The runes flared as Kyrell stepped through the stone gate.
Light didn't follow him—only memory.
The corridor descended in spirals, the air thick with silence and ancient grief. Lucian moved behind him, steps measured, eyes catching the flicker of ghost-fire curling along the carved walls.
Neither of them spoke. They didn't need to.
They both felt it now—what lived below.
Not a throne.
A truth.
At the base, the tunnel widened into a crypt of staggering grandeur. Black marble walls lined with faded tapestries, and in the center, a sunken dais.
The throne.
Carved from obsidian. Veined with silver.
Untouched by time.
Kyrell faltered.
He remembered this place.
Not from stories.
From blood.
"Lucian," he whispered, voice hollow. "I've died here before."
Lucian reached out, fingers brushing Kyrell's back.
"And yet you returned."
Kyrell turned to him slowly. "What am I?"
Lucian didn't answer right away. Instead, he walked toward the throne.
On the stone floor before it were markings—scratched out by a hand desperate to erase fate.
But fate bleeds through stone.
Lucian knelt. "Your name was once beside mine. Here."
He touched the faded inscription. "We were meant to rule it together."
Kyrell's voice was barely human now. "But I destroyed it."
Lucian rose. "You refused it. There's a difference."
Their eyes locked, and something shifted between them.
A shared grief. A quiet defiance.
---
Above ground, the council met in hurried panic.
Mara watched from a perch in the shadows, lips painted the color of rot.
"Renak has vanished," one elder hissed.
"And Lucian is moving the boy deeper into the earth," said another.
Mara smiled behind her veil. "So it begins."
She stepped into the circle of flame she'd drawn alone.
With her were the remains of the spell stolen from the forbidden texts—one Silas had barely dared whisper.
She placed Kyrell's stolen dagger in the fire.
Then whispered, "Let the hunter forget his love."
The flame screamed.
Far below, Kyrell suddenly gasped, hand flying to his chest.
Lucian caught him. "What is it?"
But Kyrell's eyes were distant, trembling.
"I… I can't remember your face…"
---
Elsewhere, Renak moved through the lower chambers, that stolen portrait pressed to his chest.
He had to reach them.
Before Mara's magic erased everything.
But it was too late.
The first shadows were rising.
Not of humans.
Not even of vampires.
But of the gods buried long before the throne ever rose.
---