Indrath Castle, Romulos Indrath's Room, 588 years before the birth of Arthur Leywin
Romulos Indrath
The transition back to my own humanoid form was always a disorienting lurch, a compression of boundless potential into a defined, frustratingly limited vessel.
My room in the highest spire of Indrath Castle didn't feel like the sanctuary rooms are usually supposed to be.
It felt like the innermost chamber of a beautifully crafted prison. With a sound that was half-groan, half-snarl, I launched myself onto the vast mattress of my bed, a ridiculous construction of silk and down large enough to host a dozen people.
My body sank into the softness, a sensation that, for a fleeting moment, mimicked the comfort I truly craved.
I gave the panoramic window a cursory, resentful glance. It framed a vista that would make any lesser poet weep with awe: the sheer, impossible drop down the face of Mount Geolus, the clouds swirling like a turbulent sea below, and in the far distance, the tiny, glittering jewel of Everburn, a town of the Inthirah Clan of dragons.
A kilometer away, yet it might as well have been on another planet. Its lights twinkled, each one a testament to lives being lived, to interactions, to freedoms so mundane they were utterly beyond my reach.
I turned my back on it, burying my head into the cool, embroidered silk of my pillow, seeking darkness, seeking silence.
Thwip.
The delicate fabric offered no resistance to the sharp points of my horns. A small, pathetic tear, and a cascade of white goose down began to escape, floating around my head like a mockery of snow.
"I am so stupid!" The whine that escaped me was unbecoming of an heir, of a warrior, of a thousand-year-old being. It was the sound of a frustrated child, and the knowledge that it was an accurate reflection of my feelings only made the fury burn hotter.
The feathers settled on my blonde hair, a ridiculous crown of my own incompetence. "I hate it all!"
The thought, as it often did in these moments of abject failure, turned treasonous. I could just go. The fantasy was a well-worn path in my mind. I would slip away, use my perfected Sequence Zero of Mirage Walk, and journey across the sea to the dark continent of Alacrya.
To the Vritra. To them. There, in that den of our enemies, I would find you, my sister. I would find our mother. I wouldn't be the Heir of Epheotus there; I would just be a son, a brother, searching for his family.
But the fantasy always curdled, crushed under the immense weight of reality. I was weak. The admission was a poison I had to swallow daily. It didn't matter that I could replicate mana arts after a few decades of observation.
It didn't matter the centuries of brutal conditioning under Trainer Kordri's eye, or the profound, often terrifying lessons in aether manipulation from Grandfather himself.
My own unique affinity for decay mana, my hard-won mastery of Realmheart—it was all dust. A clever parlor trick.
Even my masterpiece, the technique I had painstakingly built from first principles, born from a theoretical understanding of aether and mana that even Grandfather had acknowledged was 'novel'—Anti-Matter.
The ability to impose a localized concept of nothingness. It was nothing. A spark against the ocean of power that was a true Asura war party. If I tried to go to Alacrya, I would be captured, dissected, tortured and used as a bargaining chip before I even sighted their shores.
Or worse, Grandfather would find me, drag me back, and seal me in this tower for a year at least, with only my books and my own echoing thoughts for company. The solitude would break me even more.
I rolled onto my back, the motion violent and graceless. I snatched the deflated, leaking pillow and hurled it across the room. It hit a bookshelf and slumped to the thick carpet, a sad, feather-spewing heap.
My gaze swept the room. My world. A vast, cylindrical space hewn from the living rock of the mountain, its curved walls not adorned with tapestries or weapons, but lined with endless, soaring shelves of books.
They were my only constant companions, these silent, leather-bound witnesses to millennia of history, philosophy, and magic I would never be allowed to practice freely.
In other words Laviania... this was the sum of my existence: a bed by a window to a world I couldn't touch, a massive writing desk strewn with half-finished theories and maps of Dicathen, and this fortress of knowledge, illuminated by softly humming orbs of blended aether and mana that cast a perpetual, sterile daylight.
I could dim them with a thought using Realmheart, plunging the room into a darkness so absolute it felt like being buried alive. Sometimes I preferred it.
The need for a different kind of comfort, a secret one, pulled me from the bed. I padded barefoot to the great writing desk, its surface a chaotic landscape of parchment and crystals. My fingers found the right-hand drawer, sliding it open with a whisper.
To any observer, it contained more scrolls, more ink pots. But I was no observer. I reached in, and with the intricate, internal focus of Realmheart, I didn't grasp a physical object.
I gently plucked at the specific golden threads of a particularly powerful instance of aether that wove a barrier over a false bottom. It was a lock of my own design, one that responded not to mana, but to the unique signature of my will.
The space beneath wasn't empty. It was a pocket dimension, a tiny, stable bubble of reality I had painstakingly folded using spatium arts—a frustratingly difficult skill I'd mastered purely for this purpose. From that hidden nothingness, I retrieved my most treasured, most secret possession.
It was a crystal, no larger than my palm. But it was not made of mana or any earthly mineral. It was solid aether, its substance a deep, translucent orange, like captured amber from the dawn of creation. It was warm to the touch, humming with a faint, spectral energy. And within it, a consciousness flickered.
"Sae-Areum?" I whispered the name into the quiet of the room, my voice hushed with a reverence I showed no living being. "I am Romulos."
Sae-Areum. She was all that remained of an Ancient Mage, a being from a race of lessers who had once inhabited Dicathen, a civilization so advanced they had brushed against truths that had seemingly consumed them.
My theory—a secret I kept locked away as tightly as her crystal—was that they had discovered a mana art of cataclysmic potential, something akin to the Thyestes Clan's World Eater technique, but born of lesser understanding. They had tapped a well too deep and had been drowned by it.
But Sae-Areum herself was a ghost in the crystal, a fragmented echo. Her memory was a shattered mosaic, and despite my every effort, my most delicate applications of aetheric healing arts, I could not piece her back together. She was a beautiful, tragic equation I could not solve.
A long moment of silence stretched, and my heart, so full of frustrated anger, began to sink with familiar disappointment. Then, a flicker within the orange depths.
"R… Romulos?" The voice was not a sound, but a vibration directly in my mind, thin and crackling with static, like a message sent across a vast and stormy gulf.
My breath caught. "Yes!" The exclamation was too loud, too eager. I forced myself to be calm. It was a rare, precious event when she recognized me, when she was more than just a recording.
In the three hundred years since I'd found this fragment hidden deep in the forgotten dungeons below the castle, buried under dust and layers of warding spells that had long since decayed, she had done this only twice before.
"Mana cores are divided into six categories," she began, her tone shifting into the flat, pedagogical rhythm of a lecturing scholar. "Black, red, orange, yellow, silver, and white. Each level is further divided into dark, solid, and light stages, save for black and white core, which do not have such categories, and silver cores, which are divided into initial, mid, and high stage."
I listened, rapt, as she recited the foundational knowledge I had known since infancy. It wasn't the information I cherished; it was the connection. The sound of a voice that wasn't Windsom's dismissive tone or my grandparents' measured, conditional approval.
I wondered, not for the first time, who she had been. A great sage? A revolutionary mage whose insights had been so profound that even Grandfather had been impressed, inviting her to Epheotus as an honored guest? It was the only logic that explained her presence here.
He must have granted her the honor of interment within Mount Geolus. This fragment, this shard of her consciousness… why was it hidden in the dungeons, separated from the rest? Where was her tomb? The questions were a whirlpool, but asking Grandfather would be like shining a light into a deep cave; it would only alert the things hiding within.
The soft, unmistakable sound of knuckles rapping on my chamber door shattered the moment. My heart leaped into my throat. In a frantic, silent scramble, I all but threw Sae-Areum's crystal back into the pocket dimension, sealing the aetheric lock and slamming the drawer shut just as the door began to open.
I threw myself back onto the bed, my back to the room, pretending a nonchalance I did not feel. The feathers from my destroyed pillow seemed to mock me from the floor.
"Romulos." The voice was gentle, layered with an ancient kindness that could, I knew, hide an iron will. Grandmother Myre. "Can I come in?"
You know, Lavinia, I thought, directing the silent words to my sister as I always did in times of stress, if I answer right away, she'll know I was doing something I shouldn't.
She has a sense for these things. I have to be rude. I have to stay silent. I remained perfectly still, hoping my feigned sleep or sullenness would be enough to make her leave.
It never was.
The door opened fully, and I heard the soft whisper of her robes on the carpet. Her presence filled the room, not with pressure, but with a dense, watchful calm.
"Romulos," she repeated, her footsteps stopping beside my bed. I felt the mattress dip as she sat on the edge. Her hand, cool and smooth as polished stone, settled on my shoulder.
"Romulos." This time, her voice held a note of gentle authority, the tone that brooked no ignoring. "Child, speak to me."
The game was up. I rolled over to face her. Her features were ageless, her eyes deep pools of violet that held the wisdom of epochs. In them, I saw my mother's face, or what I imagined it to be. The resemblance was a constant, aching reminder.
"Did Grandfather send you?" I asked, the question laced with the bitterness I couldn't fully suppress.
She smiled, a small, sad curve of her lips, and shook her head. "No, Romulos. I am here only to tell you that Kezess has agreed to give you ownership of the former city of Muraeth."
The world tilted. All my self-pity, my frustration, my seething anger, vanished, blown away like smoke.
"R-Really?!" The word was a gasp, a burst of pure, unadulterated hope so potent it was almost painful.
Muraeth. The name was a ghost on the wind, a place of fog-shrouded plateaus and crumbling, ancient architecture far to the north, in the icy reaches beyond the Kothan territories.
It was a place of profound historical significance—it had once been a stronghold of the Vritra Clan before their exile.
For years, many of the remaining Basilisks, myself included, had petitioned Grandfather to allow us to stabilize ourselves there, to reclaim a piece of our ancestral legacy. For me, it was more than that. It was a laboratory.
A place away from the prying eyes of the castle, where I could finally, finally, conduct my researches into my own nature, into the divide within me, without constant supervision.
"Yes, Romulos. He did," Grandmother confirmed, her watchful eyes studying my face, taking in my stunned joy.
A torrent of emotions flooded me—vindication, excitement, a terrifying sense of possibility.
Yes! Yes! The words were a silent scream in my mind. It wasn't freedom, not truly. But it was at least a longer leash.
A corner of the world, however desolate, that would be mine.