The Hidden Citadel never stopped lying to their senses.
Stone paths stretched endlessly ahead. All of it was inverted and suspended in a mockery of gravity that made the horizon feel wrong no matter how long they stared at it. The world above them was the floor and the floor was the sky.
They had been running for hours but the Dafes never fell behind. If anything, the opposite was true. Every corridor they passed through, every vast stone bridge and hallway seemed to invite more of them as spores drifted lazily through the air like malignant pollen. Low inverse gravity made every step feel wrong. Their bodies wanted to float but momentum stretched longer than it should. Turning corners was a nightmare but stopping was worse.
Vastarael handled it like it was nothing. By now, he was fully recovered. His breathing was steady. His body adjusted instinctively to the inverted physics like it was just another battlefield variable. Compared to his mother's training, this was barely an inconvenience. He had been hurt worse. This wasn't even close.
Asenane, however, was not okay.
She forced herself onward as she used bursts of flight to compensate for the strange gravity, alternating between running and hovering just to keep moving. Frost bloomed beneath her feet every time she touched down, crackling across the stone but it was weaker now. Her breaths were ragged. Her shoulders slumped.
Phaenora noticed immediately.
"You're burning up," she said, glancing at Asenane sideways while still running. "Like… really burning up."
Asenane tried to laugh. It came out weak and hoarse.
"I'm—fine—just—need—"
She nearly fell on her face but Vastarael was there in an instant. He scooped her up smoothly, her arms barely managing to cling around his shoulders as he shifted her weight onto his back like it was second nature. It didn't slow him down.
"Alright, that's enough."
They kept moving for another minute—just long enough to put distance between themselves and the nearest swarm—before Vastarael finally slowed down as he came to a stop beneath a towering open hallway whose ceiling vanished upward.
He activated his Codex. The Ingenious Prince unfolded around them silently. Their forms shimmered once and vanished completely. Their presence was erased so thoroughly that even the citadel itself seemed to lose track of them.
Phaenora blinked, then looked around with her eyes widening slightly.
"You could use that the whole time?"
Vastarael adjusted Asenane's weight on his back. "Yes."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because, I wanted to fully recover first. And I wanted to see how the Dafes behave when they think they're winning."
He glanced toward the corridor they had just fled from. The massive giants flowed past moments later with spores drifting thickly through the air. None of them reacted.
"They don't hunt by sight. They follow motion, pressure and disruption. The longer we ran, the more we pulled them in."
Phaenora grimaced. "Great. So we're basically Dafes bait."
"Were," he corrected.
Asenane shifted weakly against his back.
"Veneri…" she murmured.
That made him look down. Her skin was flushed. Heat radiated off her in waves. It was so intense it was visibly warping the frost she tried to summon. Ice formed along her arms, cracked instantly and then dissolved into steam-like mist.
"You don't feel good," Vastarael said quietly.
"I—I tried to cool down but my frost just… melts. It won't stay."
Phaenora explained. "That's your Draconic Energy reacting."
Asenane frowned weakly. "My… what?"
Phaenora started walking again as they moved invisibly through the citadel.
"You've been running on Divine Energy your whole life but dragons have their own energy system. You've never used it. Never needed to, really"
"And now," Vastarael said, immediately connecting the dots, "she can't rely on Divine Energy."
"Exactly. So her body's compensating. Her Draconic Energy is waking up and it doesn't care if she's ready."
Asenane swallowed. "It… hurts."
"I know," Phaenora said gently. "It always does at first. When I got my physical body as an Ascender in Erna Isles, it hurt when I began to use Essence."
Vastarael's grip tightened slightly as he carried her.
"Shimmer must be experiencing the same thing."
Phaenora nodded. "Yeah. Probably worse."
"But Runner's with her," Vastarael added. "She'll handle it."
Behind them, the Dafes released another wave of spores in form of thick, suffocating clouds that rolled across the stone paths like fog. The particles brushed against the invisible boundary of the Codex and slid past harmlessly. The worms paused briefly before they continued floating. Only when they were gone did all three of them finally exhale.
Phaenora sagged a little. "Yeah. No way we could have fought all of that."
Asenane let out a weak laugh. "I wouldn't even survive the warm-up."
Vastarael nodded once. "We're not in condition for extended combat."
He looked around scanning the endless inverted architecture.
"We need somewhere enclosed where we can we can rest without attracting attention. Let's find shelter before this place decides it wants us dead."
°°°°°°
They finally found a place to rest, which was a belvedere. Veneri did not like it because it reminded him of the one who sent him to this place but he kept it to himself.
It was vast with an open circular platform supported by pillars that stretched downward. Each column was engraved with spiraling runes that seemed to crawl if they stared at them too long. Above them—no, below them—was the ceiling of the belvedere.
They were standing on the floor but upside down. They felt the sensation of resting in a place where gravity pulled you upward instead of down made the brain itch in a way that refused to go away. Sitting felt like hanging. Lying down felt like defying instinct. Every time Vastarael shifted his weight, his body insisted that he should be falling.
Asenane barely had the strength to realize where they were.
Steam rolled off her in thick, trembling waves. Her body kept radiating heat so intense that even the ancient stone beneath them felt warm. Frost bloomed reflexively across her skin but it shattered instantly, dissolving into mist before it could do anything useful. She lay sprawled across Vastarael's lap. Her head was resting against his chest as she panted.
"It hurts. It's too hot..."
"I know."
Vastarael lifted one hand and summoned water not using Divine Energy—he couldn't afford that—but Soul Energy. A perfect sphere of water formed beside him, hovering just over his shoulder, rotating slowly.
"I'm sorry."
Before she could ask why, he tugged gently at her blouse and tore it just enough to expose her collarbone and chest. The fabric was soaked through anyway, clinging uselessly to skin slick with sweat. Asenane barely reacted. She was too far gone for embarrassment.
The water moved in gentle patterns around her chest and shoulders that never quite touched her skin but hovered a breath away. Vastarael fed Soul Energy into the water, driving its temperature down not to freezing, not to ice, but to something far colder.
It was cold without crystallization. That was when he noticed it again when he was researching the physics of Spheraphase when he was in mage training with his father. He was ten or eleven by then.
Water in Spheraphase didn't behave like it should.
It had an absurdly high resistance to freezing, stubbornly refusing to become ice even when its temperature plunged far below what would have shattered molecules on Earth. Ice, meanwhile, was something else entirely. It didn't melt into water. It sublimated into gas, dissolving into mist as if skipping an entire state of existence.
Ice and water weren't phases here. They were separate elements. And right now, ice would be useless.
He needed brutally cold water.
"Open your mouth," he told her gently.
Her lips parted without hesitation. He guided a stream of the super cooled water into her mouth. She swallowed reflexively and immediately coughed, choking slightly as the shock hit her system. He reacted instantly, cradling her so her head rested fully against his chest. One arm wrapped securely around her shoulders as the other steadied her breathing.
"Easy, there, Asenane. I've got you."
She clutched his shirt weakly, He could feel her Draconic Energy. It roared inside her like a furnace cracking open, burning through her veins as if her body were a crucible being tested for the first time. She wasn't dying but pain like this didn't care about technicalities.
Vastarael tightened his hold.
Shimmer would be in worse condition. Asenane had millennia of endurance, layers of control and a body built to withstand absurd extremes. Shimmer had talent but not tolerance. Phaenora returned quietly, slipping back into visibility beside them.
"No Dafes, Looks clear for now."
Asenane's eyes snapped open. Her fingers dug into his sleeve with desperate strength as she clung to him like he was the only thing keeping her from dissolving.
"I don't want to die. It hurts. It hurts so much..."
Tears welled in her eyes, held back by sheer force of will. Phaenora froze.
"She's not exaggerating," Phaenora said softly, kneeling beside them. "To her, this really feels like death."
Vastarael shifted, about to lower Asenane gently onto the stone to adjust the water—
"No..."
She held him tighter, pressing her face against his chest, heat flaring painfully through his clothes.
"Don't leave. Please. Don't go."
He didn't hesitate. The water sphere vanished. He redirected his Soul Energy inward, altering his own body temperature without a second thought, driving it down to an extreme cold that would have killed most beings outright. The Divinity of Water assisted instinctively, stabilizing the shift, keeping him functional.
He had done this before on the Fallen Bridge but in reverse.
Runner, who was shivering and stubborn, insisted she was fine while her body betrayed her. Shimmer immediately claiming she was cold too—obviously lying—just so she could be included.
So he had held them both. Two small girls were pressed against him. One was genuinely freezing and the other just wanted comfort, He remembered how he adjusted his body heat temperature while the cold howled around the landscape like it wanted to tear them away. This was the same. He wrapped Asenane fully against him. Her overheated skin was pressed to his artificially chilled body,
She whimpered once her grip loosened, though she never fully let go. Phaenora watched her before she scoffed.
"This might be the first time she's ever felt pain like this. No wonder she's scared. The oldest among us reduced to this by dragon fever."
"Pain doesn't care how old you are."
He lifted one hand and traced a glowing Sleep Rune in the air. The rune sank into Asenane's body as her eyes fluttered shut. Within seconds, she was asleep, breathing evenly at last. He leaned back against the stone, still holding her. His gaze drifted toward the endless inverted expanse of the Hidden Citadel.
"I really hope Shimmer and Runner are okay."