Corvis Eralith
The tunnel entrance, marked by the three fading yellow stripes, seemed like a mouth—a dark, vertical throat leading up into the unknowable gullet between Burim's foundations and the desert world above.
We stood in a blind alley, the sheer faces of buildings towering on either side, their upper stories leaning in as if to eavesdrop on our clandestine departure. The comforting, distant rumble of the city was muffled here, replaced by a silence that felt attentive, waiting.
Durzek's warning echoed in the stillness, a cold splash of reality after the warm, water-logged success in the cellar.
"What did Durzek mean by serpents?" I asked, my voice sounding too loud, too young in the confined space.
A faint tremor I couldn't suppress ran through me.
Olfred was already working the rusty key in the heavy lock. He didn't look at me, his focus on the mechanism.
"Sand Dwellers," he stated, the name utilitarian and grim. "Mana beasts, E-Class. They love the heat bleeding down from the desert and the… prey that uses these tunnels. They've been a problem for centuries. Fast. Venomous. Good at hiding in shadows and loose scree."
The lock gave with a metallic clunk that echoed up the dark shaft. He pulled the grate open, its hinges protesting with a shriek that set my teeth on edge.
I nodded, the motion stiff. The tremor worsened. I clutched the silly clay doll he'd made, its rough edges biting into my palm.
Olfred finally turned, his dark eyes catching the faint light from the alley. They narrowed slightly. "Are you scared of serpents?" The question wasn't mocking. It was assessing, clinical. "You are a mage, aren't you? Even if you're only at the solid red stage—a prodigy, but still a novice—with me here, you don't have to worry."
He said it like stating a fact of geology: the stone is hard. The tunnel is dark. I am a Lance, even though he didn't admit it, obviously.
The casual unveiling of my secret, spoken so matter-of-factly, shattered my last pretense. "You—I am not a mage!" The denial was instinctive, pathetic, and utterly transparent. It hung in the air, ridiculous.
Olfred sighed, a sound of profound weariness. "Kids your age, in your position… they'd be the happiest spawns the Mother Earth ever coughed up," he grumbled, shaking his head.
He pulled a small, rough stone from a pouch at his belt. "Do you even know? No one in recorded history has awakened a core as young as you. No one."
Of course I know that! The scream was trapped behind my clenched teeth. And my fear for serpents wasn't the simple, childhood terror of slithering things!
It was archetypal. Primal.
What were the Vritra, the clan of the god I was secretly racing against, if not the ultimate serpents? Majestic, scaled, winged, intelligent—beings of cosmic malice who viewed continents as chessboards and souls as currency.
The Sand Dwellers were just a physical, fanged echo of that deeper, more existential dread. They were a reminder that the world above wasn't just a desert; it was a landscape watched over by Asuran shadows.
"Just… don't tell anyone," I whispered, the defeat complete.
Olfred scoffed, a short, sharp sound. He held the rough stone in his palm, and with a concentration so subtle I almost missed it, it began to glow. Not with external light, but from within, as if he'd captured a miniature sunset—a pulsating, orange-red heart of magma.
The heat that wafted from it was dry and intense, cutting through the tunnel's damp chill.
"Is that magma magic?" I breathed, my fear momentarily eclipsed by fascination. Magma—the deviant element of dwarves, born from the union of earth and fire. Like plant magic for elves, it was a signature, a racial fingerprint on the fabric of mana.
"It is," he confirmed.
Then, with a flick of his will, the softball-sized orb of contained lava lifted from his palm. It hung steady as a planet in orbit, casting a hellish, dancing light that painted the tunnel walls in long, wavering shadows.
It began to float slowly ahead of us, a silent, fiery scout.
"You made it a construct!" I exclaimed, stepping closer despite myself. "But how can it fly?"
Sustained, precise levitation was notoriously mana-intensive, the domain of masters. For it to be a separate, mindless entity… it spoke of a finesse far beyond what a simple "security agent" should possess.
Olfred actually smirked, a rare crack in his granite demeanor. "You are very curious, you know that?"
Knowledge is power, I thought desperately. Insight is the only weapon I have that they don't expect.
"I can only make smaller, mindless constructs float," he explained, his eyes on the orb as it illuminated a steep, rough-hewn staircase leading upward. "And only if they stay near me. The connection is… tethered."
I studied him, the new light sculpting the planes of his face. Was it a lie, a simplified truth to conceal the vast ocean of his power as a Lance? I leaned toward deception.
True, sustained flight of a separate object was white-core territory.
But even this "tethered" display—maintaining a dense, hot, magical construct with such effortless stability—was far beyond my current capabilities. That meant he wasn't holding back that much, because even this sliver was leagues above me.
He gestured with his chin, and we entered the tunnel's maw. It was narrow, forcing Olfred to turn slightly sideways. For me, it was a perfect fit—one of the few advantages to being trapped in a child's body.
The air changed immediately, growing cooler, damper, smelling of wet stone, ancient dust, and something else—a faint, musky, reptilian odor that made the hairs on my neck stand up.
The magma orb floated ahead, our lone guardian against a darkness that felt thick enough to drink.
As we began the long, silent ascent, the only sounds were the scuff of our boots on stone, our breathing, and the low, menacing hiss of the cooling magma sphere. The tension was a physical thing, coiling in my stomach tighter than any serpent.
"Damien…" I ventured, the name still strange on my tongue. The silence was worse than the danger. "Could you talk to me about Elder Rahdeas? He's… kind of an enigmatic figure."
Ahead of me, Olfred's broad back was a wall of shadow and flickering light. "Elder Rahdeas tends to make that impression, yes."
His reply was a stone dropped into a well, followed by a long silence where we heard only our footsteps and the distant, dripping echo of water.
Then, just as I thought the conversation had died, his voice came again, lower, as if sharing a secret with the tunnel itself.
"However, he is a good man." The conviction in those words was absolute, the bedrock of his world. "You saw Durzek. The Oreguard family were once bodyguards to House Earthborn in Vildorial. A prestigious post. But Durzek's father… he caused a disgrace. Failed in his duty. The Earthborns cast them out. The entire family, their name tarnished, their prospects dust."
He paused, the magma orb gliding around a bend, revealing a junction where three tunnels met. He chose the leftmost without hesitation.
"It was Elder Rahdeas who found them. He gave Durzek and family a new chance. Gave him a purpose here, in Burim. A chance to rebuild his honor on his own terms, far from the whispering courts of the capital."
I absorbed this, humming softly. It aligned with the fragmented, tragic note I had on Doradrea from the lost timeline. I knew from the novel that Olfred's own story was a darker, more brutal variation on the same theme: the slum rat lifted from filth and given not just life, but meaning.
Yet, he offered no details about himself.
"Why Burim?" I asked after a while. "Why not help them in Vildorial?"
Olfred's pace didn't falter. "You remain the Elven Crown Prince," he said, his voice flattening back into professional neutrality. "I can't tell you everything about dwarven internal affairs."
"Sorry for pressing, then," I murmured, chastened.
He actually scoffed again, but this time it sounded almost… approving.
"King and Queen Eralith raised you well. I have never met a noble—let alone royalty—who apologized for asking a question. Or who listened as you do."
The words hit me with a force I wasn't expecting. Admiration? For me? A fraud? A coward? It felt like a crown of ashes. He saw a well-mannered prince. He didn't see the screaming, terrified interloper wearing the prince's skin.
"I owe everything to my family," I answered, the truth of that sentiment a sharp pang, even if the context was a lie. They were the anchor in my storm, the love I felt I was constantly betraying with my secrets and my fear.
The path steepened. The musky smell grew stronger. My heart began to drum again. In the fraught quiet, one last question pushed itself out. "And your family, Damien?"
I already knew the core answer: Rahdeas was his father in every way that mattered. But did he have the memory of a mother? Something resembling siblings? A friend waiting somewhere, worrying?
I felt a sudden, acute ache for him. As lonely and trapped as I felt, I was drowning in family. I had a constellation of people whose love, though sometimes smothering, was real and warm.
Olfred was chained—literally, by soul-artifact—to a king he despised. His other bond was to the secretive, plotting Rahdeas. Where was his warmth? His comfort? Did he even allow himself to want such things?
The silence this time was different. It stretched, filled only by the hiss of the magma orb and a new sound—a faint, skittering whisper of scales on stone, far above us in the darkness.
Olfred froze, his hand coming up in a fist. I stopped breathing.
The skittering faded, moving away down some unseen upper passage.
He didn't look back at me. His shoulders, illuminated by the hellish glow, seemed to carry the weight of the entire mountain.
"You wouldn't understand," he said finally, the words not harsh, but final. A door slammed shut on a room full of shadows.
He was right. And he was wrong. I understood loneliness. I understood duty that felt like a prison. But I couldn't say that.
So I let the question die, swallowed by the hungry dark of the tunnel. We continued our ascent, two solitary figures bound by a secret mission, separated by age, race, and experience, yet wrapped in a similar, silent shroud of isolation.
—
The deeper we moved, the more the silence dissolved into a living, breathing threat.
It wasn't just hisses and whistles any longer. It was also the sound of dry scales whispering over stone, a chorus of clicks from unseen mandibles, the damp, rhythmic puff of air through lateral vents—the very tunnels seemed to respire around us.
And I, foolishly, attributed every sigh of that dark ecosystem to the Sand Dwellers making my paranoia grow with each step.
Our path was a graveyard of a forgotten age. Cobwebs hung like tattered shrouds, their intricate architectures sagging under centuries of dust.
Skeletons, not just of small creatures but of things with too many ribs and elongated spinal columns, lay half-submerged in the silt.
Abandoned tools and vessels littered the way, their forms so eroded by time they seemed like brittle memories, ready to crumble at a footfall. The air was thick with the taste of chalk and a metallic hint I feared was old blood.
Ahead, Olfred moved with a deliberate, grounded pace, his broad right hand perpetually gliding along the tunnel wall. I understood his method to read the vibrations in the earth, to feel the skittering and slithering of life through miles of solid stone.
"In about fifteen minutes we should be on the surface," Olfred's voice was a low rumble, a foreign sound that disrupted the predatory harmony.
"Okay," I managed, the word brittle and small, swallowed instantly by the hungry dark.
Then, movement. Not from ahead, but from a fissure in the wall beside my head.
It uncoiled with the violent, release of a sprung trap, a blur of mottled ochre and bone-white. It had no eyes, only a smooth, tapered head that split open into a circular maw, a ripple of needle-teeth aimed for the pulsing vein in my neck.
Time fractured. I saw it all in a single, horrifying frame: the glistening interior of its throat, the muscle cords tensing along its serpentine body, the specks of stone dust clinging to its dry scales.
I was statue, a monument to my own death.
Olfred's hand, which a moment before had been a gentle reader of stone, transformed. A sheath of jagged rock encased his forearm and fingers, morphing them into a geological weapon.
He thrust. The sound was wet, a crushing splat-chunk, as his stone-spear hand obliterated the creature's head. The impact vibrated up my own spine.
"Tch." Olfred clicked his tongue, a sound of profound professional disgust. He wrenched his arm back. "It's been a long while since I have been in tunnels. I lost my touch."
My eyes, wide and unblinking, were dragged downward. What fell to the ground wasn't a head. It was a sac of ruined matter, a pulpy amalgam of brain, blood, and shattered scale—scalws, as my mind uselessly corrected.
It hit the dust with a sound that was obscenely soft, a definitive plop that echoed louder than any thunder in the profound silence that followed.
The body, headless, void of any possible center of life, did not know it was dead.
It convulsed, a whipping, violent spasm of primal protest. It twisted, coiling and uncoiling with frenetic, awful energy. It revolted against its own end, each thrash a screaming argument written in muscle and nerve.
The body slapped against the tunnel floor, a wet, meaty tattoo that spelled out a single, desperate truth: I don't want to end. I want to live.
The message was horrifically clear, a biological scream echoing in the silence.
"Finn!" Olfred's bark used my cover name like a slap, but it felt distant. "Don't look at it."
I gulped, the motion painful, my throat coated with the same dust that was now soaking up the dark, spreading blood.
I had always, intellectually, accepted the future of blood, grime, and war. I had built a mental fortification around the concept. Before what Rinia told me, before I knew Arthur didn't exist I was ready to kill Nico for Tessia, I would have even be ready to make Arthur die.
But this—this raw, convulsive denial of the end, this intimate spectacle of a body arguing with its own mortality—shattered those walls completely.
The theoretical had become tangible and lay now down right in front of my eyes.
The smell—hot copper, alien musk, and the chalky dust—clung to the back of my tongue. I could feel the phantom spray of its warm innards on my cheek.
A violent, uncontrollable tremor started in my hands. I shook my head vigorously in a physical attempt to dislodge the image burned onto my retinas: the maw, the pulp, the thrashing.
I fixed my gaze on the rough leather of Olfred's back and we moved forward, my steps clumsy and too loud.
The hisses and whistles that had haunted our journey were gone. The silence that replaced them was profound, weighted, and infinitely more terrifying. It was the silence of a realm that had just witnessed an apex predator reassert his dominance.
Now we were the dark, and everything else had just learned to be very, very quiet.