The desert had not moved.
Even after the Warden fell, even after Garfield's firestorm split the air with its violence, the sands had not shifted. They lay still, obedient, like the aftermath of war when every soldier lies breathless and the battlefield remembers what it has taken.
Garfield sat cross-legged at the edge of the battlefield, his cloak torn, his hands blackened by his own mana. He had burned through not his strength—there was no limit there—but his restraint. His veins still throbbed from the strain of compressing endless torrents into shapes that mortal flesh could barely withstand.
He closed his eyes. His breathing steadied. The world was quiet.
Too quiet.
When he opened them again, the stillness was wrong. The wind had stopped entirely. The sun hung as if arrested mid-descent, its light dimmed to the pale yellow of a dying candle. Time itself seemed to stagger here, as though the desert no longer obeyed the laws it was given.
And then, out of that silence, came the whisper.
"You linger at the edge of what cannot be returned…"
Garfield's head tilted, the whisper vibrating through the marrow of his bones rather than through his ears. The voice was the Being's, but lower, fractured—less a whisper and more the echo of something forced through a cracked vessel.
He rose. His boots crunched faintly against glassed sand, though even the sound of his steps felt muted. His gaze turned toward the ruin ahead—the black stone structure he had glimpsed before, half-buried like the ribs of a dead god.
The Tomb Maizel.
It did not welcome him. It did not even acknowledge him. It simply was—ancient, unmoving, its surface etched with spirals and runes that shifted when stared at too long. Darkness bled inward rather than outward, as if the walls were feeding on the void around them.
Garfield approached.
The closer he came, the heavier his body felt. His steps slowed—not by choice, but by pressure, a weight that bent his knees and pressed at his chest. He did not resist. Resistance was wasted effort. Instead, he adapted, moving as if wading through water, controlled and deliberate.
When he reached the wall, he placed his palm upon it.
Cold. Not the cold of night or winter. A deeper cold—the cold of absence, of something that had been ripped away and left nothing in its place. The sensation crawled through his veins like frost, meeting his mana and feeding on it.
Runes shimmered faintly where his hand touched, jagged spirals locking together into an unfamiliar script. The Being's voice returned, whispering into his thoughts.
"These are not runes of men. They are the tongue of the chained sons. The bloodline of Maizel wrote their curses upon stone so that none could forget."
The words vibrated with weight, with truth. Garfield narrowed his eyes, studying the inscriptions as they reshaped themselves, lines bending into the illusion of words.
But he could not read them.
"What do they say?" His voice was low, flat, but not without curiosity.
There was silence. Then, hesitation.
"...They speak of thrones. Of walls between heavens. Of a gate broken once and sealed thirteen times."
The voice stuttered, glitched, as if each phrase cost more than the Being could afford.
Garfield's gaze sharpened. "That is not all."
"…No. It is not all."
The words carried a weight of refusal.
Garfield pressed his palm harder against the stone, his veins glowing faintly as his mana surged. The runes flared in response, light spilling outward into the sand like veins of molten silver. For an instant, the inscriptions aligned fully—symbols converging into something clear, something whole.
And Garfield saw.
A mural, etched faintly into the wall, lit by his own mana: thirteen figures, vast and faceless, standing above mountains and seas. Behind them loomed thrones, each carved with a name. Names that bled into the air, names no man could have written.
At the far end of the mural was a fourteenth throne.
Empty.
Its name was carved, but where the letters should have been, the stone was broken, scarred, scraped clean.
Garfield's chest tightened. He reached toward it.
The Being hissed suddenly, static cracking its voice into shards.
"Do not touch what has been erased."
Garfield's hand stopped an inch from the scar. His gaze did not waver.
"What was here?"
The silence dragged long enough that the tomb itself seemed to breathe with him. And then:
"Nothing."
The lie was too quick. Too sharp.
Garfield's lips curled faintly at the edges—not a smile, not quite. Something colder.
He drew his hand back. He turned his attention to the rest of the wall. The inscriptions stretched deeper, vanishing into shadow, each line promising answers, each rune humming with a resonance his mind had yet to unlock.
And as he stared, the whispers began again.
Not from the Being this time.
From the stone itself.
Faint, fragmented words slipped into his ears, syllables in languages he had never learned, yet which pressed themselves against his skull as if they had always belonged there. Some broke apart before they could be understood. Others lingered, half-formed.
"…bloodline chained… …the seventh sealed… …the gate, the gate, the gate…"
The Being spoke again, harsher, as though cutting across the whispers.
"Do not listen. These are remnants, distortions. They will twist your sight."
Garfield tilted his head, ignoring the warning. He placed both palms against the wall now, letting his mana flow freely into the inscriptions.
And the tomb responded.
The walls shuddered. Shadows pulled inward, coiling like serpents. The runes lit with a glow not his own, their resonance aligning with his mana until it became difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
The air trembled.
And with a sound like chains snapping, the wall opened.
A passage yawned before him, swallowing the last of the desert's light.
Garfield stepped forward without hesitation.
And Tomb Maizel swallowed him whole.
The air inside the tomb was different.
It did not reek of death or dust, as one would expect from something buried for centuries. Instead, it carried no scent at all. Not even the stale tang of stillness. It was as though air itself had been stolen, replaced with a thinner echo that barely clung to his lungs when he breathed.
Garfield pressed forward. His boots struck the black stone floor, and each step rippled faintly, as though the stone remembered footsteps long vanished. The walls closed around him, smooth yet pulsing with faint veins of light, inscriptions woven in layers too deep for human eyes to untangle.
The silence was oppressive.
Until the whispers returned.
"…child… seeker… bloodline unbound…"
He ignored them. Whispers were bait. A distraction.
The deeper he went, the narrower the passage became, curving downward in a spiral. Soon the desert's glow had vanished, leaving only the pale flicker of the inscriptions lighting his way. The runes shifted as he walked past, their shapes curling like living script, reassembling themselves when he looked away.
Garfield reached a wider chamber.
The ceiling was domed, carved with layers upon layers of the same alien language. In the center lay a slab of obsidian, cracked through the middle, as though struck once by a blow strong enough to break the world. Chains, rusted yet humming with mana, lay coiled around it like the skeleton of some enormous serpent.
His gaze lingered. He could feel it—not with his eyes, not even with his mana. Something beneath the slab pulsed faintly, like the heartbeat of a corpse that had forgotten to stay dead.
The Being's voice broke into his thoughts.
"Do not touch the slab."
Garfield's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Because it remembers. And memory is crueler than death."
He turned from it, scanning the walls. Lines of text ran in circles around the chamber, the runes sharper here, more deliberate, as though whoever carved them wished not to be misunderstood.
Garfield lifted his hand. His mana seeped into the inscriptions, and light flared, racing along the walls.
The Being began to murmur translations.
"Here lies the oath of Maizel, seventh son of—"
Static ripped the voice apart.
Garfield's jaw clenched. "You cut yourself short."
"…It is not for you to know."
"Then why translate at all?"
The Being did not answer.
Garfield traced the wall with his fingers, ignoring the interruptions. He pieced together fragments. Words repeated: "thrones… chains… architects…". Another phrase lingered: "thirteen pillars… guardians of form… linked to heaven's seals…"
The words resonated with him—not because he understood them, but because something in his blood did. His mana pulsed against the inscriptions, answering like a child pressing a hand against a mirror.
And then he saw it a pattern.
The runes were not scattered symbols, but arranged into rules, like mathematics hidden in language. Some curved forward, others bent backward. Certain clusters repeated only when placed near spirals, as if bound by invisible grammar.
A language. One not yet his, but waiting.
He whispered the shapes aloud, voice steady. His throat burned as if speaking them drew blood from the inside.
And the tomb listened.
The inscriptions shifted—subtly, but undeniably. Where once there were three spirals, there was now a line connecting them, the meaning altered. The chamber itself seemed to lean closer.
The Being's voice surged suddenly, urgent.
>"Enough. Do not speak their tongue."
Garfield's eyes glimmered faintly in the half-light. "Why not?"
"…Because once it hears you, it will never let you leave."
He smiled—faintly, coldly. "Perhaps that is the point."
For a long while, there was silence.
Then the Being whispered again, quieter, resigned.
"The language ties to the Thirteen Architects. Guardians of form, yes—but not gods. They were never gods. Men mistook them for gods because they built what men could not. The Architects shaped the foundations of seas, skies, and flame. And above them, thrones were raised—thrones they could not sit upon."
Garfield's attention sharpened. "And the thrones belong to the gods?"
"…Thirteen thrones. Thirteen gods. That is all you must know."
His gaze shifted back to the inscriptions. All? No. Never all.
The chamber dimmed, as though the light itself recoiled from their exchange. The whispers of the tomb returned, louder now, threading through the gaps of the Being's words.
"…the thirteenth sealed… the fourteenth unmade… the chains undone when the hand returns…"
The Being hissed.
"Ignore it."
But Garfield did not ignore. His hand brushed the stone once more, and he let the whispers press into his veins. They were fragments, incomplete, but they were enough to see a path.
There was something missing. Something erased.
And the erasure itself was knowledge.
Garfield turned from the slab at the chamber's center, his steps echoing into another corridor that stretched deeper into shadow. The whispers followed him.
So did the silence.
........
The corridor narrowed as Garfield pressed deeper. The air no longer felt like air—it clung instead, heavy, as though the tomb itself pressed against his chest with every step. The further he went, the more his own heartbeat echoed in his ears, not with life, but like a drum marking trespass.
The whispers followed.
"…seeker… betrayer… heir of none…"
His hands brushed the walls again. More inscriptions, winding now into curved arches overhead, formed a canopy of lightless script. They no longer shifted. Instead, they glared—etched so deeply they seemed burned into the stone itself.
The corridor widened. And Garfield entered a chamber unlike the first.
It was a hall. A vast one.
Thirteen statues towered in a circle, each faceless, their forms carved from the same obsidian-veined stone as the tomb itself. Yet their shapes differed. One bore wings unfurled like a sky split open. Another carried a sword larger than its own body, the blade fractured and jagged. One seemed nothing more than shifting blocks of stone, its torso spiraled inward, as if collapsing into itself.
At the center of the hall, a dais. Upon it, a throne—empty, broken, its back cracked in two.
Garfield's steps slowed. His breath lingered. This was no ordinary hall. It was a memory, carved in permanence.
The Being's voice slithered into his mind.
"Turn back."
He ignored it. His gaze swept from statue to statue. Each radiated something—faint, but distinct. Not power, not mana, but presence. The presence of something that had once stood too tall for mortals to see.
"Are these them?" he asked quietly.
The Being hesitated.
"…The Architects. The Thirteen who bent the world's foundation to their will."
Garfield circled the dais. His fingers trailed the stone, stopping where inscriptions had been carved into the base of each statue. The symbols repeated, but in patterns that differed slightly—like signatures in a shared script.
He crouched by one. The runes curled into sharp lines, jagged like cracks in glass. His mana brushed against them, and for an instant, a vision flared—wings tearing skies apart, storms bound to a single command. He pulled back, cold eyes narrowing.
"They left pieces of themselves here."
"Echoes," the Being admitted reluctantly. "Fragments of what they were. Enough to remain feared, even now."
Garfield stood before the throne. It was not as tall as the statues, nor as imposing. Yet it radiated something more suffocating than any of them. Not presence. Absence.
A throne without a king.
Garfield's hand hovered above the fractured armrest. "And this?"
The Being's voice hardened.
"A seat no man, no Architect, was meant to claim. Walk away from it, Garfield."
He smirked faintly, though his eyes never softened. "You tell me to walk away from many things. And yet, here I still stand."
Silence stretched.
Garfield shifted his gaze. At the far side of the hall, past the ring of statues, another archway yawned. Its edges bore fresher carvings, sharper than the others, as though someone had reforged them after the tomb was sealed.
He approached. The inscriptions there were… different. Not smooth or spiraled. They glitched, jagged lines crossing one another at impossible angles, shapes that refused to stay still in his vision. His head throbbed when he stared too long.
And then—among the thirteen repeating sigils—there was space. A fourteenth. Empty.
His lips parted. "There's nothing here."
"…Do not dwell on that," the Being snapped, sudden and sharp.
Garfield's gaze lingered. "Which means there was something. Something erased."
The whispers hissed louder now, a chorus of tones threading into his mind.
"…the unmade throne… the fourteenth undone… fate erased…"
His pulse quickened—not with fear, but with hunger. Knowledge had weight, and the missing weight was heavier than any presence in the hall.
The Being surged, its voice warped, fragmented.
"Enough! To name it is to call it. To seek it is to be consumed."
Garfield's cold smile returned. "Then perhaps I am meant to be consumed."
The silence that followed was worse than the whispers.
He turned from the empty inscription, memorizing its position, and walked back toward the dais. The statues loomed, faceless yet unyielding, as though watching. Judging.
At the broken throne, Garfield sat—not fully, but on the edge, his hand resting against the stone as if testing its weight. The cold seeped into him, and for an instant, he swore he felt something pulse beneath it.
Not life. Not death. Something that existed outside both.
The Being's voice returned, quieter, fraying.
"…You toy with chains you cannot yet see."
Garfield leaned back slightly, eyes closing. "Then I will see them. And when I do, I will break them."
The whispers surged one last time, filling the hall with a thousand fractured voices. Then—silence.
The statues loomed. The throne waited.
And Garfield's descent into the tomb had only just begun.