The Divine Thread ceremony left Alaric's mind restless. Even after the council dismissed him, their eyes lingered — heavy with expectation, but also with doubt. That night, as the Academy's halls quieted and torches dimmed, he found no sleep.
The amber stone pulsed faintly in his palm, as if unsettled. He set it on the desk beside his bed, but the humming only grew louder, echoing through his skull.
Alaric…
He jerked upright. The voice was neither male nor female, neither kind nor cruel — but it called him with certainty.
Alaric Draven… come below.
He glanced toward Darian's bed. The boy slept soundly, muttering in his dreams. Elara's icy aura drifted faintly through the wall of her quarters, and Clem's breathing from across the hall was steady, unbroken. None of them stirred. Only he heard it.
The humming pulled at his chest, guiding him out of the dormitory and through twisting corridors that seemed unfamiliar in the moonlight. He passed classrooms shrouded in dust, stairways that descended further than he remembered, until finally, he reached a bricked archway — sealed, ancient, and humming with faint crimson light.
The amber stone flared in answer.
Stone cracked. Mortar crumbled. The wall shifted open, revealing a narrow stair spiraling into blackness.
Alaric hesitated. His instincts screamed to turn back, but the whispers tugged at his mind, wrapping around him like a noose. Gritting his teeth, he stepped through.
The descent was suffocating. Symbols carved into the walls seemed to writhe whenever his light brushed across them. The air grew colder, thick with the scent of rot.
At the bottom lay a crypt. Dozens of sarcophagi lined the chamber, their lids split open. Inside, not bones — but twisted remnants of flesh. Figures half-formed, caught between human and beast. Their skin was grey, their mouths sewn shut with veins of shadow.
Alaric's pulse thundered. He raised a trembling hand, light flickering at his fingertips.
One of the husks shuddered. Then another. Then all of them.
A voice, layered with thousands of whispers, poured from their sealed mouths:
"Dual Vessel… incomplete…"
Alaric staggered back, but the shadows of the chamber surged forward, curling around his feet like cold chains. His light sputtered. The amber stone throbbed violently.
"Light rejects dark. Dark devours light. Only one path remains…"
"Stop!" Alaric shouted, though fear cracked his voice.
The nearest husk sat upright, its veins splitting open as its jaw tore wider than human. Its eyeless face pressed close, breath cold as a grave.
"…Choose… or be chosen."
Panic roared through him. With desperation, Alaric unleashed both his powers at once — a burst of blinding light wrapped in coils of shadow. The collision cracked the walls, split sarcophagi, and silenced the whispers in a single violent shudder.
When the dust cleared, the husks were gone. Nothing remained but fragments of stone and a single marking scorched into the floor — a circle of light intersected by shadow.
His knees gave way. He could barely breathe.
The mark glowed once, then faded, but its meaning carved itself into his thoughts as surely as if branded into his flesh:
"Dual Vessel… your choice will break or bind the legacy."
When he stumbled back up the staircase, the archway sealed behind him, leaving only unbroken stone. No proof it had ever opened.
Alaric pressed his back to the wall, trembling, his heart pounding in his throat. He had not imagined it. The mark, the whispers, the husks — they were real.
And worse… they knew his name.