The Temple of the Verdant Mother was a lockbox waiting for my key. For three nights, I did nothing but observe. I sat in the shadow of a thorny rose trellis, my senses extended, mapping the mana-ward on the door. It was a masterpiece of organic, defensive magic. Roots pulsed with earth-energy just beneath the soil, ready to snare. Thorns on the surrounding vines held paralytic toxins. The door itself was layered with a subtle mental fog—anyone touching it with intent to enter would forget why they'd come.
A brute-force approach with the Void would work, but it would be loud, wasteful, and leave a signature of pure annihilation that even the dullest mage-scryer would notice. I needed subtlety. I needed to be a surgeon, not a bomb.
My solution was a blend of heresies.
First, I used the Void Lens not on the ward, but on myself. I focused on the concept of "intent to enter," the very trigger for the mental fog. I fed a sliver of my will into the bead and wrapped my own consciousness in a thin film of void-stuff—a Void Shroud. It didn't make me invisible. It made my intentions… nonexistent to the ward's senses. To the magic, I became a piece of the scenery, a stone with no mind to cloud.
The effort was a constant, draining whisper against my soul. I approached the door.
Next, the physical traps. The roots and thorns were activated by pressure and foreign mana. I couldn't avoid stepping, but I could change what I stepped with.
Recalling the primer's basics on Earth affinity, I focused on the stone flagstones leading to the temple. With immense care, I extended a Void Thread, not to fray, but to persuade. I encouraged a minute shift in the stone's structure, a gentle lifting of one flagstone's edge just enough to create a hairline crack. Then, I did it again on the next stone. I created a fragile, almost invisible pathway of disturbed stone that led directly to the door.
When I stepped, I placed my feet precisely on these cracks. The roots beneath sensed the stone's own minute movement, not the pressure of a foot. They remained dormant.
Finally, the door. The locking mechanism was a living knot of petrified wood infused with mana. A key of specific, life-attuned energy was required. I had no key.
But I had a universal lockpick.
I placed my palm over the knot. Instead of attacking the mana, I focused on the concept of "locked." On the state of being closed. I fed a stronger thread of will into the bead, forging a Void Pin so small it was theoretical. I directed it not into the wood, but into the magical condition binding it.
There was no flash, no sound. The petrified wood didn't break. It simply… sighed. The tense, coiled energy holding it rigid unraveled. The knot untwisted with a soft, organic creak, and the door swung inward an inch, releasing a breath of air that smelled of damp soil, old incense, and something else—the sharp, clean scent of ozone and crushed herbs.
I slipped inside, sealing the door behind me.
The interior was not a temple. It was a laboratory.
Moonlight filtered through high, grimy windows, illuminating a long table cluttered with alembics, mortars and pestles, and bundles of strange, glowing plants that pulsed with their own inner light. Scrolls were piled haphazardly, filled not with holy scripts but with complex chemical notations and anatomical diagrams. In the center of the room, a large, shallow basin held not water, but a swirling, opalescent liquid that emitted the sickly green mana signature I'd been tracking.
This was no place of worship. This was a place of heretical study.
"I wondered when you'd come," a voice said, dry as old leaves.
I turned. In a deep armchair in the corner, cradling a cup of steaming liquid, sat an old woman. She was willow-thin, draped in robes that might once have been fine but were now stained with earth and strange chemicals. Her hair was a wild cloud of white, and her eyes, magnified by thick crystal lenses in wire frames, were a startling, intelligent green.
She took a sip from her cup. "The wards didn't stop you. They didn't even whisper. That's new."
I said nothing, assessing her. She had no visible guard, no weapon. Her mana was a quiet, deep pool of Life affinity, but laced through with threads of something sharper, more analytical. An alchemist. A heretic.
"You're the one they call the Hollow Prince," she stated, not asked. "Kieran. The mana-inert. Except you're not inert, are you? You're something else. Something that drinks the light." She gestured with her cup towards my chest. "I can feel it from here. A little chill. A little silence where there should be noise."
"Who are you?" My voice echoed flatly in the cluttered space.
"Lyra," she said. "Once the Royal Herbalist and Alchemist to your grandfather. Now, a retired woman with a hobby." She nodded at the opalescent basin. "Studying the Glimmerblight. A fascinating parasitic fungus that feeds on magic. Useless for most. But for someone who cannot wield magic… perhaps a tool."
My mind connected the dots. The green mana. The secrecy. "You're the one who's been coming here at night."
"I am. And you're the one who's been listening to the walls," she countered, a sly smile on her wrinkled face. "The conduit echoes have been… oddly clean lately. Like a pane of glass wiped in one spot. Was that you?"
I remained silent, which was answer enough.
She chuckled. "Good. Cautious. You'll need that." She set her cup down and stood, moving with a grace that belied her age. "I knew your mother, boy. Not well. She was curious too. Asked the wrong questions about the nature of souls and the silence between stars. They called it heresy. I just called it good science." Her green eyes bored into me. "She feared for you. Said if you lived, you'd be either the empire's doom or its salvation. I think she'd be fascinated to see what you've become."
"What have I become?" The question left me before I could stop it, a crack in the void's ice.
She stepped closer, peering at me through her lenses. "A living paradox. A creature of consumption in a world of creation. You don't build. You unmake. But…" she tapped a fingernail against a glass beaker, "unmaking can be a form of purification. A surgeon's scalpel removes the sickness to save the body."
She understood. More than Victus with his political scheming, more than anyone, this old hermit understood the nature of my power.
"Why show yourself?" I asked.
"Because you need a teacher," she said simply. "Not in politics, or swordplay. In the art of the subtle cut. In alchemy. In the properties of things that exist on the edge of being and unbeing. You have the scalpel, child. I can teach you anatomy."
She gestured to the Glimmerblight in the basin. "This fungus can weaken magical structures, make them brittle. Used with your… particular talents… the possibilities are intriguing. A ward could be softened before being severed. A mage's internal mana flow could be… encouraged to clot."
She was offering me knowledge. A way to use my power with precision, with less cost. A way to fight the magical world on its own terms, by subverting its rules.
It was an alliance. A dangerous one.
"What do you want in return?" I asked.
"Protection," she said, her voice dropping. "This temple is my sanctuary, but the walls have ears. Victus tolerates me because I occasionally provide him with useful tinctures—truth serums, memory foggers. Valerius would burn this place and me with it if he knew half of what I study. Your unique abilities could… reinforce my wards. Make this place truly hidden. And in return, my library, my knowledge, my concoctions are yours."
She was a resource. An immense one. And she saw me not as a pawn, but as a potential peer. A fellow heretic.
I looked at the Glimmerblight, at the scrolls, at the sharp intelligence in her eyes. This was a path to power that didn't just rely on the void's hungry negation. It was a path of craft, of strategy.
"We start tomorrow night," I said.
Lyra's smile widened, revealing surprisingly sharp teeth. "Excellent. Your first lesson: the seven binding principles of catalytic mana disruption. Bring a notebook. And try not to erase it."
As I left the temple, re-locking the living knot with a thought and a trickle of will, I felt something unfamiliar.
Anticipation.
The void in my chest didn't warm. But for the first time, its cold felt less like an emptiness, and more like the clean, sharp edge of a tool being honed.
I had a teacher. I had a direction.
The game was no longer just about survival or politics.
It was about becoming a master of the unseen art.
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