Anatheon no longer felt like a sanctum. It felt like a mausoleum suspended in the clouds.
The Crucible was sealed.
Classes were hollow. The instructors wore expressions like masks, and the students drifted through corridors with haunted eyes—numb, restless, waiting for a bell that would never ring.
But Siege couldn't wait.
Not when smoke still clawed its way up the sky from Halgrith's corpse of a city.
Not when the air carried the distant scent of ash and rot. Not when every dream began and ended with the image of his father slumped in a dark room, dying alone and afraid.
So he trained.
In secret.
In silence.
---
The lower gymnasium was abandoned—sealed after a Corruption incident two years ago. However, Albion knew the access code, and he had given it to Siege without a word, without a price.
"You'll either die or break through," Albion had said. "Either way, nothing good will happen."
Siege stood at the center of the ruined gym, surrounded by shattered dummies and rusted chains.
The walls were lined with faint sigils—dead wards that once glowed with protective incantations, now blackened like old bones. Frost lingered in the corners, and dust hung like mist.
His breath steamed in the air.
He summoned Gram.
The black-and-blue greatsword exploded into existence with a sound like metal scraping across the cosmos. Its silver runes pulsed, then dimmed, as if the blade itself shared his exhaustion.
"Again," he muttered.
And he moved.
---
The drills began with movement. Footwork. Balance. Every step slow, deliberate, carved into muscle memory.
There was no instructor. No sparring partner. Just the echo of his own footsteps and the whispering voice of pain.
He swung Gram in wide arcs, feeling the weight pull at his spine.
Again. Again. Every time he faltered, he dropped into pushups until his arms trembled. Every time he gasped for breath, he ran laps around the dead gym until he collapsed.
There were no breaks.
No audience.
No praise.
Just the image of his father's trembling hands, and the promise Siege had made to an old grave.
A promise to take care of his father.
"I'll find you. Just hold on."
---
On the seventh night, Albion visited.
He didn't enter. Just watched from the threshold as Siege slammed Gram into the broken body of a training dummy until its limbs scattered across the floor.
"You're wasting energy," Albion said. "That's not a guard post you're breaking. It's a dummy."
Siege leaned on his sword, breath ragged. "I need the training."
"You'll never last on raw determination alone."
Siege turned, face shadowed by exhaustion. "Then I'll die with it in my chest."
Albion said nothing for a long time. Then he pulled a flask from his coat and tossed it. Siege caught it, startled by the weight.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Solar extract. Stolen from the apothecaries. You're lucky I'm technically a criminal now."
Siege cracked a smile. It hurt. "You always were."
Albion vanished without another word. When Siege drank from the flask, the heat nearly broke him—light pouring down his throat like liquid fire, burning the fog from his limbs.
Siege had considered asking his friends for their help, but tossed that thought to the back of his mind.
Though he still believed them to be arrogant pricks, they were his closest friends.
And just because he was fine with dying out there didn't mean he would drag them to their deaths too.
He trained alone until dawn.
---
By the twelfth night, Siege was hallucinating.
Not from magic. Not from darkness.
From worry. From fatigue.
He dreamed of a staircase beneath the school—black stone, spiraling forever down into the dirt. At the bottom was a door, and behind that door, a mouth. It didn't speak. It didn't roar. It only opened.
And the hunger reached for him.
He awoke covered in frost, Gram humming in his hands like a tuning fork for despair.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't. The lockdown was still in place. And every day the wards pulsed stronger, reinforced by instructors who feared the city's sickness would spread upward.
He would have to go through them. Or go around them.
---
In the evenings, Siege mapped the patrol patterns of the Guardians.
These weren't human instructors. They were stone-faced automata powered by mechanical cores and bound to the will of Anatheon's Warden, Lyssandra Maxwell.
They didn't speak. They didn't bleed. But they moved like clockwork, and clockwork could be broken.
*Who would have thought my time with Fafnir would come in handy...*
He studied the bridge sigils next—those that connected Anatheon to the upper layers of Halgrith. The glyphs pulsed blue with divine authority, enforced by ancient edicts of the True Gods.
But Siege wasn't looking to ask permission.
He was looking to exploit failure.
In one of the disused codices in the library, he found what he needed: an ancient transit passage built before the modern sigils—hidden beneath the school's foundation, forgotten in the dark age before the rise of Citadels.
Accessed only by those who wore the seal of a Guardian or forged one to exact specifications.
He stole blueprints.
He bribed a forge-hand with his remaining stipend.
He bled into the mold.
By the seventeenth night, he had a prototype: a crude, imperfect seal etched in blacksteel and scorched with greekfire residue. It burned when he touched it.
That felt like a good sign.
---
On the eighteenth night, Thrakkor confronted him.
Siege was leaving the gym when the massive figure stepped from the shadows like a storm wrapped in human skin.
"You think I wouldn't notice?" the instructor growled. "The Crucible's sealed, but your scent's all over the training fields. Your blood, your sweat—your damn Aspect."
Siege stood tall, though his body screamed for rest. "You said we were soft. You were right."
Thrakkor's lip curled. "You think this is strength? Bleeding yourself dry in the dark like a mad dog gnawing on its own leash?"
"I don't care what it is," Siege snapped. "I'm going to the Slag."
Silence.
Then Thrakkor stepped closer, one massive hand resting on the hilt of his blade.
"The last time I was in the Slag, I watched an orphan rip her sister's throat out for a crust of bread. That was before the hunger changed."
"I'm not afraid."
"You should be."
"I am." Siege's voice cracked. "But I'm going anyway."
The old warrior stared down at him for a long moment, then grunted. "If you're going to do this, you'll need something more than a fake seal and a bedtime story about secret tunnels."
Thrakkor reached into his cloak and tossed something at Siege's feet.
A key. Iron. Ancient.
"Found that during the last purge," he said. "Didn't know what it unlocked. But seeing that passage I had an inkling"
Siege picked it up slowly. The key was cold—too cold.
"Why are you helping me?"
"I'm not." Thrakkor turned, boots echoing in the stone hall. "I'm giving you one more nail for your coffin. If you're lucky, it fits the lid."
---
At dawn, Siege stood before the old vault door beneath the academy's western wing, half-buried beneath dead ivy and frost.
He held the iron key in one hand and the forged Guardian seal in the other.
Behind this door was the forgotten passage.
Behind that passage: Halgrith's Slag.
And his father.
He didn't pray. Didn't hesitate.
He turned the key.
And the silence broke.