Chapter 25

  For once, I’ll spare the Archivists the exhaustive details—especially these. The next four hours after my talk with Vin passed without anything particularly remarkable happening, and I don’t intend to waste parchment recounting every sigh and chuckle. We talked. That was it. Not about missions, not about magic, not even about the Crytomancers. Just simple, mundane things—like two people who’d forgotten, for a moment, that the world was falling apart around them.

  She told me, almost laughing, that she once accidentally set her childhood home on fire with uncontrolled fire magic. That it happened long before the Dragon War, when she was still small, and her hands couldn’t hold power properly. She remembered the flames, the panic, her mother’s screams, and the way the other kids never looked at her the same after that. Then she shrugged it off, as if it were just another odd memory from a life full of them. It should’ve felt heavier. But instead, it just felt... human.

  By evening, the tavern had begun to fill again. The warmth of lanternlight flickered on old wooden beams, and the sound of boots on floorboards mixed with murmurs, laughter, and the occasional clink of metal mugs. Markus had resumed his post behind the bar, playing the perfect host with that same polished arrogance of a dethroned noble who refused to acknowledge reality. At one table, Simon and Maira were deep in conversation, exchanging quiet, fast-paced whispers about arcane formulas. I caught a few words—“mana flow,” “reverse sigil logic,” “blood-trace wards”—and immediately stopped listening.

  Then, out of nowhere, Vin turned to me. Her voice was quiet but clear. “Want to head upstairs early? Just us? Alone?”

  What the—?

  I blinked, caught off guard. My thoughts scrambled for clarity. Was she just looking for privacy to talk? Or... something else? I honestly couldn’t tell. I still can’t. Even now, with hindsight and all the context in the world, I have no idea what was going through her head in that moment.

  What I did know, however, was that I couldn’t take the risk. Whatever game the fates were playing with us, whatever quiet promises hung in the air between conversations, I couldn’t let it become something more. Not now. Not the night before I would go away.

  So I gave a polite, noncommittal smile and shook my head gently. “Not tonight,” I said.

  I braced myself for disappointment. A sigh. A furrowed brow. Some trace of hurt in her expression.

  But instead, she just shrugged. “Okay,” she said, like it was nothing. As if she hadn’t asked at all. And then she turned back to her drink, her expression unreadable.

  And in that moment, I realized something: I would never understand her. Not fully. Not truly. And maybe that was the point.

  -

  Later that evening, I gathered the entire group around the hearth in the common room. The flames crackled gently behind us, casting long shadows on the timber walls, and despite the warm light, the mood in the room was anything but relaxed. We all knew what was coming.

  I stood at the center, arms folded, and looked at each of them. “Is the mana cage ready?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  Simon gave a single, sharp nod. “It’s in place. Stable. It’ll trigger the moment the Crytomancers enter the central field.”

  “Good,” I said, trying to keep my tone even and composed. “Then tomorrow evening, Markus will position himself inside the activation zone of the cage. Vin and I will be standing guard—just outside, but close enough to strike.”

  “I’ll cast a minor invisibility ward on both of you,” Maira interjected, sitting on the arm of a nearby chair with her fingers loosely clasped. “Just in case they scry the room beforehand.” Her voice was calm, but her words carried weight.

  That hadn’t even crossed my mind. Scrying. Of course. In Tirros, divination magic was used regularly—for battlefield surveillance, for tracking targets, even as part of layered security systems. Some forms of it were passive and constant, like magical surveillance cameras fueled by a steady stream of mana. I should’ve considered that.

  “Wait,” I said, turning slightly toward her. “Can they see the cage through divination?”

  She shook her head with quiet certainty. “No. Trap-based spells like the mana cage are specifically constructed to be immune to divination magic. It’s part of their core design—if you could detect them that easily, they’d never work.”

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  I exhaled slowly. One less thing to worry about.

  Simon chimed in again. “Vin and I will also remain on the upper level, ready to intervene at the first sign that something doesn’t go as expected.”

  I nodded in appreciation. That kind of backup could be the difference between containment and a massacre.

  Then I looked around the room—at each of them. Maira with her cautious precision, Simon with his sharp mind, Vin with her unpredictable depth, and even Markus... lurking in the corner like he was already rehearsing for his role in the grand performance.

  “Alright,” I said firmly. “Everyone knows their role. Everyone’s prepared.”

  One by one, they nodded.

  “Good,” I concluded. “Then it’s time to end this. Tomorrow, we spring the trap. And with any luck… tomorrow night, the Crytomancers fall.”

  -

  “I’m disappointed in you,” said the woman standing over the boy, her voice flat and sharp like a blade drawn across stone.

  The child—twelve, maybe thirteen at most—stood frozen amidst the wreckage. His black hair was tousled, messy from the fall, and his pale, narrow face was streaked with sweat and faint soot from the ceramic dust still lingering in the air. A faint bluish bruise was beginning to form on his cheek, and a thin trickle of blood ran down his right forearm, escaping from a shallow cut where a sharp shard had pierced the skin. The wound wasn’t deep, but it would scar. It always did.

  He remembered the accident clearly. One moment he’d been laughing, running barefoot through the hallway with some crudely whittled toy in hand, chasing imaginary dragons. The next, his foot slipped on the polished stone floor. He’d crashed to the ground sideways, flailing to catch his balance, and in doing so had grabbed the edge of a delicate wooden table. Several priceless vases—he never knew where they came from or why they were so important—toppled and shattered around him with a noise like thunder.

  He could still hear it now in the dream.

  His father had come running first, silent, concerned. He fetched salve and clean cloth, tending to the wound quickly, efficiently. But his mother… his mother had said those words.

  “I’m disappointed in you.”

  She kept saying it. Again and again, each repetition colder than the last. Her arms never reached out. Her face never softened. Her eyes never left the broken shards on the floor.

  But… that’s not how it happened. Not truly.

  Luken knew this. He remembered the pain, the shame, yes—but also the warmth of her embrace. He remembered how she had wrapped her arms around his trembling form before scolding him gently, only after making sure he was safe. He remembered her kindness.

  This… this was not her voice.

  The words were the same, but the tone was all wrong. Hollow. Unforgiving. Alien.

  Luken’s mind stirred uneasily in the dream. He was reliving the memory, but someone else was speaking through her face, using her voice like a mask.

  And suddenly, in the back of his mind, he realized—he wasn’t a child anymore. Not really. He was dreaming. He was remembering. But something… or someone… was rewriting the memory. A subtle manipulation, a quiet infection of the past.

  Then the voice changed. It grew clearer, deeper—no longer the soft reprimand of a mother, but something guttural and loathsome, thick with scorn. The tone rumbled with a bestial growl, each syllable like gravel dragged across metal. This was no longer the voice of a woman. No longer the voice of the person Luken once loved.

  And as the memory unfolded—his father returning with cloth and ointment to tend the boy’s bleeding arm—the figure of his mother turned slowly, unnaturally, her gaze breaking from the child on the floor. She looked directly at the adult Luken now, the one suspended above the moment in time like a ghost witnessing his own past. Her eyes locked with his—and changed.

  What had once been warm brown irises shimmered, then pulsed, turning a horrific, gleaming crimson. Not just red, but wet and raw, like wounds staring back at him. Her lips curled upward, stretching into a hideous, unnatural grin—too wide, too forced. It was a grin that didn’t belong on any human face.

  And then the voice spoke again. This time in mockery, cold and disturbingly calm. “Luken, Luken, Luken... You’ve disappointed me.” The creature tilted its head as it inspected him, amusement flickering behind those demonic eyes. “First, you refuse to kill that Varnedor bastard... and now you’re cozying up to that foolish little elf girl. Really? What would your precious order think?”

  Luken didn’t respond to the taunts. Rage tightened in his chest like a coiled serpent. His jaw clenched. “What are you?” he growled, voice low and boiling with fury.

  The thing wearing his mother’s face grinned wider still, savoring the tension like fine wine. “Ah... now that’s the fire I like,” it purred. “That seething fury, that boiling wrath... It makes you delicious. You feel it, don’t you? How it claws at your ribs, how it blackens your thoughts. You try to fight it, to bury it under oaths and armor—but in the end, Luken, you are exactly what you swore to hunt into the deepest pits of Hell.”

  Still, Luken refused to react. His eyes narrowed. His fists trembled.

  He roared this time. “What. Are. You?!”

  The thing laughed—a cruel, echoing sound that seemed to shake the very foundation of the dream around them. The face of his mother stretched into a grotesque expression of delight, her smile warping in a way that no human mouth should ever move.

  “Luken, Luken,” it crooned with a voice like molten iron, “the great leader of your ragtag little band... future slayer of Crytomancers... shining knight of the Eagle Order.” Then it surged forward, suddenly, face inches from his own, and whispered into his ear with breath like burning ash, “And yet so very, very clueless.”

  Luken stood frozen, heart pounding, the dreamworld beginning to crack at the edges like stained glass under pressure.

  Then everything broke and he fell. He fell deeper and deeper as the monster continued to laugh until everything went black.