Chapter 24 : Sophia
Evan and Sophia had no quarrel with each other, and in fact shared a common enemy. The Creationist Church showed no more mercy to the Blood Clan than it did to liches. In that regard they were already natural allies, and now that the immediate tension had passed, there was no reason to maintain it. Whatever philosopher's stones might or might not be found here could wait. Establishing whether they were on the same side came first.
The exchange of blows had served its purpose. Allies needed to know each other's capabilities. Evan had shown enough of his, and Sophia had shown enough of hers.
Sophia was perceptive. She heard the shift in his approach and responded to it. Her wings folded and disappeared. She dropped to the ground and said, "There are no philosopher's stones here. This is a castle of the Gonishu people. The Gonishu — though calling them barbarians, as history does, tells you more about Kehwa's court historians than about the Gonishu themselves. Their magical civilization was more advanced than what exists today. This castle is evidence of that. Do you know why it doesn't appear in Kehwa's campaign records?"
"Why?"
Evan dismissed the Bone Cage with a wave. The hell-hound growled but stayed back. Sophia spoke a word to it and it settled.
"Because the castle was invisible during that period. The concealment used up its stored energy over five centuries, and only when that was exhausted did it become visible to anyone passing by. The castle exists in two states simultaneously — what you see from outside is ordinary stonework, but it connects to a demi-plane. Everything significant is there. We only discovered this recently."
"A demi-plane." Evan had not expected that. Demi-plane work was Legend-tier magic — the territory of practitioners so far beyond the normal scale that most people never encountered one. Mages who reached Legend-rank typically withdrew from public life entirely to pursue their research, and were rarely seen again.
"Yes. I wouldn't normally say this to a stranger, but time is short — we've heard the Church knows about this place. More allies mean more chances. You're a lich, and clearly not the kind anyone has seen before. How do you look like a living person? What happened?"
"I'm not entirely sure myself. Something went wrong in the transformation, I think." He genuinely didn't know the full answer, and being vague cost him nothing. "You're not quite what I'd expect from the Blood Clan either."
"I'm half-blooded. My father is Duke Windsor. My mother was human." She said it matter-of-factly.
That explained it. Evan filed it away and moved on. "The area outside seems calm. Those plants are yours, I assume. But there's nothing matching the old stories about this place — no spatial disturbances, nothing obviously wrong. What am I missing?"
"You mean the curse, and the time-space instability."
"Yes."
"The explanation is simpler than the stories. When the castle's concealment energy ran out, some of it scattered rather than dissipating cleanly. That residual energy has been affecting the local environment ever since — the plants, the wildlife. There's no curse. It's just old magic bleeding out slowly."
Evan nodded. The simplicity of it made more sense than a shaman's dying curse surviving fifteen hundred years. "I'll admit this place has my full attention," he said, and meant it.
Sophia allowed herself a small smile. "Come in, then. Follow me."
She turned and walked through the gate. Evan followed. The doors closed behind them without anyone touching them, and the ivy resumed its position across the wood so quickly that within moments it was impossible to tell anyone had passed through at all.
They had barely entered when sound reached them from outside — the heavy beat of large wings. In the distant sky, a red dragon appeared, circling. Its rider wore heavy plate covered in runic arrays, a cross-star reliquary on the chest, a dragon lance in hand. Iron Cross Order. Great Knight Raphael — the man the Church called the Blade of Gabriel, who had once cleared an entire heretic stronghold alone, killing over a hundred, including Great Knights and senior mages.
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His partner was the red dragon Shur.
In this world, dragons and humans could form permanent bonds through formal contract, each gaining from the arrangement — the human gaining access to the dragon's power and something of its longevity, the dragon gaining significant intelligence advancement. A dragon knight was roughly equivalent in combat to a knight one full tier above their actual ranking, with magic resistance to match. The relationship was recognized and approved by the Creationist Church.
Shur's voice carried across the night air: "Raphael, there's something unpleasant below. Smells like Blood Clan. Do we go down now, or wait for the others?"
The dragon was too large for the castle in its current form; descending would mean shrinking, and Raphael would have to continue on foot.
"Wait a while. Clear the perimeter first. My intelligence says this castle belongs to the Gonishu culture — their magical development was substantial, though their population was small, and Kehwa's people burned most of their records. It's only recently that the Church has taken serious interest in Gonishu magic, and even now the underlying principles aren't well understood. This castle is a specimen. The Blood Clan got here first, but they won't crack it quickly."
Shur banked, opened its mouth, and a column of dragonfire fell from above. The plants on the mountainside made sounds as they burned — high and thin, like something between a whistle and a scream. The ones the fire missed pulled their roots from the rock and fled.
Inside the castle, Evan followed Sophia through corridors lined with stone figures. Most were gargoyles of types he recognized. A few he wasn't sure about. None of them moved as Sophia passed, which told him the Blood Clan had found whatever the activation keys were.
The route twisted back on itself multiple times in a way that was clearly designed to confuse, and Evan found something unexpected: a map forming in his mind as he walked, every passage they'd covered remaining perfectly clear. He noted it without comment. Some spatial awareness had developed in him without his noticing — probably a side effect of his magical training, though he couldn't point to exactly when it had begun.
The castle's layout was becoming transparent to him as they moved through it.
Sophia stopped at a wall that appeared completely solid, smooth stone with no seam or feature. She walked through it without pausing. Evan followed.
The sensation was nothing — a moment of slight resistance that wasn't quite physical, and then he was through and standing in a large hall. Light filled it from above, soft and steady. He looked up. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, and wall sconces ran along all four sides, none of them using candles or oil. The light came from gemstones engraved with magical arrays — they absorbed ambient energy during the day and released it as light at night. Simple in principle, impossible to scale commercially. A gemstone lamp that never wore out guaranteed there was no replacement market, which meant no producer could sustain themselves on it. Consumer goods required consumption to sustain production. Eternal lamps were a philosophical curiosity and an economic dead end.
Evan let the thought go. He had more pressing things to look at.
The hall held perhaps fifteen people, or things that appeared as people. Most looked up when Sophia entered, and several frowned when they saw she'd brought company. She walked in without hesitation and no one spoke — her authority in this space was clear.
"Father. This is Evan, a lich."
Duke Windsor looked at Evan with the measured attention of someone who had been alive long enough to have seen most things. When Sophia identified him as a lich, the tension in the room shifted. A lich was hunted by the Church. The Blood Clan were hunted by the Church. The enemy of their enemy.
"My lord Evan." Windsor's voice was warm in the way of someone with extensive practice at being warm. "Sophia brings you here for reasons I trust. Consider yourself among allies."
"My lord Duke." Evan inclined his head.
"We arrived only a few days ago. Sophia's people have been here for two years already. In all that time, the castle's deeper secrets haven't yielded — the passage to the demi-plane remains closed." Windsor gestured at the gathered Blood Clan. "These are all Windsor clan."
Evan understood more from Nicholas Andrew's memory than Windsor perhaps realized. The Windsor line was one of the Thirteen Clans, but it had fallen far — the ancient vampires at the root of their bloodline had entered long sleep, which significantly diminished the clan's power, and they had been keeping a low profile for generations. But ambition didn't atrophy with age. They had found this secret by chance, and they were here to see whether it could reverse their decline.
Two years and they hadn't opened it. Sophia had brought Evan in partly to see whether he could.
He looked at the far wall.
There was an inscription there, cut into the stone in Gonishu — a wedge-form script, angular and precise. Nicholas Andrew had spent real effort on Gonishu linguistics, driven by his interest in their civilization, and Evan had that knowledge in full.
Death is both the ending of life and its beginning. Only the force of life carried within death can reach the far shore.
He read it again.
It looked like an aphorism. The kind of thing you engraved on a wall to make the room feel significant. But why here? What did it have to do with the passage to the demi-plane?
He turned it over in his mind.