Chapter 18 #2
"The Solar-Crest girl was meant to die cleanly," Morne’s voice continued. "Her death would shatter her father's coalition on the High Council."
Vael stared at the hologram, her face an unreadable mask. She was listening to her own death warrant being discussed like a line item on a budget.
But then, the log played something they hadn't heard before. The terminal contained the private, encrypted files that Morne had been reviewing during the conversation.
The hologram shifted. The image of the High Proctor vanished, replaced by a massive, scrolling schematic of Spireheart Academy.
"You grow sentimental, Vance," Morne’s voice echoed over the schematic. "Do not forget the foundation of our longevity. We do not run a school. We run a harvester."
The holographic blueprint zoomed out. It showed the academy sitting atop the mountain. But then, the blueprint highlighted a massive, terrifying shape buried deep in the earth beneath the school. It was the Leviathan.
"The beast requires constant sedation," Morne’s voice preached, cold and clinical. "If it wakes, it will tear the Dragontooth Mountains apart. To keep it asleep while we siphon its aether-tar to sustain our immortality, we must feed it."
The blueprint zoomed in on the massive brass chalices at the academy gates. The chalices Riven had scrubbed every morning.
"The Tithe of Vitality keeps the surface quiet," Morne explained. "But the true sedative is the raw, violent kinetic energy of human death. The Crucible is not a testing ground. It is a digestive tract."
Riven felt the blood drain entirely from his face.
The exams. The brutal, lethal combat trials where dozens of initiates died every semester. It wasn't about forging the strongest warriors. It wasn't about martial perfection.
They were feeding teenagers to a monster.
"The Solar-Crest lineage understands the cost of power," Morne’s voice continued, a dark, cynical amusement coloring his tone. "Why do you think Lord Solar-Crest sent his favored daughter into the meat grinder? He didn't want a champion. He wanted an extended lease on his youth."
The hologram flashed. A document appeared in the air.
It was a formal, arcane contract. It detailed the deliberate, scheduled assassination of Vael during the mid-term exams, in exchange for a fifty-year extension on a massive aether-siphon reserved exclusively for the Solar-Crest estate.
At the bottom of the glowing blue document was a signature, sealed in golden wax.
Vael stared at the hologram.
She stared at her father's signature.
The silence in the cavern was absolute, save for the hum of the broken terminal. Riven could not breathe. Carys covered her mouth with her hands, tears welling behind her cracked glasses.
They had all believed they were victims of a flawed system. They were wrong. The system was functioning perfectly. The academy was a slaughterhouse, carefully managed by butchers who traded their own children for a few extra decades of life.
The pale blue light of the hologram flickered and died, plunging the cavern back into the dim violet glow of Carys’s crystal.
Vael did not cry.
The shock, the grief, the profound, world-ending betrayal did not manifest as tears.
Riven watched as the dying girl's face underwent a terrifying transformation.
The fragile vulnerability of a crushed victim vanished completely.
Her jaw locked. Her golden eyes, previously dimming with impending death, suddenly flared with a cold, absolute, terrifying wrath.
It was a hatred so pure it felt like a physical heat in the freezing air.
"My father sold me for a longer life," Vael whispered. The words were perfectly calm, utterly devoid of panic.
She looked up at Riven.
"Architect," Vael said, her voice dropping into a lethal, venomous rasp.
"You are going to get this rock off me. You are going to give me back my halberd.
And then I am going to climb the steps of the High Tower and I am going to separate High Proctor Morne's head from his shoulders.
And when my father attends the funeral, I will kill him too. "
Riven stared into her burning eyes.
The crushing, suffocating guilt that had paralyzed him since the fall simply evaporated.
It was burned away by a sudden, answering fury.
He wasn't guilty. He was angry. He was angry for the sweeps who were treated like trash.
He was angry for the initiates who died thinking they were heroes. He was angry at the mountain.
"I lost the sync," Riven said, his voice hard, matching her resolve. "The Lexicon is dead."
SQUELCH. CRACK.
The sound was deafening. It came from the darkness directly behind them.
Carys whipped her head around, her violet focus crystal illuminating the gloom.
Fifty yards away, the shadows parted.
The Leviathan dragged itself into the light.
It was an abomination of nature and machine.
A massive, towering mound of pale, calcified flesh, overgrown with petrified wood and jagged bone.
But the true horror was the academy's modifications.
Thick, rusted iron brackets were bolted directly into the beast's skull.
Hundreds of pulsing, severed blue aether-cables trailed behind it like broken, bleeding tentacles, leaking raw magic into the mud.
It had no eyes. But its massive, gaping maw, lined with rows of jagged obsidian teeth, turned directly toward the violet light.
It had smelled the magic. It had heard the hologram. It was hungry.
"It's here," Carys screamed, scrambling backward until her back hit the basalt boulder trapping Vael.
The Leviathan let out a deafening, organic roar that vibrated the very air in their lungs, and began to charge. It didn't run; it surged forward like an avalanche of meat and metal, crushing the ancient bones in its path into dust.
Riven stood up. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't have his power.
"Carys," Riven yelled over the roar of the approaching monster. "Why did the sync sever? Why did the Lexicon shut down when I touched the pillar?"
"Because it was biological!" Carys shouted back, terrified, clutching her satchel. "The Lexicon is architectural code! When you forced it into a living, biological aether-siphon, it caused a critical system crash in your neural pathways! The frequencies violently rejected each other!"
Riven looked up into the darkness above them.
Hanging from the ruined, shattered ceiling of the cavern, dangling like the severed veins of a slaughtered god, were the thick blue aether-cables that had broken when the floor collapsed. They were wildly sparking, spitting raw, highly unstable Spireheart magic into the damp air.
"How do you fix a crashed system?" Riven demanded, not taking his eyes off the sparking cables.
Carys followed his gaze. Her eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror as she realized what he was suggesting.
"Riven, no!" Carys shrieked. "You can't! It’s ungrounded, highly volatile aether! It isn't a reset button; it's a lightning strike! The voltage will instantly boil the fluid in your brain! It will stop your heart!"
The Leviathan was thirty yards away. The ground shook with every heave of its massive bulk.
Riven looked down at Vael. The warrior was trapped, staring up at him, her eyes burning with the demand for vengeance. She wouldn't die a victim. She demanded a war.
Riven looked at his right hand. The golden circuitry was black and dead. He was just a man. But he refused to die a sweep.
"My heart already belongs to the mountain," Riven said coldly.
He didn't hesitate. He broke into a dead sprint.
He ran away from Vael and Carys, sprinting directly into the path of the charging Leviathan. He splashed through the bloody mud, his heavy leather duster flying behind him.
"Riven!" Carys screamed, a sound of absolute despair.
The Leviathan roared, raising its massive, calcified head, preparing to bring its crushing weight down upon the tiny, fragile human running toward it.
Riven didn't look at the beast. He looked at the thick, sparking blue aether-cable dangling just ten feet off the ground, directly between him and the monster.
He reached the spot. He planted his left boot deep into the mud. Ignoring the blinding agony in his recently healed collarbone, Riven launched himself into the air.
He reached out his dead, blackened right hand.
His fingers closed around the severed, sparking end of the live aether-cable.
The world instantly erupted into blinding white fire.