Chapter 5: Threads of the Void

Chapter 5: Threads of the Void

The flare of silver-blue mana from Kaelen’s hand cast dancing, hostile shadows along the corridor. He stood coiled like a spring, every instinct honed by two brutal deaths screaming at him to either flee or attack this impossible woman.

“How?” he bit out, the single word a jagged shard of his frayed nerves. “How do you know what happened?”

Lyra remained perfectly still, her calm an infuriating counterpoint to his turmoil. She didn't seem threatened by the raw, untamed power crackling around his fingers. Instead, her silver eyes held a clinical, almost sorrowful, curiosity.

“Because I can see the echoes,” she said, her voice a low murmur that didn't carry. “Most souls move forward in a single, unbroken line from birth to death. Your soul… it’s a catastrophe. It’s been severed and re-tied, leaving frayed ends that scream into the aether. I saw the first echo when a creature of the void unmade you. I felt the second, a sharp, ugly thing of steel and betrayal, just moments ago in my own perception of time.”

The raw mana around his hand sputtered and died. Her words were too precise, too horrifyingly accurate to be a guess. She wasn't just observing him; she was reading the scars on his very existence.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“My name is Lyra. My order has watched over the veil between worlds for centuries. We are the Veil Wardens.” She straightened up, stepping out of the shadows. The esoteric symbols on her clothes seemed to shift in the faint light. “Those things you saw, the horrors that fell from the sky—they have a name. We call them the Void Walkers. They are the parasites of reality, the hunger that exists in the silent spaces between the stars.”

Void Walkers. The name resonated with the forbidden knowledge he’d gleaned from the library's darkest corners, giving his formless terror a label.

“And what do you want with me?” Kaelen’s suspicion was a shield he held up against her impossible knowledge.

“The flow of fate is a river. The Sundering you witnessed is a waterfall we are all rushing towards,” Lyra explained, her gaze intense. “Everything and everyone is caught in its current. Except you. Your curse, this cycle of death and rebirth, has ripped you from the riverbank. You are a paradox, Scribe. An unpredictable variable in a deterministic equation. That makes you either the catalyst that will ensure our final, absolute destruction… or the one stone that might divert the river.”

Hope was a dangerous, foreign emotion, but a sliver of it pierced through his paranoia. Not a solution, but a purpose. He wasn't just a victim trapped in a loop; he was an anomaly. A weapon.

“You want to help me get in there,” he stated, gesturing to the sealed door. It wasn't a question.

“I need to know what the Arch-Scribe was doing in his final days,” she confirmed. “My visions led me here, to the epicenter of the disturbance. Your desperation to enter confirms my suspicions. We both need answers from behind this door. A wary alliance seems our most logical path forward.”

Wary alliance. It was better than no alliance at all. Rhys had offered him trust and protection, and it had ended with a sword in his chest. Lyra offered only a shared goal and a chillingly honest assessment of his nature. Strangely, he found that far more believable.

“Fine,” Kaelen agreed, his voice tight. “But the door is sealed with a City Guard magi-lock. It’s warded.” He remembered her previous words. “You said it was warded against raw mana.”

“It is,” Lyra said. “Your method would be akin to using a battering ram on a puzzle box. It would be loud, messy, and attract the attention of the very guards who you have good reason to avoid.”

Without another word, she stepped past him and placed her palm flat against the cold oak of the door, right next to the pulsing magi-lock. She closed her eyes. Kaelen watched, ready to unleash another blast of power at the first sign of a trap.

But nothing violent happened. The air around Lyra grew still. She wasn't chanting or forcing her will upon the lock. She seemed to be… listening. Her fingers twitched, tracing patterns in the air that mirrored the glowing runes of the ward.

“Every ward is a weave of magical threads,” she murmured, her voice distant. “And every weave has a knot, a point where the caster tied it off. It’s not about cutting the threads, but gently, carefully… un-spooling them.”

Her fingers found a spot on the silver seal. She pressed lightly. The pulsing light of the magi-lock flickered, wavered, and then, with a soft hiss like deflating lungs, it dissolved into harmless motes of light. The heavy oak door swung inward with a low groan, revealing a yawning darkness.

Kaelen stared, astonished. Her magic was the polar opposite of his own—it was precise, subtle, and elegant. A scalpel to his sledgehammer.

Together, they slipped inside, Lyra sealing the door behind them with a touch that reactivated the ward. The workshop was pitch-black. A wordless pulse of intent from Lyra and the tip of her star-metal staff bloomed with a soft, cold light, like a captive moonbeam.

The scene it revealed stopped Kaelen cold.

He had expected signs of a struggle. Overturned tables, scattered scrolls, a desperate, violent kidnapping. But the workshop was immaculate. Books were neatly shelved, tools were hung in their proper places. But the familiar, comforting scent of Elara’s pipe tobacco and old parchment was gone, replaced by a sharp, sterile smell of ozone and something else… something faintly metallic and unsettlingly organic, like old blood and cold stars.

And then he saw it.

It dominated the center of the room, carved directly into the thick wooden floorboards. It was a ritual circle, but like none he had ever studied. It wasn't drawn from the traditional schools of invocation or elementalism. The lines were jagged, the geometry alien and nauseating to look at. The runes etched within it were a horrifying fusion of arcane script and symbols that seemed to writhe at the edge of his vision. At key junctures in the circle were dark, ugly stains that had soaked deep into the wood.

“This…” Kaelen breathed, his Scribe’s mind reeling. “This isn’t a warding circle. It’s not a transportation matrix… This is a gateway.”

Lyra’s light drifted towards a heavy lectern near the circle. Upon it lay a single, leather-bound journal, left open. It was Elara’s personal research log, his familiar, elegant handwriting filling the page. Kaelen rushed to it, his heart pounding a frantic, terrified rhythm. This would have the answers. This would tell him who took them.

He began to read, his silver eyes scanning the page, then the pages before it. Lyra stood silently beside him, her staff’s light illuminating the spidery script.

The early entries were academic, filled with Elara’s typical intellectual curiosity. ‘Theoretical inconsistencies in the Veil’s membrane… A quantifiable energy signature emanating from the void… A whisper, a signal, a voice in the static between worlds.’

But as Kaelen turned the pages, the tone shifted. The detached scholar became an obsessed zealot.

‘It is not a voice, but a key! A new form of energy, a power source beyond mana, beyond anything our world has ever conceived! Aethelburg could be powered for a millennium! We could step through the veil ourselves!’

Kaelen’s hands began to tremble. This was madness. This was forbidden.

He reached the final entry, dated the night of the disappearance. The handwriting was frantic, sloppy, the ink smudged as if by a shaking hand.

‘The final sequence is ready. Eliana is worried, but she trusts me. She has to. This will be my greatest gift to Aethelburg, to the world. A door to the infinite. The final calculations are complete. Just a small tear, a controlled aperture to draw forth the energy… I am about to knock on the door to forever.’

Then, a final sentence, scrawled at the bottom of the page in a jagged, panicked script that was barely recognizable.

‘A miscalculation. It’s not a door… it’s a wound. They aren’t knocking back. They’re clawing through. Gods, what have I done?’

The journal slipped from Kaelen’s numb fingers and hit the floor with a heavy thud. The truth crashed down on him, heavier than any gravestone.

His family hadn’t been taken. They weren't the first victims of the invasion.

They were the cause.

The Arch-Scribe, his mentor, his father, hadn’t been stolen away by monsters. He had invited them in.