Chapter II: The Fall of Hidenheim
The truth of Hidenheim's fall has long been contested. Many argue over what truly transpired, yet all surviving accounts agree on one point—the Boy With No Name was at the heart of the catastrophe."
Year 798 T.F. — The Fall
Liora was near the prayer hall when a girl stepped into her path.
She was a study hall mage like her —broad-shouldered, with dark braids and a smile with no warmth behind it.
"Where are you coming from?" The smile sharpened. "I've heard a rumour about you. About the east wing and what you do there." She leaned in slightly. "Is it true what they say—that you visit the demon's spawn?"
Liora looked at her.
"Who told you—?"Liora was stunned
Then she turned, gripped the prayer hall's heavy door with both hands, and shoved it open.
It boomed against the wall like a thunderclap. Every head in the hall turned. The silence that followed was the kind that rings.
"Liora." The hiss came from Mage Jeze, kneeling in the nearest row.
"Where have you been?"
"I was—"
"Kneel."
Liora knelt.
"You're late again," Jeze continued, low and close. "You know what happens to mages who can't keep their vows? Who can't stay in their place? They are removed from it. Martha won't always be here to shelter you. You are bound to fail—it's only a question of when."
Liora stood up.
She pushed Jeze's hand from her shoulder and rose to her full height. The entire hall watched.
"You've changed," Jeze said, something ugly entering her voice.
"What is happening here?" Martha's voice came from the front of the hall.
Liora turned, walked out.
The door swung shut behind her.
"The demon has claimed her," someone muttered from the middle rows.
"Enough." Martha's gaze swept the hall. "This is a holy place. Conduct yourselves accordingly, or I will—"
"The demon spawn should be removed," a voice called from the back. Others rose to join it.
"You will be silent," Martha said, and the hall went quiet.
Outside, beneath a sky thick with cold stars, Liora walked beside Martha. Between them they carried a heavy wooden bucket of water, taking turns with the weight.
"He didn't choose to be what he is," Liora said quietly. "So why is he treated like he's done something unforgivable?."
She looked at Martha from the corner of her eye. "Why?"
Martha was quiet for a moment.
"When I brought him here, I broke ancient custom—that exists for reasons, not all of them wrong. It was a necessary choice. But I knew the cost of it, and I'll answer for it."
She exhaled. "The sisters who resent him are afraid of what they don't understand. Fear doesn't excuse cruelty, but it does explain it."
"It feels like mages hide behind the word 'realm'," Liora said. "They say it's for the good of everyone, and somehow that makes it acceptable to be cruel."
She kicked the bucket in frustration, wincing as it rattled loudly across the stones.
Martha caught it by the handle before it could tip, then rested a hand on Liora's shoulder.
"Careful," she said softly.
She looked at her for a long moment.
"You have a good heart, Liora. Most mages lose theirs quietly over years—traded for certainty, or convenience, or the comfort of a doctrine that asks nothing difficult." The fact that yours is still intact, still asking questions, still angry on someone else's behalf—" She paused.
"That is exactly what a Völva must be. Hold onto it."
Before Liora could answer, the night broke open.
Not the prayer bell. Something else—lower, more urgent, the sound of an alarm that the stones of Hidenheim had not needed to make in a very long time.
"Go," Martha said. "The east tower—find him. Now."
Liora ran.
"Supreme Mage." Jeze's voice came fast and breathless from the direction of the main hall. "You need to come. There's been a breach."
"A breach of what?" Martha turned.
"The realm's boundary, it's serious."
Martha followed. They were still a corridor's width from her chambers when one of the sisters ahead threw her hands up and shouted—"Knýta—!"
Martha raised her own mark, and the binding shattered before it reached her. She looked at the women surrounding her—eight of them, in a loose ring, marks lit and ready.
"Sisters." Her voice was very still. "What are you doing?"
"What should have been done the day you dragged that thing into this realm?" Jeze said. Her robes were disarrayed, her tarnished cuffs bright now with active mana.
"You've endangered every one of us. Every one of our order. You've had your time, Martha—it's over."
"The elder six will never sanction this."
"The elder six are being persuaded to see things differently. As we speak." Jeze tilted her head. "You're not in a position to give orders anymore."
A scream split the corridor from somewhere beyond the wall—and then another. And then something wet and heavy hit the floor.
One of the sisters, sent to check the noise, returned at a sprint—and was taken from the side by something enormous, all red eyes and slack jaws and the smell of rot. A hound. Then a second one, from the stairwell. The sisters scattered. Two went down before they could raise their marks.
"Move—" Jeze shoved Martha bodily through her own chamber door and pulled it shut behind them both, leaning against it, breathing hard.
"This is your doing," Martha said.
"He promised no one would be hurt." Jeze's hands were shaking. Her weapon was on the floor. She hadn't picked it back up. "He promised."
"Who?" Martha asked. "Who promised you?"
A figure moved at her writing desk. Hood drawn, face unreadable, hands moving slowly through the papers there as though he had all the time that existed.
"Who are you?" Martha demanded. "Answer me. I command it."
The figure gave a low, quiet laugh.
"Your little tricks have no teeth here."
Martha's lips moved: "Klímata tis yis, ypakoúste sto kálesmá mou—"
The floorboards split by the effect of her spell. Thick-rooted vines erupted upward and closed around the intruder in seconds, thorns pressing through fabric and into skin.
Martha stepped forward, ready.
The vines shattered. Every one of them. Dry as winter sticks, gone in an instant.
Martha stopped.
"How," she said, "is that possible? That was—"
"Weak," the figure said.
The force hit her like a wall of stone. It drove her back through the chamber wall—through the plaster and the lathe and out into the corridor beyond—and she hit the far side and crumpled ribs singing with the impact and blood filling the back of her throat. The world tilted and went white at the edges.
Martha lay in the rubble and tried to move. Her body refused. She could only lie still and listen as, one by one, the sounds of her sisters—fighting, crying out, and falling silent—moved through the stone around her like water finding its level.
Jeze ran. That was all she could do — run and not look back, though the sounds behind her made not looking back an act of will that cost something real. Her sisters were screaming, the kind that stretched and frayed and eventually stopped in ways that were worse.
"Help me—" said one voice among the others, close enough that Jeze could hear fingernails scraping on stone. She didn't stop.
She pressed her palms flat against her ears and kept moving, gasping through each breath as though air had become something rationed.
She didn't stop.
— ✦ —
The East Tower
Dot jolted upright as hands gripped his shoulders and shook him hard.
"Dot! Wake up!"
He blinked, the room assembling itself slowly around him — the narrow chamber, the single window, the dark — and then Liora's face, too close and too urgent to be a dream. "Liora? What's happening?"
The alarm bells answered for her. They were already ringing when he became aware of them — deep, clanging, relentless — and beneath that, the sound of running feet and voices cutting through stone walls from directions he couldn't place.
"We need to go. Now. Liora grabbed his wrist, then stopped herself. "Ser Rick — get Ser Rick."
The cat, already awake and sitting upright on the windowsill, looked at them both with composure.
Liora crossed to the window and looked down. Dot came to stand at her shoulder.
Below, in the courtyard, figures had gathered — study-hall students, older mages, and faces Liora recognized, including Zara, who had been there.
Mage Celei stood at their front, her expression not angry but resolute in a way that was somehow harder to look at than anger would have been.
" You can still leave Liora," Celei called up to her. Her voice carried easily in the cold air.
"Go now. No one will stop you. No one will hurt you."
Liora's grip on the window frame tightened.
"He's done nothing wrong."
Dot stepped up besides her. She extended her arm without looking, keeping him back from the window's edge.
Below, Celei closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, something in her face had settled into grief.
"Forgive me, Liora."
"Floga."
Fire erupted from the base of the tower — not slow, not gradual, but a sudden violent wall of it, climbing the stone with terrifying speed, the heat arriving at the window almost before the light did.
"We have to go," Dot said. "Now—Liora, we have to—"
"Take my hand."
He looked at her hand. Looked at the fire already licking the outer wall below them. Took it.
"This might not work," Liora said, which was not the most reassuring thing she said to him at the moment.
"Cetremastropa."
— Boom —
The world lurched. Dot felt himself leave the floor – leave the tower entirely – with the night air rushing past him, the burning east wing falling away below at a speed that made no sense, and the ground nowhere near as close as it should have been.
He twisted in the air and caught a glimpse of Liora going limp besides him, her hand slipping from his, and then he caught her – one arm around her waist, the other reaching – and then the trees were there and they crashed through branches, and then the grass came up fast, and he hit it back-first and lay still, staring at the sky.
Ser Rick landed on his chest from somewhere above, with perfect precision and no acknowledgement that anything unusual had occurred.
"Ow."
"How are we alive?" Liora said, from somewhere besides him. Not a question — more the verbal equivalent of someone taking inventory.
She sat up. Looked at him. Her expression shifted. "Dot. Your ear."
He reached up and found a branch no thicker than his finger lodged cleanly through the upper cartilage of his ear. He pulled it free. The wound closed over within seconds.
Liora pressed her hand over her mouth.
"I'm fine," he said. "Weirdly fine." He sat up and looked back towards the east tower, where the fire had taken hold properly now, orange light pulsing through the smoke. Screaming still rose from somewhere inside it — and then, piece by piece, stopped.
" We have to move," Liora said, and took his hand again.
— ✦ —
They found Martha in the corridor outside her chambers.
The hallway looked like the aftermath of something that couldn't be undone. Mages lay across the floor at wrong angles, blood spreading in dark, still pools beneath them. The smell of it was iron and smoke and something older, something they both didn't have a name for yet.
Liora dropped to her knees before she had consciously decided to. Martha was breathing — barely, shallowly — with her back against the wall, her hands folded in her lap with a strange, deliberate stillness.
She opened her eyes as Liora touched her face.
Something moved across Martha's expression — recognition, and behind it, something that looked almost like relief.
Her voice was very quiet. "I felt it — all the way from here. You finally did it."
"Don't. "Liora's voice cracked on the single syllable. "Don't do that. We're getting you up. Dot—"
Dot moved to take Martha's other arm. She resisted with a gentleness that was more absolute than force.
"No." She shook her head once, slowly. "Let me rest here. I'll catch up to you. Go, Liora. Go."
"I won't leave you. " Tears fell from Liora's face to her hands, which were wrapped around Martha's. "I won't. Not now. Not ever."
Dot stood back; Ser Rick pressed against his chest. His own eyes were burning. He didn't try to stop it.
Martha reached up with one trembling hand and removed the cloth covering her hair.
Liora went very still.
Silver. The same silver as her own.
"You're like me," Liora breathed.
"A Drevari. Martha's voice was fading but steady. "Both of us. They despised us for the colour of our hair – calling us freaks, omens, and aberrations.
She looked at Liora with eyes that had stopped being tired.
"The difference is that when my tribe needed me, I ran. I hid my hair. I let them die as I watched, and I have carried that ever since." Her hand found Liora's face.
" But you — you never ran from anything. Not once. Not from the ridicule, not from this place, not from him—"
"When every voice around you said to. That is not a small thing, Liora. That is everything."
She pressed a small iron key into Liora's palm and closed her fingers around it.
"My study. Take what you find there. Find a way out of this realm — both of you." Her eyes moved to Dot. "You — take care of her."
"I promise," Dot said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.
"I have never been certain of much," Martha continued, her voice thinning now. "But I am certain of this: the histories will remember your name, Liora. Not as a footnote. Not as a curiosity. As the greatest mage who ever lived.
A faint smile. "I look up to you. You made me better than I was."
"Run," she whispered. "Both of you. Run."
They ran.
Behind them, Martha's breathing slowed and stopped.
— ✦ —
They turned the corner — and stopped.
The thing in the corridor was enormous. Two heads on a single neck, each one snarling from a different direction, four red eyes burning in the dark. Blood dripped from both sets of jaws in long, unhurried threads.
"Run."
More of them came from the side passages — three, four, the sound of their movement low and guttural, claws clicking on stone. Liora thrust both hands forward.
"Left—go left—"
They dived through a side chamber door, and Liora slammed her hands flat against the air behind them.
As the chamber barrier shimmered into existence just as the first hound hit it — jaws snapping and claws raking against something invisible, close enough that Dot could see the black inside its throat —
"That won't hold long," Liora said, already moving to the shelves.
The room was lined with Martha's things — books, folded papers, and objects whose purpose they couldn't guess. Liora moved through them fast, searching. She found a folded note written in Martha's hand and read the first line aloud – ancient letters spelling out something in a language Dot didn't know.
Η Άνοδος του Κάτω Κόσμου Μονάρχη — The Rise of the Infernal Monarch.
Two unsealed letters beneath it. She read the first: the Althing has ordered the boy's death.
And the second, dated two days ago: Deliver the boy and yourself to the Council or face execution for treason.
Liora set the letters down very carefully.
The barrier behind them cracked — a sound like ice giving way — and then the door came apart entirely in a storm of wood and force.
Black vines erupted from the smoke that poured through the gap. They found Dot before he could move, wrapping around his arms and his torso, yanking him off his feet and dragging him forward into the dark.
"Dot—"
Liora seized a spear from the wall and slashed through the vines — one, two — but more replaced them, and the smoke thickened, and from inside it something stepped forward.
The face was wrong in a way that was hard to look at directly — features set at angles that didn't correspond to anything human, a mouth that moved in ways mouths didn't move. It held Dot suspended in its vines and regarded them both with something that was not quite curiosity and not quite hunger.
A dying mage staggered through the doorway behind it, trailing blood, and drove a glowing spear into the creature's back with the last of everything she had.
"RUN—"
The demon turned. The mage's body came apart. Liora grabbed Dot's hand as the vines fell loose, and they moved.
— ✦ —
The realm's outer edge was a darkness with texture to it — a wall of pressure, faintly shimmering where it met the treeline, the boundary between Hidenheim and the world beyond. They hit it at a run and stopped, hands flat against the invisible surface, breathing hard.
"We need a breach," Liora said. "A weak point — somewhere the barrier's already failing—"
The ground behind them detonated.
Earth and stone blew outward in a radius around the thing that rose from it — the demon, larger now, or perhaps only closer, its four red eyes finding them immediately across the distance. It moved towards them without hurry.
Liora's mind reached for the shape of a spell and found only static. Her hands were shaking. She couldn't find the words, couldn't hold the structure; the demon was still coming, and Dot was besides her and—
The claws closed around Dot and lifted him off the ground.
"Liora — run. Leave me—just run—"
She looked at him. At the demon. At Dot's face, which was terrified and still somehow telling her to go.
"Run away," she said quietly. "If I can't save you from something like this—" she exhaled—"how would I ever become a great mage?"
She found the words.
A mark finally appeared on her forehead — the shape of a half-moon, luminous and old, the light of it falling across the ground at her feet. She spoke the spell.
In the space between one moment and the next, Dot was standing on the ground.
And Liora was where he had been.
— ✦ —
The demon's claws came through her chest.
The half-moon mark on her forehead dimmed.
Dot was on the ground, unhurt, staring at her with an expression that had not finished forming yet — still catching up to what had just happened, still one moment behind.
Liora looked at him. She tried to hold herself upright and couldn't, and her knees met the ground, and she found she wasn't afraid.
She was very tired, and there was a great deal of warmth, and Dot's face was the last thing she wanted to see, and it was what she was looking at.
"Thank you," she mouthed. "Dot."
She fell.
"No—" Dot crawled forward, hands scrabbling on the earth. "No — Liora — no—"
The demon raised its claws above him.
And nothing happened.
A figure had appeared between them. It had not arrived — it simply was there now, where it had not been a moment before. Hooded. Still. The demon held its position, uncertain.
"Wait," the figure said to it. Quietly, the way you speak to something you own.
Dot looked up. The man lowered his hood.
"Who are you? " Dot's voice came out broken and raw. "Who the hell are you?"
The man looked past him, at Liora's body.
"Remarkable potential," he said. "Wasted."
Something ignited in Dot — not grief exactly, not rage exactly, something beneath and behind both of those things. His eyes went red at the edges. He felt his fingertips change.
"I asked you a question."
"Who are you?"
The demon lunged — not at Dot, but at the figure besides him, on some blind animal impulse. The man extended one hand and touched its hide.
The creature came apart in a spray of black.
"Filth," the man said, without inflection. He turned back to Dot. "You really are interesting."
The man was behind him before he could react.
Something cut through Dot's body — clean and precise, the kind of cut that knows exactly where to go — and he screamed and hit the ground on his hands and knees, blood soaking the earth.
"I'm going to kill you," Dot said, eyes blazing crimson, claws pressed into the dirt. "I swear it."
" We'll meet again, then. The man stepped back. Somewhere behind him, a woman's voice:
"Shall I take him?"
"No. Leave him. He's of no use to us yet."
The man surveyed what remained of Hidenheim — the smoke, the flames, and the silence where there had been voices — and something in his expression approached satisfaction.
" The fall of man," he said, almost to himself. "The world truly began there. Not before." He glanced at the woman besides him. "Hidenheim fell. Long before tonight."
"A wonderful thing to witness," she agreed.
"Destroy it."
The woman raised her hand. The sky opened above. Hidenheim, like a wound, poured fire down through the gap – not the ordinary fire of torches or spells but something absolute, something that didn't leave wreckage so much as remove the possibility of what had been there. The towers went first. Then the walls. Then everything else.
A portal opened. They stepped through it and were gone.
— ✦ —
Jeze was still running when the blast found her. She had time to register the heat — extraordinary, sourceless, like the air itself igniting — and then she was gone too, and the screaming finally stopped.
Dot crawled through it all.
The realm was coming apart around him — the anchor destroyed, the structure that held Hidenheim separate from everything else dissolving from the inside out, walls and towers beginning to lose their relationship with the ground. He crawled towards where Liora had fallen, through the fire and the falling stone, and reached her and gathered her to him and held on.
— ✦ —
Valdheim — The Human Realm
Outside a certain town
The farmer had been up since before dawn. He was standing in the near field, doing the ordinary thing of looking at his ordinary sky, when the ordinary sky tore open.
He ran. He didn't stop to understand what he was seeing – the rift widening, the impossible structure falling through it, towers and walls and all the stone of a place that had not existed in the human world descending towards the earth with a sound like the end of something.
He ran, and behind him the mage castle of Hidenheim struck the ground in a thunderous avalanche of dust and ruin that was visible from every hill for miles in every direction.
Minutes later, hoofbeats.
A man swung down from his horse and moved through the wreckage without hesitating, stepping over broken stone and splintered timber, until he found what he was looking for: a boy, barely recognisable, body knitting itself back together with impossible slowness, arms wrapped around someone he wasn't letting go of.
The man lifted him gently and held him.
" I promised," Dot said, his voice barely there. He didn't open his eyes. "I promised."
To Be Continued