The service tunnels beneath the Royal Castle didn't just smell of damp stone; they smelled of history rotting in the dark. It was the scent of centuries of unwashed fear and stagnant water, trapped beneath the weight of the monarchy.
Ogdi moved through the gloom, his footsteps striking the wet pavement with the force of a hammer, yet producing absolute silence.
He had Edited the Acoustics.
He hadn't just muffled their steps; he had reached into the local Lattice and deleted the concept of reverberation within a three-meter radius. It was a disorienting sensation. The visual feedback of a boot splashing into a puddle occurred, but the auditory feedback was severed. It created a disconnect in the brain, a rolling nausea that made the world feel dreamlike and unstable.
The cost was immediate. A high-pitched, screaming tinnitus drilled into Ogdi's left ear—the phantom frequency of the deleted sound trying to force its way back into existence.
"You walk like a thief," Azad whispered in the back of his mind. The entity's voice was dry, dripping with an aristocrat's disdain for manual labor. "A Sovereign does not sneak. He arrives. He rearranges the door to meet his location."
"A Sovereign who arrives through the front door gets shot by a thousand porcelain soldiers," Ogdi thought back, wiping a trickle of warm blood from his nose. "We are architects tonight, Azad. Not warriors."
Behind him, the team moved in a tight, nervous phalanx.
Kai took point, his daggers drawn, moving with the fluid, predatory grace of a man who had broken into hell before and found the climate agreeable. Eloi Raventhir walked in the center, his face pale but composed, guiding them through the labyrinth he had once ruled as Prime Minister.
And Ylaeth… Ylaeth was fading.
She held the Crown of Silence wrapped in a heavy velvet cloth. But the cloth was failing. The artifact's power leaked like radiation. The air around her turned grey and sluggish. Dust motes in her vicinity hung suspended, trapped in amber seconds, refusing to fall.
"Hold it together," Murik muttered, walking beside her. The old artist clutched his charcoal stick like a holy relic, his eyes darting at the shadows. "We're almost at the canvas."
"I'm fine," Ylaeth whispered. Her voice sounded warped, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a deep well. "It's just… hungry. It wants to eat the noise of the castle."
They reached the heavy iron door that marked the transition from the servant quarters to the Lower Keep.
Kai checked the lock. "Electronic and magical. Dual layered. I need two minutes."
"We don't have two minutes," Ogdi said. "Protocol Zero starts at dawn."
He stepped up to the door. He didn't pick the lock. He placed his black-stained palm against the cold metal.
He closed his eyes and felt the Lattice of the door—the rigid, iron-willed structure of the lock's mechanism, the alignment of the tumblers, the molecular friction holding the bolts in place.
Exchange.
"I offer the lubrication of my joints," Ogdi commanded silently. "Remove the friction."
A sharp, grinding pain shot through his knees and elbows, a sensation like sand being poured into his sockets. His synovial fluid evaporated for a split second, transferred into the mechanism of the door. He gritted his teeth, suppressing a scream.
Click.
The tumblers inside the lock slid open as if they were greased with the finest oil. The heavy door swung inward without a creak.
"Show off," Kai grinned, though his eyes remained tight. He slipped through the gap.
They entered the Lower Keep.
It was a gallery of nightmares.
The hallway was lined with Hollows. Twenty of them. They stood perfectly still, their porcelain masks gleaming in the low gaslight like rows of polished skulls. They were dormant, waiting for a trigger signal from the Tower—a signal that Ogdi had disrupted, but not destroyed.
"Don't breathe," Eloi warned softly. "They react to thermal shifts."
They crept past the statues of flesh and ceramic. The silence was thick, pressing against their eardrums.
Then, gravity glitched.
Ylaeth stumbled. The weight of the Crown shifted, warping the space around her foot, causing her to miss a step. Her shoulder bumped a suit of armor on a pedestal.
Clang.
The sound was quiet, barely a whisper of metal on metal, but in the hyper-tense silence of the Keep, it was a thunderclap.
Twenty heads snapped toward them simultaneously.
The porcelain masks caught the light. There were no eyes behind the slits, only a dull, rising red bioluminescence. A mechanical purr started in twenty chests.
"Run?" Murik squeaked, raising his charcoal.
"No," Ogdi said, his eyes glowing violet. "Erase."
He didn't use a wish. He didn't use a spell. He used the environment.
He looked at the gas lamps lining the walls. He saw the pressurized fuel moving through the copper pipes.
"Expand," Ogdi commanded.
He grabbed the concept of the gas pressure. He pulled the Lattice lines apart, removing the constraint of the metal tubing.
Exchange.
A capillary burst in Ogdi's left eye, flooding his vision with a terrifying red haze.
BOOM.
The gas lamps didn't just break; they detonated. The hallway exploded inward, not with fire, but with pure, concussive pressure. The blast threw the Hollows against the walls like discarded dolls. Armor crunched. Porcelain shattered with the wet, sickening sound of eggshells breaking over meat.
"Kai! Murik! Clean up!" Ogdi shouted, clutching his face, blinded on one side.
Kai was a blur of motion. In the dark, he was the apex predator. He moved between the disoriented Hollows, his daggers finding the gaps in their neck armor with surgical precision.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Murik was painting war. He slashed the air with his charcoal, drawing jagged spikes of shadow that erupted from the floor like obsidian stalagmites, skewering the Hollows that tried to rise.
"It's messy!" Murik yelled, sketching a guillotine blade that severed a Hollow's arm in a spray of sparks and fluid. "The composition is all wrong!"
"It's effective!" Eloi countered, shooting a Hollow point-blank with a silenced pistol he had pulled from his jacket.
In thirty seconds, the hallway was silent again.
The floor was littered with broken white masks, twitching limbs, and darkness.
Ogdi leaned against the wall, breathing hard. The red haze in his vision was slowly clearing, but his head pounded with the rhythm of the Lattice's recoil.
"Sloppy," Azad critiqued. "You used a hammer when a needle would have sufficed. You expended 4% of your structural integrity on a hallway skirmish. At this rate, you will be a pile of dust before you reach the stairs."
"We're moving up," Ogdi wheezed, ignoring the voice. "To the Throne."
The Throne Room
The doors to the Throne Room were three times the height of a man, carved from petrified wood that dated back to the First Era. They didn't look built; they look grown, twisting veins of ancient timber fusing with black iron.
"This is it," Eloi said, his hand trembling slightly as he reached for the handle. "The heart of the National Lattice. The King uses this room to amplify his commands to the borders."
"Then we turn the amplifier into a cage," Ogdi said.
They pushed the doors open.
The room was vast, a cathedral of shadows. The ceiling vanished into darkness, and the floor was made of polished obsidian that reflected nothing. It felt like walking on a frozen lake at night.
At the far end, atop a dais of jagged iron roots, sat the Throne.
It wasn't a chair. It was a chaotic knot of petrified wood and metal, fusing into a seat that looked uncomfortable, painful even—a reminder that power was a burden.
"The King isn't here," Kai whispered, scanning the shadows. "It's empty."
"He's preparing for the dawn ritual at the apex of the tower," Eloi said, checking his watch. "We have twenty minutes before the sun rises. Once he starts the Ascension, the Lattice will be too unstable to lock."
"Ylaeth," Ogdi turned to her. "The Crown."
Ylaeth walked up the stairs to the dais. She unwrapped the velvet cloth.
The Crown of Silence gleamed in the darkness. The void-stone in its center pulsed, eating the ambient light, creating a small sphere of absolute darkness around her hands.
She placed the Crown on the seat of the Throne.
"I need to weave it into the roots," Ylaeth said. Her hands were shaking, stained grey up to the elbows—the necrosis of holding the void too long. "I need to convince the Throne that the Crown is the King."
"Do it," Ogdi said. "I'll hold the frame."
Ylaeth closed her eyes. She began to hum—a low, discordant sound that vibrated the teeth of everyone in the room.
"What has no walls but keeps you in?"
She placed her hands on the Crown and the Throne simultaneously.
HUMMMMMM.
The room reacted violently.
The obsidian floor began to ripple like water. The iron roots of the Throne writhed, curling around the Crown, fusing with the silver metal like vines reclaiming a ruin.
Ogdi felt the Lattice of the castle scream. The structure was being inverted. The energy that usually flowed out to the country was being violently pulled in.
"It's heavy!" Ogdi shouted, falling to one knee.
He was acting as the anchor. He was the Editor approving the draft.
He felt the weight of the entire nation's geography pressing down on his skull. The mountains of the North, the rivers of the West, the burning slums of the East—they were all heavy, and they were all resisting the lock.
Exchange.
"Take my stability!" Ogdi roared at the universe. "Take my foundation!"
His skin began to crack. Not dry skin—fissures. Thin lines of blue light appeared on his arms where his flesh was literally pulling apart under the strain of holding the command.
Blood poured from his nose, his ears, his tear ducts. He was paying the butcher's bill in real-time.
"Ogdi!" Murik screamed, stepping forward to help.
"Stay back!" Ogdi choked out, spitting red. "Only... only the Sovereign... can pay this."
"It's working!" Ylaeth cried out. Her eyes were pure black nebulas now. "The weave is shutting!"
BOOM.
A sound like the sky breaking echoed across the world.
From the Throne, a massive, translucent grey dome erupted. It passed through the walls of the castle, expanding outward at the speed of thought.
It raced across the city. It raced across the burning slums. It raced to the borders of Oravus.
And then, it closed.
The sensation was suffocating.
The air in the Throne Room turned into liquid glass. Every sound stretched out, deepened, and slowed.
Outside the high windows, the first hint of dawn was breaking.
But as the Dome sealed, the light died.
The grey energy blocked the sun. The sunrise turned into a bruised, purple twilight. The world felt smaller. Heavier.
They were locked in. The country was sealed. A Closed Loop.
Ogdi collapsed onto the obsidian floor, gasping. His body felt like shattered glass held together by willpower. The blue fissures on his skin slowly faded to white scars.
"We did it," Eloi whispered, staring at his hands in horror and awe. "The connection to the outside world is severed. The King cannot draw power from the global Lattice. He is trapped here with us."
"And without his external power source," Kai grinned, spinning his dagger, "he's just a man with a fancy chair."
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The sound was slow, rhythmic, and terrifyingly calm.
It echoed from the shadows behind the Throne.
"Beautiful," a deep voice resonated. "Truly, beautiful architecture."
Ogdi froze. The blood in his veins turned to ice.
The shadows behind the Throne parted.
King Aethelred stepped out.
He wasn't wearing armor. He wasn't holding a weapon. He was wearing a simple white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms covered in intricate, scar-like tattoos.
He looked… refreshed. Alive.
"I must admit," the King said, walking down the steps of the dais, ignoring the Crown that was now fused to his seat. "I was worried you wouldn't make it in time. The ventilation in the tunnels is dreadful, isn't it?"
Ogdi struggled to his feet, swaying. "You... you knew?"
"Knew?" The King chuckled. It was a warm, fatherly sound that made the terror worse. "My dear boy, who do you think left the servant door unlocked?"
Eloi stepped forward, his face twisting in a mask of betrayal and confusion. "But... the Lock. We sealed the country. You can't Ascend now. You can't reach the Global Lattice."
"Ascend?" The King stopped. He looked at Eloi with genuine, patronizing pity.
"Is that what you thought I wanted? To become a god?"
He shook his head, smiling.
"Eloi, you always lacked imagination. I don't want to be a god. Gods are distant. Gods are impotent. I want to be a Gardener."
The King spread his arms, gesturing to the suffocating grey twilight outside the windows.
"I wanted to clean my house. But the neighbors... the other nations... they are so noisy. They interfere. They send spies. They send treaties. They complain when I burn the weeds."
He pointed a finger at the grey dome of energy pulsating around them.
"I needed privacy. Total, absolute isolation. A laboratory where no one could interrupt my work. But to cast a seal of this magnitude? To create a pocket dimension?"
He looked at Ogdi, his eyes gleaming.
"It would have cost me half my soul. I would have been too weak to finish the purification."
Ogdi felt the room spin. The nausea hit him again, harder than the Exchange.
He hadn't thwarted the King. He had been the battery.
"So I waited for someone else to pay the bill," the King whispered.
"You used us," Ogdi whispered, the realization crushing him. "You let us break in. You let us seal the country."
"And now," the King said, his eyes glowing with a terrifying, golden light, "no one can get in. No one can get out. No one can stop me."
"Kill him!" Kai screamed.
The thief lunged. He moved faster than thought, a blur of steel aiming for the King's throat.
The King didn't move. He didn't even blink.
A figure stepped out from the shadows beside the King.
He moved with a fluidity that was almost liquid. He wore the armor of the Royal Guard, but his helmet was off.
He had a handsome face, bright green eyes, and a smile that was sharp enough to cut glass.
He caught Kai's wrist mid-air.
He didn't just catch it; he stopped the momentum so abruptly that the air cracked like a whip.
"Now, now," the guard said. His voice was light, cheerful. "No running in the house."
Kai's eyes widened in shock. "You..."
The guard twisted his wrist.
SNAP.
The sound was wet and loud. Kai screamed, dropping the dagger. The guard followed up with a kick to the chest that sent the thief flying across the room. Kai slammed into a pillar and didn't get up.
"Meet Alsys," the King introduced, placing a hand on the smiling guard's shoulder.
"He is the Commander of my new dawn. Unlike the Hollows, Alsys kept his emotions. I find that cruelty is an art form that requires… passion."
Alsys winked at Ogdi.
"Hi," Alsys said, waving a hand that was still holding Kai's crushed wrist bones. "Big fan of your work. The chandelier? Classic."
Valerius, the Nullifier, stepped out from the other side of the throne, adjusting his glasses. The room's Lattice died around him.
"Azad," Ogdi thought, panic rising in his chest like bile. "Analysis."
"We are locked in a cage with a tiger," Azad whispered, his voice trembling for the first time. "And you just welded the door shut."
The King walked toward Ogdi.
"The board is set," the King said. "The doors are locked. The filth is trapped inside."
He smiled at Ogdi—a smile of pure, victorious malice.
"Thank you, Architect. Now... let the purification begin."