The battle was chaos incarnate.
Gregory's wardens crashed into the black-robed figures like a wave breaking on rocks. The impact sent bodies tumbling, shields shattering, the precise formation of the enemy ritual dissolving into desperate close-quarters combat. Magical energy filled the air—bolts of flame and lightning streaking in every direction, shields of shimmering force crackling under impacts, counter-spells that made reality ripple and bend in ways that twisted Gregory's perception. The sound was deafening, a cacophony of screams and explosions and steel meeting steel and the terrible tearing sound of the rift above the citadel.
Heat washed over Gregory in waves—from magical fire, from the desert sun, from the exertion of combat. Sand churned beneath his boots as every step risked sending him sprawling. Grit filled his mouth, crunched between his teeth. Sweat plastered his shirt to his back and stung his eyes. The air reeked of ozone and copper and the sulfurous rot that drifted from the rift itself. Every breath tasted like despair.
Gregory fought his way toward Abigail, his enchanted sword cutting through the cultists—for what else could they be?—with brutal efficiency. Eighteen years of training had made him far more than the merchant's clerk who had once stumbled through a fight with bandits. He moved with lethal grace, his blade finding gaps in defenses with practiced precision. Block, parry, thrust. Sidestep, slash, advance. The forms flowed through him like water, ingrained so deeply they required no thought.
A cultist lunged at him with a staff wreathed in purple flame. Gregory ducked under the swing, heat singeing his hair, and drove his pommel into the man's throat. The cultist dropped, gagging. Gregory's follow-through took the next attacker across the face, opened his cheek to the bone. The third came at him with a knife—close fighting, dangerous—but Gregory caught the wrist, twisted, heard the pop of dislocating joints, and shoved the screaming man into a fourth attacker coming up behind.
"Abigail!" The word tore from his throat.
She spun toward him, and her shoulders dropped a fraction, her rigid combat stance loosening for just a heartbeat before her expression hardened back into focus. Blood splattered her armor—not hers, judging by how she moved—and her silver hair had come loose from its usual braid. At forty-eight, she was still as dangerous as ever, her twin daggers moving in patterns too fast for the eye to follow. But exhaustion dragged at her movements—deep shadows carved beneath her eyes, the slight lag in her reactions that spoke of muscles burning from prolonged combat. She'd been fighting for who knew how long before they arrived.
The iron band around his ribs eased at the sight of her, alive and fighting. His next breath came deeper than any he'd drawn since the Ranger's report.
"About time!" She finished off her opponent with a savage thrust between the ribs and moved to join him, her daggers dripping crimson. Her breath came hard and fast. "They hit us without warning. No scouts, no approach—they just appeared. Some kind of mass teleportation, like your circle." She blocked a spell on her dagger, sparks cascading, and used the momentum to spin into her next attacker. "Then they threw up a dampening field to prevent us from sending for help. We only got the message out because Kira—the young Ranger, not the mage—sacrificed herself to disrupt their wards."
Gregory's stomach clenched. Another name to add to the memorial wall. Another life spent in this endless war.
"How many?" He cut down a cultist who tried to flank them.
"At least a hundred, maybe more." Abigail ducked under a gout of flame, came up inside the mage's guard, and buried both daggers in his chest. She wrenched them free and kicked the body aside in one fluid motion. "And they're well-trained—this isn't some desperate cult, Gregory. These are professional mage-soldiers. They move in formation. They coordinate their spells. Someone trained them specifically for this operation."
Which raised the terrifying question of who had the resources to field a hundred mage-soldiers and the willingness to use them to release a Void Walker. This wasn't the work of some mad prophet or doomsday cult. This was a military operation, planned and funded by someone with enormous power.
Gregory filed the question away for later. Right now, they had to survive.
Tam appeared beside them, his sword glowing with captured nexus energy—a technique Mina had developed that allowed warriors to harm magical beings more effectively. The light pulsed with his heartbeat, casting blue shadows across his face. His silver warden's cloak was torn and bloodstained, but his eyes burned with fierce determination.
"The rift is growing!" He parried a blast of force that would have taken his head off. "Whatever ritual they're performing, it's working! We've broken their outer circle, but there must be more of them inside!"
Gregory looked up at the tear in reality. It had widened since they arrived—thirty feet across now, maybe more, and the edges were fraying faster. Through it the Void Walker became clearer—a massive, shifting horror that defied description. It had no fixed shape, no stable form. One moment it had wings; the next, tentacles; the next, nothing but eyes and hunger. It pressed against the weakening seal like a drowning man pressing against ice, and with every pulse of the ritual, the ice cracked a little more.
Waves of wrongness crashed through Gregory's skull. His thoughts kept trying to slide away from the sight, to look at anything else, to refuse the vision. His eyes watered. His stomach heaved.
"Mina! Can you counter their ritual?"
The Chief Mage was already at work, her hands weaving patterns of light while two other mages protected her from attacks. "I can slow it down!" Sweat ran down her face despite the cooling charms woven into her robes. "But I can't reverse it alone! The ritual is being powered by something inside the citadel itself!"
Inside. Where Bryce was maintaining the network, transformed into something more than human, unable to defend himself against physical threats.
"They're using Bryce's power against him." The realization hit Gregory like a physical blow—cold spreading through his chest, his vision narrowing to a tunnel, his jaw clenching so tight something popped behind his ear. "Turning the Guardian's energy into a weapon to break the seal."
"We need to get inside and disrupt whatever they've set up." Abigail was already scanning the battlefield, her tactical mind working the problem. She pointed toward the main entrance with one bloody dagger. "But that approach is suicide. Three ranks deep, interlocking shields, and those fire mages on the walls will cut us down before we're halfway there."
Gregory surveyed the defensive line, his mind racing through tactical options. The black-robed mages had formed an impenetrable wall around the citadel's main entrance. More were on the walls, raining destruction down on anyone who approached. Bolts of fire and lightning cascaded from their positions, turning the sand before the entrance into a killing field of superheated glass.
A direct assault would cost them half their force before reaching the doors.
"There's another way in." The memory surfaced from eighteen years ago—a desperate escape, Bryce wounded and leaning on his shoulder, scrambling through darkness toward uncertain freedom. "The collapsed section that opens into the catacombs. Bryce and I used it to escape last time."
Abigail's eyes narrowed, calculating. "Last time was eighteen years ago. The desert could have filled it in. The citadel could have sealed it." She wiped blood from her eyes—one of the cultists had opened a cut on her forehead. "But it's better than charging into that." She jerked her chin toward the killing field. "I'll take point. You cover our backs."
Gregory caught a cultist's sword on his blade, twisted it aside, and drove his fist into the man's throat. "Tam, you're in command here—keep them busy. Make noise, draw their attention. Abigail, Mina, with me. We're going in."
"I can't leave the counter-ritual." Mina's face was pale beneath the sweat, her arms trembling with the strain of holding back the rift. "If I stop, the rift will expand exponentially. Minutes instead of hours."
"Then send someone else who knows magic." Gregory locked eyes with her. "We need you out here holding the line. Someone has to keep that thing from breaking through while we stop the ritual at its source."
Mina's jaw tightened. She nodded once, sharp and decisive, then turned to scan her subordinates. "Kira! Front and center!"
A young mage broke from the protective formation—maybe twenty-five, with sharp features and clever hands. Her eyes widened, color draining from her cheeks, but she crossed the battlefield at a dead run, dodging spells and sidestepping bodies with the kind of agility that spoke of years of combat training alongside her magical studies. She arrived breathing hard, blood on her cheek from a near miss.
"She's skilled with disruption magic," Mina gripped the young mage's shoulder. "Best I've seen since myself at that age. If there's a ritual to break, she can do it."
Kira met her mentor's eyes. Her hands trembled at her sides, but her voice came out steady. "I won't let you down."
"I know you won't." Mina released her shoulder, already turning back to the rift. "Now go. Every second counts."
Gregory, Abigail, and Kira broke away from the main battle, circling around the citadel toward the collapsed section. They ran low, using the curve of the wall as cover. Twice they had to fight through scattered enemies—pairs of black-robed mages trying to flank the Order's forces. Abigail killed the first pair before Gregory could even raise his sword, her daggers finding throats and kidneys with surgical precision. The second pair fell to Gregory's blade while Kira covered them with a barrier spell that deflected three killing bolts.
The gap in the wall was still there, though smaller than Gregory remembered. Sand had partially filled it, and ancient stones had shifted, narrowing the opening to barely two feet across.
Abigail went first without waiting to be asked, squeezing through the gap and disappearing into darkness. A moment later, her voice drifted back: "Clear. Tight, but passable."
Kira followed, then Gregory bringing up the rear. The stones scraped against his armor, and for a moment he was stuck, panic fluttering in his chest. Then he twisted, exhaled, and pushed through.
The darkness inside was total. Kira conjured a light that hovered above her hand, a soft golden sphere that pushed back the shadows. She held it steady despite the tremor in her fingers, despite the fear that tightened the corners of her eyes.
The catacombs were exactly as Gregory remembered—ancient corridors lined with burial niches, some still holding the remains of Lyria's people after three thousand years. The bones gleamed silver in the magical light, arranged in positions of repose. The air hung thick with dust and age, dry and cold against his sweat-soaked skin. Their footsteps echoed strangely, bouncing off walls covered in carved glyphs that Gregory couldn't read. The stone was cool underfoot, a stark contrast to the scorching sand outside.
But now the catacombs pulsed with faint blue energy that hadn't been here before. The network's power flowed through the citadel like blood through veins, visible as thin lines of light along the floor and walls, converging toward the center of the structure. Toward Bryce.
"This way." Gregory took point, trusting his memory to guide them.
They moved quickly through the twisting passages, encountering no resistance. The cult had clearly focused all their forces on the exterior, confident that the citadel's interior defenses would prevent intrusion.
They were wrong.
After several minutes of navigation through corridors that twisted in ways that shouldn't be possible—doubling back but arriving somewhere new, descending but finding themselves on higher levels—they heard it. A rhythmic chanting in a language Gregory didn't recognize, syllables that slid around his comprehension like oil on water. The sound resonated in his bones, in his teeth, in places behind his eyes. Wrong. The language was wrong in ways he couldn't articulate.
Following the sound, they emerged into a vast chamber that Gregory had never seen before. It must have been deeper in the citadel than he and Bryce had penetrated all those years ago, deeper perhaps than the original builders had intended anyone to go.
The chamber was circular, easily a hundred feet across, with a domed ceiling covered in glowing glyphs. Thousands of them, arranged in spiraling patterns that drew the eye inward and refused to release their hold. The walls were smooth, polished stone that reflected the glyph-light in nauseating ways. The air thrummed with power—raw, barely contained magical energy that prickled across Gregory's skin and raised the hair on his arms.
And in the center, surrounded by a ring of chanting cultists, was a pulsing sphere of dark energy that swallowed the light around it. The sphere was fifteen feet across, its surface swirling with colors that had no names, colors that existed in the gaps between reality. Looking at it made Gregory's eyes water and his stomach churn.
But that wasn't what stopped him dead.
Bryce was there.
Or rather, a crystalline statue that had once been Bryce. The transformation had changed him even more than Gregory had feared—his body was translucent, shot through with veins of blue light, more mineral than flesh. His skin had the appearance of quartz, his hair had become filaments of pure energy, and his features had blurred into a suggestion of the man Gregory remembered rather than a precise likeness. His eyes were open but distant, looking at something beyond mortal perception. He sat cross-legged in the center of the dark sphere, hands pressed against its surface, clearly struggling to contain it.
Something sharp twisted in Gregory's gut. Eighteen years ago, Bryce had been a man. Young, strong, full of determination and quiet humor. Now he was... this. A being suspended between flesh and light, neither fully human nor wholly transformed. A sacrifice given form.
"They've anchored their ritual directly to him." Kira's voice came out barely above a whisper, her magelight flickering as her concentration wavered. She steadied it with visible effort, her jaw tightening. "They're using the Guardian's connection to the network to break the seal from the inside. Every bit of power he draws on to maintain the seal, they're corrupting and turning against him. That's... that's brilliant and horrifying."
Abigail's jaw locked, the muscles standing out like cables beneath the skin. Her daggers didn't tremble—they went absolutely still in her grip, the kind of stillness that preceded violence. Gregory recognized the look. Not the crack in her armor that usually appeared when Bryce was involved—not vulnerability, not tears held back. This was fury. Cold, focused, ancient fury, the kind that could sustain a woman through any battle. Someone had done this to the man she loved. Someone had turned him into a weapon against himself.
"Can you break it?" Her voice came out like a blade drawn from a sheath—quiet, controlled, and sharp enough to cut.
Kira studied the ritual with narrowed eyes, her hands moving in small patterns as she traced the flows of power. "Maybe." She circled slowly, examining the construct from different angles, muttering under her breath. "The structure is complex but not unfamiliar. It's based on reversal principles—taking an existing magical construct and inverting its purpose. I can see the anchor points, the power flows, the vulnerabilities." She stopped, her expression hardening with determination. "But if I disrupt the ritual wrong, the backlash could kill the Guardian. Or release the Void Walker immediately. Or both."
"And if you don't disrupt it?" Gregory pressed. They were running out of time. Above them, through the ceiling and the earth and the open sky, the rift was still growing.
"Then the ritual completes in about ten minutes and releases the Void Walker anyway." Kira's voice steadied, the terror giving way to professional assessment. She met Gregory's eyes directly. "At least this way we have a chance. I can do this. I just need you to keep them off me."
There were eight cultists in the chamber, so focused on their ritual that they hadn't noticed the intruders yet. Gregory, Abigail, and Kira were outnumbered, and any fight would disrupt Kira's attempt to counter the ritual.
Gregory made his decision.
"Abigail, when I give the signal, you and I take out as many as we can as fast as possible. Kira, you start countering the ritual the moment we engage. Don't stop, no matter what happens. Understood?"
They both nodded. Abigail's daggers appeared in her hands as if they'd always been there—her grip steady now, the trembling locked away behind decades of combat discipline. Kira squared her shoulders and began gathering power, the air around her shimmering with barely contained force.
Gregory took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. His heartbeat steadied. The familiar cold calm of combat settled into his bones. Eighteen years of this. Eighteen years of moments where everything hung in the balance.
He raised his sword, and charged.
The first cultist died without even seeing him coming, Gregory's blade punching through his spine and out his chest. The man dropped without a sound, his portion of the chant dying with him. The ritual sphere flickered.
Abigail was a heartbeat behind, silent and lethal. Her daggers found two more cultists before they could react—one through the kidney, one across the throat. Blood sprayed across the polished floor. Three down in as many seconds.
But the remaining five were fast, faster than any normal mage should be. They abandoned their chanting instantly, spinning to face the threat, hands already weaving defensive shields and offensive spells. Their coordination was flawless, their responses practiced. These weren't scholars or priests. They were killers.
Fire erupted from one cultist's hands, a roaring gout of flame that turned the air to furnace heat. Gregory dove aside, his cloak catching fire, hit the ground rolling and came up with his back screaming. Ice spears materialized around Abigail, a dozen crystalline daggers that tracked her movements. She dove into a defensive roll, came up slashing, took one cultist across the face but another's spell clipped her shoulder and spun her around.
The chamber became a whirlwind of violence, magic against steel, speed against power. Gregory parried a bolt of lightning on his sword, the shock running up his arm and numbing his fingers. He kept fighting anyway. Blocked a staff strike with his forearm, the bone bruising on impact, rammed his pommel into his attacker's temple. Another cultist came at him with a blade of pure energy—no steel to parry, it would cut through anything.
Gregory stepped inside the swing, too close for the weapon to be effective, and broke the man's nose with his forehead.
Then a blast of force hit him square in the chest—invisible, unavoidable, like being kicked by a giant. The impact threw him backward. He crashed into the wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs, hard enough to crack something in his chest. His sword flew from nerveless fingers, clattering across the floor.
Darkness spotted his vision. His lungs refused to draw breath. His body refused to respond.
One of the cultists advanced on him, hands crackling with lethal energy. Purple lightning danced between his fingers, building to a killing strike. His mask had been torn away in the fighting, revealing a young face, maybe twenty-five—the same age Kira was now. Eyes full of zealous certainty.
Gregory fumbled for his iron-pommeled dagger—still carrying it after all these years, through a thousand battles and a hundred close calls—and hurled it desperately. His arm was dead weight. The throw was clumsy, weak.
But his aim was true. The iron struck the cultist in the throat, and the young man went down gasping, clutching at the hilt protruding from his neck. The lightning died on his fingers.
But there were still three cultists standing, and Gregory was disarmed and winded and possibly dying. Every breath sent knives through his chest. Abigail was holding off two of them, her daggers a blur of steel, but she was bleeding from a dozen wounds and slowing with every exchange. She couldn't help him with the third.
The last cultist raised his hands toward Gregory, power gathering for a killing blow. This one was older, calmer. He took his time. He wanted Gregory to see death coming.
Gregory tried to move. Couldn't. Tried to speak. No air.
Then the cultist's head simply... came off.
Gregory blinked as the body collapsed, blood fountaining from the stump of its neck. Behind where the man had stood was a figure that hadn't been there a moment before. A woman in tattered robes, holding a sword that crackled with blue energy. Her hair was silver, her face ageless, her eyes ancient and cold.
Lyria.
The ancient Guardian moved like flowing water—her blade carved through one cultist's guard, sheared his arm off at the elbow, and the return stroke opened his belly. She was already pivoting as he fell, her sword arcing to catch the next attacker across the throat. Steel met flesh with a wet sound. The third cultist turned to run, managed three steps before Lyria's thrown dagger took him between the shoulder blades. He pitched forward and didn't move. Within seconds, all eight were dead, and Lyria stood in the center of the carnage, barely breathing hard.
Blood dripped from her sword. It made no sound when it hit the floor.
"You took your time." Her tone was dry, though Gregory couldn't tell if she was addressing them or making a general observation.
Abigail still held her daggers ready, her stance balanced for combat. "Are you helping us?"
"I am helping maintain the seal." Lyria wiped her blade on a dead cultist's robe. "Which, at the moment, aligns with your interests. The ritual—"
"I'm on it!" Kira's voice rang with fierce concentration. She had been working throughout the fight, her hands weaving patterns that intersected with the dark sphere surrounding Bryce. Sweat poured down her face, her robes soaked through, but her movements were precise and confident. "I think I can redirect the energy flow, turn it back on itself. But I need everyone to be very, very quiet for the next sixty seconds."
They stood in tense silence while Kira worked. Gregory forced himself to his feet, using the wall for support, one arm wrapped around his cracked ribs. Every breath was agony. Abigail moved to stand beside him—they'd both retrieved their weapons, though neither of them was in any condition to use them.
The sphere pulsed and flickered, fighting Kira's control. Colors that shouldn't exist swirled across its surface, and sounds that weren't quite sounds emanated from within—the Void Walker, still pressing, still hungry. Sweat poured down Kira's face, soaking her robes, dripping from her chin. Her hands shook with strain as she pushed harder, speaking words of power in a steady stream.
The sphere pushed back.
Kira gasped, staggered. Blood began to run from her nose, from her ears. "I can't—"
"You can." Lyria's voice cut through like a blade. "You will. Find the central strand and pull."
Kira's eyes went wide. She caught the asymmetry in the pattern—her whole body stilled for a fraction of a second as understanding clicked into place. Her voice steadied. Her hands moved with new precision, attacking a vulnerability she hadn't seen before.
And then, with a sound like breaking glass, the sphere shattered.
The dark energy dissipated, flowing back into the network rather than tearing open the seal. It poured through the glyphs on the ceiling and walls, reabsorbed into the structure of the citadel, leaving only fading afterimages and the smell of ozone. The glyphs flickered and went dark. The oppressive hum of power died away.
The ritual was broken.
Kira collapsed. Abigail caught her before she hit the floor, easing the young mage down with surprising gentleness. "She did it." Abigail's eyes shone, her breath catching as she looked down at the unconscious mage. "The kid actually did it."
"She'll be all right." Lyria didn't check—she already knew. "Magical exhaustion. She'll wake in an hour."
Gregory barely heard her. His eyes were fixed on Bryce.
The crystalline form slumped slightly without the sphere's pressure to push against, and for a terrifying moment Gregory feared they'd killed him. The blue light within his translucent body dimmed, flickered.
Then his head turned, very slowly, to focus on them. The movement was inhuman, too smooth, like watching a sculpture animate. His eyes—once brown and warm and full of life—were now pools of shifting light that saw things no human eye could perceive.
When he spoke, his voice was strange—layered, as if multiple versions of Bryce from different moments in time were speaking simultaneously. The sound echoed in Gregory's skull, in his heart, in memories of a younger man laughing by a campfire.
"Gregory. Abigail. You... came."
Gregory's throat closed. He wanted to say something, wanted to tell Bryce that of course they came, that they would always come, that they had never stopped thinking about him in eighteen years. But the words wouldn't form. His chest ached with more than cracked ribs.
"Always." Abigail moved toward him, tears running freely down her cheeks, cutting tracks through the blood and dirt. But Lyria held up a hand.
"Don't touch him directly. The transformation is... delicate. Physical contact could disrupt the balance he maintains. The energies involved would burn you to ash."
Abigail stopped, her hand extended but not quite reaching the crystalline figure that had once been the man she loved. Three inches of air between her fingers and his face. Three inches and eighteen years. Her whole body trembled with the effort of not closing that distance. "Are you all right?" Her voice cracked on the last word.
"Define all right." Despite everything, a hint of his old humor surfaced in the multilayered voice. A ghost of the man he'd been, still there beneath all that power and isolation. "I'm alive. I'm functional. I've prevented a Void Walker from escaping. I'd call that a successful day."
The joke fell flat. None of them smiled.
"Someone tried to use you to break the seal." Gregory forced the words out past the tightness in his throat. "A cult, working with professional mage-soldiers. We need to know who they are and what they're planning."
"I can answer that." Lyria sheathed her sword with a motion too fast to follow. "Because I have been investigating the same question. Come. We don't have much time, and there is much you need to know about the threat you face."
Abigail looked back at Bryce, and a look passed between them—held too long, weighted with twenty years of separation and a love that hadn't dimmed despite the years and transformation. "Will he be safe here?"
"Safer than he was." Lyria was already moving toward a passage Gregory hadn't noticed. "I will place additional wards. But eventually, they will try again. The forces working to release the Void Walkers early are not easily discouraged."
Gregory helped Kira to her feet—the young mage was conscious again, barely, her legs unsteady beneath her. She'd pushed herself to the edge of death to save them all, and she was maybe twenty-five years old. He wondered if he'd been that brave at her age, and suspected he hadn't been.
Together they followed Lyria deeper into the citadel, toward revelations that would change everything they thought they knew about the coming war.
Behind them, Bryce sat in silent vigil, a living prison for horrors beyond comprehension, counting down the days until he could be free.
Or until the world ended.
Whichever came first.
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