"You taste of rage, broken one."
My eyes snapped open to absolute darkness. Not the normal kind where your vision adjusts after a few minutes. This was different. Hungry, like the shadows had teeth.
I tried to sit up. Pain shot through my chest where the death curse had taken root. The wound was still there, still bleeding, but slower now. Thick drops that fell into silence.
No echo when they hit the ground. No sound at all.
The stone beneath my back felt different. Smoother. Older. This wasn't the rough volcanic glass of the Spire's corridors. I pressed my palms flat against the surface and felt intricate carvings worn smooth by centuries.
Where the hell was I?
I tried to speak. "Hello?"
Nothing. The darkness ate my voice before it could travel three feet.
But something heard me anyway.
"Such delicious anger. Such perfect despair. You will do nicely."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It bypassed my ears entirely, speaking directly into the marrow of my bones. Female, maybe. Or had been once. Now it sounded like wind through broken glass.
I rolled onto my side, biting back a groan. My ribs felt like i had crashed through the ground with it. Through the pain, I started to piece together what had happened.
The corridor floor must have collapsed. The whole Spire was riddled with chambers and passages from whatever civilization had built it originally and I'd fallen into something much older than the demon-infested levels above.
My hands found the edge of what felt like a stone platform. Carved symbols ran along its border—script that predated the Empire's founding. The letters seemed to squirm under my fingertips.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
"The Heart of the Forgotten. Where broken things come to be remade."
A faint glow appeared across the chamber. Not light exactly, but the absence of absolute darkness. Phosphorescent moss clung to the walls in patches, providing just enough illumination to see shapes. Tall pillars. Vaulted ceiling. Murals depicting figures that hurt to look at directly.
And whispers. Dozens of them, coming from empty air.
"Another hero cast aside..."
"Left to die by those he served..."
"Such loyalty. Such waste."
I tried to stand. My legs shook but held. The whispers grew stronger as I moved, like I was walking through invisible crowds of ghosts.
The shadows moved wrong here. Independent of any light source, they reached toward me with grasping fingers, then pulled back when I looked directly at them.
Something was watching me. I could feel its attention like a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders.
In the center of the chamber, a pile of rubble glowed with pulsing red light and it wasn't the clean radiance of Selena's divine magic or the golden warmth of Valen's heroic aura. This was darker and hungrier.
I approached carefully, stepping around chunks of fallen masonry. The closer I got, the stronger the whispers became. They spoke of other desperate souls who'd found this place. Warriors left for dead, mages abandoned by their covens and scholars whose discoveries had been stolen by their masters.
All of them transformed, all of them changed, all of them fed to something that waited in the dark.
The rubble shifted as I knelt beside it. Underneath, wrapped in chains, lay a book.
But not just any book. The cover defied easy description—not leather, not metal, not wood. Something that might once have been skin but had been worked and treated until it resembled black marble. Symbols crawled across its surface, rearranging themselves when I wasn't looking directly.
The Nameless Codex. The whispers provided the name without being asked.
"Touch it," the voice urged. "Learn what you could become."
My hand hovered inches above the cover. The chains uncoiled slightly, as if sensing my presence. They were warm to the touch.
"What's the price?" I asked.
The laughter that answered came from a dozen directions at once. "Clever boy. The price is always the same. What you were for what you could be."
Images flooded my mind. Not my memories, but those of others who'd made this choice. A knight whose lord had sent him to die for political convenience. A healer whose patients had been murdered for the crime of receiving care. A scholar whose research had been burned along with his entire academy.
Each one had knelt here. Each one had made the same desperate bargain.
And each one had risen as something new. Something powerful. Something that couldn't be discarded or forgotten or left to die in dark corners.
The death curse pulsed through my veins. I had few minutes left. My vision was already starting to blur around the edges.
Five years of loyalty. Five years of believing I mattered. Five years of watching Valen's back while he planned my eventual disposal.
He's already spent, that word coming through my mind again.
Rage bubbled up from somewhere deep in my chest. Not the hot, explosive kind that burned out quickly, the cold, calculating fury that could last for decades.
They'd left me here to rot, to become another skeleton decorating these ancient halls. Another cautionary tale about support mages who overestimated their worth.
I pressed my palm against the Codex.
The chains struck like vipers, wrapping around my arms, my chest, my throat. But instead of choking me, they felt like a embrace. Welcome home, they seemed to say. We've been waiting.
Blood seeped from my palm into the pages. The book opened itself, revealing text written in the same shifting script that covered the walls and as I watched, new words appeared, written in my own blood.
Caelum Thorne. Abandoned by the Hero of Light. Seeks transformation through betrayal's gift.
The words burned as they formed. Not painful but like cauterizing a wound that had been festering for years.
Power flooded through me. Dark magic that rewrote my core from the inside out and my support spells twisted into new forms. Healing became corruption. Buffs became curses. Barriers became binding circles.
My bones cracked and reformed. Longer. Stronger. Built for channeling energies that would have killed my old body. Glyphs burned themselves into my flesh… protective sigils that would hide my true nature from casual observation.
The Codex fused to my left arm, becoming part of me. Its knowledge flooded my consciousness, all its forbidden spells and techniques banned by every civilized nation even magic that predated the Hero's divine backing by millennia.
Black fire erupted around me. Not destructive—transformative. The rubble pile exploded outward as raw power convulsed through the chamber. Above, I felt the Spire's foundations shake.
I threw back my head and screamed.
Not from pain. From rebirth. From the sheer relief of finally, finally being something more than disposable.
The scream reached the surface where demons cowered and touched the distant mountains where my former party was probably celebrating their successful retreat.
Let them hear it. Let them wonder what they'd awakened.
When the echoes faded, I stood in the center of a circle of melted stone. The whispers had gone silent, even the shadows had pulled back, giving me space.
My reflection stared back from a puddle of melted rock. Same face, but the eyes now glowed with inner fire. Veins pulsed with dark magic just beneath the skin as the Codex had become part of my left arm, its surface smooth as polished obsidian.
I could feel everything now. Every living creature in the Spire above. Every demon, every scavenger, every parasite that fed on magical corruption. And beyond that, much farther away, five familiar souls traveling rapidly south.
My former party. My former friends. The people who'd left me here to die.
Knowledge flooded my mind. Spells that could track across continents. Curses that could kill with a whispered word. Techniques for turning someone's own magic against them.
I flexed my fingers.
Time to test my new capabilities.
I looked up at the collapsed ceiling. Stone and rubble blocked the way back to the surface which was no problem as I traced a burning sigil in the air—a symbol that hadn't been seen for a thousand years.
The stone began to melt.
"Time to dig my way out of this grave."