Chapter 45

Chapter 45: Chapter 45

Hi everyone, your favourite author here. I put a lot of work into the next two Chapters, so I am asking for a reward. What reward shall you say? Well, go and review the book , we are facing dark times here, i shall continue to write, but your support makes me write more. That would help a lot. Thank you, and enjoy the Chapter.

Oh, and drop some power stones while you are at it.

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The bronze was cold against my cheek.

I didn’t open my eyes right away. Just lay there across the threshold — torn muscle, cracked armor, blood everywhere it shouldn’t be. Behind me the antechamber had gone dead quiet, nothing left in it but the faint tick of the halberd wielder’s armor cooling on the obsidian.

I made myself breathe. Every pull of air felt like swallowing glass. My left arm hung dead at my side, no feeling in it at all. Whatever the Ember had been running on was gone — cold ash where a furnace used to be. My body had started eating itself just to keep my heart going.

I opened my eyes.

No fungus glow here, no eternal brazier. This light was different — harsher, colder, almost clinical. Raw quartz veins ran through the ceiling, shot through with whatever the Shaman had done to corrupt his own magic, throwing a pale, sick-white glare over the whole room.

I dragged myself forward, the sword back to being a crutch, hauling my own dead weight over the threshold.

The air here was foul in a different way than the tunnels. Not rot, not stagnant water. Ammonia. Oxidized iron. Old marrow gone to powder. A slaughterhouse sealed shut for centuries and never once aired out.

I got my knees under me, boots sliding in the dust.

The chamber opened into something like a laboratory — heavy iron workbenches bolted to the floor, lined with rusted tools, bone saws, blackened vats of what used to be alchemical resin. But the real horror was built into the walls around it.

Cages. Hundreds of them.

Crude iron bars, stacked three tiers high, running the whole curve of the room. I limped toward the first row, dragging the sword behind me.

The skeletons upstairs had only ever been guards. This was where the actual work happened.

First cage, eye level: a subterranean serpent, coiled, dead, jaw locked open in whatever scream it died on. He’d flayed it alive and tried fusing iron plates straight to its spine, each one carved with the same artificial runes from his journal. It hadn’t worked. Whatever he’d forced into it had burned the creature from the inside out, left nothing behind but charred scale and melted metal.

I moved on. Breath coming shorter with every step.

Next: a mountain cat, skull cracked open to fit some kind of glowing core into the bone. Its own body had rejected it outright, as something foreign — I could see where it had torn its claws down to nothing against the bars before its heart finally quit.

Row after row. Cage after cage. Snakes, cats, rodents, things too mutated to have a name anymore.

He’d been hunting for the right vessel — something that could carry what the Empire had by blood alone. Every swamp predator he’d tried had failed the same way. Too violent a burn, too much heat, nothing built to survive it. Every cage down this wall was a dead end, and every dead end had died screaming.

My vision tilted. Dizziness dropped me to one knee before I even felt it coming.

I caught myself on the sword, forehead against the cold bars of an empty cage. This was it, I remember thinking. No adrenaline left to run on. Couldn’t climb back up those stairs if I wanted to, couldn’t fight off anything else that came looking. This room was as far as I was going.

Then something cut through the quiet.

Faint. Soft. Rhythmic.

Swish. Tap.

Nothing like the dead weight of a skeleton’s footsteps, nothing like the wet click of the insects. Something almost delicate.

I snapped my head up — muscles screaming at the movement — and forced myself onto my feet, sword still gripped tight. The sound led me to the far end of the lab, to a single cage set apart on a raised stone dais.

I limped toward it, boots leaving bloody prints behind me.

This cage wasn’t like the others. Silver lined the bars, and the lock was some intricate arrangement of gears, untouched by rust — like it had never had the chance to age. Even the air felt warmer here, none of the sterile cold hanging over the rest of the room.

Three paces out, I raised the sword one-handed, shaking, and braced for whatever the Shaman’s last experiment might have become — something stitched together out of bone and borrowed power, feeding on its own ruined flesh just to stay alive down here.

Tap-tap.

I stepped into the light around the dais and looked in.

No monster.

A bird sat perched on a rusted crossbar. Small. A falcon, built clean and perfect — grey plumage, sharp black-and-white patterning along the wingtips and tail. Not a feather out of place, nothing about it touched by the decay eating everything else in this room.

It was alive.

Somewhere under all the trauma, whatever was left of my old logical mind tried to object. No water in that cage, no food, and the Shaman had been dead for centuries. None of it should’ve been possible. And yet there it sat, chest rising and falling, calm as anything.

I stepped closer. Sword still up.

It didn’t flinch. Didn’t screech, didn’t throw itself against the bars. Just turned its head and fixed me with a pair of black eyes that looked a lot more aware than they had any right to be.

Except it wasn’t looking at me. Not my face, not the blood soaking my tunic.

It was looking at the sword.

Head tilted, gaze locked dead on the steel.

Then the blade started to vibrate in my hand. Not the hard, violent shock I used to drop enemies — this was low, resonant, like striking crystal with a tuning fork.

The runes lit up on their own, no command from me at all. But they didn’t throw off the usual wild sparks. They just glowed — steady, calm, a deep sapphire that held.

The falcon let out a soft, trilling chirp and lifted its left wing.

Carved into the skin underneath, glowing that same sapphire, sat an identical rune.

He hadn’t failed after all. Out of every cage in this room — every screaming, burned-out dead end — this was the one time it had worked. A stable rune, in a living body, and it was answering mine like it had been waiting for me specifically.

The moment the two lights touched, the distance between us just stopped mattering. Something locked into place — a tether, invisible, absolute — and the cold dead space in my chest caught a spark for the first time since the fight upstairs.

It wasn’t attacking me.

It was holding me together.

The resonance ran straight past my ruined Ember and fed power directly into whatever was left of me. The shaking in my muscles stopped cold. The pain in my arm dulled down to almost nothing, torn vessels sealing shut under a rush of heat that wasn’t even mine to begin with.

I lowered the sword. It kept humming, soft, in time with my own pulse.

I stepped up onto the dais. Didn’t bother looking for a key — just pressed my palm to the silver gears and pushed whatever heat I had left straight into the metal. The silver gave almost at once, pins melting loose inside the mechanism.

The door swung open with a soft creak.

I didn’t reach in. Just stood there, breathing steady for the first time in days.

The falcon hopped down off its perch, moved like it owned the place — unhurried, almost arrogant about it — and stopped right at the edge of the open door. Looked up at me. Waited.

I raised my right arm and offered the back of my bloodied gauntlet.

It stepped on, talons finding the leather, wings flaring once — the rune under its feathers flashing bright in the dim light — before it settled in against my forearm like it had always been there.

I looked around at the ruined cages. At the tunnel behind me, still thick with bone dust and the wreckage of everything I’d killed to get here. Still miles under the surface. Still cut off from the 7th. Still surrounded by every kind of death this place had to offer.

But with that steady warmth pulsing up through my arm and into my chest, the weight of being alone down here finally broke.

I wasn’t by myself anymore.

"Astra," I said. My voice came out rough, hoarse in the quiet.

The falcon answered with a short, sharp chirp — something almost metallic in it — and tightened her grip on the gauntlet.