Chapter 41: The Stonehouse
Maire drank deeply, tossing the waterskin back with a sharp exhale.
"Thanks," she muttered, completely ignoring whatever Olyra tried to say next. She turned on her heel and headed straight toward the bunkhouse.
My gaze remained violently anchored to her spine, tracking the sway of her hips until the heavy door finally swallowed her.
Did she feel it? Had she seen what I saw? What the fuck had that been?
The questions bottlenecked inside my skull, crowding out reason until a sharp snapping sound broke through the static, inches from my nose.
"Caelen." Snap. "Caelen." Snap. "Yoo-hoo. Earth to Caelen."
I flinched, my attention snapping reluctantly to Veyra. "What?"
She planted both hands firmly on her hips. "Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we start with whatever the hell that maneuver was."
I opened my mouth to deflect, but she lunged forward. Her fist twisted into the collar of my tunic, hauling my frame down until we were practically eye to eye.
"Maire and the others might be blind to what just happened," she hissed, "but you cannot fool my eyes. That is the second time today you’ve displayed magic and martial skill far beyond anything an ordinary acolyte should possess."
I planted my heavy boots against the stone and slowly straightened to my full height, forcing her to release her grip. I casually brushed the dirt from my collar, making her wait for the rest.
She stared at me, her silver eyes calculating, as if ruthlessly reconsidering every single assumption she had made since the moment we met.
"That display of mastery..." Her expression tightened into something dangerously serious. "Honestly, if you fought one of us alone, I’m not certain we could beat you."
She had absolutely no fucking idea how terrifyingly accurate that was.
If I told her I was still actively suppressing the overwhelming majority of my divine nature, I suspected this conversation would become considerably less pleasant.
"What can I say, Master?" I shrugged, weaponizing enough casual arrogance to make irritation flash hotly across her face. "I was taught well. And what you just saw wouldn’t have placed me anywhere near the top of my old sect."
Her jaw slackened for barely a fraction of a second. Then, pure, unadulterated curiosity took the reins.
"Who was the best fighter?"
I hesitated.
Garyx.
The name nearly slipped past my teeth before common sense violently caught it. The literal personification of destruction had been one of the most lethal entities to ever walk the hallowed halls of the Starlight Palace. Even the gods implicitly understood that provoking him was an absolute death sentence.
"That would be Gar—" Fuck. "—Garen."
Veyra’s eyebrow arched sharply.
"Garen Veyr," I finished, smoothing the lie over. "Probably the strongest among us. I never fought him one-on-one, but he had a nasty habit of utterly dismantling anyone stupid enough to challenge him."
She motioned for Tessa and me to follow her. "This Garen Veyr. If you never crossed blades with him, how could you possibly know you wouldn’t win?"
That question deserved the heavy silence it received.
Could I?
If the catastrophic Miasma still dormant within my chest had been fully mastered, could I have actually overcome the physical embodiment of destruction himself?
I honestly never knew.
"I’m not certain, Master Veyra," I admitted smoothly as we started down a descending, winding mountain path. "And I highly doubt I’ll get the opportunity to find out anytime soon."
She considered the answer, her boots crunching against the gravel. "Curious."
"What is?"
"The way you fight." She flicked her gaze pointedly toward my bare hands. "You’re obviously lethal without a weapon, but your movement tells me you strongly prefer steel."
At the end of the path stood a massive, heavy wooden door engineered directly into the unforgiving rock of the mountain itself. Veyra pushed it open, revealing a cavernous, dimly lit corridor carved straight through the heart of the stone.
Massive structural pillars had been left intact to support the crushing weight of the ceiling, their surfaces meticulously covered in intricate draconic reliefs. Sprawling wings curled around the ancient stone. Mythic wyrms wound fiercely through carved clouds and jagged mountain peaks.
Veyra stepped aside, gesturing for us to cross the threshold.
"What makes you think I favor weapons?" I asked. I was genuinely interested now. Just how much raw data had she extracted from a single sparring session?
"The calluses on your palms," she noted dryly. "Your foundational stances certainly help."
She fell into step behind us.
"You also reach for balance points that simply aren't there when you fight empty-handed," Veyra noted, her voice carrying a dry, calculated authority. "It's subtle, but once you know to look for it, it becomes glaringly obvious." She offered a casual gesture. "Your stances give you away, similarly to Maire, who favors bows and handaxes. Olyra favors daggers, and Vaelorn has only used his limbs since he started fighting."
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Tessa, walking entirely too close, bumped right into my back. She bounced off my solid frame and hit the cold stone floor with a muffled thud.
"Ow! Caelen, why did you stop?" she groaned.
"Sorry." I leaned over and hauled her upright by the arm, offering a brief apology.
But my thoughts had already violently shifted elsewhere. Maire used bows and handaxes. For some inexplicable reason, knowing that specific detail intrigued me far more than it should have. Olyra preferred daggers. Vaelorn fought almost entirely with his body. But Maire... Of course she favored weapons that could lethally strike from a distance and still split bone up close. It suited her perfectly.
I turned back toward Veyra, catching her studying me. "Then what weapon do you think I use, Master?" I asked.
She knew exactly what I was doing. I was testing her to see if she was worthy—prodding her, waiting to see if she was competent enough to decipher the answer herself. It was another old, arrogant habit I needed to fix. Unfortunately, the verbal sport of this conversation was doing a much better job of keeping my attention than anything else. Because even with Maire somewhere across the monastery, the visceral, suffocating feeling she had instilled in me hadn't fucking gone away.
Tessa got up, dusting herself off, as Master Veyra stepped close behind her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.
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"Just beyond the door behind you, Caelen, is the Stonehouse," Veyra announced. She pointed toward the far end of the hall, perhaps a hundred feet away. A sprawling carving of a dragon was splayed across the wall surrounding the heavy door, a small, clear crystal orb held securely within its stone jaws.
"And to answer your question about the weapon..." She hummed, thinking for a suspended moment before grabbing my hands.
Veyra turned my palms over, pressing her thumbs firmly against the bumps and ridges of calluses on my skin—feeling the worn marks that this reconstructed body absolutely should not have possessed, yet somehow did.
She let my hands go. "Maybe a longsword, or even a greatsword."
I looked at her, my eyes widening in genuine surprise. "How do you figure?"
She flashed a knowing smile and gently booped my nose. "That’s a trade secret, Caelen."
I scowled. She turned away before I could interrogate her further.
"Now let's go inside and figure out what your regiment will be, okay?" she said, pivoting toward the corridor.
I nodded and took a couple of steps forward before Tessa spoke up from behind me.
"Master Veyra, what do you think I use?" she asked tentatively.
Veyra let out a small chuckle, walking beside Tessa and patting the girl on the back. "Tessa, my dear little acolyte, you use a scythe or a glaive."
I caught the exact same expression of bewildered shock mirroring on Tessa’s face that I had worn moments earlier.
"I’m not quite sure if you kill people for fun, or if you’re just used to farming," Veyra added, her chuckle blooming into a full, bright laugh.
Tessa’s gaze flicked to me in sudden, panicked embarrassment. "I don’t enjoy farming," she muttered. I merely raised an eyebrow. She sighed. "But you are right, my Master taught me to use a scythe."
We reached the end of the hall. The massive carved dragon loomed over the doorway, its jaws clamped around the crystal orb.
I grabbed the heavy door and pushed, but it was stuck fast. The orb in the dragon’s mouth instantly glowed a violent, warning red.
"Hold on, Caelen," Veyra cautioned, stepping forward. "I need to place the sigil on the orb before it’ll let us in."
She took a few quick steps and pressed her palm flat against the orb.
The rune etched beneath her skin flared to life, a pulse of verdant magic that bled right through the crystal. Emerald swallowed crimson.
Deep within the ancient stone, a heavy, metallic groan echoed like a dying breath.
Veyra shoved the door open.
I stepped across the threshold.
And the air was stolen right from my lungs.
The Stonehouse was a cavern of impossible scale. Murals consumed the space—some painted in sweeping, desperate strokes against the mountain rock, others carved with such brutal depth that the figures looked ready to bleed out of the stone itself.
Then, I tipped my head back.
And my heart stopped beating.
The vaulted ceiling was a masterpiece of slaughter. It wasn’t some distant myth. It wasn’t a legend.
It was my memory.
The very battle that had shattered Liliana’s brood over a millennium ago. The day my mortal body had been torn apart. Where Darian had traded his life for his family’s survival. Where Liliana had ripped Maeril from Mira’s arms.
The world had taken my ruin and spun it into art. My mind refused to grant it such mercy.
It was horrifyingly beautiful. Majestic dragons diving through tempests of color, warriors standing like gods against impossible odds. Golden light piercing the painted shadows as if victory had been woven into the stars themselves.
But all I saw was Darian choking on his own blood.
Mira shattering into a million pieces because they had dared to follow me.
My very existence had been the blade that carved their lives apart. My cursed fate had dragged everyone I loved into a war that belonged only to me.
Seeing my tragedy painted as a triumph tore open a wound I’d spent centuries pretending had healed into scar tissue. I wrenched my gaze down, sick to my stomach, but the walls offered no sanctuary.
Different battles. Different deaths.
The worst moments of my existence, immortalized as righteous glory for generations of starry-eyed acolytes who would never taste the ash and blood it had actually cost. The agony of my friends was their holy inspiration.
A bitter, metallic taste coated my tongue.
Lock it down, I ordered myself, swallowing hard. Do not let them see you bleed.
Veyra swept deeper into the cavern. Desperate to outrun the ghosts clawing at my mind, I anchored my gaze on the room’s centerpiece.
It was a fatal mistake.
A low altar of dark stone dominated the space, flanked by two colossal dragon skulls. They faced each other over the dais, their jaws frozen in silent, eternal roars. Cradled on their tongues were enormous, pulsing crimson jewels.
Anyone else would have called them rubies. I knew the truth the second my eyes landed on them.
Dragon blood.
Not fresh—crystallized by centuries of brutal magic until the essence of something wild and living had hardened into cold, glittering stone.
Ancient runes scarred their surfaces. I took a step closer, drawn by a morbid gravity.
Recognition slammed into me with enough force to shatter my ribs.
Seraphine. Ilyon.
This was their blood. Their gods-damned desecrated bones.
My horror dragged my gaze to the skull on the right. A jagged, familiar fissure scored the bone near the temple. I knew that scar. I had memorized it when it was still wrapped in warm, living scale.
Ilyon.
They had hollowed out my friend and mounted him on a pedestal, turning his soul's blood into a parlor trick for testing initiates.
My hand clamped hard over my sternum. The floor rushed up to meet my knee with a bone-jarring crack. The oxygen in the room simply ceased to exist. I gasped, fighting the suffocating darkness, barely clinging to the edge of consciousness.
For a terrifying span of heartbeats, the Stonehouse melted away, drowning me in the violent, blood-soaked memories I had spent centuries learning not to touch.
A rush of movement, and then Tessa was dropping to her knees beside me. Bless her fierce, resilient soul. Veyra was already at the altar, her voice echoing as she droned on about the ritual, entirely blind to my unraveling.
Tessa leaned in close, bringing with her a grounding warmth. “Are you alright?” she murmured.
I tried to nod. But the lie turned to ash on my tongue.
I shook my head. No.
She didn't press. She didn't demand the ghosts surrender their secrets. Instead, she slid a supportive arm beneath mine, pulling me up, tethering me to the present. I let myself lean into her heat for three precious seconds before I forced my trembling legs to hold my own weight.
Veyra’s voice echoed, dripping with reverence. “…you will press both hands to the rubies. The ancient draconic magic will awaken, revealing the absolute truth of your nature.”
A bitter, hysterical laugh clawed at my throat.
Ancient draconic magic.
Absolute bullshit.
It was identification magic. Exquisitely crafted, undeniably potent, far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals—but entirely rooted in the same threadbare spells wizards had been tinkering with for generations. Seraphine and Ilyon had just twisted those threads tighter after brushing against the divine.
If they were here, they would have laughed themselves breathless at being worshipped as an unknowable miracle of dragonkind.
Unfortunately, pointing out their ignorance would likely get me burned at the stake as a heretic before high sun.
By the time Veyra’s speech wound to a close, I had shoved the pieces of my soul back together and locked the cage.
Shoulders squared. Breathing even. Expression utterly, flawlessly blank.
The mask of Caelen was firmly back in place.
For the span of a single heartbeat, I brushed my mind against Tessa’s.
Thank you.
A soft, pretty flush crept up her neck, staining her cheeks. She averted her gaze before Veyra could catch the silent intimacy between us.
Master Veyra turned from the desecrated bones of my friends and clapped her hands, a sharp, ringing sound that shattered the silence.
“Now…” Her hawkish eyes slid between us, bright with expectation. “Who goes first?”