---
The rain didn't stop for two days.
Even with magic stirring in his blood and strange power beneath his skin, Aether was soaked like any other man. The cold wind clawed through his robes. His boots were caked in mud. But still, he kept walking—through forest, field, broken ruins.
Behind him, the Seminary was gone. Ahead of him, *nothing*. Not yet.
But it would come.
It had to.
He had seen it in the darkness, in the binding—visions of a place that didn't exist yet. A fortress carved from shadow, a citadel untouched by gods or kings. **Noctis Sanctum.**
And today, he would begin building it.
Not with stone.
But with *intention*.
---
The site revealed itself by instinct.
Aether came upon a valley shaped like a wound in the earth. The trees avoided it. The wind circled it like a wary dog. To most, it would've felt cursed—wrong. But Aether felt something different.
> A hum.
Soft, like a whisper just behind the ear. Like the earth itself was waiting for someone to speak the right word.
He stepped into the center and dropped to one knee. The soil was damp. When he pressed his palm into it, he felt warmth—not heat, but the **residue of memory**.
Leylines.
Fractured, yes. Faint. But still alive.
"This is it," he murmured.
---
He didn't have blueprints. Only fragments—symbols that came to him in dreams, outlines half-drawn in the dirt while he slept, designs that seemed to burn into the sky when he closed his eyes. He wasn't an architect.
But something was guiding him.
Maybe it was the Hollow Star.
Maybe it was madness.
Either way, he picked up a stick and began to draw.
---
He worked in silence for hours.
Circle within circle. Paths that crossed at impossible angles. Towers shaped like spirals, like needles piercing the sky. Everything was wrong by normal standards—impractical, twisted, strange. But somehow it *fit*. It felt inevitable.
Mirelle arrived before dusk.
She said nothing, just dropped her pack and joined him. Her eyes moved over the designs with practiced calculation. She didn't ask questions. She just started building a fire nearby.
Bairn came next, limping from a bad knee. He brought old books and a tired smile. Tollin showed up a day later with tools he swore were cursed—but they worked better than any magic he'd seen.
They didn't speak much.
But they *understood*.
This wasn't just a base.
It was a **beginning**.
---
They built with what they had. Stone, wood, woven shadow, traces of alchemy. The first structure was a circle of standing stones—anchor points, etched with glyphs Aether couldn't read but somehow knew how to draw.
The second was a pillar—tall, thin, made from obsidian Tollin had shaped using a forge they barely understood. It pulsed with a soft blue light when night fell.
On the fifth day, something *shifted*.
---
It began with the ground.
It **breathed**.
Aether woke to the feeling of motion beneath him, like the valley had turned into a great beast stretching after centuries of sleep. The glyphs flared with pale fire. The symbols they'd drawn in chalk now burned into the stone as if engraved by invisible hands.
Mirelle stood watch, sword drawn. "Is this... normal?"
"No," Aether said. "But it's right."
He stepped into the center of the circle.
The mark on his chest began to glow.
And the voice returned.
> "The seed has taken root."
> "The first verse begins."
Aether stumbled as the air grew heavy—thick with pressure, memory, something sacred. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he *saw* it:
Walls grown from starlight. Halls humming with runes. A throne wrapped in shadows that reflected no one. The Sanctum. Not a building, but a **presence**.
And it wanted to be real.
---
The days bled together after that.
They worked with rhythm, not schedules. When they grew tired, the walls themselves seemed to hold them up. The deeper they built, the more *alive* the valley became.
Tollin unearthed a chamber that shouldn't have been there—a sealed dome of mirrored metal and bloodstone. Bairn entered it and didn't return until the next morning, his eyes wide and unfocused.
"I saw a memory," he whispered. "A city that never existed… and yet I remember it."
Mirelle didn't speak much anymore. She trained in silence, blade in hand, moving like she knew something was coming. And Aether… Aether began to write.
Not spells. Not plans.
**Doctrine.**
---
At night, by candlelight, he scribbled in a book with no title.
He wrote what the world had forgotten. What it would one day *fear*. Truths not found in temples or courts, but in the spaces between them.
> *"Power is not a gift. It is a weight, a wound, a weapon."*
> *"The gods are not wise. They are jealous."*
> *"To reshape the world, we must first teach it to break."*
The pages did not burn.
They absorbed his words.
And something in the dark took notice.
---
By the tenth day, the first chamber of the Sanctum was complete.
It wasn't large. It wasn't grand. Just a room of stone and silence, lit by a single floating sigil in the ceiling.
But when Aether stepped inside, he felt it:
> Belonging.
This was not a fortress.
It was a **wound dressed in purpose**.
He turned to the others and nodded. "This is only the first layer."
Mirelle looked up. "How many more?"
"As many as it takes."
---
Far away, kings dreamed of war.
Priests whispered of omens.
The world spun forward, unaware that something old and forgotten had begun to breathe again.
---
In a nameless valley, beneath stars that no longer blinked, the **Sanctum** had taken root.
And Aether?
Aether no longer walked alone.
---
**To be countinue....