Chapter 57

The Grand Council Chamber exploded into a frenzy as the councilors scrambled to surround him. Freed from the oppressive weight of their scrutiny, Isaac turned his eyes toward the front, his heart pounding in alarm. Ruorden’s eyes had rolled back, showing only the whites as he wheezed and clawed frantically at his neck. A physician was summoned instantly, dropping to his knees to begin a frantic, futile assessment. Within moments, Ruorden slumped into true, empty unconsciousness.

At that precise second, a faint, ethereal sigil flickered into existence above his forehead, then disintegrated into nothingness. It resembled a complex, jagged illustration traced in luminescent powder. The mark endured for only a heartbeat, but it was long enough for the dozens of eyes fixed upon him to catch the terrifying truth.

Several councilors gasped, recognition dawning on their pale faces.

“The contract…!”

The pact had shattered. His contract with his magician had been annihilated. This was not a dissolution conducted through the customary, mutual legal procedures of the palace. Lord Ruorden’s bond with his contracted magician had been severed, violently and unilaterally.

“Who was Lord Ruorden’s contracted magician?”

“What on earth happened?”

“Summon him at once!”

The clamor swelled into a deafening roar, prompting the prince to rise from his seat.

A sudden, stunned silence rippled through those in his proximity as Kaiyan walked toward the chamber doors without a flicker of hesitation. Isaac remained poised like a sentinel near the rear exit. The prince passed directly before him, his stride rhythmic and purposeful, before stepping out of the Grand Council Chamber. For the briefest of moments, their eyes locked.

Isaac did not pause to think; he simply moved, hurrying to shadow the prince. Someone behind them shouted the prince’s name, but Kaiyan did not turn. Neither did Isaac. He kept to his master’s wake, trailing him down the quiet, vaulted hallways.

It did not take long for the destination to become painfully clear.

Once Kaiyan turned into the long, solitary corridor leading toward the northeastern wing, there was no longer any room for doubt. At the terminus of that road stood the Magicians’ Hall, the private research complex where the kingdom’s mages gathered to debate and experiment. Isaac struggled to comprehend why a man who notoriously despised magicians would now march directly into their den. The image of Lord Ruorden’s collapse remained seared into his mind, vibrant and horrifying.

What had truly transpired?

A magical contract of that magnitude could not be dissolved by a minor accident or a fleeting error—certainly not unilaterally. Breaking such a bond required the absolute consent of both parties. If one party withheld their consent, the other could only succeed if they possessed something intimately connected to the first party’s very soul. A superior might, in theory, sever a subordinate’s head to terminate the bond through death, but for a subordinate to dissolve a contract without their superior’s permission was fundamentally impossible.

Unless, of course, the magician possessed something that could act as a proxy for Lord Ruorden himself. A vital piece of his body, or perhaps his very blood.

Isaac’s mind flashed back to what Brick had whispered regarding the night of the new moon, when Ruorden had suffered such agonizing, unexplainable pain. Even without having witnessed the scene, Isaac could conjure the image of the horrific screams and the metallic, cloying scent of blood drenching the chamber.

Yes.

During those dark hours, Lord Ruorden would have been oblivious to his surroundings. The magician could have taken anything he needed.

“…”

The young magician’s eyes, cold and haunting, surfaced in Isaac’s memory. Pitch-black. Darkness as thick and viscous as warm tar. The pale, sinister face from which every trace of human vitality had been bled dry.

A glacial chill raced down Isaac’s spine, leaving him breathless.

By now, the prince had entered the Magicians’ Hall. Several mages, lounging near the entrance and throughout the courtyard, froze in surprise as they recognized his silhouette. When Kaiyan strode forward without breaking his unwavering pace, they exchanged looks of profound confusion and scattered in different directions. They were, no doubt, sprinting to alert their superiors.

It was a pointless exercise. Every magician they encountered in the winding corridors stared after Kaiyan with a mixture of shock, suspicion, or open hostility, and many began to trail behind him, drawn by the inexplicable gravity of his presence. Isaac remained at the silent prince’s shoulder.

Kaiyan could not have visited this building before, yet his stride never faltered. He navigated the labyrinthine hallways as if he carried the architectural blueprints etched into his memory. Several high-ranking magicians, clearly spurred by the panic of their underlings, rushed to intercept him.

“Lord Kaiyan! What is the meaning of this intrusion?”

“Beyond this point lie the private laboratories. Outsiders are strictly forbidden to enter!”

“Even you cannot simply barge into this facility like you own the place!”

Kaiyan gave no indication that he heard their protests; he treated their voices as little more than background noise. A magician reached out to grab Isaac as he moved to follow, but Isaac shook off the hand with a sharp, warning glare and continued after the prince. From the cacophony rising at the far end of the corridor, palace officials and mages alike were caught in the wake of the news, rushing toward them.

What is he doing? What does he intend to achieve?

Isaac followed in silence, despite the mounting, suffocating unease churning in his gut. Finally, Kaiyan halted before a heavy, reinforced door at the deepest end of the research complex. A magician, standing guard with his hand on his weapon, stepped squarely into his path.

“This is the private laboratory of Lord Husfelt, head of the court magicians. No one may enter without his express permission, regardless of—”

The guard’s head spun through the air before he could finish the sentence. Isaac winced as the guard’s body crumpled. A look of grim, unwavering sternness remained etched into his features—a man who had never even understood the hand of death that had struck him down.

THUD

Kaiyan pushed the door wide. Isaac offered a silent, fleeting prayer for the fallen sentry before stepping across the threshold, tailing the prince. He rushed through the entryway, only to collide headlong into the prince’s back as he stopped abruptly. Only then did Isaac notice that Kaiyan remained absolutely motionless, looming just inside the room.

“I—I am sorry,” Isaac whispered.

He offered a hurried apology, then peered over the prince’s shoulder. He froze. This was the Guildmaster’s private laboratory.

A sanctuary supposedly forbidden to all without strict authorization, it appeared far more pedestrian than Isaac had anticipated. Every wall, save for the one housing the doorway, was burdened with towering, packed bookshelves. The chamber was cavernous, reminiscent of a grand mansion’s hall, and a massive, central table groaned under the weight of experimental apparatuses and precarious stacks of research journals. While the sheer volume and complexity of the materials were undeniably impressive, nothing seemed bizarre enough to trigger an alarm.

The wide, unobstructed expanse of floor beyond the table, however, was another matter entirely.

A massive circle had been drawn upon the polished stone. It spanned at least five or six meters across. Within its borders, incomprehensibly intricate formulas and geometric patterns had been arranged according to some dark, hidden order.

Every single line had been traced in a viscous, dark crimson liquid. As it dried, an overwhelming, cloying metallic stench bled into the air. The magic circle was so grotesquely sinister that it sent instinctive, bone-deep chills through Isaac the moment his eyes fell upon it.

At the far edge of the circle stood a hunched, elderly figure. Despite the violence with which the door had been flung open—a sound loud enough to startle any living soul—the old man remained with his back to them, perfectly still.

The massive, wicked circle of blood. The elderly man looming at its edge. The suffocating stench. The immense, roiling vortex of malignant energy.

The old man began to turn, his movements agonizingly slow, as if wading through a heavy atmosphere. When he finally brought his face into view, the air left Isaac’s lungs entirely. His eyes were devoid of whites, shifting and glistening with a fluid, unnatural blackness that suggested every fiber of his being had rotted away from the inside out.

Isaac recognized him instantly. He had glimpsed the man from afar at major royal ceremonies in the past. This was the head of the court magicians, a man contracted directly to the king. Yet, was this truly the imposing figure he remembered, or merely a small, pathetic, withered husk? Could this hollow, rotting shell possibly house a witch?

“Husfelt,” the prince called out.

The old man did not react. He stood like a marionette, staring blankly at them.

Kaiyan surged forward without hesitation. Isaac had no chance to intervene or utter a warning. In a fluid, lethal arc, the prince’s blade sliced through the old man’s neck. Nothing happened.

The head tumbled into the magic circle with a sickening, effortless grace, followed by the body. The only anomaly was a faint, shimmering pattern of light that flickered briefly over the old man’s forehead—a sigil mirroring the one Isaac had witnessed on Lord Ruorden mere moments earlier. It faded into nothingness.

His Majesty will suffer a temporary shock from the forced dissolution of this contract.

That thought had barely registered when a foul, nauseating stench assaulted him. It was a vile odor far worse than anything he had ever endured. Even as he clamped his hand over his mouth to hold his breath, the air trapped within his lungs was enough to roil his stomach. The room stank of a corpse left to decay for months in a sweltering, wet grave, as if every individual cell in the man’s body had dissolved in an instant.

“…”

Isaac instinctively pinched his nose shut. No. Something has gone wrong.

The host of a witch had died. The head of the court magicians was dead. It was impossible for the aftermath to be this quiet. That stench suggested the body had been rotting for a long time.

This was merely a shell. Whatever had been inhabiting it had already migrated, leaving this empty vessel to collapse into putrefaction. The Roverni’s witch had fled elsewhere. Into someone else.

Nothing remained here. But where?

Isaac’s gaze locked onto the opposite edge of the circle. A crimson footprint marred the floor—a bare footprint, still wet and glistening, as if someone had stood there only seconds ago.

They are too late.

Kaiyan caught sight of the print almost simultaneously and approached it. He touched the mark with the tip of his sword. A singular drop of black, viscous blood slid down the cold steel and fell onto the footprint.

At that moment, space itself buckled.

A violent, unseen gale whipped through the chamber. It howled with such harrowing ferocity that Isaac felt his ears ring, yet not a single sheet of paper shifted on the cluttered tables, as if the wind belonged to a ghost-ridden dimension entirely separate from their own. Despite its spectral origin, the wind’s blade-like currents tore a myriad of shallow, stinging lacerations across Kaiyan’s and Isaac’s skin. Then, the air itself fractured.

— “You have come? But you are too late.”