Chapter 32 Kaelren
Kaelren
Day one in the tunnels, and I already wanted to kill something.
The passages were narrow, the air thick with earth and age and ancient magic. Root-carved tunnels that remembered everyone who’d walked through them. Every rebel who’d fled. Every king who’d hunted. Every iteration’s desperate push toward failure.
My team moved behind me in a single file—Sarnyx, Vashael, Nimor, Eltrien. Four fighters who’d followed me into this darkness without hesitation. And Peeble, on my shoulder, glowing faintly to light our way.
I shoved thoughts of Bryx aside. Whatever he was doing, wherever he’d gone—I couldn’t afford to care right now. Elle was ahead. The seed was ahead. Everything else was just noise.
“Hold,” I said, stopping abruptly.
The others froze. Ahead, barely visible in the dim light, something glinted across the passage.
“Wire,” Nimor confirmed, becoming shadow to investigate. “Thin. Almost invisible. Detection spell attached.”
“Can you disable it?”
“Give me ten minutes.”
We waited while he worked, pressed against tunnel walls that pulsed like living things. Through the bond—muffled, distant—I felt Elle. Awake. In pain. Fighting to stay conscious during whatever fresh horror Auradelle had planned for today.
“Hold on,” I sent, knowing she probably couldn’t hear me through the suppression. “We’re coming.”
“Done,” Nimor called softly.
We moved forward, careful not to touch anything. Found two more wire traps in the next hour, both designed to alert every guard in the Heartspire. Both disabled by Nimor’s shadow work.
“They knew someone would try this route,” Vashael observed.
“Good,” I said. “Let them waste resources on useless threats.”
We pressed deeper. The passages branched, twisted, doubled back on themselves. Sometimes I swore we were moving in circles, but the bond kept pulling me forward, unerring as north.
Then the first real obstacle hit.
The tunnel opened into a chamber, and I knew immediately something was wrong. The floor was too smooth. The walls too perfectly curved. And there, carved into stone, was a pattern that made my corruption recoil.
“Binding circle,” Eltrien said, approaching the edge. “Designed specifically for Root-touched and corrupted. Step inside and you’re trapped.”
“How do we get past it?” Sarnyx asked.
“We don’t. This is the only way forward.” Eltrien studied the runes, his marks flaring bright blue. “All the other passages lead nowhere. They converge here.”
A bottleneck. Exactly what you’d design if you knew someone was coming.
“What if we trigger it deliberately?” I asked. “Step in, break it from inside?”
“That’s insane,” Vashael said.
“Got a better idea?”
Silence.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “My corruption is what it’s designed to catch. Better me than all of us.”
“Kaelren—”
“If I can’t break it, find another way. Don’t waste time trying to save me.”
Before anyone could argue, I stepped into the circle.
The binding hit like a physical blow. Runes activated, power wrapped around me like chains, and the circle tried to pull the corruption from my body and trap it in stone.
My legs buckled. Vision went white. Every nerve screamed as the binding dug into my essence, trying to pin me here until I died or went mad.
“Now!” Peeble shouted. “While it’s focused on him!”
The little beetle leapt from my shoulder, and suddenly they were glowing. Bright, blinding light that made the binding runes scream in protest. Peeble landed on one of the key runes, and I watched as their form changed, expanded, became something that was more memory than beetle.
For a moment, I saw them as they truly were. Not a bug. An echo. A ghost. A fragment of Elle from the first iteration.
“I’ve disabled this stupid circle sixteen other times,” they said, and their voice was Elle’s voice, layered with exhaustion. “You’d think someone would change the pattern.”
The runes shattered.
I collapsed forward, gasping. The binding’s remnants still clung to me, making my marks burn, but I was free.
“It’s true. You’re her,” I said when I could speak. “The first Elle.”
“Was her. Am her. It’s complicated.” Peeble hopped back onto my shoulder, still glowing brighter than before. “The point is, I’ve seen sixteen versions of you walk these tunnels. Sixteen versions die trying to save sixteen versions of Elle. Every single time, it ends with both of you destroyed.”
“Not this time.”
“That’s what you always say.”
We moved on. The tunnels grew warmer, the air thicker. My corruption responded to something ahead, spreading another inch with each step. Soon I’d be more monster than man.
Didn’t matter. Elle was ahead.
We encountered our first guards six hours into the journey. Nimor spotted them first—four Bloomguard patrolling a wider section of tunnel ahead.
“I can’t use corruption,” I said quietly. “It’ll flare like a signal fire. Alert every guard in the Heartspire to exactly where we are.”
“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” Sarnyx said, thorns extending. “Quick and silent.”
We set up an ambush in a narrow passage. When the guards rounded the corner, we were ready.
Sarnyx struck first, thorns piercing through armor gaps. Vashael’s poisons dropped two before they could scream. Nimor pulled one into shadow—I didn’t see what happened to him. Eltrien did something with his marks that made the last guard simply stop, frozen like a statue.
“Hide them,” I ordered.
We dragged the bodies into a side passage, covering them with loose stone. Not perfect, but maybe good enough.
“That was too easy,” Vashael said what we were all thinking.
“They weren’t expecting us this deep yet,” I replied. “That’ll change.”
We moved faster now, checking every surface for traps. Found three more binding circles, all disabled by Peeble. Found pressure plates that would collapse the ceiling. Found sections of floor that would drop into pit traps below.
And all the while, Elle’s pain pulsed through the bond. Constant. Relentless. A reminder of what was happening while we crawled through darkness.
Eight hours in, we stopped to rest in a chamber where the tunnel widened. I forced down food that tasted like ash.
“How much further?” Sarnyx asked while checking her thorns.
“Maybe halfway,” I guessed based on the bond strength. “But the second half will be harder.”
“How much harder?”
“Expect—”
The pain hit.
Not my pain—Elle’s, flooding through the bond with enough force to drop me to my knees.
I felt my back arch, felt my throat try to scream, felt my marks burn like they were being carved fresh.
But worse than the physical pain was the emotional bleed—her fear, her rage, her desperate attempt to hold onto herself while Auradelle pulled her apart.
My corruption exploded outward.
It wasn’t conscious. The rage and pain simply tore through every control I’d built. Black veins spread from where I knelt, killing everything they touched. Stone crumbled. Moss shriveled. Even the air seemed to rot.
“Kaelren!” Vashael’s voice cut through the haze. “Control it! You’ll bring the tunnel down!”
But I couldn’t control it. The corruption was rage given form, and that rage had a target. Every guard between me and Elle. Every wall separating us. Every second that kept me from reaching her.
The team backed away as my corruption spread further, creating a circle of death twenty feet across. But Peeble stayed.
“I can feel her too,” they said quietly. “Through our connection. She’s fighting. But he’s testing her limits.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I growled.
“In the previous iterations, this was the moment you lost. This exact moment. You felt her pain, let the corruption take you completely, and by the time you reached her, there wasn’t an unmarked place on your body. You killed everyone, yes. But you also killed the possibility of saving her.”
That cut through the rage like a blade. “What are you saying?”
“Channel it. Don’t let it take you. Use it.” Peeble’s antennae twitched.
I took a deep breath, and with all the self-control I could muster, I pulled back in the corruption. The strain visible through the veins bulging in my neck. I would not fail Elle.
Twelve hours into the journey, the tunnel changed. The stone beneath my feet went from rough-carved to smooth, like we’d crossed an invisible threshold. The temperature dropped, and I could taste metal on my tongue.
“This is it,” I said, feeling the pull Elle had described. “The branching passage.”
But I didn’t see it. None of us did.
We searched the chamber, running hands along walls, checking for hidden seams or pressure points. Nothing. The tunnel continued straight ahead—the only visible path.
“It’s here,” I insisted. “I can feel it.”
Vashael moved to the center of the chamber and exhaled, not breath, but pollen. A cloud of it, shimmering faintly in the moss-light, spreading through the air like dust motes. We watched it drift, settle, disperse.
Then we saw it.
A draft. Subtle, almost imperceptible, but there—pulling the pollen toward what looked like a natural rock formation jutting from the wall. Just a bulge of stone, unremarkable, the kind of thing you’d walk past without a second glance.
Vashael approached it, reached out.
Her hand went through.
“Illusion,” she said, pulling back. “Old magic. It’s not hiding the passage—it’s making you not want to look at it.”
That’s why the guards had never found it. Not because it was sealed or locked, but because the Root itself had wrapped it in disinterest. You could stand right in front of it and never think to reach out.
I stepped forward and pushed through the illusion. The stone rippled like water, and suddenly I was on the other side, a narrow descending passage, real and solid.
The others stopped. We’d discussed this at camp—only Eltrien, Peeble, and I would go forward. The rest would hold this position, guard our backs.
“How long?” Sarnyx asked.
“However long it takes,” I said. “Don’t let anyone past you.”