CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
Jules didn't even flinch. She was already stepping over the threshold. "We need to find a match for those symbols in the journal, Ava. If that language exists anywhere in the realm, it'll be in these archives."
For a human, she was gods-damned brave. I swear, if she were a wielder, she'd outsmart half the third-years in the Trials without breaking a sweat. I followed her, already regretting my life choices.
Aether had stayed above, claiming he needed to "keep watch" near the phoenix bench.
"You're a celestial panther," I'd hissed at him before descending. "You're literally made of starlight and power. You shouldn't be afraid of a few dusty basements."
He hadn't even dignified me with a response. He'd just flicked his tail, yawned, and curled up on the stone like the dramatic, glowing coward he was. Apparently, his whole “I protect you” thing had a clause excluding haunted basement bullshit.
So here I was.
I walked through a corridor that smelled like rot and ancient magic, passing arched crypts carved into the stone, silent and heavy with the weight of the dead.
The tombs on either side bore no names, only worn symbols etched into the masonry in languages that felt like they predated the gods.
“I wonder who these belonged to,” I whispered, my voice bouncing off the cold walls and making me pull my hood tighter.
Jules ducked under a low, crumbling arch. "Probably ancient scholars. Maybe royal lineages from before the Second War. This ground was sacred, remember? Alayna didn't build her fortress here by accident."
I nodded, stepping carefully over a fragment of a broken skull that looked far too human for my liking. "Well, if they were so royal, they should've built better doorways."
We moved deeper until the path fractured, splitting left, right, and straight ahead into the gloom.
All of them were unlit. All of them looked cursed.
"Of course it does this," I sighed, my fire flickering in my palms. "Nope. We are not splitting up. I've seen how this ends in the stories."
She rolled her eyes, though she stayed glued to my side. "Obviously. You think I want to get eaten by some subterranean book ghost?"
“Good.” I exhaled, though the tension in my shoulders refused to leave. “Then left it is.”
The corridor narrowed until the stone pressed close on either side. The deeper we ventured, the brighter the symbols on the walls became—etched into the pillars and burned into the floor.
"Whoa," Jules whispered, her breath fogging in the freezing air.
My heart thudded against my ribs, hard and erratic. I recognized them. Those swirls, those curling, aggressive sigils... They were the exact ones scribbled in Jax's journal.
I had thought they were just a code he'd invented or some dead tongue from a dusty textbook.
But here, they pulsed softly with a rhythmic magic. They were alive. They were breathing.
"Seems like we took the right path," I muttered.
"Finally," Jules said—just as a floor tile sank beneath her boot with a hollow click.
"Shit—"
A hidden trap in the column to our right burst into life. A searing arc of fire hissed through the air aimed directly for Jules’s head.
I tackled her, shoving her to the floor a split second before the flames roared over us.
The flames passed close enough to singe the very edges of her orange curls.
"My hair!" she hissed, frantically swatting at her head. "That almost took my face off!"
"You're lucky I'm fast," I grunted, offering her a hand to haul her up. "Otherwise, you'd be bald and eyebrowless right now."
We pressed on, ducking through low arches and dodging a second trap that sprayed freezing silver mist from the ceiling, until the corridor finally opened into a wide circular chamber.
And there it was.
An alcove of books, ancient and suffocated by dust. Some were stacked on crumbling shelves, while others floated inches off the ground, held aloft by faintly glowing runes.
The entire chamber hummed with a power that made my skin itch, but what drew us in was the pedestal in the center.
Resting upon it was a single black-covered book.
Of fucking course it was black. Apparently, forbidden ancient knowledge didn’t come bound in pastel pink with little gold stars.
Predictable. And terrifying.
"Well, I guess this is it," Jules muttered, her scholar's heart clearly warring with her survival instinct.
We stepped forward together, the chamber falling into an eerie, heavy silence. The air smelled of old ash and something sharp, something metallic that reminded me of blood.
I reached out, my fingers trembling as I brushed them along the surface of the pedestal.
Dust spiraled away into the blue light, revealing a single word etched into the stone beneath the book.
VEYARI.
My blood turned to ice. Every muscle in my body locked tight as the implications clawed at my throat.
"No," I breathed, the word coming out as a fractured ghost of a sound. "No, no, no—this can't be right."
"What?" Jules asked, blinking rapidly behind her fogged glasses.
"This language," I whispered, pointing to the glowing sigils. "It's not just old magic, Jules. It's theirs. The Veyari."
Her eyes widened behind her lenses, the color draining from her face.
A heavy silence followed as Jules looked from the pedestal back to me. "And your brother was writing in their tongue."
The truth slammed into me like a wall of falling stone. Jax wasn't just investigating a disappearance or looking for a lost relic.
He was chasing something older. Something divine.
And we had just stepped right through its front door.
We settled on the floor of the alcove, robes discarded and ancient books sprawled around us like the wreckage of a forgotten library.
Blue fae-light flickered across the chamber walls, dancing like restless fireflies over the skulls watching from the shadows.
Jules had her scholar's runes spinning in the air, her lips moving in quiet concentration, while I kept my eyes fixed on Jax's journal.
His frantic handwriting was finally starting to breathe into meaning.
Hours bled past in the cold silence. At some point, Jules let out a sharp gasp, her quill stilling mid-stroke.
"Can you translate it?" My voice cracked.
"Slowly," she murmured, already flipping back to the first page. "Just give me time."
She worked relentlessly, cross-referencing runes and tracing meanings, scrawling frantic notes.
Finally, Jules lifted her head, her orange hair falling loose around her flushed face. She slid a translated sheet toward me.
It wasn't a chronicle of war. It was a record of Scott Eldrin, Jax's old roommate from the year above.
The entry trembled with desperation, the words jagged as if carved in a panic.
Jax wrote about how Scott had slipped into the grip of Eclipsa, and how the drug didn't just numb him, it warped him.
It twisted his very essence. His veins had blackened, his mind fogged. Then, one night, he disappeared.
Days later, he was found stumbling across the southern fields—confused, trembling, and almost hollow.
Just like Ryven. Only worse.
Jax had been terrified that the drug was a corruption—a slow rewriting of the body.
He described watching Scott lose himself piece by piece, and then, recklessly and brilliantly, Jax began developing an antidote. He wrote that it had worked once.
Barely. Scott had survived, but the process was harrowing.
“It was terrible,” Jules said, her voice unsteady. “Painful. It nearly killed him.”
She flipped the page, her eyes darting faster. "He says it only works if it's caught early—before the blackened veins spread too far. Once it's rooted in the bloodstream... there's no reversing it."
The parchment quivered in my hands. My throat felt like it was filled with ash. "Where did he find the ingredients?"
Jules kept reading, then stopped dead. Her face fell.
"The antidote can only be made from a single flowering bud.” She licked her lips.” It's a rare variant of the Eclipsa vine itself. It blooms only during a full moon."
My stomach dropped. "When's the next full moon, Jules?"
She looked up at me, her face pale in the sapphire light. "Tonight."
Fuck.
We'd have to go back to where Ryven had been found.
I shot to my feet and reached for my cloak. “I need to go. Now.”
Jules closed the book gently. "I'll keep working on this. If there's more... I'll find it."
I looked at her, my chest heavy with gratitude. "Thank you, Jules. Seriously."
"Yeah, yeah," she muttered with a small smile. "Go. Before your celestial cat has a panic attack."
I managed a small smile, slipping the enchanted cloak back over my shoulders and leaving her in the faint blue glow of the catacombs.
When I reached the surface, the night air hit me, cool and heavy with salt.
"Aether," I called softly, stepping around the stone phoenix bench. Nothing.
My brow furrowed. Unease crawled beneath my skin.
Then I saw him.
His massive obsidian body was stretched out beside the bushes, his golden eyes closed. His chest was barely rising.
"Aether!" I ran to him. "Aether—wake up!"
He stirred faintly, his mental voice a flickering thread. "Poison," he hissed. "Ava—run."
I barely had time to gasp before a heavy hand clamped over my mouth. The metallic scent of earth filled my senses.
A sharp sting lanced into my neck.
Everything blurred instantly. But as my knees hit the stone, the bond—the tether I had tried so hard to quiet—exploded.
It wasn't a hum. It was a scream.
Asher’s fury ripped through the bond, violent and devastating.
It was the sound of a storm breaking, the roar of shadows being unleashed.
He knew.
He felt the sting, he felt my terror, and he was coming.
The sheer force of his rage was the last thing I felt before the world went black.