The wind shifted as Ray followed the crumbling trail through the northern glade, a dull chill threading through the trees like a whisper of warning. He'd left Elric behind with strict instructions: stay hidden, stay quiet, trust no one.
The boy had nodded, though his eyes were wide with the same worry Ray felt churning inside him. Time wasn't on their side. Whatever was rotting Thornmere wasn't slowing down—and Ray had no tools yet to stop it.
The map fragment he carried was stained and half-burnt plucked from an old ledger buried in a roadside waystone two days earlier. It spoke of a structure once known as Vareth's Light—a secluded repository of magical theory, deep history, and long-abandoned research, lost since the last great surge of wild mana over a century ago.
If anyone had ever studied spiritual decay, or something like Dreamroot, it would be here. Assuming the place still existed.
The trail narrowed into a stair of broken stone, overgrown and slick with moss. Ray moved carefully, hand brushing the hilt of his blade, while his system remained subdued—only a quiet pulse of awareness lingering at the edge of his thoughts. It was as though it, too, was holding its breath.
The path ended at a ravine split by time, its opposite edge just barely reachable by a collapsed wooden bridge.
Across the chasm, partially buried in ivy and stone, loomed a dome of shattered glass and bone-white marble columns—half-sunken, crooked, and clinging to the cliffside like a dying relic. The Library of Vareth.
Ray exhaled once, then crossed.
The bridge groaned under his weight but held. He reached the other side and stepped through a fractured archway. Inside, the air changed—colder, heavier, tainted with the dry, bitter scent of old ash and long-dead paper.
Light filtered weakly through broken stained-glass windows, painting pale colours across shattered bookcases and heaps of debris. Dust hung thick in the air, disturbed only by Ray's careful steps.
He moved like a shadow between fallen shelves, his eyes sweeping across remnants of parchment, bone-dry ink, and gnawed bindings. Most of it was ruined beyond recognition. Time, moisture, and perhaps scavengers had done their worst.
But deeper inside, past a locked iron gate he forced open with a slow grind, the damage was less severe.
Here, the shelves stood taller. A sealed dome ceiling overhead bore murals of stars and constellations, cracked but still legible.
Something in the way the structure curved suggested it had once been warded—shielded from the outside world. The magic was long dead, but its echo clung faintly to the air.
Ray approached a nearby shelf and began to scan.
---
[System Sync Initiated – Archive Signature Detected]
Origin: Pre-Collapse Aelorian Archive Fragment
Status: Unstable | Data Recovery: Partial
Keywords: Dreamroot | Spirit Parasite | Mind-Bleed Nexus
Entry Integrity: 37%
---
He pulled a brittle tome from the shelf, brushing off a thick layer of grime. The title was embossed in gold leaf: "Symbiotic Threats of the Sub-Spiritual Realm." Carefully, he opened it.
The pages trembled in his hands.
Words flared briefly with system highlights, some sharp, others blurred beyond saving. He skimmed quickly, searching for anything useful, anything new. Fragments jumped out at him in glowing text.
"...encounters with rootbound anomalies often result in early-onset cognitive bleed…"
"...origin theories suggest subterranean seed cores linked to failed transcendental rituals…"
"...containment requires harmonic disruption—often through tuned catalysts such as blessed crystal or soul-marked metal…"
"...the affliction thinks in patterns. Avoid speaking to the infected. They listen back."
Ray's brow furrowed.
This was more than sickness. This was sentience. Or something close to it.
And just as he leaned forward, parsing a diagram of a root core's spiral pattern, something shifted in the dark.
A dry click echoed from the far corner of the chamber.
Ray froze. Slowly, he turned.
From the far side of the dome, where the deeper stacks fell into shadow, a low scraping sound began. Then a shape moved—four-legged, lanky, too long in the limbs. It crawled, skittering from shelf to shelf with unnatural grace, as though spiderlike, though no spider had eyes that glowed with amber light.
---
[Unknown Entity Detected]
Classification: Archive Warden – Corrupted
Threat Level: Moderate
Behaviour Pattern: Patrol / Aggression on Intrusion
Note: Originally a bound construct. Corrupted by local decay.
---
It hadn't noticed him. Yet.
Ray ducked behind the shelf, heart steady, breath control. He'd faced worse, but this creature had the advantage of home ground—and corrupted constructs were notoriously unpredictable. He scanned the map his system provided—basic layout only, no hidden paths revealed.
He had three options: retreat, distract, or fight.
But he hadn't come this far for nothing.
Silently, he pulled a chalk stick from his pouch and scrawled a disruption rune on the floor near his position. It was weak—an old destabilizer rune—but with luck, it would momentarily short out the construct's corrupted mana circuit.
The thing moved again, clicking as it neared his shelf. Ray backed away, luring it toward the trap. Closer. Closer…
The creature hissed low as it stepped across the rune's threshold.
Ray slammed his palm to the floor.
The rune flared.
The construct shrieked—a sound like warped metal twisting in on itself—and its limbs spasmed wildly. Ray didn't wait. He dashed past it, toward the back of the library, where a vault door stood half-open behind a fallen statue.
The construct flailed behind him, trying to recover. Sparks flared from its joints.
Ray slipped into the vault and yanked the door shut.
Inside, it was dark. Still. Colder than before.
His crystal light flickered to life again—and illuminated something strange.
In the centre of the room, resting on a broken pedestal, was a stone tablet. Covered in roots.
No—carvings of roots. Intricate, coiling patterns that spiralled into a central eye—almost identical to the sigil he'd seen in the house in Thornmere. Beneath it, words etched in an ancient dialect—half-faded, but recognizable.
---
[System Translation Incomplete – 62% Recovered]
"To sever the eye, strike not the dream… but the anchor. The dream floats, but the anchor binds."
"Catalyst required: Soul-tempered shard, burned in thought-fire."
"Beware the second root. It waits."
---
Ray stared at the carving, mind reeling.
An anchor? A secondary point of infection? Or perhaps the true origin of the Dreamroot infection? Whatever it meant, this was the first true lead he'd found—a warning, a clue, and a method. But it also spoke of a second root. Something worse. Something waiting.
The construct screeched again from the other side of the vault, its claws raking at the door.
Ray backed away, tore a final page from a journal on a nearby desk—one filled with sketches of the same spiral root patterns—and slid it into his pack.
He was out of time.
He grabbed a flask from his belt—oil, mixed with a spark gem—and hurled it against the door. As the construct forced its way in, Ray struck the gem.
Fire roared.
He used the chaos to slip past it, sprinting through the halls, leaping over debris, the smell of burning stone behind him. He didn't stop until the library was far behind and the trees once again surrounded him.
His breath came hard and fast as he reached the ravine. The bridge nearly broke under his weight—but held.
Only when he was safely back in the forest did he stop and look back.
Smoke now curled from one of the dome's cracked windows, rising like a sigh from the past.
---
Ray returned to camp at dusk, covered in soot and cuts. Elric stood quickly as he approached.
"You're hurt," the boy said.
Ray shook his head. "Just tired."
"Did you find anything?"
Ray sat by the fire, pulled the torn journal page from his pouch, and held it up to the fading light. The spiral roots, the eye, the warning.
"I found something," he said softly. "But we're nowhere near the end."
---