Prologue Chapter 3
The door was barely opened a crack before Arkyn's eyes were instinctively shut and he turned his head away.
'This doesn't make any sense.' Arkyn thought while trying to get his eyes adjusted from the darkness to light. 'The lights of the castle shouldn't be this intense. Is this sunlight?'
Arkyn stepped forward and let himself be bathed in the light while still shielding his eyes. Sure enough, the heat of the sun hit his body and an outdoor breeze told him there was something very wrong with the castle.
The doorway was supposed to open up to a lower segment of the castle. There should be another dozen walls and floors above him. Grand halls, polished floors, and stone towers should be protecting him from the elements he felt exposed to now.
Not wanting to waste time waiting for his eyes to slowly adjust, Arkyn pulled at the sleeve of his tunic. He tore a long enough piece of the thin material off and tied it around his head to cover his eyes.
Staring through the fabric made his vision blurry but he could finally see what was around him without struggling to keep his eyelids open.
Arkyn looked around, feeling his jaw and heart drop at the scene.
The wooden door should've opened to a central area of the castle, where a lot of the staff and mages should've been moving about in a hectic manner. Yet no one was there, and hardly anything remained beyond the first three stories of the castle. Arkyn could see through the countless holes and openings in the stone that not much remained of the original structures.
Sections of the outer wall were gone, multiple towers just outside the main pavilion had collapsed, and nothing but the stone was left. Carpets, tapestries, and cloth furniture were shredded down to nothing.
In a sort of daze, Arkyn began walking around the space aimlessly. He had no idea where he was going or even if he was even looking for anything in particular. He didn't even shiver as his whole body just felt numb.
He didn't even consider calling out for anyone. The idea of his voice echoing with no response was enough to add a stabbing pain in his heart.
After a while, his wandering led him near the grand dining hall. Arkyn recognized some of the path's original layout, which triggered a thought. Recalling so much of the area's destroyed history made him think to check something important.
He walked faster through the ruins, now with a spark of fleeting purpose, and nearly stumbled repeatedly. The polished stone floors had transformed into chalky terrains of rubble and barely level surfaces. It was impossible to recognize the original state of the high-level architecture.
He turned right and followed the corridors that led him near the eating space. He remembered how the wall decorum used to be, banners of black with gold trim were once spaced out between each window. The opaque glass panes would let in the rising and falling sunlight everyday.
The castle was carved into a mountain face, expanding deeper into the mountain whenever it was needed. The mountain it sat on was one of many on the edge of the West Coast of the Continent. In half a day's walk down the westside of the mountain, Arkyn would have been standing at the edge of the Altum Sea.
Fish was a common meal as a result of sitting so close to the ocean. Even now, Arkyn could faintly smell the saltwater in the breeze. He was too concerned with the current moment to experience any sort of nostalgia though.
When arriving at the collapsed doorframe of the dining hall he used to eat so much fish and bread, he felt his stomach tighten even more.
The dark wood table that once housed a hundred nobles during feasts was now in fractured remains. Barely any of the stools surrounding it were standing upright, let alone usable. They were rotted down to practically nothing.
The iron chandelier had detached from the ceiling, the fall left a crater in the wood and all the [Light Crystals] once attached to the intricate metal sculpture were now shattered. It had been so long that even the particles of crystal had been blown away and the iron rings holding them together were just red clumps of warped, rusted metal.
Arkyn let out a deep sigh before moving onto the main reason he was there.
He walked past the large stretch of space meant for the long table and approached the wall with no doors or windows, right where the [King's Throne] would sit.
The throne was a proud symbol of Odbrane that was heavily enchanted to last centuries. It was meant to showcase a lot of the magic and history around the Odbrane kingdom, so it was not a surprise to see it missing.
It was most likely somewhere deeper in the castle, sitting in the actual throne room. At least, that was what he hoped. Arkyn was not in the mood to see if he was wrong again.
Arkyn didn't even stop to hover about the vacant spot, he was more interested in the archway made of solid stone that stood against the wall. It stood about twice his height and was even wider across.
It would seem like an oddity among the feast hall, as the archway was not an opening to anywhere, it just stood against a wall of stone bricks. The archway would have been centered just behind the King at feasts and it still stood there inanimately.
In the past however, it was one of the greatest means of traveling about the castle.
Engraved along the pillars of the archway were dozens of markings that traveled vertically and sometimes spiraled into seemingly random directions.
They were known as 'Runes.' markings of magical energy that altered mana based on the shape they made. Some resembled the marking that shimmered along the [Heart of the Castle]'s doors, leaving only a quarter of the stone surface blank.
'The [Engraved Runes] seemed to be intact, but does it still have mana fueling the [Imprinted Runes]?' Arkyn thought as he activated his [Mage Sight] for the second time that day.His eyes began glowing like two, white suns through the cloth strip as he saw more threads of mana made of golden light travel from the [Heart of the Castle] and all across the ruined remains.
Arkyn couldn't remember every single magical formation or array that surrounded the castle, but he knew a lot of the original tethers were missing.
The lines of mana were once orderly and arranged in long circuits across the walls, floors, and even ceilings. Now some were disconnected where the walls crumbled or just unraveled from the stone and drifted aimlessly into the air.
Magic was ethereal in nature, until something assigned the energy a certain element, it would stay in a nonphysical state. All it took was someone to guide or direct the flow so it acted how they wanted. The only thing that could stop it was an opposing force or until the energy being fed into it was depleted.
Once a tether was no longer being fed energy, it would eat away at itself until crumbling back into an undefined state. It seemed that wherever the walls fell apart, the circuits would just abruptly end, including all the ones around the arch Arkyn was examining.
There should have been ghostly runes that filled the smooth and uncarved sections of the archway, but the [Imprinted Runes] had died off as it had lost too many mana tethers.
'Damnit, the [Gate Network] is destroyed too. Everything is truly gone . . . so what is making that annoying buzzing?'
Akryn hadn't forgotten the noise, it was still resonating along the castle remains. It echoed a bit, throwing him off as he searched, but eventually Arkyn found the source was at the main entrance, leading out the front of the castle walls and down the dirt roads of the mountain.
The noise was coming from one of the very few arrays that were still operating above ground. The array was designed as a security measure for anyone walking through the gates without following the proper procedures.
The array was intentionally incomplete so that whenever someone walked through its boundaries, their natural mana would complete the circuit. The end result of completing it was air magic blaring a siren horn that Arkyn discovered to be still working beside the guard station.
If a guard wasn't there to disconnect the lines feeding the whole thing power, anything carrying a drop of magic would spark the array awake.
That meant it could have been anything from a ten-foot-tall beast to a simple bird. Every living creature innately circulates natural mana in the physical plane. All it took was a bit of practice to motion the mana outside the body and affect external forces.
Something had crossed the threshold at some point and because no one was standing guard, the array had a completed circuit and had been triggered.
'That could've happened yesterday, a week ago, or even years ago. This thing has been blaring the whole time and I never realized it because I was too fucking scared to ever check. Gods, I am just a coward.' Arkyn kicked the dirt in frustration, he couldn't help himself as his emotions came flooding back.