the other hand, was a thirty-nine-year-old veteran covered in two decades of scars and camp dust, forced to bend his knee to someone who had fewer years of life than he had of service. In Lucius's warped mind, her talent—which consecrated her as one of the most lethal Arcane Swordswomen in the region—was nothing but privilege and birthright. He would never accept that a woman's prowess could surpass his years of pure brutality.
Ignoring the fury emanating from Lucius like a sickly heat, Beatrix walked. Her steps were light, almost rhythmic, as she approached the soldier still sobbing on the ground. The contrast was a visual assault: her armor, impeccable and of a lethal elegance, reflected the sun, while she knelt before the puddle of filth and blood staining the stones.
"What is your name?" she asked. Her voice was soft, devoid of any aggression, which was somehow even more disturbing.
"Yu... Yulius," the boy stammered, the words coming out broken by short breath.
"Yulius..." Beatrix repeated, savoring each syllable as if weighing the resistance of the lad's soul on an invisible scale. "Tell me then, Yulius: do you maintain that it was the vice-commander who ordered the carriage to pass?"
Yulius felt crushed. On one side, Beatrix's glacial serenity; on the other, Lucius's volcanic fury, which seemed ready to explode at any second. The silence at Sephira's gate became a physical weight. He was not naive; he knew that words fired against a noble were death sentences signed with one's own blood. Lucius, even as a low-ranking noble, had the weight of the law to demand his head for calumny.
But the memory was there, vivid and burning like embers beneath his eyelids. He could still see the officer's face, still hear the exact timbre of that voice ordering the gate to rise. I am not crazy, he screamed to himself in thought, as cold sweat ran down his spine.
His eyes sought, in a reflex act of desperation, any sign of help. But the guardhouses were deserted. His companions had gone for dinner, leaving him behind as the sole sentry—and now, the sole piece of sacrifice. Even if they were here, they would look the other way, he thought with a bitterness that rose in his mouth like bile. No one would die for a "nobody."
The boy swallowed the knot of dread blocking his throat. He had already crossed the abyss; trying to turn back now would only be admitting to a lie that would seal his fate regardless.
"Yes, Commander Beatrix," the voice came out trembling, but anchored in a desperate conviction. "It was him. He gave me the order. Eye to eye."
Lucius took a step forward, his hand tightening on the sword's hilt so hard that the leather of the glove creaked and his knuckles cracked. He wanted to split the boy in half right then and there, scatter his entrails across the gravel to wash away the affront. However, a minimal gesture from Beatrix—just two fingers raised—paralyzed him. It was as if she had pulled the reins on a rabid animal.
"Are you absolutely sure of this, Yulius?" Her voice remained gentle, almost maternal, which was infinitely more terrifying than Lucius's bellows. "Do you understand the weight of what you are saying? A commoner pointing the finger at the noble blood of an officer... you know where this path ends, don't you?"
Yulius felt his oxygen vanish, but he did not look away.
"Yes, ma'am. I am sure. I would sooner take the gallows than make up such a thing."
Beatrix nodded slowly, an almost imperceptible movement. She cast Lucius a look of pure, silent disdain and then returned her gaze to the fallen lad. A small smile, thin and cold as a blade of ice, appeared on her lips.
"There is only one detail that doesn't fit your truth, Yulius..." She made a calculated pause, letting the sound of the wind and the scent of the approaching rain fill the void. "Vice-commander Lucius was by my side at the base, reviewing reports, the entire day. It is physically impossible for him to have been here."
Yulius's world crumbled. The ground beneath his feet seemed to dissolve as the certainty of his memory was shattered by the commander's cold logic. The silence that followed was no longer one of doubt; it was the heavy silence of an execution cell door closing.
The boy's head spun. Physically impossible? He could have sworn, by his very soul, that he had seen Lucius's features and heard that deep timbre. Doubt began to corrode his mind like acid—a seed of madness planted by Onir's spirit that now flourished in the soil of dread.
Beatrix watched him. For a microsecond, the mask fell: a genuinely sadistic smile lit up her face—the delight of a predator savoring the exact moment the prey understands the trap is perfect. But before the boy could process it, the expression was replaced by a mask of false pity. Yulius, drowning in his own terror, did not see the act.
"But I believe you, Yulius," she proclaimed, rising with an elegance that seemed almost divine. "I am certain there is a logical explanation for this."
The boy's heart took a violent leap. Hope—that cruel flame Beatrix loved to fan just to watch the trail of ashes afterward—burned brightly. The veterans were right, he thought, feeling the weight of the world slip from his shoulders. She is different. She is just.
Beatrix extended her gloved hand. It was the gesture of a savior in the midst of a nightmare. Yulius accepted it promptly, feeling sheltered by the woman's aura. As he tried to wipe the dust and blood from his clothes, she spoke again, her voice now flowing like warm honey.
"However, we must investigate. For your safety and for the honor of the Order. Yulius, would you mind accompanying the vice-commander so we can formalize a few questions? Is that all right with you?"
She smiled. It was a smile of lethal beauty, the kind that disarms any survival instinct. Yulius, with his hormones racing and gratitude clouding his judgment, did not see the abyss. He nodded, feeling almost honored to be of help.
He began to walk, side by side with Lucius. The boy did not notice when Beatrix held the officer's gaze for a second longer.
"Lucius..." she said, her voice now laced with a cold cynicism that did not reach Yulius's ears. "You know exactly what to do, don't you?"
A brutal and hungry smile tore across Lucius's face. He nodded with a sinister firmness.
The truth was that Beatrix's justice was a theater of shadows. She was not a good soul; she was a monster who used beauty as bait. Her pleasure lay not just in physical pain, but in the sound of a heart breaking when "kindness" revealed itself to be a lie. She loved the moment when the light of hope transformed into the absolute horror of betrayal.
Beatrix watched the boy's back vanish toward the cells. Then, she turned her face to the northeast road, where the forest swallowed the tracks of Maria and Claude. Yulius was merely the necessary blood sacrifice so the others could flee.
"One of these days, I'll find you, you bastard..." she whispered to the void of the road, before turning to follow the trail of screams that would soon begin to echo in the dungeons of Sephira.
*******
Continuation: Echoes of the Dungeon
The rain wasn't just falling; it lashed the thatched roof of the cabin with the fury of a thousand whips. The sound was a deafening drumming, a rhythmic chaos that seemed intent on crushing any thought that dared to surface. Two days had passed—forty-eight hours of a desperate flight, crawling through the damp bowels of the forest.
Onir let out a heavy breath. The vapor of his breath vanished into the freezing air, carrying a weight that no steel armor could ever simulate.
"He's dead," his voice came out raspy, a whisper that sounded like a funeral sentence.
In that same instant, thunder roared over the roof, making the rotted wooden beams groan. A flash of lightning tore through the darkness, flooding the room with a white, raw, and ghostly light. For a brief second, Onir's face looked like a mask of pale marble.
"Who died, Onir?" Kandria's voice came from behind him, soft, but with a firmness that tried to anchor the room. He approached holding a clay mug, from which a spiral of steam rose. The earthy, bitter aroma of black tea was the only living thing in that place impregnated with mold and damp dust.
Onir, who kept his eyes lost in the curtain of water pouring through the door, took a moment to come back to himself. His joints cracked when he finally turned. His hands, still trembling—perhaps from the cold, perhaps from what he had seen—wrapped around the warmth of the mug offered to him.
"Well?" Kandria sat beside him on a creaking wooden crate. "Who are you talking about?"
Onir brought the steaming liquid to his lips. The scalding heat burned his tongue—a welcome physical pain, a reminder that he was still alive. He swallowed the bitterness along with the knot that insisted on tightening in his throat.
"The boy... the recruit we deceived at the Sephira gate. Beatrix found him. She ground him down until his spirit broke... and then, she threw what was left away, like trash."
Kandria looked away at the dying embers in the corner of the cabin. The silence that followed was shared, heavy, and uncomfortable.
"How can you be so sure?" he asked, his voice dropping to a tone of near fear.
"Because I never left him alone," Onir replied, staring at the black bottom of the mug. "I left an observation spirit embedded in his shadow. I heard every scream, Kandria. I saw the light fade from those eyes... and it was I who handed him to her on a silver platter."
Onir let out a long sigh, watching the water run through the cracks in the window as if the cabin itself were weeping. With every clap of thunder that shook the sky, his mind was dragged back to the dungeons. To him, the sound didn't come from the clouds; they were the echoes of the torture his spirit forced him to witness.
He was no stranger to blood. He knew swords were made to tear and that the world wasn't shaped by kind words. But with Yulius, it was different. It was a new life, a small flame he himself chose to extinguish with a cowardly manipulation. The weight of being the architect of that misfortune piled up in his chest, dense and cold as lead.
Kandria watched him from the corner of his eye, his mind searching for words that might serve as a balm, something to stem the open wound in his companion. But before he could break the silence, a deep and weathered voice spoke from the shadows:
"Onir, if anyone here carries the weight of this death, it is I."
The timbre was calm, yet it possessed the gravity of an avalanche. Onir and Kandria startled, their shoulders rising in the reflex of those still expecting an attack, as they turned to the figure emerging from the cabin's shadows.
"Don't get up," Claude ordered, pulling a moth-eaten wooden crate to sit beside them, closing the circle.
He also held a clay mug. The steam rose lazily, carrying the bitter aroma of the herbs Maria had prepared—a silent thank you, almost a ritual, for the sacrifice of her protectors. Claude took a long sip, letting the bitterness settle on his tongue, as if processing the very taste of betrayal before continuing:
"It was I who ordered the use of your magic. It was I who drafted the plan that put that recruit in Lucius's crosshairs. Every drop of blood spilled at that gate is on my hands, directly or indirectly."
"Commander Claude, I am not blaming you," Onir hastened to say, the urgency almost making him choke on his words.
And it was the naked truth. Onir's resentment was not against the man before him, but against the inherent depravity of Beatrix and Lucius. He knew the dark reputation of that pair; in noble halls, among crystal goblets and expensive tapestries, whispers of that lineage's sadism were as omnipresent as the wine.
"Even so, Onir," Claude countered, his eyes fixed on the embers struggling not to go out in the corner of the room. "I knew exactly what Beatrix would do. I knew she wouldn't seek the truth, but the pleasure of shattering someone. By using him as a distraction, I held the hilt of that knife alongside her."
The silence returned, filled only by the crackle of damp wood and the deluge punishing the roof with renewed fury. Outside, the sky seemed like a God in tears, mourning the misery of the souls lost in that mud.
Claude broke the trance, feeling the dense discomfort emanating from his subordinates. He knew they would follow him to the gates of hell if he gave the order—and it was exactly this blind loyalty that made the weight of his conscience almost unbearable.
"Understand one thing: this mission is born of my own selfishness," he confessed, his voice dropping to a nearly confessional tone. "It is the price of an old debt, from when I failed to stop my sister from being taken by the Duke." Claude paused, letting the weight of that revelation float in the damp air. "I can only thank you for being here. But do not forget: everything done for love is beyond good and evil. I will never abandon you."
Claude brought the mug to his lips. The tea was cold now, mirroring the cold Onir felt in his chest. But hearing the commander, the young mage felt a flash of clarity. They were in the same boat, rowing through a sea of shadows in search of something they still believed, deep down, to be light.
They stayed there for a long time, three silhouettes drawn by the fire, each lost in the labyrinth of their own doubts while the world outside fell apart under the storm.
Suddenly, the melancholic silence was shattered. Onir gave a violent start, his body reacting to an invisible shock. The clay mug slipped from his fingers, exploding on the floor into a thousand pieces along with the cold liquid. The crate where he sat creaked and gave way under the sudden movement.
He turned to the commander. His face, previously pale with sadness, now exuded an electric dread.
"Commander!" Onir's shout duelled with the thunder. "They are coming. Beatrix and Lucius are leading the troop... and they know exactly where we are going!"
Onir was not naive. The spirit he had left behind served not only to witness Yulius's end; it was his silent sentry, his eyes fixed on the enemy's shadows.
They know where we are? The thought hit Claude like a punch. He narrowed his eyes, his military mind entering combat mode, calculating routes and losses in fractions of a second. Do they have a Spiritual Mage as capable as Onir? Or something even worse?
"Onir, sweep the area!" Claude ordered, already standing up. "Is any spirit watching us now?"
Onir squeezed his eyelids shut, diving into his ethereal perception. For a moment, the spiritual world seemed mute, a blank canvas under the noise of the rain. But then, the sudden cry of a baby broke the atmosphere of the cabin.
At the same time, a pulse of energy—something dense, ancestral, purely spiritual—emanated from the corner where Maria slept with little Kaelion. Onir felt a shiver run down his neck. This makes no sense... it's just the boy. It must be interference.
Confused and cornered by time, he decided to ignore the signal.
"No, sir. There is nothing watching us here."
Claude nodded, his face hardened by the coldness necessary for survival.
"Kandria, get Raphaelo from the post!" he commanded. "We're resuming the flight. I want everyone ready yesterday!"
Organized chaos took over. Kandria dove into the darkness of the forest. Maria, awakened by her son's crying and the tone of urgency, appeared with her face marked by exhaustion, seeking her brother's gaze.
"We need to go, Maria. Now!" Claude left no room for questions. "Wake Emanuelle and run to the carriage!"
In less than five minutes, the cabin was returned to the shadows. Maria, Isabel, and the children were shoved into the carriage, which sped off, cutting through the mud. Raphaelo whipped the reins as if hell itself were nipping at his heels. Around them, Claude, Kandria, and Onir rode like spectres, their magic sparking on the treacherous path between the ancient trees.
It was then that a colossal lightning bolt tore through the firmament, turning night into day for a blinding second. Inside the carriage, under that white flash, Kaelion finally opened his eyes.
After two days of deep sleep fraught with shadows, the former occultist was back.