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The blue haze loosened its grip one curl at a time.
Arion stopped only when the mist thinned enough for his own shadow to exist again.
Colour had returned to the world—damp greens, streaks of bronze light filtering through a higher canopy, but the change felt abrupt, as if two climates had been welded together.
He crouched and pressed a palm to the soil. Warm.
Too warm for the altitude he'd climbed. Moisture steamed faintly off his hand.
"Temperature shift… no gradient," he muttered.
His eyes narrowed, "That's not weather. That's design."
The air smelled of wet minerals and moss instead of fungus rot. A steady trickle of water ran somewhere nearby, the sound clean and thin after the mist's heavy silence.
He took the journal from his coat and coaxed open the half-frozen pages. The script shimmered where the last of the frost melted.
He looked down at the journal. The previous page's corrupted text flashed through memory — the voice, the whispers, the impossible warmth of a ghost that wasn't there.
'The forest will lose its colour and reclaim it again. The next region is older ground, the temple's outlands. The land itself changed around it.'
He read the next line.
'Gravehowls'
'It was once their territory.'
"Gravehowls?" He frowned.
He ran a thumb along the page margin where dried mud had stuck, then glanced at the trees. Bark scored, branches broken at consistent heights. The signs fit, large quadrupeds, territorial, pack-born.
"Still active?"
The forest didn't answer, only shifted with distant creaks that might have been trunks or movement. He took a few glances around, now on alert for the next threat or mental breakdown.
He shut the book. "Alright. Noted."
The ground underfoot had turned coarse, grain giving way to packed dust and scattered slate chips. Ahead, the blue moss darkened to olive and rust, stretching over wide stone blocks half-buried in root systems.
Arion slowed his pace. Each new step felt older.
He brushed a boot across one slab—flat, cut, aligned. Foundations. He crouched and traced a straight edge running perfectly north-east, still true despite centuries.
"Artificial plate-alignment… this is the temple's perimeter."
He smiled, faint and involuntary. The tone of a scientist sighting a miracle after a nightmare.
More fragments appeared as he moved forward—broken plinths, column stumps, scattered tiles dulled by age. The forest had swallowed a civilisation whole, yet left its bones arranged as if respectful.
Above him, humidity thickened. Drops fell at random from unseen leaves. The light took on a gold tint, diffused through moisture like oil through water.
He wiped them clear and exhaled through his teeth. "Different biomes, same latitude. No transition zone."
He stopped again, studying how the air shimmered in pockets, temperature gradients rising from the stone itself.
"Energy bleeds from an underground chamber? Or…"
He looked toward the faint outline of distant masonry through the trees. "…does the temple generate its own micro-climate?"
He wrote the thought in the margin of the journal, ink bleeding slightly.
'Ecological distortion radiates outward from structure. Possible cause: residual Luminary field.'
Writing steadied his hands. Observation was order; order meant control.
The path widened naturally between two ridges. He followed the line of least resistance, tracing faint claw marks along the stone. Some fresh. Some very not.
Gravehowl territory, confirmed.
He slid a finger across one gouge. Edges smooth, no splintering. Whatever made it had talons harder than steel.
"Perfect," he muttered. "Meat-eating locals. Just what I needed."
A short laugh escaped him—dry, almost sane.
He pocketed the journal and continued downslope.
The ruin's grounds began where the ridge broke open. A half-circle terrace sank into the ground, its surface patterned with fractured slate tiles. Between the cracks, pale weeds had grown in symmetrical spirals, as if following buried lines of force rather than sunlight.
He crouched again, brushing dirt aside until a sliver of metal gleamed beneath. A conduit vein, thin as a vein of silver. Not dead. When he focused, he could feel a faint current humming beneath his fingertips—Luminary resonance, weak but cyclical.
"Containment lines still charged after gods-know-how-long…"
He ran a thumb along the metal. "Temple's bleeding power into the ecosystem. That could explain the climate, maybe even the Gravehowls' migration pattern."
The analytical tone steadied him further. Each word chased away the ghost of his mother's voice, the echo of the mist.
He stood, scanning the ruins ahead. The layout curved inward, forming a funnel of broken walls leading toward what looked like a courtyard. In the centre, a raised dais shone faintly beneath tangled vines—an old altar or hub point. Beyond it, higher ground rose in black silhouette: the temple gates.
For a moment, awe replaced fatigue.
"Finally."
He took a slow circuit through the lower perimeter first, mapping with his eyes. Stone ribs. Collapsed corridors. Air vents disguised as hollows. The architecture obeyed geometry older than reason.
He crouched again to inspect a wall panel half-collapsed under its own weight. Beneath moss, relief carvings showed strange symbols, some complete, some not. It did not seem religious.
Geometry replaced worship here; precision replaced faith.
He murmured, "He built temples the way we build reactors."
The words came out half-admiring, half-afraid.
A faint tremor rippled through the ground under his boots. Subtle—like something vast shifting weight far away. The vibration rolled up through his calves and faded.
He waited. Listened. The forest answered only with dripping water.
Still, he drew Vitalis reflexively into a loose shell around his body. The sensation was muted, dampened by whatever field the temple emitted. He felt it fight him slightly, like magnet against magnet.
He adjusted his flow, threading it tighter until the resistance eased. The feedback hummed through stone instead of air. A test. A learning curve.
It steadied again, and he felt it—a pulse returning from the ground, faint, rhythmic. A living echo of motion somewhere ahead.
He froze. Counted the beats. Three. Heavy.
"Not seismic," he whispered.
His eyes narrowed, "Organic."
He crouched low, closing his eyes. Luminary transmission carried back through the earth—waves bouncing off density. Primitive sonar. Crude, but functional.
Another pulse. Closer this time.
He opened his eyes, focusing on the terrace above. Nothing visible. But he felt the shift, a presence. Large. Watching.
Gravehowl.
The pulse came again.
Three slow beats. It's close.
Arion placed one palm pressed against the fractured slate. The vibration rippled up through bone and tendon — faint, deliberate, rhythmic. The kind that didn't belong to wind or stone.
He closed his eyes, letting his Vitalis flow down through his hand, spreading waves of Luminary Essence through the ground like a ripple in dark water.
The signal returned, like an echo of noise a heartbeat later, distorted but readable. The shape it outlined was large, low to the ground, weight distributed evenly, movement slow.
"Quadruped," he whispered. "Massive… but careful."
The pulse vanished. Then came another, shorter. Above him this time.
He turned his head just enough to see it, a dark shape crouched on a broken statue, half-blended with the ruin's shadow. Its body was lean, muscles like cords beneath lightless skin, four limbs jointed backward, and a head ending in a maw lined with curved fangs. Shards of calcified bone plated its back like shards of shale.
A Gravehowl.
It watched him with eyes the colour of burnt copper, silent except for the faint rasp of claws scraping against stone.
He didn't move. Didn't speak.
One was manageable. A full pack would have meant death.
He slowly adjusted his posture, lowering his centre of gravity.
The creature mirrored him, muscles tightening in slow rhythm.
He felt the air shift — a faint hum of Essence bleeding through the ruins. The creature's Vitalis signature pulsed like heat distortion.
He pushed a fraction more of Luminary into the ground, spreading it thin, calculating angle and range. The echo map formed in his mind, a cone of pressure lines, faint outlines, noise of the terrace edges, and one dense, living shape on the far statue.
I see you~
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Fingers brushed the ground, tracing a line of focus.
He channelled Vitalis outward, compressing Luminary into a thin conduit. The energy followed the cracks between slabs, refracting like light through water.
"Linear conduction… Frost variant."
He snapped his wrist.
Hssss—
The spell triggered with a sharp, single, narrow filament of freezing light racing across the floor. It split through dirt and debris, a low whistle marking its passage. When it struck the statue, frost burst upward like a wave, climbing the creature's legs before it could leap.
Shriek!
The Gravehowl shrieked once, the sound cut short as the ice sealed its jaw shut. In seconds, it froze solid, posture locked mid-lunge, a sculpture of terror and motion.
Tsssss.
Steam rose from cracks in the frost. The air trembled with residual energy.
Arion straightened, the faint hum of power fading from his hands.
He studied the statue, stepping closer until he could see his reflection in the creature's glossy eye. The ice refracted light in long threads, crystalline and still.
"Frost Snap variant: Linear conduction," he muttered, voice even. "Minimal spread loss. Direct conduction through a solid surface increases velocity by… thirty percent, maybe more."
He brushed frost from his sleeve. "Efficient. Could scale with denser mediums."
He leaned closer to inspect the Gravehowl's frozen form — curious, not triumphant. The creature's Vitalis signature had vanished, yet he could still feel faint feedback, like static trapped inside the ice.
Not death. Containment.
He tapped the ice once with his knuckle. "Sorry, big guy. Science."
The humour came out flat but honest.
He turned, glancing back across the ruins. No movement. No answering call from others of its kind. The pack was gone, or had never survived this deep into the temple's reach.
"Territory abandoned," he noted aloud. "The temple's field probably disrupted their navigation. Or… it consumes competition."
When he looked up again, the light had shifted. The gold tones of the forest had deepened to amber, reflecting off the glassy fragments scattered across the terrace.
The air itself hummed faintly, a low resonance carried on the wind.
He followed it.
The trail led up a wide stone incline, the kind of deliberate geometry that only ancient builders used, angles too perfect to be natural. At its crest, the forest stopped.
Ahead, the temple stood clear of trees — vast, black, and warped at the edges where stone had melted into glass.
The Gate.
For a long moment, Arion said nothing. He simply watched the wind slide into the sundered threshold, carrying thin streams of dust and leaves that vanished the instant they crossed the line.
The hum in his bones deepened.
"Haaa~," he sighed quietly. "No turning back now."
He adjusted himself and began the slow climb toward the gate, the frozen Gravehowl standing behind him like a monument to his return.
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