Shadows Over Soravin - Part 2

Long before Soravin was a ruin, before its spires fell and its vaults fractured, it had been a convergence point, a place where the arcane and the forbidden met in secret beneath a scholarly veil. Though the Crimson Library never acknowledged the site’s existence in their public archives, the deeper researchers whispered of it: The Embervault, a subterranean experiment in anchoring fireblooded emotion to crystallized oath contracts.

Elira had only glimpsed the early diagrams as an initiate, back when memory sorcery was still a theoretical art and phoenixblood heritage was treated as a hazard, not a strength.

Now, walking through the vault’s exposed arteries, she could feel it thrumming again, alive, half-awake, angry.

The stairwell narrowed as they descended, glyphwork shifting subtly along the walls, changing with every passing thought. The magic here was not static, it fed from their presence. Elira’s sigil-lantern, etched into a floating copper disk she kept hovering by her shoulder, pulsed red when her thoughts darkened, blue when she focused, and gold only when Vaelin neared.

Vaelin, moving ahead with the precision of a silent predator, whispered an oath under his breath. The shadows folded into him like threads drawn tight. The atmosphere thickened with his breath.

Tovi walked beside Elira, arms crossed but eyes sharp, chewing dried citrus rind like it was battlefield rations. “You know,” he said, “I’ve broken into a dozen vaults, impersonated three Archmages, and once seduced a cardinal’s ghost, yet this might be the first time I’ve been nervous before we reach the relic.”

Elira didn’t smile. “Good. That means your instincts aren’t completely dulled by theater.”

“They’re dulled by trauma, actually. But thanks.”

The corridor opened into a massive antechamber. A broken circle of obelisks surrounded a glass platform suspended over a dark chasm. Each obelisk bore a name, written not in ink or glyphs, but memories. Elira could see them flaring faintly against the stone like scars in motion.

Vaelin paused at one. His eyes narrowed.

She stepped closer and read the memory out loud:

He hesitated. Just once. And that was enough to damn them both.

She looked up at him. “This one’s yours.”

He didn’t deny it.

Before she could ask, the memory writhed and bled into the floor, vanishing. The vault reacted to acknowledgment; it always had. Elira remembered enough of the theory now. Emotion created power. But regret? Regret had always been the most volatile medium for Remnant birth.

From the other side of the platform came a mechanical click. A containment circle slowly began to rotate, revealing a coffin of translucent emberglass encased in layered warding rings. At the center of that coffin floated a woman in suspended fire. Her robes were scorched library red, edged in gold runes of memory-lock. Her expression was peaceful, yet her mouth was slightly parted, as though she had been trying to speak when she was sealed.

Elira stopped breathing.

“I… I know her.”

Tovi stepped beside her, frowning. “A relative?”

“No.” Her voice barely carried. “I think she was me. Or I was her. I don’t know how, but…”

The containment wards flickered. The coffin’s surface cracked, sending tremors through the surrounding rings. A projection, a ghost-memory, burst from the floating body and spiraled into the chamber like smoke from a ritual pyre.

They saw a vision: Elira, younger, her phoenixfire blazing out of control, standing opposite a tall man clad in a cloak of dusk-feathers and ashsteel. He bore the Nightblade insignia, but an old one, predating even Vaelin’s initiation.

“I bind you to flame,” he said. “Your memory to mine. Your heart to the pyre. Burn with me, or burn alone.”

And then she answered. Not with fear. Not with hesitation.

“With flame, I choose you.”

The vision shattered.

The vault screamed.

Chains unraveled from the ceiling, descending like grasping hands. Relics on floating platforms began to stir, masks, daggers, quills of blood-ink, and branded rings, all trembled under the weight of rising Remnants.

Vaelin was already moving, blades drawn, eyes cold. “They’re responding to the bond’s awakening.”

Elira summoned layered sigils to her arms, threads of memory-laced fire spiraling around her as she shielded the coffin. “I think I bound my phoenixblood to someone, and he sealed me. Wiped my memories to keep the bond from killing us both.”

Tovi spun on his heels, flicking glamoured knives through the air. Each blade shimmered with runes that mimicked reality just long enough to confuse and disorient. One such knife struck a floating mask, an assassin’s relic etched with a burning eye.

The mask twitched, then launched toward Elira.

Vaelin stepped into its path. His oathmagic flared, not from his blood, but from his guilt. The shadows reacted to his unspoken memory, forming a dome of translucent night. The mask struck and shattered, but Vaelin staggered.

A whisper echoed from the impact site.

“You let her die. And you’d do it again.”

He didn’t speak. He simply breathed, and his shadows thickened.

Tovi vaulted over a broken platform, hurled a chain around a rising Remnant’s neck, and yanked. “I hate this vault,” he muttered. “I hate magic that talks back.”

More relics surged. Memory-born forms began to rise, half-formed ghosts of oathbreakers, faces indistinct, voices like fractured glass.

And then, the woman in the coffin opened her eyes.

Golden, brilliant, identical to Elira’s.

She stepped through the shattering glass, barefoot, untouched by fire.

“You left me,” she said softly.

Elira’s hands trembled. “I didn’t choose to forget. He tore it from me.”

The woman smiled, not cruelly, but with infinite sadness.

“You chose him, Elira. Then. And now.”

She looked to Vaelin, and the flames around her pulsed brighter. “But he won’t be enough when the vault finishes waking. You bound your life to a flame greater than his shadow can shield.”

With that, she turned and stepped into the darkness beyond the dais, disappearing through a doorway that hadn’t been there moments ago.

Elira tried to follow.

But the threshold rejected her. Flames burst along the stone like a heartbeat skipped. She fell back, smoke curling from her palms.

Tovi caught her. “Well, that was dramatic. Do you always hallucinate your past lives this intensely?”

“I don’t think she’s a past life,” Elira whispered. “I think she’s what I left behind. My flame, my bond, it fractured. And part of it became her.”

Vaelin stared at the darkened doorway.

He felt it too, the call of the vault, the whisper of things forgotten. Somewhere down here, the Nightblade Circle had tried to forge weapons from broken vows and scorched love.

And now those weapons remembered their names.

Far above them, the vault began to shift. The fracture that had exposed Soravin’s ruins groaned as something stirred deeper within,something that had been waiting for her return.

Not Elira.

The Bondburnt.

And it was no longer sleeping.

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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