Chapter 5: A Crack in the Covenant

Chapter 5: A Crack in the Covenant

The Architect’s face was burned into Deon’s memory, a mask of cold, aristocratic cruelty. He was no longer just digging; he was marked. His workshop, once a fortress, now felt like a tomb he was waiting to be sealed in. He had stripped the forged rune from his hand with a painful alchemical solvent, but the phantom sensation remained—a cold spot on his skin, a ghostly link to the city’s dark heart.

Kaelen’s plea for death echoed in the oppressive silence, a counterpoint to Cassian’s apocalyptic warning. Kill the Warden, and the city bleeds. Let him live, and a good man suffers eternal torment. It was a perfect, hellish trap, and Deon was pacing its floor. Every path led to ruin.

He turned to the only source of knowledge that might hold an answer beyond the conventional: the forbidden collection. The books his mentor, Elias Thorne, had kept locked away in a lead-lined chest. These weren’t the standard texts on Aether-craft; they were grimoires filled with heretical theories, studies of soul-magic, and dangerous whispers from the edge of the Fold. Elias had warned him against them, his eyes serious. “Some knowledge costs more than you’re willing to pay, son.”

Now, Deon was willing to pay anything.

For two days, he worked, fueled by stale nutrient paste and a burning desperation. He cross-referenced texts written in dead languages, his silver hand immune to the corrosive inks and decaying paper. He found endless treatises on control, domination, and soul-destruction—all echoes of the Architects' vile work. But he found nothing on how to undo it. The magic of the Sanguine Covenant was too old, too fundamental. It wasn't an enchantment laid over a man; it was woven into the very fabric of his soul. You couldn't cut the threads without unraveling the man entirely.

Just as hope began to fray, he found it. Tucked into the glossaries of a brittle, thousand-year-old scroll, was a single, cryptic passage. It didn't speak of severing a bond, but of overwriting it. It described a theoretical ritual, a form of sympathetic magic of the highest and most dangerous order. It called it the Cor-Vinculum. The Heart-Rune.

The theory was both elegant and terrifying. Instead of trying to shatter the powerful runes controlling Kaelen, the ritual would superimpose a new one, a master rune that would hijack the existing network of control. It would be like replacing the general of an army without a single soldier knowing. The old runes would still be there, still connected to the Covenant, but they would take their orders from a new source.

Deon’s heart hammered in his chest. This was it. A crack in the Covenant. A way to free Kaelen from the Architects without breaking the pact that held the city together. He could seize control of the puppet himself.

Then he read the price.

The Heart-Rune wasn't a one-way street. To overwrite a bond forged in a soul, the new bond had to be just as absolute. The ritual would forge an unbreakable link between the caster and the subject. Their life-forces would become intertwined, their wills connected. If Kaelen felt pain, Deon would feel its echo. If one of them died, the other would follow within minutes. It was a shared existence, or a shared death. A prison for two.

He sank back in his chair, the scroll slipping from his grasp. The choice had become even more monstrous. To save a man he barely knew, he would have to shackle himself to him for life, risking not just a quick death in a failed ritual, but an agonizing one if Kaelen was ever recaptured or destroyed. His pragmatism screamed at him. This was suicide. This was insanity. He was a survivor, not a martyr.

But then he saw Kaelen’s face in his mind's eye, the sheer, undiluted agony of a man begging for an end. He saw the Architect’s smug, dismissive expression. The city had created this injustice, and it was content to let it fester in the dark. If he walked away, who would ever stand for the man named Kaelen? Who would ever fight the Architects? His cynicism was a shield he had carried for years, but now it felt thin and useless against the fire of this righteous anger.

The internal war left him drained, directionless. He paced the workshop, his gaze falling on the lead-lined chest that had held Elias’s books. He had emptied it of its grimoires, but his hand still hovered over the lid. A faint, residual trace of Aether, familiar and unique, clung to the iron lock. Elias’s touch. For years, Deon had accepted the official story: his mentor, his only real family, had died in an Aetheric experiment gone wrong. But now, knowing what he knew about the Fold and the Covenant, that story felt too simple, too convenient.

Driven by a sudden, desperate instinct, he ran his silver fingers over the inside of the chest. The metal was smooth, seamless. But his Aether-sight saw what his eyes could not. A hairline crack in the energy field. A false bottom. With a click of his prosthetic’s mechanisms, a thin, sharp pick extended from his index finger. He slid it into the seam and pried. With a soft groan of protest, the bottom panel lifted away.

Beneath it lay a single object: a slim, leather-bound journal, protected by an oilcloth wrap. It was Elias Thorne’s personal log.

Deon’s breath hitched. He lifted it out with a reverence he hadn't felt in years. The pages were filled with Elias’s familiar, spidery script. He started from the beginning. The early entries were academic, full of theories about the Fold and the strange energy spikes he was tracking beneath the city. But the tone grew more urgent, more fearful.

The disappearances in the Gutters are not random, one entry read. There is a pattern. A harvest. The energy signatures are ancient, predatory. The city is paying a price for its existence.

Deon’s blood ran cold. Elias had been on the same path. He had discovered the Tithe, the Sanguine Covenant, the Architects. He wasn’t the victim of a random accident. He was a casualty of the same war Deon was now fighting. The disappearance that had haunted Deon for a decade was no longer a mystery; it was a murder.

His hands shaking, he flipped to the final entry. The date was the day before Elias had vanished. The handwriting was frantic, rushed, the ink smudged.

They know I’m close. The Architects are not just men; they are jailors. The Warden is their key, but he is also a prisoner. I’ve seen him. The torment in his eyes… there must be a way to break the control without shattering the dam. I think I’ve found it. A desperate, foolish gamble, but the only one left. A resonant bond… a shared soul… a Heart-Rune.

And there, on the final page, drawn with a stark and desperate clarity, was the schematic. It was a complex diagram of interlocking circles and arcane script, depicting two human figures linked by a blazing rune on the chest. It was the Cor-Vinculum. The very same ritual he had just discovered.

Deon stared at the drawing, his silver hand tracing the lines his mentor had penned in his last hours. This wasn't a choice he had stumbled upon by chance. This was a legacy. A final, desperate plan passed from a dead man to his student. The path to saving Kaelen had been laid out for him years ago, waiting in the dark. And Deon knew, with the chilling certainty of fate, that he was meant to walk it.