The rhythmic thumping—the heartbeat of the abyss—faded as quickly as it had arrived. It didn't retreat into the distance; it simply dissolved, as if the air itself had decided to stop vibrating. Silence returned to the bone-white corridor.
Kaelen remained motionless, pressed against the cold, calcified wall. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic counterpoint to the dead stillness of the Ziggurat. He waited, his ears straining for the sound of a footfall, a breath, or the skittering of an Ink-Eater.
Nothing.
He exhaled slowly, the vapor of his breath ghosting in the freezing air. The "Tinta" in this level was denser, heavier. It felt like walking through invisible cobwebs that clung to his skin and mind.
"Logic," he whispered to himself, the sound of his own voice a fragile anchor in the dark. "Analyze. Observe. Survive."
He couldn't remain in total darkness. In a place where geometry was a weapon, blindness was a death sentence. He raised his right hand, his fingers trembling slightly—not from fear, but from the sudden decline in temperature. He didn't reach for his staff yet; he needed something subtler.
He focused on the spark of mana at the base of his brain, drawing it down through his shoulder and into his index finger. He didn't envision a roaring fire. He envisioned a single, pinpoint star.
—"Ignis Minor."—
A tiny flame, no larger than a grape, flickered into existence an inch above his fingertip. It didn't burn with a warm, orange glow. Instead, it was a pale, sickly violet, fueled by the ambient magical radiation of the Ziggurat.
The light peeled back the shadows, revealing a room that felt uncomfortably small. The walls were made of a porous, bone-white stone that looked less like masonry and more like the interior of a giant's skull. There were no seams, no mortar. The room had been grown, not built.
As the violet light washed over the floor, Kaelen's eyes locked onto a shape near the center. He knelt, lowering his hand to illuminate the ground.
There it was.
Etched into the white stone was a geometric seal—a series of interlocking circles and jagged lines that seemed to vibrate if he looked at them for too long. It was the exact twin of the mark in the Displacement Nexus above.
"A receiving node," Kaelen muttered, his scholar's mind automatically cataloging the information. "The Nexus isn't random. It's a transit system. This is a designated 'collection point' for intruders. Which means..."
He turned the light toward the corners of the room. If this was a collection point, he wasn't the first person the Ziggurat had "collected."
In the far-right corner, slumped against the wall, was a heap of rags and shadows.
Kaelen approached with the caution of a man walking through a minefield. His staff was ready in his left hand, the iron tip cold and silent. As he drew closer, the heap resolved into a recognizable form.
It was a man, or what was left of one. He wore the remains of a scout's leather armor, now brittle and cracked with age. His skin had mummified in the dry, stagnant air, pulled tight over a skeletal frame. The corpse's mouth was locked in a permanent, silent scream, and his eye sockets were empty pits of shadow.
He had been here for decades. Maybe a century. Time was a fluid concept in the Archive.
Kaelen knelt beside the body. He felt no pity—pity was a luxury for those who weren't currently trapped in a living nightmare. He felt only a cold, predatory curiosity.
"What did you bring with you, traveler?" Kaelen whispered.
He began to search the body with practiced, clinical movements. The leather armor crumbled under his touch like burnt paper. The man's satchel contained nothing but grey dust—the remains of rations that had long since rotted away. His sword was a rusted sliver of iron, useless and brittle.
But as Kaelen moved the man's stiff, leather-clad arm, something glinted at the throat.
Tucked beneath the collar was a necklace. It was a simple cord of braided silver wire, surprisingly untarnished by the years. Hanging from it was a pendant: a tear-shaped piece of obsidian that seemed to swallow the violet light of Kaelen's flame. At the center of the obsidian was a microscopic etching of a closed eye.
Kaelen felt a jolt of static electricity as his fingers brushed the silver. It wasn't just a trinket. The mana flowing through the wire was faint, but it possessed a rhythmic, pulsing quality—like a heartbeat.
"A relic of the Shrouded Era," Kaelen murmured, his eyes widening. "Low-tier, but well-preserved."
He unclasped the necklace from the dead man's neck and held it up. The obsidian felt abnormally heavy, and it was unnervingly warm against his cold palm.
A scholar of the Tower knew that magical items were rarely "free." They were tools with specific logic. He studied the etching of the eye. The Eye that Does Not See.
"Let's test the hypothesis," he said.
He slipped the necklace over his head. The moment the obsidian touched his chest, the warmth exploded into a searing heat that made him gasp. The violet flame above his finger vanished instantly, extinguished not by wind, but by a sudden vacuum of energy.
The room went black.
Then, Kaelen felt a strange sensation—a feeling of being poured into a mold that didn't quite fit. His skin felt numb, then tingly, as if a thousand cold needles were pricking him at once. He looked down at his hands.
He couldn't see them.
Not because it was dark, but because he wasn't there. He could see the faint, phosphorescent glow of the bone-white walls right through where his chest should be. He was a ghost, a ripple in the air, a shadow in a world of light.
He moved his hand. There was no sound. His boots, which had clicked loudly on the stone, were now silent. He was invisible, and more importantly, he was omitted from the environment.
«Incredible,» he thought, his pulse quickening. «It's not an illusion. It's a localized spatial displacement. It's shifting my light-reflecting properties into the ethereal spectrum.»
He took a step toward the door. The sensation was intoxicating. With this, he could bypass the horrors of the Ziggurat. He could walk right past the Ink-Eaters, right to the heart of the Archive.
But then, the heat in the obsidian pendant began to change. It didn't cool down; it sharpened. It felt like a hot needle was being driven into his sternum.
His vision flickered. One moment he saw the room as a transparent ghost; the next, his solid, muddy boots reappeared.
The invisibility snapped.
Kaelen stumbled, his body suddenly feeling twice as heavy as before. He clutched the pendant, his breath coming in ragged gasps. A wave of intense nausea washed over him, and a metallic, copper taste filled his mouth—the classic sign of mana exhaustion.
"Duration... barely a minute," he wheezed, leaning against the bone-white wall.
He waited for his breath to stabilize, then gripped the pendant again. He tried to channel a sliver of mana into the obsidian eye, intending to trigger the effect once more.
Nothing happened.
The pendant remained cold. No, not cold—dead. It felt like a piece of common rock. He pushed harder, trying to force his mana into the silver wire, but the necklace rejected it with a sharp, stinging kick that numbed his fingers.
"A cooldown," Kaelen analyzed, his brow furrowed. "Or a daily limit. The internal matrix of the obsidian needs time to recalibrate its resonance after a displacement. I've exhausted its 'breath' for now."
He tucked the necklace inside his robe, hiding it against his skin. It was a powerful tool, but a temperamental one. It was a trump card that could only be played once, a single chance to disappear when death was at his heels.
He couldn't rely on it to get him through the maze. He was still a scholar with an iron staff and a dying light.
Kaelen turned toward the only exit—a narrow archway made of the same lachrymose stone. There was no door, only a yawning gap that led into a wider hallway.
He summoned the violet flame once more. It was smaller now, flickering weakly. He was tired, and the Ziggurat was vast.
He stepped through the archway and into the main corridor of the lower level.
The hallway was immense, the ceiling lost in a forest of hanging stalactites that looked like sharpened teeth. The bone-white walls were covered in more inscriptions here, but these weren't names. They were maps—impossible, shifting diagrams of the stars as they looked ten thousand years ago.
Kaelen began to walk. Every step echoed, a lonely sound in the heart of a dead god. He was alone, his companions were scattered or dead, and he was deeper in the abyss than any living man had a right to be.
But as he looked at the ancient star maps on the walls, a cold, dark spark of ambition flickered in his eyes.
"I'm coming for you," he whispered to the silence. "Don't hide too well, Aethelgard."
He disappeared into the shadows of the corridor, a lone moth flying deeper into the mouth of the flame.