Chapter 10: The Wizard's Truth

Chapter 10: The Wizard's Truth

The process of becoming human again was a grinding, agonizing reversal. It was not a release, but a compression; forcing an infinite, chaotic thing back into a finite, fragile container. Bones snapped back into their proper places with wet, sickening cracks. The two monstrous extra limbs dissolved, not retracting but being unmade, a process of self-vivisection that left phantom aches in his ravaged back. The Umbral sigils receded from his skin, retreating to the cage of his forearm, the retreat feeling like his very soul was being flayed.

When it was over, Alex was on his hands and knees, gasping on the cold obsidian floor. He was himself again, but the psychic echo of the monster lingered—a hungry, chittering thing in the back of his mind.

He risked a glance at Lyra. She was on her feet, her expression a shattered mosaic of horror, pity, and a profound, unbreachable distance. The fear was still there, etched into the lines around her eyes, but it was now tempered with a terrible understanding. She had seen the true nature of the power he had stolen. She had seen the abyss.

“We have to finish this,” he rasped, forcing himself to his feet. His body screamed in protest, but the will to see this through, to finally confront the architect of it all, was stronger than the pain.

“That… thing…” Lyra started, her voice barely a whisper. “Is that what you are now, Alex?”

“It’s what I have to be to win,” he said, the lie tasting like ash in his mouth. He couldn’t tell her that he hadn’t been in control, that the monster had worn him like a suit. He couldn’t afford to be weak. Not now.

He turned from her and faced the grand archway at the far end of the chamber, the one Kaelen had emerged from. It led up, into the heart of the Council’s power. Lyra hesitated for only a moment before falling into step behind him, a silent, wary ghost at his side. Their alliance, forged in desperation, had been cracked by his transformation, and he didn’t know if it could ever be repaired.

They ascended a spiral staircase that seemed to twist through space itself, the obsidian walls giving way to ancient, book-lined shelves that stretched into an impossible, vaulted darkness. They had arrived at the Athenaeum, but this was a different section—the Wizard’s personal sanctum.

And there he was.

Magus Valerius sat upon a simple, high-backed obsidian chair in the centre of a vast, circular library. He was not surrounded by guards or crackling wards. He was simply waiting, his hands steepled before him, an ancient, leather-bound tome open on the lectern at his side. He looked exactly as he had in Alex’s memories: imposing, ancient, and radiating an aura of absolute, unshakable calm. He looked up as they entered, his piercing eyes showing no surprise, only a deep, profound weariness.

“So,” Valerius said, his voice the quiet rustle of old parchment. “The rabid dog has finally slipped its leash and savaged the groundskeeper. I trust you are proud of your work, Alexander.”

Alex’s rage, which had been banked to a low ember by his exhaustion, roared back to life. “Your ritual is broken, Valerius. Your plan to become a god is over.” He took a step forward, his hands clenching, the shadows around him writhing in sympathy with his anger.

Lyra put a restraining hand on his arm. “It’s over, Magus. Stand down. Answer for what you’ve done.”

Valerius looked from Alex to Lyra, a flicker of something akin to pity in his gaze. “Oh, my poor, foolish children,” he said softly. “You still think this was about power? You think I would risk the sanctity of the Veil, the very stability of this world, for something as vulgar as deification?”

He closed the book before him with a soft thud. He didn’t rise. He didn’t prepare a spell. He just watched them, his expression one of immense, tragic disappointment.

“I am not going to fight you, boy,” he said, his focus entirely on Alex. “There is no point. You have already won. And in doing so, you have doomed us all.”

The statement was so contrary to what Alex expected that it stopped him cold. He had come here for a final battle, a cataclysmic duel of shadow and light that would decide the fate of London. He was prepared for spells, for combat, for anything but this quiet, crushing finality.

“What are you talking about?” Alex demanded. “We stopped you!”

“Stopped me?” Valerius gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “You have completed the very catastrophe I have spent the last two years—and a lifetime before that—trying to prevent. You think you stole a weapon from this council two years ago, did you not? A source of immense power to use for your own righteous crusade?”

He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Alex’s. “You fool. You didn’t steal a weapon. You stole the lock.”

The words made no sense. “The lock?”

“The Heart of the Umbra was never a tool for conquest,” Valerius explained, his voice taking on the cadence of a lecturer explaining a fundamental, horrifying truth. “It was a seal. A key turned in the most ancient and terrible prison this world has ever known. A prison that holds a single inmate. A consciousness from before the stars were right. A being of infinite hunger that we, the Concealed Council, have guarded for millennia.”

Every word was a hammer blow, systematically dismantling Alex’s entire reality.

“The power you wield, the beautiful, chaotic, unmaking energy of the Umbra… its only purpose was to be the one thing that could contain the prisoner. It is the antithesis of creation, the cosmic concept of nothingness given form. And it was the substance of the cage.”

He gestured vaguely at the city around them. “This ritual, this blasphemy you fought so hard to destroy, was not a ritual of ascension. It was a desperate, clumsy, brutal attempt to do the impossible. It was an attempt to rebuild the lock you shattered. I was corrupting the ley lines, yes, but only to gather enough raw material to forge a new, inferior seal before the prisoner fully awakens.”

The truth slammed into Alex with the force of a physical blow. The Whisper-Wight, a creature of entropic decay. The Gloom Hounds, crafted from the shadows of condemned souls. The anchors, siphoning and corrupting magical energy. It had all been part of a desperate, monstrous act of magical engineering. Valerius hadn’t been building a throne; he’d been trying to patch a hole in the dam.

And Alex, in his righteous, guilt-ridden fury, had just dynamited it.

“You… you’re lying,” Alex stammered, but the words were hollow. The truth resonated with every fibre of his being. It explained everything: the Council’s utter desperation to retrieve the Umbra, Kaelen’s fanaticism, the secrecy.

“To speak of the prisoner is to feed it,” Valerius said quietly. “To know its nature is to give it a foothold in your mind. Secrecy was the first and most important layer of its prison. A layer you tore down because you were too arrogant to believe that some things are forbidden for a reason.”

Lyra stared at Valerius, her face pale as death. “All this time… we were… wrong?” She had betrayed her oaths, her comrades, her entire life, to help Alex fight a righteous war against a tyrant. But there was no tyrant. There was only a doomed jailer, and they had just murdered his deputies and destroyed his tools.

As if on cue, a low, sub-audible hum began to vibrate through the very stones of the library. It wasn't a sound one heard, but a pressure one felt in the bones, in the teeth. Ancient tomes rattled on their shelves. The faint, magical glow from various artifacts flickered and died.

A tremor shook the entire building, deep and violent.

Valerius’s calm finally broke. A line of sweat beaded on his temple. “It stirs,” he whispered, his eyes wide with a dawning, cosmic terror. “You have destroyed the last of my pathetic wards. You have knocked on its door. And now… it is answering.”

Alex looked down at his own hands. The hands that had stolen the lock. The hands that had dismantled the last hope of keeping it shut. The Umbral sigil on his forearm pulsed with a faint, sickly violet light, no longer a mark of his power, but a brand of his failure. The guilt he had carried for two years was a flickering candle flame compared to the raging inferno of this new, world-ending culpability.

His quest for atonement hadn’t saved anyone. It had just damned everyone.