The first light of dawn bled across the horizon like a fresh wound, casting the academy's outer walls in hues of amber and gray. Elias stood near the eastern gate, cloaked in a traveler's mantle, a satchel slung across his back and his badge of authorization tucked safely within. Unlike the ceremonial or academic robes worn inside the campus, this attire was functional—reinforced leather lined with inscriptions to ward against elemental hazards and spiritual anomalies.
This mission would take him outside the protective boundaries of the academy for the first time.
The instructors had not overstated the danger. The world was raw and untamed.
Elias passed the warded stone arches at the gate and entered a narrow causeway that linked the academy's isle to the nearest of the southern archipelago's wild islets. Known as Kel'rath's Teeth, the cluster of small, rocky islands lay between the mainland continent and the academy's domain. They were littered with natural inscriptions and scattered with rare spirit-conductive flora—remnants of ancient wars and natural phenomena.
He consulted the mission scroll again. "Harvest three bundles of Cinderglow Root from the Hollow Caves of Ansk." Straightforward on paper, but the Hollow Caves were known to harbor low-intelligence spiritual beasts. Creatures that thrived in darkness and fed on radiant essence.
Elias reached into his satchel and touched the Coin of Destiny through the cloth. It remained warm. Not from the blood sacrifice it had consumed, but from something subtler—its dormant awareness reawakening.
"You've tasted a soul," Elias thought, eyes narrowing. "Now you'll learn to hunger quietly."
His boots crunched over bone-dry soil as he stepped onto the wild island. The air changed immediately—denser, heavier, saturated with ambient spiritual energy. It clung to the skin like unseen vines. Strange birds called from the canopies, their tones discordant, like broken flutes. In the distance, he could hear the deep rumble of something dragging itself across stone.
The archipelago was home to more than just flora and beasts. Buried within it were forgotten ruins, abandoned battlefields, and collapsed engraver sanctums—each pulsing with dormant inscriptions. These were the arteries of the old world, as the elders called them.
Elias passed a withered tree with leaves like crystal knives and marked it in his memory. Such trees grew only in soil nourished by spiritual bloodshed. He knelt and touched the bark—sure enough, faint traces of an inscription formation remained embedded in the roots. Something had died here long ago. Something powerful.
"This world… it remembers what it once was."
As the sun climbed higher, he descended into a narrow ravine, heading for the location marked on the mission map. The path grew darker, colder, more confined. Moss-covered stones jutted from the ground like broken teeth. Somewhere ahead, the Hollow Caves waited.
He paused.
A flicker of movement.
From a crevice in the rock, a small spirit beast emerged—barely the size of a hound, with three luminous eyes and barbed scales. It let out a low hiss and tensed.
Elias didn't hesitate.
He raised his hand and released a thread of inscription energy—subtle and precise. The sigil etched in his palm flared once. The beast twitched, spasmed, and collapsed. Not dead—but paralyzed.
He moved past it without a second glance.
"Too weak," he muttered. "Not even worth engraving."
At the cave entrance, Elias took out his tools—an inscription blade, a bottle of concentrated warding essence, and a prepared sigil stone. He knelt and carved a protective rune into the earth just outside, a precaution in case the beasts within were smarter than expected.
Then he entered.
The Hollow Caves of Ansk were damp and echoing, filled with veins of glowing mineral and whispering winds. The walls themselves hummed faintly, like they remembered songs from centuries past. Deeper still, faint orange pulses guided his way—the telltale sign of Cinderglow Root, which only grew in places saturated with both fire and blood essence.
He reached the first cluster, careful to avoid the roots' tendrils. They twitched when touched, reacting to the heat of a body. A careless pluck would alert the others—and more dangerously, the Cindermites, whose ember-lined carapaces moved in swarms.
Elias activated a minor inscription of isolation, shielding his scent and heat signature. He moved slowly, methodically, cutting the root just above the essence-nodes. A mistake would render the material useless.
The second bundle took longer. A swarm of mites stirred nearby. Elias stilled his breath, waited, and recited a silent incantation—an echo from his past life. The mites skittered away, unsettled by the foreign energy.
Only when the third bundle was safely wrapped did Elias allow himself to exhale.
But as he turned to leave, the coin in his pocket pulsed once.
Not in warning.
In invitation.
"Something deeper?" he wondered, glancing at a collapsed tunnel veiled behind growth and dust. His eyes narrowed.
This mission was complete. But the wild offered more than what the academy assigned.
Much more.
And Elias intended to claim it all.
* * * * * *
The air grew colder as Elias descended deeper into the cave. The narrow passage twisted and narrowed, its walls slick with condensation. Every step he took echoed faintly through the stone corridors, the sound quickly swallowed by the oppressive silence.
His inscription lamp cast a faint glow, illuminating jagged rock formations and clusters of faintly glowing moss clinging to the walls. Deeper still, the spiritual energy shifted—denser, heavier, pressing against his skin like a phantom's breath. Whatever lay ahead had been left undisturbed for a long time.
The deeper he went, the more unnatural the surroundings became. Bones littered the floor in places, some cracked, others gnawed. A pungent scent of mildew and death clung to the air. Something had lived here. Perhaps something still did.
But Elias pressed on.
Eventually, the tunnel widened into a crude cavern. The ceiling opened into a yawning maw overhead, stalactites hanging like teeth, and the floor dipped into a natural basin. Pools of still water mirrored the glow of his lamp, reflecting distorted shapes onto the walls.
That was when he saw it.
A corpse, slumped against a broken boulder, half-covered in dust and moss.
Elias approached slowly. The body had long since decomposed—clothing rotted, flesh gone—but the bones remained intact. The figure had once worn robes similar to those of inscription masters, though the emblems had faded beyond recognition. One skeletal hand still clutched a rolled parchment.
Elias knelt beside it.
Carefully, he pried the parchment from the brittle fingers. Despite the rot and age, his inscriptional senses told him it was protected by a preservation technique—rudimentary, but effective.
He unrolled it.
A map.
Or at least, part of one.
The upper half depicted a region Elias didn't recognize—forests, ruins, and what appeared to be deep ravines drawn with precise ink strokes. Several markings were inscribed along the edges in an ancient dialect of inscriptionists, though only fragments were legible.
"...chamber of echoes…"
"…energy well beneath..."
"…only those marked by fate…"
The lower half of the parchment had been torn clean through—gone, perhaps destroyed or never completed.
Still, it was a lead.
Elias examined the body again. Closer inspection revealed several inscriptional glyphs carved directly into the skeleton—marks of a failed self-preservation ritual. The master had tried to preserve his soul, or perhaps his legacy, but had failed.
A whisper ran through Elias's mind—faint, cold, emotionless.
"Mark the path… before the others find it…"
He stood, eyes narrowing. The aura in this place… it wasn't just spiritual residue. There was a memory here. A presence. Not sentient—no, more like an echo. Faint, but real.
He pocketed the parchment carefully, then turned his gaze to the stone wall behind the corpse.
Upon it, faint lines of ancient inscription glowed with hidden meaning. Most were fragmented, but one word repeated itself.
"Inheritance."
The implication was clear.
This cave was once the threshold to a greater place—an inheritance site long lost to time. Perhaps the owner had perished before opening it fully. Or perhaps he had sealed it deliberately, to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.
Elias stepped back into the shadows, his thoughts racing. The incomplete map, the lingering energy, the marked wall—this was far more valuable than what he had hoped to find.
And yet, it was only a beginning.
He would need time to decipher the glyphs and identify the region shown on the map. Time—and secrecy.
He glanced once more at the bones. Then, without ceremony, he turned and vanished into the darkness, the flickering glow of his lamp casting strange shapes on the walls behind him.
The echoes of his footsteps faded.
But in the chamber where death lingered and time had stopped, something stirred.
A whisper in the stones.
A secret waiting to be claimed.