We crossed the boundary.
The sensation hit me instantly—a sudden, ruthless hollowing. My knees buckled.
It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room, dragging the magic out of my veins with it. The low, constant current of the power I’d just started to control was swiftly smothered. Muted. Gone.
I gasped, grabbing Riven’s arm to stay upright.
He was swaying too, his face grey, eyes wide and unfocused. The shadows that usually clung to him were stripped away, leaving him looking terrifyingly human.
We were dazed. Weakened.
“Breathe,” Goran ordered. His voice sounded distant.
“What… is this?” I choked out.
“Flicker-Kill wards,” Goran said calmly. He stepped past us, unaffected, closing the heavy door. “Unknown magic enters, it gets grounded. Intruders get dead.”
He looked at us, watching us struggle to find our footing.
“We’ll key you in later,” he said, his voice gruff but not unkind. “Once the wardstone accepts your signatures, you walk free. No holding hands. For now, you stay close.”
I leaned against the damp stone, waiting for the world to stop spinning. My magic felt bruised, curled into a tight ball deep in my chest, afraid to move.
“Where are we?” I said, eyeing the reinforced plating of the walls. “We’re dozens of metres under the bedrock. At least.”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Goran said. He started walking down the corridor.
“I want answers,” I called out, stopping dead. “Not riddles. If we’re walking into a cage, I want to know who holds the key.”
Goran stopped. He looked back at me, black eyes unreadable. Then he shifted his focus to Riven.
Riven leaned against the wall, clutching the iron box like a lifeline. He looked at the large man, and for a moment, the mask was gone. He looked like a boy who had just found safety.
“He’s the one who pulled me out of the lab twenty-three years ago.”
The confession hungin the stale air, more suffocating than the iron walls pressing in on us.
I looked at Goran. He turned without a word and began walking deeper into the dark. His presence here, guiding us through the kill-zone of his own home, was acknowledgment enough.
I pushed myself off the wall. I was still shaking, the nausea of the magical suppression rolling in my stomach, but I forced my legs tomove. Riven fell in beside me, his hand white-knuckled on the canvas-wrapped box.
We walked in silence. The tunnel seemed endless, a throat of iron and stone burrowing deep under the city. The air was cold, recycling the breath of centuries.
“If you saved him,” I said to Goran’s back, my voice echoing, “why isn’t he with you?”
The big man kept walking, though his spine stiffened. “He made a choice.”
“He offered me safety,” Riven said. His tone was rough, stripped of its usual detachment by the damp air. “He showed me how to strangle the power so Korenth couldn’t track it. He wanted me to stay down here. To hide.”
Riven stared at the riveted iron walls. “But I refused to cower. I wanted to fight back.”
“He chose to stand beside them,” Goran stated, void of judgment. “To wait for the right moment.”
“I used his lessons to infiltrate,” Riven said. “To become exactly what Korenth needed, until I could gut them from the inside.”
“And look where it got you,” Goran replied. “Bleeding out on a precipice while the sky burned.”
Riven offered no defence. We walked on. The tunnel began to widen. The iron plating gave way to weathered, carved stone—pillars rising into the gloom, marked with sigils that were vibrating with faint, steady power.
