The wind in Virellos changed.
Not the air. Not the scent. But the feeling—like the city had finally noticed Liora wasn't just another foolish necromancer digging for power.
She was the heir to something ancient. Dangerous. Unforgivable.
And something in the dark had just woken up to it.
They moved through the underground sanctum in silence. The relics didn't hum anymore. The soul cages were no longer dormant—they vibrated gently, like tuning forks catching a note no one else could hear.
Liora was still dripping from the memory pool, silver rivulets crawling down her arms, refusing to evaporate. Her heartbeat thudded against her ribs like a war drum. The memories hadn't faded. They'd rooted into her—seeds of something monstrous and beautiful.
She could still hear her mother's voice.
"You will not chain my daughter."
Not a plea.
A promise.
Callux broke the silence. "Someone followed us."
Liora didn't look at him.
"I know."
She could feel Mavrek's presence now. Not as footsteps or shadows. But as a low hum in her bones, like something was gnawing at her soul from the inside.
"You've felt him before, haven't you?" Callux asked.
She finally looked at him. "He was there. When I died the first time."
Callux's eyes widened. "You remember that?"
Liora nodded slowly. "I don't think I ever came back whole."
They found the heart of the temple buried beneath layers of broken spells and dead language—a vault sealed in forgotten runes. Liora traced the letters with her fingers, recognizing words she hadn't known she'd learned.
"The Gravedancer sleeps beneath."
She whispered the phrase, and the vault split open with a hiss of rotten air.
Inside was a chamber so black it bent sound. And in the center, wrapped in burial silks soaked in inked prayers, lay a skeleton of a giant—twelve feet tall, arms folded, with no face left behind.
But hovering above the ribs, suspended in threads of silver soul-twine, was a mask.
Bone. Smooth. Empty.
And screaming with silent intent.
"Don't touch it," Callux warned.
But it was too late.
Liora stepped forward, and the mask drifted into her hands like it had been waiting.
And when her skin met it—everything stopped.
She stood in a field of black grass under a sky of blood-red moons.
Thousands of souls danced around her, faceless and weeping, each one pulling at her sleeves, whispering her name in voices stolen from memory.
One stepped forward.
Not a ghost.
Not a hallucination.
A memory made flesh.
Alric.
"You've opened the gate too early."
"I had no choice," she said.
"Then you've doomed more than yourself."
He stepped closer. His face was sunken, eyes hollowed by knowledge and grief.
"The Gravedancer wasn't a person. It was a curse. It bonds to bloodlines. Yours… and mine."
Liora's heart dropped.
"So it's true. You were my—"
He cut her off.
"I never wanted this. But you need it now more than ever. When the White Circle falls, when Mavrek reveals the other side of the Veil, this mask will be the only anchor you have left."
She looked down.
The mask had fused to her chest like a second sternum.
"You'll feel them all now," Alric said. "The dead. Their wants. Their regrets. Their hunger."
She whispered: "Will they obey?"
His voice trembled.
"They'll worship you. Until you break."
Liora woke with a scream.
Callux had her in his arms, shaking her.
The chamber was cracking—the bones of the Gravedancer disintegrating into light and dust. The walls of the sanctum were bleeding dark magic, and the door was gone. Gone like it had never existed.
But worse—
They weren't alone.
Across the chamber, on the far side of the collapsing relics, stood Mavrek.
Cloaked in whispering shadows.
His eyes glowing like fire beneath water.
He didn't speak.
He just raised his hand, and the floor erupted in a spiral of death magic so pure it tore through the walls like knives.
Callux lunged forward—
—and was caught mid-leap by the blast.
His body twisted. His sword shattered. And Liora watched, frozen, as his skin bubbled from the inside.
He screamed her name.
And then—
He stopped.
Mid-motion. Mid-breath.
A statue of bone and ash.
Liora couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
Mavrek tilted his head. "I told them she would break."
Then he vanished, slipping into the Veil like a dream ending too soon.
Liora fell to her knees, her hands pressed against Callux's still chest.
His heartbeat… was gone.
But the mask on her chest whispered: Not yet.
And the souls in the temple began to rise.