The transition from the small, bone-white chamber to the hallway beyond felt less like stepping through a door and more like walking into the throat of a leviathan. The air here was different—older, heavier. It tasted of ozone and dry decay, a flavor that coated Kaelen's tongue with a metallic tang that no amount of swallowing could clear.
He paused just past the threshold, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim, bioluminescent moss that clung to the high, vaulted ceiling. The silence was absolute, a heavy blanket that smothered even the sound of his own breathing.
Kaelen pressed a hand against his chest, feeling the cold, hard lump of the obsidian necklace beneath his tunic. The "Shroud of the Unseen." A powerful tool, but one with a heavy cost. The lingering nausea from its brief activation still churned in his gut, a reminder that magic in the Ziggurat was never a gift; it was a transaction.
"One use per cycle," he murmured, his voice barely a whisper in the vast corridor. "Perhaps two, if I'm willing to risk mana poisoning."
He adjusted his grip on the blackened iron staff and began to walk.
The corridor was immense, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast. The floor was made of the same seamless, white stone as the room behind him, but here, it was polished to a mirror sheen. His reflection, distorted and ghostly in the dim light, walked beneath him like a shade from the underworld.
As he moved deeper, he noticed the walls. They were not bare.
Carved into the white stone were relief sculptures of staggering complexity. They depicted figures in flowing robes, their faces hidden behind masks of geometric shapes—triangles, circles, and many-pointed stars. They were marching in a procession, carrying offerings toward a massive, celestial body that dominated the center of the mural.
Kaelen slowed, his scholar's curiosity warring with his survival instinct. He raised his finger, reigniting the small, violet flame of Ignis Minor. The pale light danced across the carvings, throwing long, dancing shadows that made the figures seem to move.
"The Procession of the Equinox," Kaelen identified, recognizing the iconography from a fragmented scroll he had studied in the Tower's restricted archives. "These aren't humans. They are the Aethelgardian High Priests. And they aren't worshipping a god..."
He moved his light to the object the figures were approaching. It wasn't a deity or a beast. It was a mechanism. A massive, intricate sphere of interlocking rings and gears, surrounded by floating islands.
"They are worshipping the Great Machine," he realized, a chill running down his spine. "The Ziggurat isn't a tomb. It's an engine."
He continued down the hall, his eyes scanning the murals for more information. The carvings changed as he walked. The orderly procession descended into chaos. The geometric masks cracked. The celestial sphere in the mural shattered, raining fire and jagged lines down upon the priests.
And then, he saw it.
In the final panel before the corridor ended, there was a single figure standing apart from the rest. It didn't wear a mask. Its face was blank, erased by a deep gouge in the stone that looked intentional. Above its head, seven stars were arranged in a specific, uneven pattern.
Kaelen stopped. He pulled out his journal, the leather cover creaking in the silence. With quick, precise strokes, he copied the pattern of the seven stars.
«Three tight, two distant, two falling,» he noted mentally. «A constellation I've never seen in the night sky. The 'Lost Septet'. Why erase the face but keep the stars?»
He stared at the gouged face for a moment longer. The vandalism wasn't recent. It was ancient, done by the same hands that carved the relief. It was a damnatio memoriae—a condemnation of memory. Whoever this figure was, they had betrayed the order, and their punishment was to be remembered only as a void.
"Caution," Kaelen whispered to himself. "If history was erased here, the trap ahead will likely test if I know the truth or the lie."
He snapped the journal shut and looked ahead. The corridor ended abruptly in a massive archway, flanked by two statues of the masked priests. Their stone eyes seemed to bore into him as he passed between them.
The floor simply stopped.
Kaelen halted, his toes curling inside his boots as he teetered on the edge of a precipice.
"By the Void..."
He wasn't looking into a pit. He was standing on a balcony overlooking a vast, spherical chamber that defied all architectural logic. The ceiling was a swirling nebula of deep violets and blacks, dotted with thousands of glittering specks that mimicked a night sky. Below, the abyss stretched down into an infinite darkness that made his head spin.
Floating in the center of this void were massive, flat platforms of white stone. They were suspended in nothingness, unconnected by chains or magic, drifting slightly like leaves on a slow river.
"The Celestial Mosaic," Kaelen breathed. The name came to him instinctively, a memory from the texts he had translated. "The testing ground for the Star-Walkers."
He looked at the nearest platform. It was about five meters away from the ledge—a difficult jump, but manageable. On its surface, inlaid in glowing blue obsidian, was a symbol.
The Triangle.
He looked at the next platform, floating slightly higher and to the left. The Circle. Another, lower and to the right. The Square.
Dozens of them. A scattered archipelago of geometry leading toward a massive, circular gate on the far side of the chamber, easily three hundred meters away.
"It's not random," Kaelen said, his mind shifting into overdrive. He looked back at the mural in the hallway. The priests wore masks of shapes. Triangle. Circle. Star. But the order... what was the order?
He closed his eyes, visualizing the relief carving.
«The procession started with the Triangles—the initiates. Then the Circles—the acolytes. Then the Squares—the masters. And finally... the Stars—the high priests.»
"Hierarchy," Kaelen muttered, opening his eyes. "The path follows the hierarchy of the Order. I must step on the lowest rank first."
He looked at the platforms again. There was a Triangle platform within range. Further out, a Circle. But wait...
He leaned over the edge, squinting into the gloom. Far below, drifting in a lazy orbit, was a platform marked with a Broken Line.
"The outcasts," he realized. "Servants. Below the initiates. If I step on a Triangle first, I bypass the foundation. The machine will see me as arrogant."
He needed to get down to the Broken Line.
Kaelen looked around. There was no ladder, no rope. Only the sheer drop. But he noticed that the gravity here felt... thinner. The dust motes in the air floated longer than they should.
"Localized low gravity," he deduced. "To simulate space."
He took a breath, gripped his staff, and stepped off the ledge.
He didn't plummet. He drifted, falling with the slowness of a feather. He guided his descent with subtle shifts of his body weight, aiming for the platform marked with the Broken Line.
His boots touched the stone with a soft tap.
The moment he landed, the platform shuddered. The Broken Line symbol glowed with a soft, white light. A chime echoed through the vast chamber—pure and crystalline.
Ding.
"Acceptance," Kaelen let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
He looked up. The next platform, the Triangle, was floating above him. He bent his knees and jumped. In the low gravity, he soared like a bird, landing gracefully on the symbol of the initiate.
Ding.
Blue light.
"Triangle. Circle. Square. Star." He repeated the mantra, leaping from stone to stone. The rhythm took over. Jump, float, land, chime. Jump, float, land, chime. He was crossing the abyss, a tiny speck of life in a manufactured galaxy.
He reached the halfway point—a large, hexagonal platform marked with the Square. He landed, expecting the chime.
CLANG.
The sound was discordant, harsh, like a hammer hitting a cracked bell.
The white light of the Square flickered and turned a deep, angry crimson.
Kaelen froze. "What? The sequence is correct. Initiate, Acolyte, Master. Triangle, Circle, Square."
The platform beneath him groaned. He felt a vibration rumble up his legs, violent and jagged. The low gravity that had buoyed him suddenly spiked, becoming heavy, crushing. His knees buckled under his own weight.
"No," he gasped, struggling to stand. "The hierarchy... it's not just about rank. It's about history."
He looked back at the floating stones he had crossed. They were drifting away, rearranging themselves. He looked forward. The next platform, the Star, was moving too. It was rotating, turning its edge toward him, becoming a wall instead of a floor.
"The Betrayer," Kaelen hissed through gritted teeth. "The figure with the gouged face. He wasn't a Master. He was something else."
He frantically pulled the journal from his pocket, his hand shaking under the increasing gravity. He looked at the sketch of the seven stars.
Three tight, two distant, two falling.
He looked up at the "sky" of the chamber. There, hidden amongst the thousands of fake stars, was that exact constellation. But it wasn't above the Star platform. It was aligned with a small, cracked platform drifting off to the side, unmarked by any geometric shape.
"A hidden path," he realized with horror. "The mural wasn't showing a procession of triumph. It was showing a procession of exile. The Betrayer didn't leave the order; the order left him."
The Square platform beneath him began to tilt. The red light pulsed faster.
Crack.
A fissure appeared in the center of the stone.
"I have to jump," Kaelen thought, panic rising in his chest. "But the cracked platform is too far. Even with low gravity..."
But the gravity was no longer low. It was increasing by the second. The Ziggurat had realized an intruder was trying to claim a rank he didn't possess.
Kaelen scrambled toward the high edge of the tilting platform. The abyss yawned beneath him, no longer a gentle drift but a hungry mouth waiting to swallow him whole.
He judged the distance. It was impossible. He needed a bridge. He needed a boost. He needed...
The Staff.
"Physics," he shouted over the grinding noise of the stone. "Action and reaction!"
He pointed his iron staff backward, directly at the center of the glowing red symbol. He didn't have combat magic, but he had raw force.
—"Pulsus!"—
A blast of pure kinetic energy exploded from the tip of the staff, slamming into the stone. The recoil was brutal. It wrenched his shoulder, nearly tearing the joint, but it launched him forward like a cannonball.
He flew across the void, arms flailing, reaching for the small, cracked platform.
His fingers brushed the edge.
He slammed into the side of the stone, the impact knocking the wind out of him. He clawed at the rough surface, his legs dangling over the infinite drop. The gravity here was normal again—heavy, unforgiving.
He hauled himself up, gasping, his muscles screaming. He rolled onto the surface of the cracked platform and lay there for a second, staring up at the mock stars.
He was alive.
But as he pushed himself up to his knees, he saw it.
On this forgotten, broken platform, there was no symbol. There was only a small, stone pedestal. And sitting on top of it, covered in centuries of dust, was a mask.
Not a Triangle. Not a Circle.
It was a mask with no face. Just a smooth, blank surface with seven small holes drilled into the forehead in the shape of the constellation.
Kaelen reached out, his hand trembling.
"The Betrayer's Mask," he whispered.
Before he could touch it, the shadows around the pedestal began to bleed. The dust didn't swirl; it coalesced. A figure began to form from the darkness—tall, robed in tattered grey, wearing the very mask that sat on the pedestal.
Kaelen scrambled back, gripping his staff, but the figure didn't attack. It simply tilted its head, the seven holes in the mask staring at him with an abyss deeper than the one below.
"You walk the path of the Exile," a voice echoed, not in the air, but directly inside Kaelen's skull. It sounded like dry leaves scraping over stone. "Are you here to mourn him, or to replace him?"
Kaelen's heart hammered against his ribs. The puzzle wasn't over. It had just changed the question.