The departure from Oakhaven was a quiet, solitary affair, a stark contrast to his bloody arrival in the Eclipse Peak pass. There were no desperate guards at the gate, no fearful eyes peering from behind shuttered windows. The gate stood open, a symbol of newfound confidence, and as Boreas carried him out of the relative safety of the palisade, the only sound was the crunch of hooves on fresh snow and the distant, cheerful ring of a blacksmith's hammer. A sound of life, of rebuilding. A sound that felt a world away from his destination.
He guided Boreas onto the familiar, winding path that led away from the valley, a path he had descended in blood and exhaustion only days before. To ascend it now, under the cold, watchful eye of a morning sun, felt like a journey back into the jaws of a beast he had only managed to wound, not kill. The air grew colder with every hundred feet of elevation gained, the comforting smells of woodsmoke and baking bread replaced by the sterile, clean scent of pine and cold stone. The warmth of Oakhaven, both literal and figurative, receded behind him like a fading dream.
His body was a symphony of dull aches, but his mind, honed by his morning's meditation, was sharp and clear. He was acutely aware of his limitations. The vast wellspring of the Eternal Blizzard within him was still dangerously low. He could likely manage a few defensive spells, perhaps form a simple ice blade if pressed, but a battle on the scale of his confrontation with the Lich was utterly beyond him. This knowledge did not bring fear, but a cold, calculating caution. He was not a warrior heading into battle; he was a surgeon approaching a cancerous tumor, armed with knowledge and precise tools rather than overwhelming force.
The mountain felt different this time. The oppressive, malevolent aura of the Lich, a psychic pressure that had felt like a constant storm on the horizon, was gone. But the silence it left behind was not peaceful. It was… expectant. The wind that whispered through the jagged peaks no longer howled with mindless fury; it seemed to carry secrets, fragments of silence that felt heavier than any sound. The very rocks seemed to be watching him, their ancient, stony faces impassive and knowing. He was an intruder here, more so now than ever before. He was treading on ground that had been claimed by something far older than the necromancer he had slain.
As he rode, he allowed his mind to drift, to process the events of the past days. He thought of his conversation with Elara, of her warning about kindness consuming its wielder. It was a mirror of his own tutor's philosophy. Kael had taught him to build walls of ice, to insulate himself from a world that would inevitably seek to drain and destroy him. Elara, a healer, built bridges of empathy. For a moment, he wondered which approach was ultimately more sustainable, and which was simply a slower form of self-destruction.
His gloved hand instinctively went to the small pouch on his belt, the one that did not contain salt or iron. He could feel the small, hard shape of the memory stone through the leather. Find a moment, she had said. Give it one good memory. The thought was so alien to him. His life was a collection of grim necessities and bitter victories. He scanned the landscape around him, trying to see it through her eyes. The sun glinted off a distant glacier, creating a dazzling, momentary flash of pure white light. Was that a good memory? The stark, lonely beauty of the unforgiving wilderness. He considered it, then dismissed the thought. Beauty was a distraction. There was no room for it in his work.
But the stone remained, a persistent, quiet question against his side.
He focused back on the task at hand, pulling the crude map from his satchel. He was not heading towards the ruins of the fortress. His analysis of the ley lines had pointed him to a different target: a secondary, slightly lower peak a few miles to the north, a place the hunters' maps had left ominously blank. The source of the confluence. The place where the land's natural power was strongest. He knew, with a hunter's certainty, that if the book was the heart of the darkness, it would be located closest to its source of nourishment.
The journey took him off the established paths. He had to forge his own trail through deep snowdrifts and navigate treacherous, icy inclines. Boreas, sure-footed and powerful, handled the terrain with a stoicism that matched his own, his warm breath pluming in the frigid air. As they climbed higher, Valerius began to see the subtle signs he had been looking for, the evidence of a power that warped the natural world.
He noted the way the snow crystals on the north face of a boulder were malformed, twisted into unnatural, left-handed spirals, a tell-tale sign of prolonged magical interference. He saw a stand of ancient pine trees, all of them bent away from the target peak as if recoiling from an invisible wind. There were no animal tracks here. Not even a hardy mountain goat or a snow fox dared to tread on this ground. Nature itself was shunning this place.
He felt the ley lines thrumming beneath him, no longer a faint tremor but a palpable vibration that resonated in his bones. It was a feeling like standing too close to a massive, silent bell that had just been struck. The power here was immense, raw, and untamed. The Lich had only been tapping a fraction of it, siphoning it through the fortress. The true reservoir was here.
By late afternoon, he reached the base of the peak. It was not a grand or imposing mountain, merely a jagged fang of black rock thrusting towards the sky, its slopes perpetually shadowed. The air here was thin and still, carrying a faint, almost imperceptible scent of ozone and something else… something that reminded him of warm, turned earth, a smell that had no place in this frozen wasteland.
He dismounted, leaving Boreas in a small, sheltered copse of the twisted pines. "Wait for me," he commanded the horse, giving its neck a final, firm pat. He knew the animal would not stray.
His injured ankle protested with every step as he began the final ascent on foot. He used his walking stick for balance, his eyes constantly scanning, not for enemies, but for inconsistencies. He was looking for a seam, a flaw, a place where reality had been bent to conceal something. He drew a small amount of his own power, not enough to form a spell, but just enough to coat his fingertips in a fine layer of frost. He let his hand trail along the surface of the black rock as he walked. Where the rock was natural, the frost remained. But where unnatural magic lingered, the latent warmth of the corruption would melt it instantly.
He spent nearly an hour circling the base of the peak, his frustration mounting. There was nothing. Just sheer, unforgiving rock. He was about to reconsider his theory when he felt it—a brief, intense pulse of warmth from the rock face under his hand. His frost-covered fingers left a trail of instantly melting moisture. He had found it.
He stopped and examined the spot. To the naked eye, it was just another section of the cliff face, a flat wall of dark, wind-scoured stone. There were no cracks, no seams, no markings. It was perfect, unnaturally so. He remembered Kael's teachings: The most effective deception is not a complicated illusion, but a perfect lie. Nature is chaotic, full of flaws. True perfection is always artificial.
He stepped back, his eyes narrowed, seeing the space with a mage's sight. He could perceive the faint, shimmering outline of a ward, a powerful glamour woven directly into the stone to make the eye slide right past it, to register it as nothing of interest. It was ancient work, far more subtle and sophisticated than the Lich's brute-force necromancy.
Knowing he lacked the raw power to shatter the ward, he chose a different approach. He reached into one of his pouches and took out a handful of the greyish powder—the mixture of salt, iron, and silver. He did not throw it. Instead, he blew a fine cloud of it towards the rock face.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. As the fine particles of the warding mixture touched the invisible glamour, they did not simply fall. They adhered to the magical field, revealing its structure. A shimmering, rectangular outline, the size of a large door, appeared on the rock face, glowing with a faint, sickly purple light as the iron and silver disrupted the spell. At the center of the rectangle, ancient, interlocking runes blazed into view for a moment before fading. They were from a language Valerius had only ever seen in the most forbidden tomes, a pre-human tongue that spoke of formless things that dwelt in the void between stars.
With the glamour disrupted, the physical illusion failed. The flat rock face wavered like a heat haze, then resolved into its true form. What stood before him was not a natural cliff. It was a doorway. It was fashioned from a single, massive slab of polished obsidian, perfectly fitted into the mountainside. There was no handle, no lock, only the smooth, black surface that seemed to swallow the light. It was a door that had not been opened in millennia.
Valerius stood before it, his breath held tight in his chest. This was it. The entrance to the sanctum. Behind this door lay the book, the source of the mountain's corruption, the Master's final legacy. He felt the faint, pulsing warmth of it even through the solid rock, a slow, patient heartbeat of ancient evil.
He methodically began his work. He took one of the sacks of pure rock salt and, walking backwards, poured a thick, unbroken circle on the ground around the doorway, leaving only a small gap for him to enter. This would not stop anything physical, but it would create a formidable barrier against any purely ethereal entities that might be guarding the interior. He then took the rowan branches and drove them into the snow at the four cardinal points of the circle, their pale wood a stark contrast to the black rock.
His preparations were complete. He stood at the edge of the circle, looking at the obsidian door. The wind picked up, whipping his cloak around him, but it made no sound here. It was as if the air itself was afraid to speak.
He thought of Oakhaven, of Elara's plea to be safe. He thought of Isolde, and the kingdom he had failed to protect. They were two sides of the same coin, two failures he was determined not to repeat. He reached into his belt pouch and his fingers closed around the smooth, cool memory stone. He held it tightly. There was no good memory to put into it yet. There was only the cold, hard certainty of the task ahead.
Taking a deep breath of the thin, ozone-tainted air, Valerius stepped over the line of salt, breaking the sacred circle to stand before the ancient door. He placed his bare palm against the obsidian. It was not cold like stone. It was warm, humming with a deep and terrible power. And as he pressed, he felt it give way, not with a creak or a groan, but with a smooth, silent sigh, swinging inwards to reveal a passage of absolute, impenetrable darkness.
The heart of the mountain had opened for him. And it was time to cut it out.