The safe-house became their war-room for the next ten days. Dorian fed them constant intelligence updates. The thefts had sent shockwaves through the elite. Security for remaining token-holders tripled. Borin Emberheart had been publicly chastised and sidelined by his family; his older cousin, Lian, now held the reclaimed token. The Emberhearts were furious, their honor stained. Jax Swiftwind was withdrawn, paranoid, but was seen in closed-door meetings with Corvus Vale and other Accord-aligned figures.
Arlan's focus was integration and refinement. He trained in a shielded sub-basement, pushing the limits of his new Negation Zone and its synergy with Aethelbrand. He practiced until his mana drained and his muscles screamed, then meditated, the bond with the sword and the Oblivion Core fragment deepening.
Personal Status - Arlan Thorne
Age: 17
Order: 4th (Anomaly - Void Scion)
Rank: 3 (Early) - Progress steady.
Mana Capacity: 7800/8200
Weapon Bond: Aethelbrand - Synchronization 21%.
Oblivion Core Fragment Bond: 7%
Negation Zone: 4m radius. Control: Refined. Can now selectively negate specific concepts (e.g., sound, a specific element) within the zone.
He learned to "flex" the Zone—expanding it in a sudden burst to negate an incoming spell's structure, then collapsing it to conserve energy. He practiced severing not just physical bonds with the sword, but conceptual ones: the intent behind an enemy's glare, the momentum of a charging foe.
Selene's training was different, and it worried him. She spent long hours locked in the soundproofed room beside his, the air around it growing cold and acquiring the metallic scent of blood and the ozone-tang of deep witchcraft. She was preparing, honing her innate powers to their razor's edge, but he could feel the darker pull of the pact she'd mentioned.
One evening, after a particularly grueling session where he'd practiced severing the "illumination" property of a light-crystal (plunging the room into an absolute darkness even his Umbral Sight struggled with), he found her in the main room. She was staring out the window at the neon-soaked city, her profile etched in the reflected glow. She looked pale, and her violet eyes had a distant, fractured quality, as if she were seeing multiple overlapping realities.
"Selene."
She didn't startle. She slowly turned her head. "Arlan." Her voice was quieter than usual.
"The pact with the Crimson Bough," he said, not as an accusation, but a statement. "You're delving deeper."
"I have to." She turned fully to face him, crossing her arms defensively. "The Labyrinth won't be a garden party. The heirs will have Dynastic treasures, centuries of resources. You have your… unique path. I have my blood. It's what I am. I need to master it, not fear it."
"You said the price was a drop of heart's blood. A leash." He took a step closer. Her Sanguine Silence aura brushed against him, a cool, quiet pressure. "There's always a worse price with witches."
"I'm not making the pact with them," she said, her eyes flashing. "Not the full one. But they have knowledge. Rites. Ways to draw power without the bond. I'm… borrowing the principles. Adapting them." She touched the obsidian pendant. "My mother's lineage knew things. Dangerous things. I'm learning."
"At what cost to you?" The question came out more harshly than he intended, born of a frustration he couldn't name—a need to protect something he felt slipping away.
She looked at him, really looked at him, and the fierce mask slipped. He saw the fear there, the loneliness of walking a path no one else could understand. "Every time I use a deeper cant, I lose a memory, Arlan. A happy one. A quiet moment with my mother before she was cast out. The taste of a specific fruit from my childhood. The feeling of sunlight on my skin the first time I walked into the Academy grounds, before everyone knew what I was." Her voice wavered. "The price is my past. Who I was. To become who I need to be."
The raw confession hung between them. Arlan, whose own past was a wound covered in glacial ice, felt something crack inside him. He understood the trade—memory for power. His had been traded for survival in the dark. Hers was being traded willingly, for strength.
He closed the distance between them in two strides. He hugged her. He placed a hand on her shoulder, the contact firm, real. "Then we remember for each other," he said, his voice low and rough. "I'll remember the sunlight for you. You…" He trailed off, unsure how to finish.
Selene stared at his hand on her shoulder, then up at his face. The fractured look in her eyes receded, replaced by a warmth that seemed to melt some of the cold around his own heart. A faint, sad smile touched her lips. "You'll remember the sunlight," she repeated softly. Then, with a spark of her old fire, she added, "And I'll remember that beneath all the Void and Severance, you're still the boy who trusted a half-blood outcast when no one else would."
It was the first time either had acknowledged the bond that had been growing between them since the academy—a bond of understanding between two monsters the world had made.
She covered his hand with her own. Her skin was cool, but the touch sent a current through him. "We survive this, Arlan. We get stronger. We break the ones who broke us. And then… we see what's left after the breaking."
He nodded, a single, sharp dip of his chin. The agreement was sealed.
The moment was broken by Dorian's urgent voice over the comm. "Guys. Problem. The night before the Melee, there's a mandatory 'Blessing of the Ancestors' ceremony at the Grand Solarium. All token-bearers have to attend for a final attunement scan. It's a deep scan—life-force and soul-print verification, not just mana. Our forgeries won't pass it. We need a biological sample from the original token holders to create a sympathetic resonance."
Arlan's mind snapped back to the tactical problem. "A piece of Lian Emberheart and Jax Swiftwind."
"Exactly. Hair, blood, a significant personal effect. The closer the link, the better the forgery."
Selene withdrew her hand, the strategist back in place. "That's a problem. They'll be guarded like emperors now, especially after the thefts."
"Not necessarily," Enya's voice came through, hushed. She was in her family's solarium, speaking from behind a privacy screen. "The ceremony itself. It's crowded, ritualistic. There are moments of obligatory contact—the passing of ceremonial items, the anointing with blessed oils. If you could get in, disguised as attendants or minor guests…"
"It's our only shot," Arlan concluded. "We need to be at that ceremony."
The next 36 hours were a flurry of activity. Dorian, with Rourke's underworld connections, procured new identities for them as junior attendants from a minor, invited family from a backwater province—the kind of people who were functionally invisible to the Dynasty elites. The disguises were more elaborate, involving subtle glamour-charm jewelry to alter their features and aura signatures more profoundly.
The night of the ceremony arrived. The Grand Solarium was a breathtaking dome of crystalline panels under the moons, filled with night-blooming scentless flowers and ancient menhirs humming with ancestral power. Heirs in elaborate, traditional robes moved in solemn, silent procession. The air was thick with the weight of history and immense, dormant power.
Arlan, dressed in simple grey attendant's robes, kept his head down, his Umbral Sight a torrent of information.
Status Check - High Elder Torin Emberheart
Age: 87
Order: 6th (Monarch)
Rank: 4 (Mid)
Class: Molten Patriarch
Domain Seed: Forge of Legacy (Dormant but immense)
The sheer concentration of power was staggering. Monarchs. Generals. The air vibrated with restrained auras. He saw Lian Emberheart, standing proudly with his family, the reclaimed token now on a cord around his wrist. Jax stood with his stern-faced father, a Wind Monarch whose aura was a barely-contained storm. And Corvus Vale was there, a silent, watchful statue at the periphery.
The ceremony began. Low chanting vibrated through the stone. Heirs placed their tokens on specific ancestral altars, where beams of focused moonlight activated them, "blessing" them for the Labyrinth.
Arlan's target was Lian. As the heirs moved, attendants circulated with ritual implements. Arlan took a tray of silver anointing bowls.
He moved through the press of bodies, coming up beside Lian just as the young Emberheart heir was retrieving his token from the altar. As Lian turned, Arlan "stumbled," the tray tilting. He reached out to steady himself, his hand brushing Lian's wrist.
"Forgive my clumsiness, my lord!" Arlan muttered, bowing deeply.
Lian scowled, flicking a drop of fragrant oil from his sleeve with a spark of annoyed heat. "Wretched provincial. Mind your feet."
Arlan bowed again, backing away. Clenched in his palm, hidden by a fold of Umbral shadow, were three fine, red hairs he'd plucked from Lian's wrist with a whisper of spatial precision during the "stumble."
One sample acquired.
He saw Selene across the room, performing a similar "accident" near Jax, her grace making the stumble look utterly convincing. She met his gaze for a millisecond—her eyes, even through the glamour, held a focused calm. She gave a tiny nod. With her charm and beauty, Jax was stunned for a second.
Good.
They had what they needed. Now they just had to leave.
That was when the wards screamed.
Not an alarm, but a deep, psychic keen that erupted from the central altar stone. The menhirs flared with angry crimson light. A wave of ancient, furious consciousness washed over the solarium.
INTRUDER! BLOOD-THIEF! ANCESTRAL SANCTITY VIOLATED! The psychic broadcast was not in words, but in pure, outraged concept.
Every head snapped towards the center. The assembled Monarchs' auras snapped awake like slumbering dragons, a crushing, multifaceted pressure that pinned the weaker attendants in place. Arlan felt his own knees buckle slightly before his Negation Zone automatically flared, fracturing the pressure around him.
Corvus Vale's voice cut through the psychic noise, cold and clear. "A life-force theft has been detected by the ancestral wards. Someone here has stolen a piece of a blessed heir. Seal the dome. No one leaves."
True panic, now. The crystalline dome's exits shimmered with dense, multi-layered sealing barriers. Attendants were seized roughly by Dynastic guards, who began crude but effective scanning.
Arlan's mind raced. The altar spirit could detect the theft of the consecrated heirs' biological matter, but not pinpoint the thief instantly. They would search. They would find the hairs on him, the whatever Selene had taken from Jax.
He caught Selene's eye across the seething crowd. Distraction, he mouthed, shaping the word without sound.
She understood. As two burly guards approached her, she didn't resist. She let them grab her arms. Then she looked at the lead guard.
Her violet eyes swirled, the obsidian pendant at her throat glowing with a deep, hungry light. The guard froze, his eyes glazing over. Witch-Cant: Befuddlement of the Senses. It was a minor curse, but potent. He released her, staring blankly at his own hand. The other guard shook him, causing a commotion.
In that moment of shifted attention and confusion, Arlan acted. He couldn't Voidstep through the multi-layered seal; the spatial lock was too strong. But he didn't need to go through it.
He activated his Negation Zone, not at full expansion, but compressing it into a thin, full-body shell. He walked calmly, but quickly, towards a section of the crystal wall that was also a primary structural mana conduit—a weaker point in the overall matrix, according to Dorian's schematics.
The Zone interacted with the sealing barrier. It didn't break it. It created a localized null point where the barrier's layered energy simply ceased to function for a half-second in a man-sized area. He stepped through the brief, silent hole in reality's wall.
He was outside, on a windswept service ledge hundreds of meters above the city. Selene was still inside.
He turned, ready to go back, to fight his way in, but he saw her through the crystal. She had broken free of the befuddled guards. She looked at the sealed dome, then directly at him. She shook her head sharply, once. Go.
Then she turned back to the chaos, raised her hands, and spoke a single, guttural word in the forgotten tongue of the Crimson Wood witches. The sound made the crystal vibrate and several heirs clap their hands over their ears in pain.
"Forget."
A pulse of dark purple energy, visible only to those with mana sight, exploded from her in a wave, washing over the entire interior of the solarium. Heirs, elders, guards—all blinked, their expressions going slack for a moment, their short-term memory of the last thirty seconds scrambled into incoherent fragments.
In that blanket of confusion, Selene melted into the panicked crowd, her own disguise and the mental veil hiding her as she moved toward a secondary service exit used by kitchen staff.
Arlan didn't wait. He trusted her. He Voidstepped from ledge to ledge down the sheer side of the solarium tower, a falling shadow against the city's glow, and vanished into the labyrinthine streets below.
He returned to the safe-house, heart hammering not from fear, but from a cold fury that had been absent since the pit. They'd been detected. Selene had been forced to use her power, risking exposure and paying the price. The Accord would be on highest alert.
An hour later, the door hissed open. Selene slipped in, her glamour gone, her face pale as moonlight, dark circles under her eyes. She looked drained, but triumphant. She held up a small, silver button inscribed with the Swiftwind family crest—a hawk on the wind. "From Jax's sleeve. It'll do." Her voice was hoarse.
"You used a deeper cant," Arlan stated, moving toward her.
"A stronger one. The price was…" she closed her eyes, pain flickering across her face. "The memory of my first kiss. A stupid, fumbling thing with a boy from my village. It's gone. Just… an empty space where it was." She swayed slightly.
Arlan was there in an instant, catching her elbow, guiding her to a chair. He fetched water, his movements uncharacteristically gentle secretly happy she had forgotten that memory now "You shouldn't have."
"I had to. It was that or capture. We're too close." She drank, her hand trembling slightly. "Did you get it?"
Arlan placed the three red hairs, now sealed in a tiny stasis capsule, on the table beside the silver button. "Dorian can work with these?"
The hacker's face appeared on the main screen, grim. "I can. I've already written the resonance forging algorithm. But listen—the security at the Gate itself will now be unprecedented. They know someone is coming with forged tokens. The scans will be soul-deep. They might even have a Monarch-level psychic doing the verification."
"Then we'll have to be perfect," Arlan said, his voice like forged steel. He looked at Selene, at the cost of her missing memory etched in the new hollows of her expression. "We have the pieces. We have the will. The Gate opens tomorrow. We'll be there."
He looked at the tokens, at the stolen pieces of his enemies, at the weary, fierce girl beside him who was trading her past for their future.
The path to the Aethelian Labyrinth was paved with theft, sacrifice, and the quiet, terrifying promise growing between two broken people.
They were ready.