Chapter 30 #2
“You said we were heading to the Archives,” I said, keeping my tone level. “This is a ruin. And I’m not following a stranger inside.”
I looked from the dark mouth of the tunnel back to Riven.
“I want to know who he is, Riven. And I want confirmation that this tunnel actually has an exit.”
Goran loomed in the doorway, filling the frame. He watched the exchange with solid, unblinking patience, leaving the explanations to Riven.
Riven stepped closer to me. He shifted the iron box to one arm and reached out with his free hand.
He took my hand, his fingers threading through mine. His skin held the chill of the rain, but the contact sent a jolt of warmth straight to my chest—that familiar, undeniable current.
“He’s the only reason I’m alive,” Riven said softly. The blue in his eyes was fierce, stripped of all deception. “He saved me when no one else would. Trust that.”
I looked at him. I felt the bond thrumming between us, steady and sure even in the chaos.
He trusted this man with his life. And right now, I had to trust Riven with mine.
“Okay,” I whispered.
I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, hard.
We entered the shed.
The floor was covered in rotting leaves, but Goran kicked them aside, revealing a thick iron ring set into a flagstone.
He heaved it up. No groan of rusty hinges—the stone slab moved smoothly on hidden, well-oiled gears, revealing a set of stone steps descending into pitch blackness.
“The path is below,” Goran rumbled.
Riven went first, the box held tight. I followed. Goran came last, pulling the stone slab shut above us.
The darkness was total. The air instantly changed—cold, dry, smelling of stale earth and iron.
“Light,” Goran said.
A flare of amber light erupted from his hand, cast by an old-fashioned glow-stone he had fished from his pocket. It illuminated a long, narrow tunnel walled with bricks that looked older than the city itself.
The tunnel dead-ended at a slab of strange, dull alloy that seemed to swallow the gloom.
Goran halted.
“You’ll feel a pressure,” he warned. “Do not fight it. Do not reach for your power.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The wards will interpret it as an attack,” Goran said. “And they will kill you.”
He pressed his palm flat against the metal surface.
Clunk. Hiss.
The door swung open.
The Manor was gone and Varessia’s hunters were closing in, leaving us entirely dependent on a stranger who had materialised from the fog. But Riven trusted this man with his life, and the answers I desperately needed were waiting behind that door. I took a breath, the only way left was forward.
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 hung in 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 to move. 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.
Goran’s black eyes swept over my movement, my stride.
“You walk like him,” he said, glancing at me. “Like Eamon. Same heavy heel. Same way of checking the corners before you turn.”
My throat tightened. “You knew him?”
“I knew them both,” Goran said, facing forward again. “Liora was one of us. The brightest of us. She brought the Archives here when the surface became too dangerous. And Eamon… Eamon was the wall she stood behind.”
He tapped the stone wall of the tunnel.
“I walked this path with them many times. You have his gait, girl. But you have her fire.”
I forced down the lump in my throat. Blood hadn’t forged me, but they had. Even down here, in the dark, my parents had left footprints for me to follow.
We reached the end of the passage. It terminated at a massive, circular blast door. It looked like the entrance to a bank vault built by giants, etched with runes that made my eyes water just looking at them.
Goran stepped up to a rusted iron wheel set into the stone and heaved.
Gears ground within the thick walls. The floor vibrated. The doors groaned open, revealing a vast, cavernous space.
I moved inside and stopped.
It was an atrium the size of a cathedral, carved directly into the bedrock. Walkways crisscrossed high above, lit by amber lanterns that cast long, shifting shadows against the stone.
To my left and right, broad dark archways led into the rock, hinting at a network of chambers branching off the main hall. Directly ahead, at the far end of the hexagonal cavern, a cavernous open archway loomed, leading deeper into the stronghold.
It was a fortress. A city beneath the city.
But it was empty. The quiet was total, speaking of a population that had dwindled to almost nothing.
Except for one figure standing in the centre of the room. She was waiting for us.
She wore a long grey dress, her pale hair loose around her shoulders. Her luminous eyes were fixed on the door.
Aelira.
The City Archivist. The woman who had known and worked with my mother, and the one who had pointed me towards the truth before I could even see it.
I looked at Riven.
The tension drained out of him. He hadn’t known Goran was leading us to the deep sanctuary, but the sight pulled him back from the brink.
Aelira offered a wistful smile.
“Selene, Riven,” she said. “Welcome.”
She held his gaze, the shared memory of his rescue hanging between them.
“It has been a long time since you stood here with us.”