There was a quality in the way the air smelled—smoke beneath the skin and rust on the tongue.
Aelric was here before. He recalled the slab, the whispers, the vision that was never really his. But things were different since then. Something was called.
The Codex in his satchel throbbed with warmth as he walked through the ruined tunnel in front of the shed where he practised alchemy. The pulse was a whisper. A heartbeat. A warning.
The Gate waits.
Back he went into the ancient catacombs. The trail, previously closed in centuries of grime, was disturbed. Rock carried scratches in the form of claw marks. Light flickered where torches were not lit.
The company was provided.
But whatever accompanied him through these tunnels didn't have lungs.
Aelric walked through the empty chamber where the slab originally was. Replacing it was a ring of scorched stone—burnt signs in the form of the Void Crown, the sovereign magical sigil. Flickering magical embers lingered in the air.
But this was not where the Codex was taking him.
Hidden beneath a fallen arch and three layers of debris beyond the back wall was a door.
Aelric discovered it by accident—or intuition. The Codex this time didn't speak. It hummed. Deep and low until his bones were thrumming with it. His fingers followed along the symbols, and the stone yielded.
A sealed arch. Older than anything he'd ever seen.
And in its centre was a gate, carved in gold-veined obsidian.
A genuine one.
It towered more than twelve feet above, crafted out of iron bone and petrified root, and vines of crystal entwined through it. At its centre were divine runes pulsating softly like embers in ash—six in a perfect spiral, shimmering with ancient law.
Everyone emitted a different sort of magic:
No.
Raising
Sentence:
And at its centre… Null.
Written over them in a language older than Dominion parlance were the following:
"Bound by will. Broken by blood. The Sovereign shall pass, and the world will forget."
Aelric's breath hitched.
He extended a hand to rest against the gate—
—and the divine runes blazed in rejection.
The stone repelled a touch with a force unseen, forbidding he should touch it as if in judgment.
He backed away, shaking.
"Why now? Why bring me to this place if I am—"
In response thereto, the Codex in his satchel snapped open.
The new page, initially blank, started to script itself in writing composed of flowing starlight:
The gate does not open to brute strength. No name.
No spell.
To memory locked in anguish.
And under it:
"Blood is the key."
He gazed at the runic symbols.
Before he knew it, his body already knew what to do.
He drew out the knife he carried concealed in the fold of his robes—a dull blade pilfered from a training ground months past. Not a blade of magic. Just steel.
He drew it across his palm without even noticing.
The agony didn't count.
The blood did.
As it spilt over, he pressed his hand to Null in the centre.
The gate creaked.
Not through sound.
But with echo.
Reality itself shook.
The runes burst forth in a blaze of light, and roots began to unravel, unwinding like a giant sleeping giant's fingers. The air was growing colder. Time itself was slowing.
And then
the gate opened.
Apart from it was not a chamber.
There was a void.
A stepped spiral into darkness. The step existed in a state of suspension, without support, disappearing into the void. Aelric stalled—but The Codex throbbed again.
He followed.
The fall stretched out for hours. Or seconds. Time was irrelevant anymore.
Upon finally reaching the bottom, he discovered a chamber there which shouldn't have existed.
A stone island afloat in a sea of stars. Black stars. And at its centre— The Eclipse Codex.
It wasn't a book.
Not really.
It hovered in midair, shaped like a prism that shifted forms—a cube, a sphere, a spiral of pages that folded themselves into impossibilities.
A sentient relic.
A living system.
Its voice was inside his skull before he could speak.
"Aelric. Nullborn. Unwritten."
He stepped forward. "You know me."
"I know what you were made to forget."
"What am I?"
"A Sovereign Seed. One of the last.""You were erased. Burned from the bloodlines. Hidden behind shadow spells. But memory… always echoes."
The prism shifted, and a holographic sigil appeared in the air: the same symbol from the catacomb slab. A circle broken by a line of fire.
"You were not born powerless."You were born to replace the power."
Aelric's heart beat faster.
"Why me?"
"Because the world chose you.""Because the world is dying.""And because they—"The relic trembled. "—They are waking up again."
"Who?"
"The Hollow Kin. The ones who first severed the ley-lines. They remember. They hunt the echoes. They will come for you now."
The Codex's tendrils extended—ethereal strands of thought and light—and entered his wound.
Pain lanced through him.
But with it came knowledge.
Memories of forbidden glyphs. Maps to ley lines long buried. Faces of people he had never met but somehow knew.
System Initialisation…
Welcome, Aelric, last Sovereign of the Forgotten Line.
System Core: Eclipse Codex.User Level: Unawakened.Mission: Reclaim the Echoes. Restore the Veil. Choose the Shape of the End.
When Aelric opened his eyes again, the chamber was gone.
He stood at the gate.
It was sealed once more.
But the mark on his palm now shimmered.
The Null sigil—glowing faintly with divine energy.
Behind him, the world awaited.
And above, far above, the Academy's towers still glittered in ignorance.
But Aelric now carried a system older than kings.
And for the first time, he did not walk in the world's shadow.
The world now walked in his.