2024-07-22 10:30:34
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Chapter 406
The air at Erynd’s Crossing was dead. It did not move. It did not breathe.Caster Spellbound stood perfectly still. He looked at the black glass statues all around him. These were people once. Now, they were frozen in time. Their mouths were open in silent screams. Their arms reached out, begging for a mercy that never came. Caster felt a heavy weight in his chest. This place was a graveyard of bad choices.He looked down at the black stone platform in the center. The node. It was dark, but he could feel it watching him. It was a door that had been shut for a very long time.Crunch.The sound was sharp. It broke the deep silence.Caster did not jump. He did not turn around right away. He just slowly closed his eyes. The sound was a boot stepping on black glass soil. Someone had followed him."Do not move, Caster," a voice said.The voice was rough. It sounded tired, but very angry. It was a voice that had practiced giving orders, but right now, it was shaking.Caster turned his head,
Chapter 405
Caster Spellbound slowed as the ruined path stretched before him. He had followed the hidden markers on the ancient Blackthorn maps for days, descending through scarred hills and ash-choked valleys, guided only by the faint hum of soul-thread resonance. Erynd’s Crossing had once been a research enclave, one of the first nodes in the Blackthorn network, but the remnants now lay scattered like a warning etched into the land itself.The air was thick with metallic tang. Every step across the black-glass soil made a brittle crunch beneath his boots. Wind stirred faint echoes of spells long extinguished, and for a moment, the sound of distant chanting threaded through the quiet. Caster adjusted his gloves and ran his fingers across the edge of his satchel, confirming the layered wards he had brought with him remained intact. He did not intend to disturb the node, not yet, but he needed to see it up close.The center of the clearing came into view. A circular platform of obsidian-black s
Chapter 404
Caster closed the heavy door behind him and let the click of the warding seal echo once in the silence. The Subterranean Archive above had grown still, the distant hum of the Tower’s upper rings barely audible. Here, in the neglected vault he had claimed for himself, the air smelled of scorched paper and the faint iron tang of old wards.Candles guttered along the stone shelves, their flames trembling against the draft from unseen cracks in the vault’s ceiling.He set the atlases on the broad stone table and spread them carefully, one atop another. Each parchment carried a history the Tower had tried to bury.Lines of leylines drawn by hands that had known what lay beneath the Tower. Nodes marked with glyphs that had been blacked out centuries ago. In the dim light, some of the ink had begun to flake, leaving small black islands that reminded him, faintly, of ash.Caster’s fingers hovered above a particularly old sheet, a hand-drawn map that smelled of resin and age. Unlike the of
Chapter 403
The air in the Forbidden Wing was thick, heavy with layers of neglect, dust, and residue of spells long past. Caster Spellbound moved through the corridors like a shadow, his boots silent against cracked stone, his robes brushing against walls that had not felt attention in decades. Ash hung in the air, suspended in deliberate swirls that seemed almost sentient. It twisted around him, catching on his sleeves and tracing the lines of his body, but it did not attack. It waited.He paused at the mouth of a chamber marked with a dozen incomplete sigils. The light filtering from broken windows painted the ash in muted gold. Here, the leyline threads converged, barely visible unless one knew how to see them. Caster’s eyes scanned, tracing the intricate lattice of Blackthorn energy woven beneath the Tower. The network pulsed faintly, as though aware of his presence.This was the root. Everything that had happened, the Ashfall, the Warden, the tether to himself, stemmed from this single p
Chapter 402
Caster’s boots echoed in the narrow corridor, though the sound felt almost swallowed by the Tower itself. The Forbidden Wing stretched ahead, a place no student or mage had wandered willingly for decades. Its doors weren’t sealed with polished wards or gleaming sigils; they were ignored. Neglect had woven them into obscurity, leaving only faint cracks and the occasional tremor of residual magic. Caster ran, each step measured yet frantic, aware that every motion left a trace behind him. Ash drifted in the air, lifted from the stone floor as though it anticipated him, and the faint scent of scorched parchment clung to the walls.He paused briefly beneath a broken archway. The corridor opened into a low-ceilinged hall. Here, the air shimmered with instability. Residual energy pulsed unpredictably. Lights in the torches overhead warped and twisted in mid-air, bending toward invisible currents, while the ash took on shapes, half-formed, flickering figures that rose and collapsed the i
Chapter 401
Caster staggered into the center of the SRC evaluation chamber, the iron and stone of the room pressing against him with a weight he didn’t immediately recognize. The wards along the walls shimmered faintly, each glyph suspended in midair like a captive insect. He could see the soul-stabilization anchors flickering in the corners, the oath-dampeners humming faintly along the floor. Nothing about this was routine.Lysane stood across the room, her posture formal, arms crossed, but her eyes betrayed tension. Kael Dorn hovered beside her, his fingers twitching as if he wanted to draw a purifying sigil but restrained himself. Caster’s eyes swept the space, noting the circle drawn around him, every line and curve precise, every intersection reinforced with double-layered containment wards.“Start,” Lysane said, her voice steady, measured.Kael’s hands twitched, the air around him brimming with suppressed force. “You’ve left us no choice, Caster. We can’t.”“You’ve already made the choi
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