Chapter 51
Once the enormous archway had opened fully, Lilith and Giles found themselves looking into a vast chamber that spiraled downward — a broad walkway winding along the walls, descending level by level, with sealed rooms lining the passage at regular intervals, their contents hidden behind closed doors.
Lilith studied the structure. "Let's go."
Only after stepping through did the chamber's true scale sink in.
There were no matching gates on the far side, none anywhere along the walls; aside from the evenly spaced rooms, the enormous spiral interior was a deserted atrium with nothing else worth noting.
They'd entered through a monumental archway — and no other entrance existed.
Lilith frowned. "Shouldn't every faction arrive through its own gate? There's no sign of anyone else."
A more careful sweep turned up no immediate threat either. For now, at least, they seemed to be safe.
Giles walked to the edge, scaled the massive, ten-foot-tall railing, and peered down into the depths. "My Lord, it looks like at least three hundred feet to the bottom. There's some kind of plaza down there."
"This dungeon is much bigger than we thought."
There was no way back. If the archway behind them marked the starting point, the spiral path was the only road forward.
At the first room Lilith stayed cautious — for about as long as it took curiosity to win.
The door was plainly a different material from the archway; looking straight at it produced no dizziness, no mental pressure, and she doubted it was indestructible.
Lilith preferred action to speculation anyway.
She formed a sphere of Deathfire and hurled it at the stone door.
The explosion thundered through the enclosed chamber and echoed across every level. Before the dust could settle she lobbed a second fireball inside, and the blast lit the dark interior long enough for even Giles to see exactly what it held.
Nothing. The room was completely empty — an unfinished chamber, abandoned before anyone ever moved in.
"Empty?" Lilith stared into it. "How can it be empty?"
She'd expected a dungeon to hold danger, treasure, or preferably both. Plenty of rooms remained, so she didn't linger — the spiral corridor strung identical chambers together one after another, and she meant to search them all.
The deeper they went, the less they found.
Some rooms held nothing but bare walls and dust. Others contained the rotting remains of wooden furniture.
A few entrances bore the scars of old traps; others were webbed with cracks, damaged long ago.
No treasure. Not even more constructs. Lilith had hoped to collect additional Dragoncore Crystals, and what she got instead was hours of picking through dust and decay.
Eventually she turned up something at least unusual: stone tablets, their surfaces covered in dense draconic runes, most of the script worn smooth by time.
Every tablet looked nearly identical. She picked one up.
The draconic writing meant nothing to her — it seemed to have been designed specifically for magic — but the System offered a partial translation.
[...cataclysm...]
[...my fall...]
[...traitors among the Sacred Race...]
[...the Legacy must endure...]
[...key to the deeper level...]
"What is this supposed to mean?"
She tossed the tablet onto the floor. Even translated, the fragmented phrasing barely held together. Unwilling to give up, she examined the rest — much the same — and only after piecing the fragments together did the picture form: the tablets were meant to unlock the dungeon's lower level.
Lilith immediately snatched the discarded one back up. "So they are valuable." It hadn't broken. Small mercies.
The purpose of this whole section was coming into focus. "There's no treasure or danger here because the chamber itself is a barrier," she said. "The original owner built it to keep intruders from reaching the deeper levels."
Giles followed the thread. "The locking mechanism should be at the bottom. If we find the correct tablet, we can continue." He looked out at the countless rooms lining the spiral walkway. "But there's a problem."
There was. Only one tablet was likely genuine, hundreds of identical copies could be scattered through the chamber — and if they fed the wrong one into the mechanism below, the entire structure might come down.
Lilith couldn't so much as scratch the white stone walls.
If this place buried them, survival was a long shot.
Their lives, in other words, seemed to hinge on picking the right tablet by luck.
Then Deathfire flared across Lilith's palm and engulfed the stone in her hand.
Giles flinched. "My Lord, what are you doing?"
He understood a moment later, as the tablet crumbled into ash.
Lilith frowned at the remains. "The real key shouldn't be this easy to destroy." There had been three tablets in that room; she tested all of them, and every one burned. Her expression darkened. "All fakes?"
She couldn't be certain the method was sound. It was still the best they had.
They went back to searching every chamber, and the process grew steadily more tense — until Lilith uncovered another cache of tablets and let out a quiet breath.
"Good. For a moment, I thought I might have burned the real one."
This time she didn't test them on the spot. Instead of carrying them, she simply dropped each tablet over the railing to the plaza below, trusting their magical durability; they could sort the whole collection at once when they reached the bottom.
Three hours later, having split up to cover ground, Lilith and Giles had gathered a total of 121 tablets. The sheer number left them both staring.
"That's ridiculous."
By then they stood on the lowest level, a broad plaza spreading out before them.
Unlike the white stone above, the floor here had been forged from a dark-gray alloy, fine channels covering its surface like veins — running in from every direction and converging on a circular recess at the center, roughly twenty inches across.
Twelve dim Dragoncore Crystals ringed its edge, all apparently drained, and the recess's interior bore the same layered draconic script as the tablets, worked into an intricate locking mechanism.
Only one tablet would be the true key. Lilith set to work, and Giles could do little but watch.
With the entire collection heaped in one place, a single wave of Deathfire was all it took.
Black flames rolled across the pile, consuming everything vulnerable to their power, tablet after tablet collapsing into ash — and when the fire finally died, a single object remained. It hardly resembled the others anymore.
Lilith's eyes sharpened. "That must be it."
She picked up the survivor and crossed the plaza without hesitation.
The moment she set it into the central recess, it seated with a soft, perfect click — and the entire plaza began to shake.
The floor channels lit one after another, waves of pale-blue light spreading outward from the center, and somewhere far below, ancient gears began to turn.
The center of the plaza descended.
It wasn't merely a lock. It was an enormous elevator platform.
Lilith and Giles sank deeper beneath the dungeon, the light above dwindling until it vanished and darkness closed around them, broken only by the glowing patterns underfoot. The descent ran nearly a minute before the platform stopped with a heavy jolt.
And before Lilith's eyes could adjust, the sounds of fierce combat reached her from somewhere close by.
Several of the voices were familiar.