Chapter 2: The Runes of Ruin

Chapter 2: The Runes of Ruin

Deon didn't stop running until the burn in his lungs was sharper than the fear clawing at his back. He slammed the heavy iron door of his workshop behind him, the sound echoing in the sudden, welcome silence. He slid three separate bolts into place, each one a thick chunk of steel that offered more psychological comfort than actual security. If the Warden wanted in, a door wouldn't stop it.

He leaned against the cold iron, his body trembling with adrenaline’s aftermath. A deep gash on his forearm, courtesy of a piece of flying concrete from the Warden's attack, was bleeding sluggishly. The rest of him was a map of new bruises. He had survived, but the encounter had left a scar deeper than flesh.

His workshop was his sanctuary, the only truly clean place in his life. Unlike the chaotic squalor of his outer office, this back room was a bastion of meticulous order. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with arcane texts bound in leather and iron, jars of rare reagents that glowed with faint inner light, and neatly categorized components of brass, silver, and crystal. In the center of the room sat his workbench, a slab of polished ironwood covered in delicate tools, soldering irons, and a complex Aetheric condenser that hummed with latent power. This was where Deon untangled the city’s magical knots.

He stumbled to a small basin, pumping water with a foot pedal and washing the gutter-filth and blood from his hands and face. As the water sluiced over his silver prosthetic, it came away perfectly clean, the intricate engravings on the metal impervious to grime. He stared at his reflection in a shard of polished mirror tacked to the wall. His eyes, normally just tired, were wide with the memory of those burning red embers.

It wasn't the creature's power that haunted him. He'd faced down rogue elementals and cornered sorcerers before. It was that fleeting, impossible glimpse of something human. That flicker of raw, undiluted agony in the heart of the monster. A beast doesn't feel despair. A weapon doesn't know anguish.

He had to know more. This was no longer about fifty Solars and a missing girl. His survival, his very understanding of the city's hidden currents, depended on figuring out what that thing was.

Ignoring the stinging pain in his arm, Deon moved to his workbench. He cleared a space and placed a smooth, black slate in the center. It was an Aetheric scry-slate, a tool for capturing and analyzing magical residues. He pressed the fingers of his good hand to his temple, closing his eyes and forcing his mind back into the stinking culvert.

He pushed past the terror, focusing instead with the precision of a master craftsman. He replayed the scene, frame by painstaking frame. The swing of the obsidian sword. The rattle of the chains. And the runes. He let his Aether-sight pour into the memory, seeing them not just as red lines on pale skin, but as blazing conduits of raw, violent power.

With his prosthetic hand, he began to draw. A silver stylus, connected by a thin copper wire to the Aetheric condenser, emerged from the wrist of his prosthetic. As he sketched on the slate, the stylus left behind not ink, but a perfect, glowing replica of the magical energy he had witnessed. The air crackled with miniature discharges of power.

He drew the first rune, a vicious spiral that seemed to claw at the air around it. Then another, a complex lattice of jagged lines that pulsed with a rhythm of sickening compulsion. He remembered the crude drawing Lyra had given him, the mark on her daughter’s wrist. He sketched it from memory beside the others. It was simpler, a fainter echo, but the foundational structure was the same. A brand. A claim.

For over an hour, he worked in absolute concentration, his breathing steady, his hands moving with practiced certainty. He filled the slate with the Warden’s chains, recreating the horrifying calligraphy that was etched into the creature's very being. When he was done, he sat back, the recreated runes casting a hellish red glow on his weary face.

They were intricate, powerful, and utterly alien to the common forms of Aether-craft practiced in Delrick. He rose and moved to his library, pulling down a heavy, dust-covered tome: Von Hessel’s Compendium of Binding and Warding. It was one of his mentor’s books, filled with archaic and forbidden lore.

He spent another hour cross-referencing, his finger tracing diagrams of demonic pacts and golem-craft. He found similarities in constructs of subjugation, but nothing on this scale. The magic described in the book was crude, brutal. The runes on the Warden were a masterpiece of cruelty.

Then he saw it. Tucked away in a chapter on soul-forging, a practice so vile it was thought to be purely theoretical. It wasn't an exact match, but the principles were the same. The text described runes that didn't just command the body, but hijacked the will. Runes that inflicted constant, agonizing pain as a mechanism of control. Runes that burned away identity, leaving only a hollow vessel for the master's intent.

They weren't marks of power. They were chains.

Not just the iron ones wrapped around its torso, but these glowing, crimson shackles carved into its soul.

Deon sank into his chair, the weight of the revelation hitting him like a physical blow. Every jagged line he’d copied onto the slate was a syllable in a sentence of eternal torment. The monster wasn't a willing participant; it was a prisoner in its own skin. The brutal strength, the relentless pursuit—it wasn't driven by rage, but by an unbearable, magically-enforced command. To disobey was to invite a level of suffering he couldn't even imagine.

That flicker in its eyes… it was a plea. A desperate, silent scream from whatever was left of the man inside, a prisoner looking out through the bars of a cage made of his own flesh.

The case had twisted into something new and terrifying. He wasn't hunting a monster. He was witnessing a slave. And the disappearance of Elara was not a simple abduction, but a tithe, collected by a puppet forced to do the bidding of an unseen master.

Who could create such a thing? Who in Delrick had the power and the sheer sadism to forge a living being into a weapon of such exquisite agony? The City Guard? One of the feuding Guilds? Or something older, something woven into the city’s rotten foundations?

He looked from the glowing runes on the slate to the crude sketch of the mark on Elara's wrist. It was a homing beacon. A way for the Warden to find its targets. Lyra’s daughter hadn't just been taken; she had been marked for collection.

The fifty Solars in his pocket felt like stones. The promise he hadn't made to Lyra echoed in the quiet of his workshop. This was no longer about a missing person. It was about uncovering the puppeteer who held the city’s most terrifying ghost on a leash of pure pain. And suddenly, Deon knew he couldn’t walk away. He had seen the prisoner behind the monster’s eyes, and in the corrupt, uncaring heart of Delrick, there was no one else to answer the plea.