Shadows Over Soravin - Part 1

The ruins of Soravin had not breathed in decades. Wind curled through the stone bones of its shattered towers, singing through rusted arc-gates and fire-scorched walls. Beneath the silence, deep below where light could not reach, something stirred.

Elira Voss crouched at the edge of the exposed vault fracture, her fingers tracing a line of broken sigils etched into the foundation stone. Heat rose faintly from the seam, pulsing with each breath she took, as if the ruin itself exhaled with her.

“I remember this place being less… broken,” Tovi muttered from above, balancing on a leaning pillar as if performing for an invisible crowd. “More books, less atmospheric doom.”

“It’s not the books that broke,” Elira replied, standing slowly. “It’s the wards. And if I’m right, the vault beneath is starting to wake up.”

Vaelin stood a few paces behind, silent as always, shadows coiling faintly around his shoulders like a cloak stitched from dusk. He knelt without a word and pressed two fingers to the dust-covered stone, his eyes clouding silver with shadowsight.

“There’s a breach,” he said. “Oaths unraveling. Something clawed its way out, or was let out.”

Elira’s chest tightened. She had hoped it was just a pulse flare, a magical echo from some decaying relic. But the energy here was alive. And worse, it knew her.

The vault door had cracked at the center, revealing a spiral descent of obsidian and memory-metal, veins of crimson light flickering like heartbeat lines across the surface. She stepped down first, boots finding purchase on glyph-carved steps. Vaelin followed silently. Tovi hesitated, then twirled a dagger into the air and caught it with a grin.

“If this place starts whispering my childhood secrets, I’m throwing myself into the nearest ghost,” he said cheerfully, and descended.

Inside, the air shifted. Not stale, but saturated, like breathing through soaked parchment. The corridor curved downward, narrowing, until they entered the first chamber. Crystalized oaths hung in the air like frozen raindrops, catching the light from Elira’s faint spellglow. Each one flickered with faint words:

I vow to forget the fire. I vow to guard the gate. I vow to obey the flame.

Elira’s steps slowed. Her sigils dimmed. These weren’t just contracts. They were hers. Old. Buried. Locked away by spells she had cast herself.

Tovi plucked one from the air before she could stop him. “This one says, ‘I vow to burn the heart that broke me.’” He turned to Elira. “Dramatic. Was that one yours?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

Something behind the far wall twitched.

Vaelin shifted his stance, twin blades sliding free with the barest whisper. The shadow behind him thickened as he whispered an oath in a language only memory remembered.

The wall ruptured.

It wasn’t an explosion; it unfolded, like a door in a nightmare. And through it came the Warden.

Tall as two men, its body was a patchwork of shredded contracts and glimmering vow-threads, looped around a hollow core where a face should be. Its arms bled parchment. Its voice was a thousand overlapping whispers.

“Elira Voss,” it said. “You broke your bond.”

The air ignited. Vaelin lunged forward, blades flashing with regret-enhanced shadow, slashing across the Warden’s knee to drop it off-balance. It didn’t bleed. Instead, a ripple of golden ink poured from the cut and congealed midair, forming a whip that cracked toward Elira.

She raised her hand and let the fire answer.

Phoenixfire burst from her palm, not roaring, but singing, high and sharp. The whip curled away from her, burned to nothing midflight. Her sigils flared across the room, layering into a containment circle.

But the Warden laughed.

It knew the circle.

It remembered.

Its next strike shattered the outer layer of her wards and sent her skidding back. Vaelin interposed himself instantly, his shadows thickening into a fog of remorse. The Warden struck again, and this time, its arm passed through Vaelin, not physically, but memory-forged.

He gasped and fell to one knee. His hand clutched his chest.

He saw her, the one he’d killed in the Circle, the girl with red eyes and shaking hands. “Why?” she asked again, just as she had when he’d buried his blade in her throat. “Why me, Vaelin?”

“I didn’t want to,” he whispered.

The Warden raised its blade-arm.

And Tovi, flipping end-over-end from a vaulted support, slammed a glamour-bomb onto the creature’s back. The spell exploded in a wave of mirrored laughter and echoed doubt. The Warden faltered, turning on itself, confused by its own refracted memories.

“Now would be a brilliant time to set it on fire again,” Tovi called.

Elira did more than that.

She stepped inside the Warden’s broken circle and pulled a memory shard from her belt, one of her own. She whispered the trigger phrase.

“I remember the man who stood beside me in the flames.”

The shard ignited. The Warden screamed. Not in pain, but in recognition. Elira thrust the burning memory into its chest, and her phoenixfire surged through the hollow spaces inside it.

The creature collapsed into a pool of melted ink and silence.

Smoke curled from Elira’s fingertips. Her heart pounded. The vault pulsed again, and beneath her skin, the phoenixblood stirred with violent hunger.

She’d seen something when she cast the memory. A glimpse she hadn’t locked away.

A man, standing beside her in another vault. Fire behind them. A ring between their hands. And his voice:

“You are mine in flame, Elira Voss. Always.”

It hadn’t been Vaelin.

And somehow, she knew that man was still alive.

She looked to Vaelin, who stood watching her with a guarded expression. She couldn’t tell what he’d seen in the Warden’s attack. He didn’t speak. Just nodded once and turned away.

Tovi stepped beside her, quieter now.

“So,” he said. “Bad ex? Ancient death cult? Both?”

She didn’t answer. The crystalized oaths above her head began to hum.

One cracked clean in half. Its pieces drifted down.

And the vault pulsed again. As if waiting.

___________________________________________________

All Parts of the Series

Shadows Over Soravin Part 1

Shadows Over Soravin Part 2

Shadows Over Soravin Part 3

Shadows Over Soravin Part 4

Shadows Over Soravin Part 5