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The hallway waited for him like a throat of stone.
Arion stepped out from the kitchen, brushing dust from his coat. The Spark drifted beside him, its glow catching warped shadows on the walls. The further he walked, the more the corridor changed—heat scars, melted channels, glassy pools of once-stone hardened mid-flow.
Something violent had happened here.
The air tasted metallic, charged, faintly bitter on the tongue — like the room itself had kept the memory.
He knew that taste. A burnt circuit.
Like failed lab experiments.
The kind that left bones scorched and nerves twitching for hours.
He crouched, running his fingertips along the floor. The surface was smooth as glass, faintly warm even after centuries. Residual energy, he thought. Too focused to be an accident.
At the end of the hall, a doorway waited. The smell hit first, dry rot and mineral dust, the stale air of sealed decay.
The next step stopped him cold.
Crunch.
Bones.
The room beyond was vast, pillars cracked, banners long rotted—but the floor had become a grave. Skeletons carpeted the space in layers, hundreds at least, the uppermost reduced to brittle tangles of ivory. Those near the threshold had fused with the stone itself, ribs and femurs half-absorbed like fossils in tar. Some were melted, others shattered outright as if caught mid-explosion.
He even saw figures of bones frozen mid-motion — hands raised, jaws open, bodies caught in the last instant before death.
One-sided fight, he thought.
A massacre, not really a battle.
The Spark dimmed to a cautious ember.
"Easy," he murmured. The orb's light trembled, flickering in and out of phase with his own heartbeat— as if it too feared to disturb the dead.
He stepped carefully between skulls, boots crunching over hollow ribs.
Whatever war had found this place had ended quickly and without mercy. He couldn't tell if these had been defenders or invaders, only that whoever held the temple last hadn't needed an army.
"Hell of a welcome mat," he muttered.
He didn't linger. The weight of so many failed lives pressed close, as if his breathing alone might wake them.
A narrow corridor branched off from the far side of the hall, leading into a smaller chamber. The air there was cooler, touched with the faint mineral scent of powdered stone.
Tables lined the walls—carved from single slabs, each set with chisels, strange drills, and crystal rods. A craftsman's den. Tools lay scattered as if abandoned mid-task.
He paused first, studying the pattern of dust. Finger trails marked a half-finished sketch, circles, intersecting lines, and a spiral leading inward. Not decoration. A formula. Something geometric and precise carved into the stone itself, now barely visible beneath years of ash.
Arion ran a hand over one of the work surfaces. Fine dust clung to his fingers, glimmering faintly with Luminary residue. "Stone-worker's lab," he murmured.
"Or someone's idea of one."
At the room's centre rose a mound of pale shapes.
Statues.
Dozens of them, stacked carelessly, their smooth features dulled by age. Some had cracked down the middle; others were missing limbs, faces, or torsos entirely. Whatever colour they once held had leeched away, leaving a chalk-white pile that looked too close to human.
He crouched beside one toppled figure. Its eyes had been carved open, mouth half-parted in the instant of a scream.
That's not unsettling at all.
His reflection warped across a cracked statue face — his own eyes doubled and hollowed, staring back from ancient stone.
The Spark hovered behind him, light trembling along the ruined forms. For a heartbeat the statues almost seemed alive—the illusion of shifting light across fading polish. He stood up fast, exhaling through his teeth.
"Creepy life-like statues," he muttered. "Minus a few points for interior design."
He backed away, trying not to look at the cracked faces watching him leave.
Returning to the main hall meant crossing the bone field again. He kept his gaze forward, focusing on the far doorway. A strange calm had settled over the place, the silence so thick it muffled even the scrape of his boots.
Another room waited opposite the hall—its entrance intact, sealed by a door of dark stone shot through with thin veins of silver. He stepped up to it and paused.
"Tch." His hand met cold stone.
He frowned. The surface had no dust — as though the air refused to settle there. Even without touching it, he could feel a faint current, like static trapped beneath skin.
No handle. No lock. Just a slab.
Wait—there's no handle…
His brain stopped working for just a moment.
You're joking… who has a door with no handle!
He stared at it a long moment, then sighed. "Now I get where the rumours of madness come from."
He brushed his palms over the surface, tracing seams and panels, but there was no mechanism, no visible hinge. Only when his hand drifted to the centre did he feel it—a pull, faint but definite, like static drawing hairs upright.
A reaction point.
He pressed both hands flat against the stone. The faint hum beneath the surface answered with a low vibration.
"This position… almost like a scanner."
Vmmmmm.
He channelled a thread of Vitalis into his palms. Lines of light bloomed outward, racing along the veins across the door. The vibration crawled through his bones, teeth aching with the frequency. Vitalis resonance, maybe. Or something else entirely, still awake inside the slab.
The stone groaned, old, tired—but began to shift. Dust fell in sheets as the seal split down the centre.
The noise was awful.
Arion shoved the doors wider, stepping aside as stale air exhaled from the darkness beyond.
"He was smart enough to build a security system," he said under his breath.
The Spark brightened on his shoulder, ready.
Arion smirked faintly. "Alright then, let's see what kind of loot you left behind."
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As soon as Arion stepped inside, the air shifted.
His ears popped. The pressure changed, collapsing into a silence that felt… shaped, deliberate. The Spark dimmed again, colour drawn from it like dye bleeding out of cloth.
Darkness swallowed the room—thick, soundless, absolute. Then a faint pulse stirred above him.
A shard-shaped crystal was half-embedded in the ceiling, sputtering weak light like a lantern on its last leg. It cast the study in tired gold, pulsing slow and uneven, but enough to see.
Of all things still working in this ruin, it's his study lighting.
He chuckled.
Smart.
Dust and ash hung mid-air like frozen stars, each mote caught between falling and stillness. The air carried a damp musk and the faint, acidic burn of old paper—pages once alive, now rotting slow.
He stepped forward, boots crunching through brittle parchment. Books lay everywhere, covers warped, spines split, pages either blank or burned through. Some were ripped by hand, others seemed to have exploded outright. Shelves leaned inward, cracked and scarred with black streaks, the aftermath of something violent.
Every crunch echoed too long, returning seconds later as if sounds themselves lagged behind him. A feedback loop, or an echo from something deeper. He wasn't sure which unnerved him more.
"Damnit. Even the study wasn't saved from the fighting."
He kicked a pile of shredded parchment; it collapsed into flakes of ash.
Everywhere he looked, ruin. Broken quills. Shattered glass jars. A toppled chair split clean through. A quarterstaff lay in the corner—splintered, heat-warped, dust thick on its surface. Boots and a torn cape hung stiff on wall hooks, brittle as dried bark.
He turned toward the main desk, the only thing still holding shape.
Come on. Something useful for once.
"Bingo!"
Half-buried beneath a thin veil of dust sat a grimoire.
Not worn. Not weathered. Perfect.
Its slate cover gleamed faintly under the shardlight, edges sharp, sigils carved deep and unbroken, as if the centuries had simply refused to touch it. The rest of the study was in ruin, yet this book looked freshly placed, waiting.
A flicker of light caught in Arion's eye — a silver shard sat upon the grimoire's spine.
His pulse quickened. Not fear, resonance. The shard's glow matched his Vitalis frequency almost perfectly, like two tones finding harmony. "That's… new," he muttered.
Plink
For an instant, it pulsed. Not random, deliberate. Almost a signal, like something alive trying to reach out.
Arion brushed the dust from its cover, eyes narrowing.
"A grimoire. Finally, something worth the headache."
He didn't yet realise what he had found.
The silver shard pulsed again.
Thumm.
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