The voice in my mind was a violation. It slithered through my thoughts, cold and ancient. The skeleton on the dais did not move again, but its empty gaze held a terrible, knowing awareness. The green threads of corruption throbbed in time with my pounding heart.
Little saint. It knew what I was. It understood who I was, or what I had been.
I forced my voice past the fear constricting my throat. "Who are you?"
I let out a dry, mental chuckle. "A question for the ages. I am the consequence. I am the result of a prayer that turned into a curse. They called me the Anchor."
"The Anchor?" The term meant nothing to me, according to Selene's memories.
"The first seal was not merely a spell. It required a sacrifice. A soul was bound in perpetuity to hold the geometry of the ward-song in place. I was that soul. The first saint's most devout disciple offered for the 'greater good.'" The bitterness in the thought was a tangible acid. "My faith was my chain."
Horror washed over me. Erebus hadn't just created the system. He had used a living person—a follower—as a magical battery to power the original seal on the Abyssal Rift. This skeleton was the twisted remains of that disciple, bound here for a thousand years. The "first saint's folly" wasn't just his betrayal; it was this grotesque, foundational sin.
"This is the academy's foundation," I whispered, understanding dawning. "They built a place of learning on top of a prison. On top of you."
The irony is truly striking. Youth and hope, nourished by my endless despair. Their light fueled by my decay. The corruption they fear in their shadows… is my soul bleeding into the stone."
The green threads. They weren't an external evil. They were the psychic leakage of a tormented, immortal soul fused with dark magic. This was the sickness at the academy's heart. And it was connected to everything—to the systems of power, to the selfish ambitions it fostered. Seraphina's cruelty, Cassian's manipulation, and the court's rot—they were all reflections of this foundational sin.
"The message said to wake up what heaven keeps. It brought me here. Why?"
The skeleton's finger bones tightened minutely on the flesh-like book. "The cycle is a wheel. The anchor is its axle. To break the wheel, you must shatter the axle. Or… replace it." The mental voice turned insidious, probing. "You feel it, don't you? The power is in you. It is the same as his. You possess the same power as the one who bound me. You could renew the seal. Make it pure again. Use your faith, your power. It would last another thousand years. You would be a true saint."
The offer was a trap woven with truth. I could feel the structure of the ward song in the chamber. It was broken, frayed, and poisoned. With my holy power, I could theoretically rebuild it. I would be doing what Selene was born to do: sacrifice for the greater good. I would save the academy from the creeping corruption.
I would also condemn this soul to an eternity of torment and bind myself to this dark place forever.
"No," I said, the word echoing faintly in the stone chamber.
"No?" The voice feigned surprise. "Then you wish to break the cycle. To free me. A noble sentiment. But foolish. My pain is what keeps the seal on the Rift intact. If I am released, the powerful seal weakens. The monsters will come. The world will burn. Is that the legacy of your mercy?"
It was a diabolical choice: perpetuate a profound evil or risk unleashing a cataclysm. This was the true face of Erebus's system: choices with no good outcomes, only varying degrees of damnation.
"There is a third option," I said, thinking aloud, my eyes locked on the book. "The system is artificial. The seal can be remade without a sacrificial soul. The knowledge must exist."
"The knowledge," the Anchor hissed, and for the first time, I felt a spike of real emotion from it: hunger. "It is in the Grimoire. The book he left behind. The one I hold. It contains the original geometry and the untainted ward-song. It is the key to remaking everything… or unmaking it."
The flesh-like book. Erebus's Grimoire. It was here. Not lost, not hidden in some distant tomb, but literally in the grasp of his first victim.
"Give it to me."
"It is bound to me, as I am bound to this stone. You cannot take it. But you can… read it." The voice turned coaxing. "Come closer, little saint. Touch the pages. See the truth for yourself. Then decide your path."
Every instinct screamed that the situation was a trick. But the Anchor was right. I needed that knowledge. The system couldn't be broken from the outside. I had to understand its blueprint.
I stepped onto the dais. The air grew colder. The green threads vibrated, coiling around my ankles like insubstantial vines. I reached out, my hand trembling, and touched the cover of the grimoire.
The moment my skin made contact, the world disappeared.
I was no longer in the crypt. I stood on a windswept plain under a starless sky. Before me stood a man of breathtaking, sorrowful beauty, with silver hair like mine and eyes that held the weariness of millennia. Erebus. He appeared not as a shadowy villain, but as a man facing the moment of his greatest decision.
I saw through his eyes. I felt desperation as the first Demon King's armies ravaged the land. I felt the betrayal of the kings and bishops who praised him with their lips but plotted to seize his power. I felt the moment of revelation when he understood that the divine power he channeled could not just seal away evil but could shape fate itself—could create cycles of heroes and demon kings to test humanity, to prove once and for all whether they deserved salvation or annihilation.
I felt him craft the first system. I saw him choose his most loyal disciple, a young man filled with fervent light, and explain the "great honor" of becoming the eternal Anchor. I felt the disciple's willing assent, then his unimaginable agony as his soul was torn and fused into the magical lattice of the seal.
I saw Erebus, tears of resolve on his cheeks, inscribe the Grimoire with the full knowledge of what he had done. Then he walked away, leaving his heart and his conscience shackled in the dark, and began his long descent into the being who would create Cassian's "Hero System" and a thousand other manipulations.
The vision shattered.
I stumbled back from the dais, gasping, tears streaming down my face. I had felt his love for the world and his devastating contempt for it. I had felt the disciple's faithful joy turn to infinite, silent screaming. The horror was intimate and vast.
"Now you see," the Anchor's voice was a whisper of shared pain. "The architect and the foundation. Both trapped. The architect is trapped by his ideology, while I am trapped by my flesh. You carry his power. You feel my pain. The cycle seeks a new center. You are it."
I understood. Erebus was looking for a successor. Someone with the holy power to either perpetuate his system or finally break it. He was herding me toward this choice.
The Anchor's offer was a test. Renew the seal, and I would become the new jailer, proving humanity needed to be controlled. Break it, and I might unleash chaos, proving humanity deserved destruction.
There had to be another way. A path is not in the Grimoire.
A sudden, violent tremor shook the chamber. Dust rained from the ceiling. From above, I heard a distant, muffled boom.
"He has found the door." The Anchor's voice held a note of frantic urgency. "The Inquisitor. He senses the disturbance in the wards. He will seal this place forever. You must choose! NOW!"
Panic surged. Greyford was here. If he found me in this forbidden crypt with the Grimoire, I'd be executed as a dark magician. If he sealed it, I'd be entombed alive with a tortured soul.
I looked at the Anchor, at its endless suffering. I looked at the Grimoire, a tome of terrible power and knowledge. I couldn't take it. I couldn't leave it.
Another explosion loomed closer. The sound of stone grinding on stone.
I made my decision.
I didn't reach for the Grimoire. Instead, I placed both my hands on the Anchor's blackened skull. I closed my eyes and did the only thing I could think of, the thing neither Erebus nor the system would expect.
I poured my holy power into the Anchor—not to reinforce its bonds, but to heal.
Not its body. That was dust. Its soul. The trapped, fragmented, agonized consciousness that had been bleeding poison for a millennium.
Golden light, pure and warm, erupted from my hands, flooding the skeletal remains. The green threads of corruption writhed and began to smoke. The Anchor's mental voice rose in a scream—not of pain, but of shock, of a sensation it had not felt in a thousand years: comfort.
"What… are you… doing?" Its voice was fragmented.
"I can't free you," I whispered, tears mixing with the radiant light. "And I won't replace you. But I can give you peace. For a moment. I can remind you what the light felt like… before he twisted it."
The screaming softened. The green threads didn't vanish, but their violent pulsing stilled. For a single, profound second, the corruption receded, and the chamber felt… quiet.
The grinding above became a roar. A section of the ceiling in the tunnel entrance shattered. Stone debris crashed down, and a figure clad in the grey robes of the Inquisition, illuminated by a harsh, white magical light, began to descend.
I snatched my hands back, the light vanishing. The Anchor's skeleton settled, the green threads resuming their slow pulse, but somehow dimmer, quieter.
I had no time. I turned from the dais and did the only thing left. I ran, not for the stairs, but deeper into the tunnel behind the chamber, into the unknown dark, as Inquisitor Greyford's furious shout echoed off the ancient stones.