Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three: A Little Too Quiet

  For a moment, disorientation seized Jace’s senses—a falling sensation, as if the floor had dropped away beneath his feet. Then stability returned, along with light.

  The hallway stretched wide and tall, beautiful in a way that felt utterly wrong. Smooth stone walls gleamed with polished inlays, etched with flowing patterns. The vaulted ceiling arched overhead in perfect symmetry, each support carved with sigils older than the palace they had just left behind. Wherever this place was, it had been built to last centuries. Just like the Regent himself.

  Dex slowed as they stepped into the vaulted corridor. Amber crystal sconces flared to life one by one, casting a warm, flickering glow that spilled across the stone. The light caught on rows of gargoyles embedded in the walls—dozens of them, crouched in recessed alcoves like patient sentries. Stone wings curled tight against their backs. Clawed hands tensed, frozen mid-pounce. Dust clung thick to their forms, softening edges, muting details.

  They didn’t move.

  But they watched.

  “It’s quiet,” Jace said under his breath.

  Dex didn’t look at him. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “A little too quiet.”

  They kept walking. But if they were being honest, the silence wasn’t truly quiet—it felt more like it was listening. Each step echoed just a beat too long.

  One of the gargoyles had a crack through its jaw, like it had once tried to scream. Another had a chain rusted around its ankle, snapped in half.

  “Okay, if they were gonna move, they’d have done it by now, right?”

  Neither wanted to guess.

  Behind them, something shifted. Just enough to hear. Just enough to freeze the blood.

  “I don’t like this,” Dex whispered.

  “Yeah,” Jace said quietly. “Me neither. But we didn’t come this far to turn around. Not that we could.”

  He stared into the dim light ahead. “Whatever way out there is... it’s forward.”

  They stepped into a chamber that shouldn’t have existed. Vast didn’t cover it. The space stretched beyond reason, defying every blueprint of the palace above.

  Come to think of it… they weren’t sure where they were anymore.

  Dex checked his map. Static.

  Jace tried his Star Map. Nothing. It only worked beneath the stars, and this place felt buried—deep and far from any sky.

  The ceiling arched high above them, vanishing into darkness. Runes spiraled up colossal columns, each glyph flickering with a sickly green pulse, like the place itself was breathing through old wounds.

  The walls didn’t end—they curved away into shadow like the interior of some forgotten god’s ribcage. Jace had seen impressive architecture before, but this vault made cathedral builders look like children stacking blocks.

  But it wasn’t the impossible architecture that stopped his breath.

  It was the emptiness.

  “Well,” Jace said, his voice echoing in the cavernous space, “this is what we in the professional treasure-hunting business call ‘a bit of a letdown.’”

  The chamber was unmistakably a vault—the ornate shelving units and display pedestals lining its perimeter made that abundantly clear. But every shelf stood bare. Every pedestal empty. The entirety of Roandia’s wealth, centuries of accumulated treasure, magical artifacts, and resources—vanished like tavern ale on half-price night.

  “He’s cleaned it out,” Dex breathed beside him. “Everything. He’s taken everything.”

  The only occupants remaining were the massive stone gargoyles lining the walls. Each stood several times Jace and Dex’s height—monstrous sentinels with wings half-unfurled as if caught mid-transformation. Their faces were twisted amalgamations of beast and stone—leonine muzzles with serpentine eyes, antlers spiraling from reptilian skulls, talons curling into the stone floor. Most disturbing were their expressions—not the mindless grimaces of decorative stonework, but knowing smirks, as if they were privy to a joke at their expense.

  Jace moved further into the chamber, his footsteps creating a percussive echo that seemed to follow him accusingly. “Where? Where could he possibly have moved so much wealth without anyone noticing? That’s not exactly a ‘stuff it in your pockets and whistle casually as you walk out’ situation.”

  “Could explain the lack of traps,” Jace said, eyes narrowing. “However he got it all out, he wouldn’t risk setting them off himself. And he didn’t bother resetting them behind him… which means either he’s not worried about being followed, or this all happened very recently.”

  “He’s leaving tonight,” Jace added, the thought settling cold in his chest.

  “Not tonight,” Dex said, shaking his head. “He’s still in his chambers. I checked. Maybe he’s waiting until after the Tower Ceremony. But the question is… why?”

  They walked in silence through the winding galleries of the underground treasury, passing chamber after chamber of nothing. Each room echoed with absence. No scrolls in the racks, no gems in the cases, no blades or bracers on the velvet-lined mounts. It was as if the very concept of wealth had been extracted, leaving only a hollow exoskeleton behind. A vault turned mausoleum.

  “It’s like a prison,” Dex muttered, running his fingers along a dustless shelf. “But for gold. Built to cage treasure, and now even the bars are gone.”

  “That’s poetic,” Jace replied, “and normally I’d mock you mercilessly for it, but there’s something unsettling about all this... tidiness. No dust, no signs of hasty packing. This was methodical.”

  They moved deeper into the labyrinth.

  The path led them down a narrower corridor, its stone less refined, the sconces older and casting shadows that seemed reluctant to remain still. At the end, they came upon a smaller chamber, tucked like a guilty secret beneath the opulence above. A desk sat there—simple, functional—its surface littered with worn ledgers, quills long dry, and an overturned inkwell. This, it seemed, was where the Regent came when he wanted to count his hoard in private.

  Jace stepped in, eyes scanning the room—and then he stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  There, illuminated by a single shaft of light filtering through an unseen crack in the stone ceiling, stood a pedestal. Unlike the others, this one wasn’t empty.

  But this was no ordinary sunlight.

  The beam pouring into the chamber wasn’t gentle or warm. It was a shaft of pure energy—coiled light and seething power—funneled from some impossible point above. The air hummed with it, a sound that made Jace’s back teeth vibrate. Dust motes froze mid-fall within the column, suspended as if time itself refused to pass through.

  And at the center, drinking it in like a dying man offered water, was the object.

  “That,” Jace said with practiced understatement, “is probably important.”

  It resembled a massive writing desk, complete with a quill poised over what appeared to be a crystal slate. But the scale was wrong—the “quill” was the size of a man’s arm, the crystal slate large enough for a giant to use as a shield. The entire apparatus was powered by what could only be described as a magical battery, a pulsing core of energy now dimmed to a faint glow like a hearth fire on its last embers.

  The machine was dark. Dormant. And visibly damaged.

  Dex approached the device with the wary reverence of someone who’d learned the hard way not to touch strange magic without gloves.

  “I’ve seen something like this before,” he said, eyeing it like a rare insect with venomous fangs. “Much smaller versions, though. Breakbinders. Nasty little things. Highly illegal and hard to come by even in the wrong parts of town.”

  He began to circle it slowly, inspecting the construction with something bordering on admiration.

  “It’s built to unravel enchantments, high-grade ones. Not something you’d use in a hurry. Can take days or weeks to crack tough chest wards.” He crouched beside it, running a careful finger along the etched lines of its casing. He spoke under his breath, almost forgetting he wasn’t alone. “But this? This is... beyond. I’ve never even imagined something on this scale.”

  “This much power...” Jace gestured to the stream of energy pouring into it. “What could he possibly be trying to access? The personal diary of a god?”

  “Something big,” Dex replied grimly. “Something old and very, very well protected. This kind of setup—this has been running for years. Maybe decades.”

  Jace frowned, a grim suspicion tightening his jaw. “Or centuries.”

  They shared a look of dawning comprehension, the kind that usually precedes someone saying, “We should get out of here.”

  “Can we shut it down?” Jace asked.

  “Not without punching a hole clean through Roandia,” came the reply. “We’d have to shut down whatever is powering it first. You don’t want that much energy flailing around without somewhere to go.”

  “I’d bet you fifty Etherium that the Regent has been trying to break into something since he took power,” Jace said slowly. “Something that required more resources than a kingdom could provide in a single lifetime.”

  “And now he’s succeeded,” Dex concluded, pointing to the cracked crystal slate. “Whatever it was, he finally broke through. The device is now just keeping it open.”

  Jace felt cold despite the ambient warmth of the chamber. “Come on, we need to keep going.”

  “There,” Dex said, pointing to a small door half-hidden behind one of the empty display cases. They crossed to it. The door opened with suspicious ease, swinging inward on silent hinges.

  Beyond lay a chamber that hadn’t been emptied—clearly a workspace. Tables cluttered with charts and diagrams. Shelves lined with jars of nameless things. A ritual circle etched into the stone floor like a scar that never healed.

  Flowlines spidered across the walls, carved deep into the stone like veins feeding a heart. Silver inlays shimmered faintly in the grooves, drawing Jace’s gaze inward—toward the circle.

  At first glance, it resembled a standard channeling formation. But the longer he stared, the more wrong it felt.

  Schematics lined the walls—diagrams of aether paths, scrawled annotations in a language he half-recognized. He stepped closer. The diagrams weren’t drawn or etched afterward. They were fused into the stone itself.

  The room wasn’t housing the spell. It was the spell.

  And the flowlines didn’t pull from ley currents or elemental veins. They all bent inward. Toward the circle. And through it—into nothing.

  A hungry, hollow nothing.

  Around the edge, discarded slave collars littered the floor like brittle leaves. Every one cracked, blackened. Their enchantments burnt out, shattered like matchsticks.

  Jace stepped back, slow. His skin crawled.

  They weren’t just channeling power. They were consuming it.

  “Gods above,” Dex whispered, lifting one of the collars. “He’s draining the slaves. Like wine from casks.”

  Jace moved to a table. A stack of ledgers waited, ancient and disturbingly neat. Names, dates, quantities—magical energy recorded down to decimals.

  “He’s been using them to power the machine,” Jace said through clenched teeth. “Thousands—generations—siphoned down to fuel this. He kept better records of it than most merchants keep of grain and silver.”

  Dex flipped through another ledger, eyes widening. “It’s more than that. Look—here. He’s been taking their years as well. Using them to keep himself alive. That’s not just forbidden—it’s nearly impossible to do without killing the caster outright. Jace, either he’s ranked far higher than anyone realizes… or whoever’s helping him is powerful. Terrifyingly powerful.”

  They didn’t say the name. They didn’t have to.

  The shape of it took form in Jace’s mind—massive and grotesque. This wasn’t subjugation. It wasn’t resource theft.

  It was an engine. A system built to harvest life, piece by piece, soul by soul. All of it fed into one central purpose: unlocking something ancient. Something sealed so deeply it had taken centuries of cruelty just to crack the surface. All while keeping the madman alive long enough to do it.

  “There’s more.” Dex dropped to a hush. He leaned over a map spread across a second table. “Transport routes. Dozens. All leading out of Roandia. Recently.”

  “The treasures from the vault,” Jace guessed. “Dex, whatever’s coming to Roandia—we don’t want to be here when it arrives. We need to warn the others.”

  “But why now?” Dex asked. “Why pull the plug after centuries of—“

  The words fell like stones in the chamber. “All of it—the drainings, the enslavement, the barrier—it’s been for him. The Eternal End.”

  Dex swallowed. “And if Koren’s running now...”

  “It means he got through,” Jace finished. “Whatever he was trying to reach—he reached it. And now he’s delivering it all to his master.”

  The thought was too vast to grasp, like trying to drink in the sky. But one truth burned, sharp and immediate: They had to tell someone. Anyone.

  “We should go,” Dex said, already sweeping the most damning documents into his arms. “Take what we can.”

  Jace reached for the nearest tome and tried to store it in his inventory. Nothing. The magic rejected him—sharp and cold, like a punch to the gut. He tried again. Same result.

  “They’re locked,” he muttered, jaw tight. “Won’t store. We’ll have to carry them the old-fashioned way.”

  “Clever,” Dex said grimly. “That’s why he left them. Probably didn’t want to lug them himself. Still, bold to leave them in the open.”

  Jace snorted. “Not that open. We did have to break into a magically sealed cave.”

  Dex lifted one of the ledgers—and grunted. It fought him. The air thickened around it, syrupy and resisting, like the book was glued to the very atmosphere. The kind of thing that wanted to stay put.

  “We can take a few,” he said, straining. “Something. Anything. Just to prove this place existed.”

  Jace stepped through the threshold, ledger clutched tight. But as he did, Dex stopped cold behind him.

  “Jace,” he said softly.

  Jace turned. Dex wasn’t looking at him—his gaze was fixed beyond, over Jace’s shoulder. His face had gone pale.

  “Don’t move. Not suddenly.”

  Jace obeyed, heartbeat slamming against his ribs. He turned his head—slowly.

  At the far end of the chamber, half-lost in the shadows, a gargoyle shifted. Stone crumbled as it moved, dust drifting from its wings. Its eyes, once empty, now glowed with a dim, unnatural light.

  “I should’ve seen it,” Dex said, voice low with guilt. “Jace, I’m sorry—I missed it. These books weren’t abandoned. They were planted. Left here for anyone who got this far. A lure, not a leak. And we took the bait.”

  The room shuddered and the walls screamed.

  Not metaphorically, not poetically. They actually, literally screamed—a sound like ancient stone suddenly remembering every indignity it had suffered over millennia of existence and deciding, collectively, that today was the day to air those grievances. The noise started as a low groan; the kind that makes instinctive parts of the human brain whisper run before conscious thought has time to form. Then it escalated quickly into a shriek that sent dust cascading from the ceiling in artistic veils that would have been beautiful if they weren’t also harbingers of imminent architectural collapse.

  Jace felt the vibrations through his boots like the world’s least relaxing foot massage.

  Dex edged toward the door, one slow, careful step at a time. “We need to—“

  Behind him, the ritual circle ignited—no warning, just a sudden roar of flame.

  Light flooded the chamber. The stone beneath it cracked. Then vanished.

  The floor gave way with a thunderous snap, collapsing inward as if the room had been hollow all along. A spiraling maw of darkness tore open, its edges crumbling, devouring everything in its path.

  The collapse surged forward, fast and hungry—like the world itself had turned predatory.

  “RUN!“ Jace bellowed, seizing Dex’s arm.