Shadows Over Soravin - Part 4
The Wards That Remember
The descent felt like stepping into the marrow of a buried god.
No light guided them, only memory. Thin lines of crystalline veinwork pulsed faintly along the vault walls, casting a sickly indigo shimmer over the steps. With every touch of a boot to stone, fragmented echoes burst outward, moments frozen in time, hazy and sharp in equal measure. Vaelin saw a gloved hand dripping with someone else’s blood. Elira glimpsed a page torn from a sigil codex, set aflame before the eyes of a weeping child. And Tovik… Tovik flinched at a laugh that sounded too much like his own, coming from a voice behind a mask.
They said nothing. Soravin did not like noise.
The stairwell ended in a vault of concentric rings, metal and stone woven like a spell made solid. Above them, the ceiling curved into a dome lacquered with sigils from languages Vaelin hadn’t seen since his Nightblade days, glyphs of memory-anchoring, soul-chaining, mnemonic siphoning. They weren't just protections. They were punishments.
At the chamber’s heart floated a prism of fireglass suspended by rusted black steel chains, its many faces constantly shifting, each angle catching and reshaping light into visions.
Elira froze the instant she saw it.
Vaelin stepped beside her, gaze narrowing.
Inside the prism was a woman, trapped in perfect stasis. Her features were Elira’s. Not similar. Not familial. Identical. The younger face bore scorch marks across one cheek, her eyes wild with grief, mouth half open in a silent scream. Flame moved sluggishly through her hair as though burning in syrup. Around the prism hovered twelve masks, ceremonial, featureless, humming. Their mouths opened and closed like they were trying to speak, but no words came, only air charged with residual soulheat.
“That’s…” Elira’s voice broke. “That was me. No, part of me. A fractured memory. I sealed this place myself. Before I left the Crimson Library. I remember now.”
Vaelin looked at her. “Sealed it, why?”
“Because we were trying to create a sentient mnemonic vault. One that fed on emotion, memory, magic, and then refined it. But the tethering was unstable. It needed more than a source. It needed a soul to ground it. So we gave it mine.”
The masks stirred.
Tovik, circling cautiously along the outer ring, stopped short. “You volunteered to be bound to an echo-prism?”
“No,” Elira whispered. “I was tricked. He told me it was temporary. A safeguard. He said the flame in me made it safe.”
The prism pulsed.
The woman inside moved, if only slightly. One eye flicked toward Elira. It didn’t blink.
Suddenly, the room dropped in temperature, as if all heat had been devoured by the echo-prism’s hunger. Chains groaned. Sigils along the dome brightened to white.
The masks spun faster.
Vaelin felt his blood twist. The air began to speak, not in words, but in voices long dead.
“You failed her.”
“You let Korrin die in the Mire.”
“You buried the oathblade where none could find it.”
Elira stumbled back as the memory of phoenixfire consumed her vision, her former bonded, robed in firelight, whispering promises in a tongue she now remembered too well.
Tovik snarled and pulled a compact mirror shard from his coat. “The masks are mirror-linked. Someone’s watching through them, maybe directing the core.”
He tossed the shard toward a wall where shadows thickened. The moment it struck the glyph-carved stone, the image fractured. For a heartbeat, a gaunt face behind a bone mask flickered into view. An unseen observer, tethered through a glamour network, blinked out with a hiss.
“Not just a trap,” Tovik growled. “A goddamn spy rig.”
Vaelin had moved already, blades drawn. Shadows roiled around him like smoke clinging to breath. Each step snapped like a heartbeat, each slash severing one of the mask tethers. As each fell, a memory discharged, blinding heat, guilt, agony, and confusion. One mask whispered Elira’s name. Another echoed a lullaby Vaelin had not heard since he was seven.
But he did not stop.
“Elira,” he said as he fought, his voice low but clear, “that thing inside the prism, it’s part of you. But it’s been changed. If it finishes the mnemonic circuit, this vault becomes a forge for memory weapons.”
“It already is,” she murmured. “But we can break it.”
She stepped into the prism’s outer field. Fire leapt up around her boots, but did not burn. Her phoenixblood ignited, aura flickering gold and copper. The chains trembled.
“I thought sealing it would erase the bond,” she said. “But he left a tether. One that kept feeding on me, on others. The Remnants outside? They came from this.”
Vaelin moved closer, face unreadable. “Then cut the bond.”
She looked at him, eyes full of flame and grief. “If I do, part of me dies with it.”
“Then let it die,” he said. “The part that still listens to him.”
Elira touched the prism. Flames surged outward.
The image of the younger Elira screamed, this time audibly, and shattered. The chains snapped, and the masks dissolved into dust. Fire raced through the glyph-lined ceiling, incinerating the old circle one sigil at a time.
Tovik threw up a glamour shell just in time to keep the collapsing echoes from melting his mind. Vaelin shielded Elira with his body as ash fell like snow.
And then… silence.
The core was gone. The vault’s oppressive magic receded. But etched into the scorched stone, visible only to those who looked with more than sight, a symbol remained.
Vaelin crouched. Traced it.
An old mark.
One he hadn’t seen since the fall of the Nightblade Circle.
“Elira,” he said, voice grave, “this wasn’t a Crimson Library project.”
She knelt beside him, touching the mark.
Her voice was hollow. “This was Nightblade work. Your work.”
Vaelin stood slowly.
“No,” he said. “His work.”
From the darkness behind the vault wall, the wind whispered a name they had all thought forgotten.
The man who founded the first Circle.
The one who taught Vaelin oathbinding.
The one Elira once loved.
The one Tovik had orders to kill years ago, but never found.
“Kael Morien.”
And somewhere, deeper than memory, something awakened.
___________________________________________________
All Parts of the Series
About the Creator
Richard Bailey
I am currently working on expanding my writing topics and exploring different areas and topics of writing. I have a personal history with a very severe form of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder.
Keep reading
More stories from Richard Bailey and writers in Chapters and other communities.
Shadows Over Soravin - Part 3
The deeper they pressed into the ruins beneath Soravin, the more the vault abandoned all pretense of architecture. Passageways twisted like veins, breathing faint heat through the stone. Glyphwork on the walls shimmered when touched, alive, reactive, growing. The vault was no longer just a site of research. It had become a living archive of the broken, a body built on fractured oaths and stolen memories.
By Richard Bailey7 months ago in Chapters
Bruce Lee and The God of War: Kuan Ti
It starts with love.. The Power to the God Of War and Wealth Walk into a Chinese restaurant (even in Oklahoma, USA), a Chinese police station, a kung fu martial arts studio or even a Chinese temple and you often see a red faced warrior holding a heavy quan-do (spear like weapon).
By WILD WAYNE : The Dragon King6 days ago in Chapters
Hobbies And Living Make Life What
When we look at our lives and the way we live them what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it the hobbies that we enjoy doing in our lives, or is it just how we live and show the world how our hobbies and life can work together? How is it that a person can live the way they do and have hobbies to make their life what it is for them? Is it just the things that they do in there lives to make it what it is, or is it the hobbies themselves and what they do to a person’s life when they do said things? I think it is how a person actually looks at their life, with all the things that a person has in their life, that makes it what it is with their hobbies. What that means is, people live the way they do because of their likes and dislikes. We wouldn’t all be different if we didn’t have those. If we didn’t have hobbies we wouldn’t really have lives, have you ever thought of that. Even when we work at a job hobbies come before that, because we always need ways to relax after a long day. We go to school, but after school we need something to calm our nerves and to give us a break, so what do we do? Well we do have a hobby of course. The question is how long have hobbies been around in our lives?
By Louise Barraco3 days ago in Chapters
Comments (1)
This description is intense! The imagery of the descent and the prism with Elira's trapped self is really captivating. It makes me wonder what led to all this and what they'll do next.