The circle was drawn in blood. Goat's blood, mostly, though the innermost ring had required something rarer. The court mages didn't talk about that part.
Twelve of them stood at the edges of the summoning chamber — a vaulted stone room buried three floors beneath the royal palace. The air stank of iron and burnt incense. Runes carved into the floor pulsed with a dim blue glow that made their robes look like funeral shrouds.
Grand Mage Aldren stood at the north point, his staff planted between his feet, sweat running into his beard. He was too old for this. They all were. Hero Summoning hadn't been attempted in over four hundred years, and for good reason. The last time, three of the twelve casters had died and the hero had arrived missing an arm.
But the King wanted a weapon, and he wanted it yesterday.
"Begin the seventh sequence," Aldren said.
The mages chanted. The runes brightened. The air in the centre of the circle began to shimmer and fold like heat haze over summer stone.
Aldren felt the connection form — a thread punching through the barrier between worlds, reaching blindly into somewhere else, latching onto a soul. He felt it lock on. A life. Young. Bright. Unremarkable in every way, which was exactly what the spell required. A blank vessel. Malleable. Someone who could be shaped.
"We have a tether. Pull."
The twelve pulled. Magic surged through the circle. The shimmer in the centre tore open into a vertical slit of white light, and through it Aldren could feel the soul being dragged — ripped from its world like a tooth from a jaw.
Then the fourth glyph cracked.
It happened fast. A flaw in the stonework — a hairline fracture that had been there for centuries, invisible until the moment ten thousand units of mana tried to pass through it at once. The glyph split. The energy feeding into it scattered.
The spatial coordinates — the part of the spell that determined where the summoned soul would arrive — scrambled.
"STABILISE IT — "
Too late. The white slit in the air pulsed once, violently, and snapped shut. The runes went dark. Three of the twelve mages collapsed. One was bleeding from his ears.
Aldren stood in the sudden silence, breathing hard, staff trembling in his grip.
The connection was gone. But he'd felt it complete — the soul had been pulled through. It was in their world somewhere. Just not here. Not in this chamber. Not in this city.
The spell had scattered the arrival point. Their hero could be anywhere on the continent.
"Find them," Aldren said quietly. "Whatever it takes."