The null-room wasn't dark. Darkness was a thing, an absence of light. This was the absence of everything. It was a sensory unraveling. The hum of London, the scent of ozone and blood, the feel of cool air on skin all of it was sheared away in an instant, leaving a silent, dimensionless grey. It was less a room and more the concept of between given walls.
Alaric staggered, a wave of metaphysical nausea hitting him. For a being whose consciousness was perpetually tuned to the subtle frequencies of magic and memory, it was like being plunged into a vacuum. His wounds, which had been knitting, stopped. His body existed, but the processes that sustained it felt muted, sluggish, as if the very laws of his existence were on pause.
"Steady," Kael's voice said, close by. It sounded wrong flat, stripped of echo or timbre, as if spoken directly into his mind. "Don't fight it. Just breathe."
Alaric couldn't hear a heartbeat, not his own, not Kael's. He focused on the memory of breath, the mechanical rise and fall of his chest. Next to him, he could just make out Elara's form, a smudge of colour in the grey. She held the case, her knuckles white.
"The door is sealed," she said, her voice also eerily dimensionless. "It's a one-way membrane from the inside. We're ghosts here. Nothing gets in, and no signal gets out. Including the grimoire's signature."
"Good," Alaric managed, the word tasting like dust. "How long can we stay?"
"Officially? Twenty-four hours for safety. Unofficially? No one's ever stayed conscious longer than six. The mind starts to cannibalize itself. Fills the void with hallucinations."
"Charming," Kael muttered. "So we've locked ourselves in a magical coffin that drives you mad. Progress."
"We're alive," Elara snapped, but the effort was palpable. The void was draining her witch's vitality like a sieve. "And they can't find us. Now we can think."
Think. In a place designed to starve thought. The irony was exquisite.
Alaric forced himself to sit on the non-floor, which offered no resistance yet didn't yield. He focused on the last moments before the void. Viktor's furious face. The communication stone. "They will escalate. Lucian does not accept failure. He will assume we've gone to ground in the London supernatural underground. He'll turn the city inside out."
"Then we can't stay in London," Kael said. "We need to move the book. Somewhere he wouldn't expect."
"Somewhere with stronger protections than a null-room," Elara said, her mind visibly working despite the oppressive emptiness. "Somewhere the ley lines are so strong and wild, they'd mask the grimoire's signal completely. A natural chaotic field."
Alaric knew the answer before she said it. Every Progenitor did. It was the one place on the continent they all avoided, a wound in the magical landscape.
"The Scottish Highlands," he said. "The Great Glen. The ley lines there are fractured. Volcanic. Unmappable. It's a supernatural dead zone and a power storm simultaneously."
"Home," Kael said, and there was a complex weight in the flat word. "The packs there are insular. They don't like outsiders, and they really don't like vampires. Even exiled ones. It's the last place Lucian would think you'd run."
"It's also where the warning came from," Elara added. "The heather, the witch's memory. The source of all this is there. We're not just hiding; we're following the trail to its origin."
A plan, born in a void. It had a certain symmetry.
Silence fell, the true silence of the null-room. Minutes stretched, indistinguishable from hours. Alaric tried to focus on the task transport, allies, routes but the void resisted. It pressed in, demanding payment for its sanctuary.
Then, the grey around him shifted.
It wasn't a hallucination born of his own mind. He knew his own memories, they were sharp, painful things. This was an imposition. The grey swirled, resolving into a familiar, agonizing clarity.
He was no longer in the void.
He stood in the Carpathian grove. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, crushed yew, and terror. Sorina stood across the ritual circle, her dark hair wild, her hands raised, not in triumph but in desperate, futile supplication. The power they had summoned was not a river to be channeled; it was a tsunami contained in a child's cup. It was breaking.
"Alaric!" her voice was raw, ripped from her throat. "The root! Sever the root!"
But he couldn't. He was locked in the torrent, feeling it scour his humanity away, replace it with something hungry and eternal. He saw the same transformation reflected in the four other figures around the circle Lucian's face a mask of avaricious joy, Valeria's a silent scream, Cassia's etched with rage, Silas's already withdrawing into cold detachment.
Sorina met his eyes. In hers, he didn't see blame. He saw a terrible, grieving love. And a decision.
She turned her hands inward, toward the grimoire floating between them. She spoke a word that cracked the stones at her feet. Not to contain the power, but to shatter it. To break the single, world-ending wave into five lesser streams, condemning them to bear the curse so the land itself might survive.
The blast of light and force was silent in his memory. He saw her body disintegrate, consumed by the backlash of her own salvation. He felt the five fragments of power raw, unstable, incomplete slam into his soul, into the others. The curse was set.
The vision began to dissolve, but not before a final, whispered echo of her voice, not from the past, but threading through time itself, reached him.
"the copy find the copy in the roots of the world"
He gasped, a ragged, painful sound in the real void. He was on his knees, though he hadn't felt himself fall. His hands were pressed to the non-floor.
"Alaric!" Elara was beside him, her hand on his shoulder, a point of shocking, real warmth in the nothingness. "What happened?"
Kael was there too, a solid presence at his other side, saying nothing but ready to anchor him.
"The void" Alaric choked out, his voice raw. "It didn't give me a hallucination. It amplified something. A memory. But clearer than it's ever been." He looked up, meeting Elara's wide, grey eyes in the gloom. "Sorina didn't just try to contain the power. She shattered it. She created us the Progenitors as a containment vessel. A deliberate sacrifice."
Elara's breath hitched. "A failsafe. She turned you into living seals."
"And the grimoire was her focus," Alaric continued, the pieces slotting together with horrific clarity. "The original burned. But she said she said 'find the copy in the roots of the world.'"
Elara's gaze dropped to the case she still clutched. "This isn't the original. It's a copy. A backup. Buried somewhere for safekeeping. And someone in Scotland didn't just find it. They understood it. They're not trying to recreate the accident." Her face paled further. "They're trying to reverse-engineer Sorina's shattering spell. To unmake the Progenitor seals. To pull the five fragments of power back out of you and your kin."
The implications detonated in the silent room. It wasn't about creating a new monster. It was about unmaking the old ones, releasing the raw, cataclysmic power they contained. It would unravel the supernatural stability of Europe, and likely the world along with it.
Kael broke the stunned silence, his flat voice grim with understanding. "So we're not just carrying a dangerous book. We're carrying a bomb, and the trigger is in Scotland. And half the vampires in Europe are now trying to stop us from reaching it, while the other half might be trying to help us blow it up."
Alaric pushed himself to his feet, the void's disorientation burned away by cold, sharp purpose. The exile was over. The caretaker was gone.
"Then we go to Scotland," he said, the words a vow in the nothingness. "We find this 'root of the world.' And we decide, once and for all, if the Progenitors are a curse to be borne or a mistake to be erased."