The sanctum's air had a metallic flavor, as if he had licked a blade rimed with frost. Arthur gasped out his breath as he and Nyra stood stock-still in front of the infinite hall of mirrors. An infinity of different distorted reflections appeared on each polished surface—a reflection with limbs stretched out to preposterous lengths, another with empty sockets for eyes, all subtly lagging behind their normal-world counterparts.
Nyra leaned against Arthur's back, her shoulder blades against his spine. "This isn't normal illusion magic," she grumbled. Her fingers quivered at her sides, black-edged fire flickering hesitantly. "I can't incinerate it."
Arthur examined the closest reflection. The mirror revealed him standing by himself, his torso entwined in writhing black veins, his eyes fully engulfed in void-light. If he lifted his right hand, the reflection lifted its left—half a second behind.
"The sanctum will try us," the parasite murmured in his bones. Its voice had altered since their complete merging—less clear, more resembling Arthur's own internal monologue. "In order to continue, you must accept what you are changing into."
In front of them, the corridor went on forever, their reflections breeding into self-satiric parodies of humanity. In one faraway mirror, Arthur perceived his double with razor-sharp claws for hands. In another, Nyra's fire devoured her body without pain, leaving a beaming skeleton wrapped in blue flames.
Nyra's elbow slammed into Arthur's side. "We can't remain here. The air's thinning."
She was right. Arthur's lungs burned with each breath, the sanctum draining the oxygen from the room at a slow flow. He gritted his teeth and pushed towards the closest mirror, his boots crunching on crystalline fragments that hadn't existed a moment before.
"Fine," Arthur snarled. He slapped his palm against the icy glass. "Show me."
The glassy surface melted under his hand, engulfing his arm up to the wrist. A cold terror traveled up his arm when the glass dragged him forward—
Memory Fragment 1: The Zenith Estate – 12 Years Earlier
Eight-year-old Arthur Zenith hid behind the velvet curtains of his father's study, knees to his chest. The thick material had a dust and snuffed-out candlewax scent. Beyond the door, armored boots of the Storm Guild enforcers rang against marble.
"You remember the Accord, Magnus." The voice of the lead enforcer was heavy with irrefutable authority. "No fire magic. Not so much as a spark. Your family's hubris almost broke the continent."
Arthur looked over the curtain slit. His father was bracing himself in front of the empty hearth, fists tight around a weathered scroll. The spell of afternoon light through the stained-glass windows cast shadows under Magnus Zenith's eyes deeper than Arthur recalled.
"We paid the price," Magnus grated. "Three centuries of helplessness. Isn't that enough?"
The enforcer advanced, his lightning-hunted gauntlet sweeping a clay figurine from the mantel—Arthur's childlike try at carving a dragon. "The curse lasts until the stars forget your name." His fingers closed. "Or until you demonstrate you've learned humility."
The clay broke.
In the here and now, adult Arthur's fists clenched. He'd remembered this scene haunting him all these years, but now he saw details he'd never seen as a kid—the stretched, unnatural shadow of his father reaching towards the smashed figurine, as if it was reaching to mend it. The pale cyan color in Magnus's irises when he didn't want anyone to notice.
A new face appeared in the memory—one that was not there in the first place. A ghostly image of Magnus's reflection in the window of the study, its mouth moving out of sync with actual-Magnus's voice:
"They never gave you the truth about the War of Shattered Peaks, boy. The Zeniths didn't lose control of their fire magic. They wouldn't incinerate innocent villages at the behest of the Storm Guild."
Young Arthur, still concealed behind the drapes, would not have heard this. But present-Arthur did.
The parasite's voice curled through the memory: "Your father knew more than he told you. More than he dared show."
The study dissolved into smoke.
Memory Fragment 2: The Ignis Guild Dormitories – 1 Year Before Exile
Nyra Vale lay cross-legged on a narrow bunk, her fingers following the Ignis Guild symbol embroidered on her rough wool blanket. Sleeping snugly around her were two dozen other initiates, their chests rising and falling in a steady rhythm in the warm barracks. Moonlight streaming through the high windows etched silver stripes on the stone floor.
A hand shook her shoulder.
"Vale." Captain Rhel's scarred face towered above her. He spoke softly. "The Masters request another demonstration."
Nyra's gut fell. They'd done this three times this week so far—the coerced summoning, the measurements, the frustrated mutterings when her flames continued to burn plain crimson rather than the clean white the Guild rewarded.
The test room stank of burned sulfur and perspiration. Guild Master Thorne towered above the ritual brazier, his ceremonial scars shining in the light of the flames. "Begin."
Nyra summoned her flames. They leaped into being, as usual, dutiful but tonight they seemed.different. A tension had been building behind her ribcage for weeks, and as she poured more energy into the flames, the edges darkened to burgundy.
"Again," Thorne instructed. "Push harder."
She did. The fire danced higher, their centers darkening to almost black. The air around them warped with heat.
A low rumble went through the gathered Masters. Thorne's hand struck out, his fingers closing on Nyra's wrist like a vice. "What forbidden books have you been studying, girl?"
"Nothing! I just—"
The Guild Master's available hand pressed against her chest. A burning agony sliced through Nyra's chest as something inside her twisted in reaction to his invasive magic.
"Parasite stain," Thorne spat. His gaze flashed to the other Masters. "The Zenith Curse resides in this one."
Present-Nyra saw her younger self get hauled away, the edges of the memory blurring with contained fury. "I wasn't infected at that point," she understood out loud. "They sowed the seed of it within me."
A phantom form coalesced next to memory-Nyra—a gray-haired version of herself with eyes streaked with void. "They were looking for a tool," the ghost breathed. "Something to make killing the last Zeniths acceptable."
The Labyrinth's Heart
Arthur and Nyra collapsed back into flesh at the heart of the maze of mirrors. The walls reproduced their most honest forms—Arthur's flesh laced with symbiotic parasite tentacles, Nyra's fire blazing from a heart of roiling void.
There was a crystalline sphere above them, its surface swirling between clarity and pure darkness.
"The trial's intent," the parasite spoke through Arthur's mouth. "To see clearly."
Nyra touched first. As her hand swept across the globe, the whole sanctum shook in wild convulsions. The mirror walls exploded at the same moment, the shards of glass vanishing into fog that showed them their next obstacle—a twisting stair made from a single enormous bone, ascending up into the sanctum's throbbing center.
Arthur led the way. The bone was warm under his feet, humming with a rhythmic beat such as a living heartbeat. Something old was waiting up there.
Nyra paused, gazing at her altered hands. The black veins along her arms beat in time with the vibrating staircase. "If the guilds were lying about the parasites. what else were they lying about?"
The parasite spoke for both of them, its voice ringing up the stairs: "Everything."
They climbed up into the pulsating heart of the First Sanctum as Veridia was aflame below.
The Bone Staircase – Ascension
The air thickened with every step, pushing against Arthur's skin as if he were underwater in hot oil. Unusual carvings lined the arcing walls—scenes of twelve robed men standing in a circle about a broken world, their hands clasped in what could have been solidarity or reciprocal annihilation.
"Primordials," Arthur said, tracing his hand over the bas-relief. "All twelve of them."
Nyra stopped in front of a very detailed panel featuring one character standing over a kneeling fighter, holding aloft a sword that flared with fire. "This one is different. The carvings are recent."
And the image had indeed been updated recently—the warrior's face changed to look like newer guild armor, the flaming blade now obviously a staff topped with Storm Guild symbols.
"They're rewriting history," Arthur understood. "So it would appear the guilds defeated the Primordials."
There was a thunderous crack above. The stairway shook as something huge moved in the room above.
Nyra's fire automatically intensified. "Whatever's upstairs just woke up."
The parasite's sense tightened its coils in Arthur's chest. "It detects Zenith blood."
They stepped into a huge hemispherical room, the domed ceiling aglow with spinning constellations that had no correlate in any night sky Arthur had ever seen. At the room's center, a colossal figure—a twenty-foot-tall monolith of fitted bones and crystallized magic, its empty eye sockets upon the intruders.
"Trespassers." The guardian's voice thundered through their bones. "Prove your right to stand where gods once walked."
Arthur's wounds seared as the parasite recognized the beast: "A Sanctum Warden. The last defender."
The Warden glided with unsettling fluidity for so massive a creature, skeletal digits etching designs in the air that left faintly glowing afterimages. The air grew cold as it called upon its instrument—a gargantuan scythe crafted of frozen lightning.
Nyra braced herself for battle, her fire becoming midnight blue. "Any bright ideas?"
Arthur bent his fingers, sensing the power of the parasite coursing through his blood. "We fight as they fight. Not with solitary components—with synergism."
The Warden charged without warning, its scythe slicing through the air with a crash of shattering glaciers. Arthur rolled to the side barely in time, avoiding the blade that shattered the ground beneath where he'd been standing.
Nyra struck back with a focused blast of blackfire, but the Warden's off-hand soaked up the fire without effort, its bones only briefly shining brighter before their normal dull ivory.
"It's drawing energy from magic," Arthur understood. "Pure element won't help."
The parasite murmured a solution: "Unite powers. Use our energy to course through her flames."
Arthur seized Nyra's wrist. For an awful instant, nothing moved—then the parasite's strength swept through their bond, running through Nyra's fire like ink in water. The flames violet at the center, blackened at the periphery, gave off an unnatural chill instead of warmth.
The Warden hesitated for the first time.
"Now!" Arthur bellowed.
Nyra unleashed the altered fire in a howling helix. Where it hit the Warden's ribs, the bones did not catch on fire—they disintegrated, their magical threads unwinding like sugar water. The guardian stumbled, its scythe falling from suddenly fragile hands.
"Impossible," it moaned. "This power was forbidden."
Arthur did not hesitate. He attacked, jumping onto the construct's destabilized leg and climbing upwards towards its skull. The parasite directed his hands—not to destroy, but to merge. As his fingers delved into the Warden's empty eye socket, he released a controlled shock of void-energy straight into its core.
The impact was immediate. The bones of the Warden liquified half way through the collapse, reconstituting into a bridge to deeper within the sanctum. Its last words rang out as it dissolved:
"The First Truth awaits beyond the seal."
The Chamber of the First Truth
The bridge dropped them in front of a gargantuan circular door adorned with twelve sigils—the same ones Arthur saw in the visions of the Fracture. When they reached the entrance, the middle sigil (stylized flame) started to glow cyan.
"That's your family crest," Nyra said. "The Zenith sigil."
Arthur touched his hand to the symbol. The door reacted immediately, its machinery groaning as ancient wards released. In a final deafening crack, the seal cracked down the center, opening the innermost sanctum of the sanctum.
Inside was not treasure or weapon—but information.
The walls of the circular room were lined floor-to-ceiling in elaborate carvings detailing the actual history of the War of Shattered Peaks. Arthur's gaze scoured the images:
- The twelve Primordials bestowing magic upon humanity
- The initial guilds (then just tribes) using that magic against one another
- The Storm and Ignis factions plotting to break the Primordials
- The Zeniths' refusal to take part in the ultimate betrayal
Nyra followed a particularly horrific panel where mages ripped a Primordial limb from limb. "They didn't kill them. They murdered them."
In the center of the chamber was a pedestal supporting one artifact—a flawless sphere of purest crystal, around which danced a tiny tendril of flame barely bigger than the tip of a candle.
The parasite responded with ferocity. "A Primordial's essence. The last unbroken fragment."
As Arthur extended his hand to claim the sphere, the ground shook with great violence. Crack lines radiated across the ceiling as the entire sanctum started to destabilize.
"We activated its self-destruct sequence," Nyra realized. "This place wasn't designed to be plundered—it's a message in a bottle."
Arthur clutched the sphere as the first pieces of crystal ceiling fell. "Run!"
They ran through crumbling passageways, the sanctum dissolving behind them. Behind, the carved realities shattered into dust, lost once more to time. Before, daylight beckoned through a rapidly closing fissure.
With one last desperate bound, they fell out onto Veridia's rooftops just as the whole sanctum exploded behind them, its crystal structure shattering into benign mist that poured down around the city.
Arthur relaxed his fingers. The sphere was in one piece—and warm.
Nyra gazed at it wide-eyed. "What now?"
The parasite's response came not in words, but in vision—a chart of sites around the continent where additional sanctums would soon fall. A path of breadcrumbs to the ultimate truth.
Arthur palmed the globe. "Now we find the others before the guilds."
Below them, Storm Guild alarms wailed and enforcers rushed to search for the collapse of the sanctum. Somewhere in the pandemonium, Maelis's replacement would be mobilizing his troops.
The pursuit of truth had commenced.