2024-08-08 22:59:44
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Chapter 385
The seal cracked with a sound like bone snapping. Caster felt it through his boots before he heard it. The vibration ran up the stone floor, into the bench legs, into his knees. The vault door did not swing open. It peeled. Layers of ward-script lifted from the surface like dead skin and slid down in strips, turning gray as they fell.A Sixth Ring warden stepped back at once. “Don’t touch,” the man said, voice tight.Caster already had his gloves on. The vault was small, square, and old. The ceiling sat low enough that a taller mage would have to duck. Three stone shelves lined the walls. On them rested scroll cases of dark metal, each stamped with a containment mark that no longer glowed.Ash coated everything. Not thick. Not drifting. Just enough to dull edges and soften corners.Caster crossed the threshold alone.The warden shut the outer gate behind him. Iron slid into iron. Three locks turned. The sound echoed longer than it should have.Caster stopped just inside the room. He
Chapter 384
The ash began falling during morning bells. Not from the sky. From the walls.Caster noticed it before anyone spoke. He stood near the edge of the Sixth Ring gallery, boots planted on polished stone, hands folded behind his back. A faint gray fleck slid down the inner curve of the chamber wall, slow and deliberate, like dust choosing gravity late. It touched the floor without sound.No one reacted. The bells rang again. Low. Measured. A call to order. More ash followed. It drifted sideways before settling. It traced the edge of a sigil etched into the floor, then stopped, as if the stone repelled it.Caster did not move. Across the chamber, an archivist from the Third Ring brushed her sleeve. Gray smeared across white fabric.She frowned, rubbed again, then noticed her fingers came away clean. The cloth was gone where the ash touched it. Not burned. Not torn. Missing.She froze. “Proceed,” said Archmage Verdan of the Fifth Ring. His voice carried without effort. “Seal the chamber.”T
Chapter 383
Ash fell before sound returned. Caster stood alone in the lower vault corridor as the last ward dimmed from amber to gray. The stone floor was clean a breath ago. Now a thin layer of ash drifted down, slow and steady, like snow that refused to melt. It did not fall straight. It slid sideways, then up, then settled into sharp edges along the seams of the stone. He did not move. The corridor lamps flickered once. They steadied. The air tasted dry.Caster knelt and reached out with two fingers. He did not touch the ash. He traced the space above it, careful to keep his skin clear. The ash responded. It crept toward his hand and stopped, forming a clean curve. He drew his hand back. The curve held.Caster rose and stepped closer to the wall where the scorched fragment was sealed behind a thin glass ward. The fragment was no bigger than a palm. Blackened stone. Hairline cracks. A rune cut so deep it had melted its own edges. The glass ward hummed. It was old. It was tired.Caster leane
Chapter 382
The ash began falling upward at the ninth bell. It lifted from the stone floor in thin gray sheets, drifting toward the ceiling as if pulled by an unseen current. Guards froze mid-step. A torch guttered and went dark without smoke. The corridor fell quiet except for the scrape of metal as someone tightened their grip on a spear. “Seal the lower vaults,” a voice snapped.Runes flared along the walls. Heavy doors slammed shut down the passage, one after another, the sound rolling like distant thunder. A ward-line snapped into place, glowing pale blue, then flickering. The ash did not stop.It slid through the light, ignoring it, gathering into slow spirals that bent toward the ceiling stones.Someone whispered. The words were wrong. Old. Bent. Not meant for breath. A guard staggered back. “That wasn’t High Tongue.”Another voice answered, thin and shaking. “That wasn’t any tongue.”The whisper faded. The ash settled again, clinging to the ceiling like frost. An alarm bell rang once. T
Chapter 381
The bell did not ring. The sound simply stopped. Caster felt it before anyone else noticed. A low hum that had filled the Sixth Ring corridor cut off mid-beat, like breath held too long. The lamps along the wall dimmed a fraction. Not enough to alarm. Enough to be deliberate. He slowed his steps.Two attendants walked ahead of him, gray-robed, silent. Their boots struck the glass-stone floor in careful rhythm. They did not turn.Caster adjusted his gloves. Leather over sigil-thread. He had learned to keep his hands busy. It kept others from watching them too closely.They reached a narrow archway. Clear crystal formed the door. Runes drifted across it like frost patterns.One attendant pressed a palm to the frame. The crystal slid apart without a sound. Inside waited a circular room made entirely of transparent layers. Floor, walls, ceiling, glass reinforced with wards. Lines of runes hovered at fixed distances, forming invisible boundaries.At the center stood a single table. No cha
Chapter 380
The escort did not speak. Six wardens walked ahead of him. Two followed. Their boots never touched the marble floor at the same time. Caster noticed that first. Perfect spacing. Perfect silence. The Tower had trained them well.The doors to the Upper Conclave waited at the end of the corridor. They were taller than the archways below, carved from layered stone that bent light instead of reflecting it. Old sigils had been stripped away and replaced with new ones, etched shallow, almost shy, as if the Tower no longer wanted its power to be seen too clearly.One warden raised a hand. The doors parted without sound. Heat washed out first. Then pressure. Then the sense of being counted.Caster stepped through. The Upper Conclave no longer had walls. It was a vast open void contained by invisible force, the sky of the Tower exposed above, clouds sliding past like slow witnesses. Seven platforms floated within the space, each a perfect ring of stone, each rotating at a different speed and
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