Chapters 48-49

Back on track as promised!

Chapter 48

The bread was cold. The wine was warm. And the guards never blinked.

Lily sat opposite her mother in the center of the estate’s narrow dining hall. Heavy curtains had been drawn shut, muting the afternoon light and drowning the room in a muted amber gloom. Silver cutlery rested untouched beside bronze-rimmed plates. One platter held steamed roots with too much salt; the other, thin strips of lamb, now congealed in its own fat.

Two guards stood by the doors, another two near the windows. Gens Claudia regulars, dressed in the house’s crimson trim and grey mail.

None of them moved. None of them spoke.

Adriana tore a bite from the dry bread, chewing slowly. Her eyes did not lift from the table. Not once.

Lily stabbed her fork into a carrot slice that barely resisted the metal.

“Still no word?” she asked.

Adriana shook her head once. “Your father has not written again.”

The reply was clean, clinical. Not resigned. Just tired.

Lily pushed her plate forward an inch. The scrape of ceramic against wood was the only sound in the room.

“What happens if he doesn’t come back before the Tournament?” Lily asked.

One of the guards shifted behind her. The others remained still.

“He will return,” she said. “And I shall talk to him.”

“But he didn’t say when,” Lily murmured. 

“No.”

It was still difficult to fathom for Adriana what her daughter had accomplished. 

Even now, days after the ritual, the weight of what Lily had done hadn’t fully settled over her. 

The Great Skill of the Gens Claudia had never passed easily—not if the records she had found were to be believed. Actually, it had not been uncommon for those undergoing the ritual to die. 

Its trial had broken men older, stronger, more experienced—and even those who survived it emerged half-wrecked, drained for months. 

Yet Lily had endured it at twelve. 

She had not just survived the ordeal; she had reshaped it. 

Lily had explained the minutiae of her ritual to her mother, which had absolutely astonished her. Lily had been lucky to have Calpurnia teach her a Skill like Coniunctionis. Now, that had most likely guaranteed Lily the highest possible version of [Life Flow]. 

Where others imposed Life upon Darkness, she had woven them together. 

There’s a chance she developed a Life Affinity already. Which means she could have access to an even stronger Class than a normal scion of a Great Family, Adriana thought.

No one in living memory had done what she had done. Not Tertullianus. Not Lucianus. None had ever reshaped the ritual to suit their Affinity. The implications were staggering.

I read the documents. Three wounds they survived. Lucianus is probably the one who got the strongest [Life Flow] in five generations. But what Lily described to me puts even him to shame. But…

Adriana feared that even once Lucianus saw just how strong their daughter was, he would still refuse to support her.

There’s one more thing to do.

Adriana had found something during her studies. She had leveled her [Librarian] Class at a staggering place and, at some point, had dabbled in what she had found to be the most esoteric Skill of her Class.

[Knowledge of the Nether].

Knowledge of the Nether was a dangerous Skill to activate. It would allow a [Librarian] to try and access pieces of information that had been forgotten or lost. 

Unlike one what might have thought, she had simply used [Knowledge of the Empyrean] to barter knowledge with the great repository that all [Librarians] had access to in order to unlock the knowledge of where the Great Skill of the Gens Claudia resided. She had accumulated enough information from the archive that she had had to pay only a very small toll for that. She was essentially doing the same in order to find out about the legalities of Lily becoming a Champion. She had been waiting on a few more information, but she could have already purchased the information. 

However, while researching [Life Flow] and its records, [Knowledge of the Nether] had thrummed. Something in the dark palace that you could enter with the Skill had resonated with the information. It had been the first time since the woman had accepted the Class that the one of the two staple Skills of [Librarians] had activated. 

She had seen something…

Unbridled power… Adriana thought.

The kind of power that would forever quench Lucianus’s doubts. 

They ate in silence until the last candle guttered, and when at last Lily rose, Adriana rose with her. 

“Darling, go to sleep,” Adriana said with a smile. “It’s going to be fine.”

Adriana walked to her office with a guard in tow and stopped when in front of the door.

“I need to conduct business. Station someone outside. I want to be alone.”

The man frowned and turned toward another guard that was in the corridor. The other shrugged and the one right beside Adrianas sighed.

“Milady, two men will be outside the door and two outside the window. May I ask you to wait for the patrol to move there? I don’t want to impose, but—”

“Sure,” Adriana nodded. “Take your time.”

Adriana closed the heavy oak door behind her, and once its bolt slid home she turned to face the carved desk. She looked at the letter from Lucianus on the polished surface, then untied the silver clasp of her robes and dropped them to the floor. 

With deliberate calm she traced a rune in the air, calling on the dusty tomes that lined the shelves behind her. 

[Knowledge of the Nether] activated.

A low hum grew in the room as the air rippled, and where the desk had stood a void opened like a wound in reality.

She stepped forward and the world went gray. The taste of rot filled her mouth before she realized there was no wind to carry it. 

She sank to one knee amid broken cobblestones littered with splintered beams and peeling plaster, the shell of a once-graceful villa rising in jagged silhouette against a sky sickly with ashen clouds.

Every wall was cracked, every threshold choked with debris, and from the shattered windows she heard faint, rasping breaths.

[Knowledge of the Nether] was a very straightforward Skill, more than one could imagine.

While [Knowledge of the Empyrean] allowed Adriana to enter a massive library that apparently all [Librarians] shared, [Knowledge of the Nether] opened into different realities—realities that didn’t fully exist, liminal space that only [Librarians] could scour for lost knowledge.

And she had already peeked at this one, which allowed her to know that there was something evil hiding in this space. She had gotten the impression that there was something powerful too, but that to find it, she might very well die. 

Adriana forced herself to rise, dusting splinters of rubble from her knees. Every breath tasted of decay—yet beneath the stink she felt something else, a pulse, as if this place still lived on nightmares. She pressed her back against a crumbling arch, trying to look inside a window. 

I can’t let this place overwhelm me. I need that power for Lily.

She tightened her cloak around her shoulders and peered down the ruined corridor. Shapes moved in the gloom—thin, gaunt figures whose flesh hung in ragged strips over brittle bone. Their hollow eyes found her in the half–light, and each time they raised a hand in supplication she pressed herself flatter.

She circled to the front and hid behind a crumbling column. 

Figures drifted among the ruin—skeletal shapes that slipped through the gardens and moaned with a wet, hollow sound. Their flesh hung in tatters, and every exposed bone gleamed slick as ivory. 

She slipped past a fallen statue of stone and a half-dissolved doorframe, edging closer until one ragged thing turned and its empty eye-socket trained on her. She froze, heart hammering, and the creature’s jaw fell open in a silent cry. Then she ducked behind a fractured column as it lurched forward, its claw-bare feet cracking the flagstones.

Further in, a vast heap of bodies crowned a collapsed portico: limbs and torsos woven into a monstrous form that rose like a grotesque cyclops. At its center a single, rotten eye stared sightlessly, and the tangled arms on either side flailed when she passed too near. 

Adriana held her breath and darted through a gap in the flesh-pile, her robes brushing damp—she could feel the slick of blood and decay where the bodies pressed against the stones. The cyclopean mass shuddered, bones grinding, but it did not catch her. 

Dawn’s Mercy! Adriana’s heart hammered in her chest. She could have never imagined such monstrosities to be in the [Knowledge of the Nether]’s world. 

As far as she was concerned, those were real. She could get killed by then. 

That’s why she had to be so careful. 

Beyond that horror she found a sunken courtyard where writhing hills of pale worms crawled over shattered columns and seeped through broken doors. 

The worms were fat and gristle-white, each one glistening with acid that sizzled where it touched stone. One slithered toward her ankle and she sprang back, boots skidding as dozens more cascaded over the edge of a fallen wall, their segmented bodies wriggling toward her with slavering insistence. 

She spun and sprinted for the ruin’s far side, shoving past a collapsed gallery and skimming over shallow pools of rancid water.

She burst through a half-standing doorway into what must once have been the villa’s great hall. Broken beams lay across shattered tiles, and motes of dust danced in the dim, gray light. As her eyes adjusted, a shape slid from the shadows—a hunched, nightmarish thing whose maw split open to a ring of jagged teeth. Before Adriana could draw mana, its clawed arm lashed out.

The blade-sharp talons tore through her tunic and scorched into her stomach. Pain detonated like black powder, and she collapsed against a crumbling column as hot blood welled between her fingers.

Panic ignited her will. 

Not here. Not now. 

She forced her vision back into focus and wove threads of Light Magic through the cut. 

For a heartbeat she swore she felt the rot of Undeath crawling in her veins—I’ve been touched by it; I should already be turning. 

But the cold dread receded. 

She was alive.

Not turning, somehow.

The creature snarled, clawed for her again, and she fled down a side corridor.

Around a corner she came upon a drifting figure—pale, translucent, with hollow eyes that gleamed in her lantern’s flicker. The ghost advanced on silent feet, skeletal hands reaching through her robe to tear at her arms and shoulders. 

In the span of a blink of an eyen, seven times its spectral claws raked her flesh, each arc delivering a burning cold that numbed her limbs. 

She collapsed against the wall, blood welling at every scratch.

For a moment she felt the old terror: I’m done. This is the end. But she had already learned to fight despair. Gathering her last reserves of [Mana Shaping], she tapped into her deepest Radiance Mana, eyes lighting with inner flame. With a sharp command—“[Holy Inferno]!”—she unleashed a torrent of blinding white fire. 

It washed over the ghost, peeling its form into motes of cinder. The apparition shrieked in a chorus of anguish, then vanished, leaving only a scorched silence.

Every part of her body ached, but her wounds gleamed sealed and whole. 

No Undead taint, somehow.

Still, she could not linger. She climbed a fractured staircase and emerged into a courtyard that twisted like a half-forgotten labyrinth. Crumbling walls leaned at impossible angles, and shattered archways framed glimpses of a blood-red sky. 

Adriana’s heart pounded as she navigated the maze of rubble, always driven by the faint pulse of white light ahead.

At last she saw it: a pure white glow spilling from a narrow opening. The light cut through the gloom of Death like a blade, and Adriana felt her pulse steady as she climbed the moss-slick stones. 

When she reached the threshold, the worms recoiled and the undead shapes paused as though afraid. 

Inside, on a dais of flawless marble, stood a mirror framed not in ebony but in brilliant, living white. 

Its surface was perfectly smooth, as if light itself had been frozen into glass.

Adriana’s breath caught, and she leaned forward until her forehead nearly touched the radiant frame. 

She closed her eyes, let her fingers hover an inch away, and then opened them again.

“I know where this is,” she whispered.

Chapter 49

Two guards paced the outer courtyard beneath the moonlit archway, their voices low so they could not rouse the villa.

“We’ve got the place under lockdown,” one said, adjusting the strap on his helmet.

“Even Lady Adriana can’t slip out now,” the other replied with a grin, “though I’d bet she’d like to try, if she thought she could.”

They laughed and kicked at a loose cobblestone as they walked toward the gate, making half-witted guesses about where she might hide if she ever tried. The younger guard bent over to inspect a faint glimmer at his boot, then straightened with a brow raised in annoyance.

“Nothing there,” he muttered, brushing off dust. “Just my tired eyes.”

They shrugged and moved on, their footsteps echoing against the marble. When at last their voices faded, the courtyard lay silent as a tomb.

From the side door came a sudden, subdued flash of light that danced along the stone before coalescing into a lone figure. It slipped through the doorway and closed the door behind itself without a sound.

Sabinus stood in the hush, the glow dying at his feet.

* 

“How did you get here?” Lily asked with a frown, seeing Sabinus casually slipping into her room.

He strolled around her bedroom with raised eyebrows. 

“What a pretty room.”

“Sabinus. What’s happening?” 

The boy sighed.

“Your mother had a message delivered to my father. We gotta go. Apparently, she wants me to bring you close to the Dead Lands. There’s an old villa that used to belong to the Gens Claudia. I don’t know what’s there. Your mother said something about a, I quote, second mirror.” 

Lily tried to keep her face unreadable and slowly nodded. 

“Alright.”

Lily was worried about her mother. She didn’t know, exactly, what Adriana was up to. She didn’t know whether she would be ok. But if her mother thought she had to go, she probably did. 

A second mirror? Lily thought, as she rode the horse Sabinus had arranged for her. 

They rode in silence, the horses’ hooves muffled by moss-soft earth as night deepened around them.

Every snapped twig made Lily’s heart skip.

But what is it? The Gens Claudia’s got only one Great Skill. Could it be… another?

There weren’t many other explanations that Lily could muster. It couldn’t be the Great Skill of another Great Family—that was almost guaranteed. But then, what? What could be so important that her mother had Sabinus take her and bring her there? 

“Do you think the guards will know where we went?” Sabinus asked, looking back, curious.

“What do you mean?” Lily said. “From the marks on the ground?” 

Sabinus shook his head. 

“I mean, from where we’re going. Would they think we’re going there?” 

“I never even heard of the place before you told me.” 

They rode in silence after that—for a while, at least.

Lily frowned. “I’m not sure I like riding in silence,” she said.

Sabinus glanced at her. “That so?”

“I keep thinking.”

“About what?”

“My mother,” Lily replied, her fingers tightening on the reins. “She told me dad wasn’t happy. And I don’t know if she’ll be okay. What happened, by the way? Your mother didn’t specify.”

Lily bit her lower lip. 

“I learned the Great Skill. She didn’t tell dad.” 

Sabinus nodded once but didn’t respond immediately. The wind shifted through the trees. 

“I imagine my own Father would be angry too if I learned the Great Skill without his approval. Is it any good, at least?” 

Lily smirked.

“Yes.”

Then, she looked down, still worried about Adriana. 

“She said to trust her,” Sabinus finally said. “And she sent me, didn’t she? She knew you’d be in good hands.”

“Shut up,” Lily rebuked, but she actually smiled. 

Sabinus leaned slightly in the saddle, his gaze scanning the tree line. The moon caught the edge of his jaw as he spoke again, voice low but steady.

“There are sometimes bandits around here.”

Lily’s hand shifted closer to her belt.

“Bandits?” she asked.

He gave a nod, not alarmed but not dismissive either.

“Deserters, mostly. Some old retainers from houses that got dissolved after the last purge. Others are just scavengers. The woods here run close to the old border before the Dead Lands expanded. Sometimes they crawl back.”

Lily looked at him, searching his expression. 

“You think we’ll be fine?”

“Of course,” Sabinus shrugged. “Bandits are [Soldiers] or [Templars] with low levels who couldn’t hack it in the militia. No honorable, strong man deserts from the war with the Undead.”

A little silence came on again.

“How powerful is the version of the Great Skill you got?” Sabinus asked.

Lily didn’t answer right away. The horses’ hooves crunched over gravel, then dipped into softer soil where the trees pressed tighter. A breeze stirred her hair before she finally spoke.

“I don’t know how to compare it. I’ve never seen another version.”

Sabinus tilted his head, watching her in the corner of his vision.

“But you’ve read the accounts. Your mother must’ve shown you something.”

“She did,” Lily said. “But none of them describe what I felt. They all talk about healing Light overwhelming Darkness. Mine didn’t work like that.”

“From what I know,” Sabinus said in a low voice, afraid that even the trees might catch on what he was saying, “all Great Skills require the mastery of Light over Darkness. To overpower it.”

“I didn’t do that,” Lily said.

Sabinus’s brow furrowed. 

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t purge it,” she said quietly. “I didn’t burn the Darkness out. I wrapped it. I pulled it into the Light and made it... turn.”

 He slowed his horse, just enough that they were riding side by side again.

“You fused the Mana,” he said, voice lower. “Like Aunt Calpurnia does for her techniques.” 

“Yes.”

“That's not how it’s supposed to work.”

“I know.”

Sabinus looked ahead. The path narrowed again, winding between trees whose trunks had blistered in past fires.

“I don’t think that even if I went back to my trial, I could do something like that,” the young man said, facing ahead listlessly. 

“Can I see?” Sabinus said. 

Before he could even get a reply from Lily, he took his dagger out and slashed his forearm open, bringing his horse closer to Lily’s. 

Blood ran freely down his arm, bright and fast. The cut wasn’t life-threatening, but it was deep. 

The muscle under the skin quivered, raw and exposed.

“Sabinus—” Lily hissed.

“I want to see it,” he said, jaw tight but eyes steady. “Show me.”

Lily bit down a curse and reached for his wrist, steadying his arm with one hand while raising the other. Her fingers hovered just above the torn skin, and in the quiet hush between trees, she called it forth.

[Life Flow]

A white, milky cone of Mana grew from Lily’s hand and enveloped Sabinus’s forearm.

Sabinus recognized Life Mana immediately, knowing that, indeed, Lily had not lied. She had actually learned a Great Skill. No common Skills could call forth a combined Affinity unless they were Class Skills. 

 wound on Sabinus’s arm hissed as the Mana spread, white-gold with a ghost of shadow threading through its core. She channeled it into the gash.

Sabinus inhaled sharply as he watched the cut knit itself together. There was no heat, no burn. Instead, a faint chill threaded through the air, edged with something sharp and vital that felt closer to waking up than falling asleep. The bleeding stopped at once, the skin sealed, and even the thin scar that should have marked the wound faded until nothing was left but smooth flesh.

He flexed his hand, testing for pain, and found none. “That’s… different,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t sting. There’s no trace.”

“It shouldn’t leave any,” Lily replied, dropping his wrist. Her voice sounded strange even to herself—flat, but not emotionless. “Life Mana is more compatible with your biology than Light Mana. It won’t fight what’s already alive. It just... makes it whole.”

“Biology?” Sabinus asked, frowning at the word.

Right, Lily thought. It’s one of those words.

After the ritual that had granted her the Great Skill, the words, the memories that sometimes came to her from a life she didn’t remember, had started growing stronger. Now, sometimes in her mind she blurred what she had learned herself and what had just been bestowed to her by these weird, strange memories. 

The muscle fibers were cut very cleanly, Lily thought. 

She still had to use Mana Sense to direct her healing properly, using the superior perception to not waste any Mana. However, since she had learned [Life Flow], everything had become much easier. In a way, even just focusing on the knowledge required to heal had become smoother. It was as if [Life Flow] somehow fused better with her knowledge of anatomy, biology, and all the branches whose names she had learned in her own head over the years. 

Sabinus made a thoughtful sound. 

“If your father knew you could do this… why would he not want you to participate in the Champion’s Trial? This is the greatest healing I’ve ever seen, Lily. I’m Level forty and you healed me like it was nothing. And Unclassed girl healed me, a Classed, Level forty man without breaking a sweat. Don’t even think about a gash like the one I just opened on myself. A scratch on me would exhaust a Unclassed healer’s Mana reserves. You…” 

“Yes?” Lily asked with a smug smile. 

“You just healed a wound that should be out of your reach,” Sabinus frowned. “A Classed person’s body is made of so much Mana… for you to…” The young man exhaled. “Whatever. This? Paired with your fighting style? You could get half your body blasted off and still clutch onto your enemy. I bet that’s what your thinking about. The Holy Flame, the Gens Iulia’s Great Skill, is terrifying. Its destructive power resembled Void. But this? I’m not sure that even if Lumius coated himself in Holy Flame, he’d be able to do any damage to you. You could rip his head off before his flames actually killed you.” 

Lily smiled widely and shrugged.

“I don’t think Lumius is my real enemy,” she said. 

“What?” Sabinus turned toward her and finally noticed that in her eyes there was a maturity he had not seen there before, as if Lily had just been replaced by another person. 

“Lumius will never be the next Pope. A Champion can become the Pope, but only if he’s the strongest Champion and the one to learn all Great Skills. Those are the requisites for the Champion’s Great Family to succeed to the current Great Family and become the main Papal lineage.”

“And?” Sabinus wasn’t following.

“Lumius has some talent,” Lily said dismissively. “But even his sister, without a Great Skill, is more dangerous than him. In the years of the Gens Iulia in command, no heir of theirs has learned all Great Skills. Pope Ennius knows two. A Champion knowing three is already a miracle, right?” 

“Yeah,” Sabinus frowned. 

“How many does Cassius already know?” Lily asked, looking at Sabinus.

Sabinus finally understood where Lily was going with this. 

“You’re not thinking about having to defeat Lumius,” he said the quiet part out loud. “You’re already thinking about Cassius.”

Something in Sabinus stirred. 

Something in Sabinus twisted, a sour pulse that he couldn’t crush. His jaw set as he wiped the last trace of blood from his wrist, glancing away from Lily’s bright, assured eyes.

He tried to sound casual, but the words came out a shade too cold. 

“Well, you should be careful not to get ahead of yourself. Cassius has a way of making even the prodigies look like beginners.” He forced a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Ask me how I know.”

Lily let the comment hang between them for a moment, reading the bitterness underneath. She didn’t push, but her answer was gentle in a way that probably irritated him more. 

“You lost to him.”

Sabinus’s laugh was short and hard. 

“Yeah. In front of everyone, like a dog. He beat me so fast I don’t even remember how it ended. Didn’t even get a scar for the trouble. Didn’t get any respect, either. That’s what it’s like when you fight a real monster. You never get a second chance.”

Sabinus was apparently talking about her, but, more clearly, he was talking about himself. 

“We’ll see,” Lily replied. 

He rode ahead a length, shoulders hunched. 

“And you’re so sure you’ll be different?”

“I didn’t say I was sure,” Lily said, voice quiet. “But I’m not fighting for a title.”

He shot her a look over his shoulder, eyes sharp. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged, unbothered. 

“You fought Cassius because they told you to or some empty ambitions. I have nothing to prove. I’m fighting because I have no other choice. If I lose, I don’t get to just walk away and be the next Patriarch of my family.”

Sabinus didn’t answer, but the silence was heavier now, full of things he would not say.

They rode in gloom, broken only by the creak of saddle leather and the dull knock of hooves. At last, Sabinus spoke again, voice tight.

“Just… don’t underestimate him, Lily. He’s not like Lumius. He doesn’t play by the rules. He already knows two Great Skills, and that was before he started training with his uncle, Cardinal Tiberius. And his Affinity’s different, too, somehow. There’s a reason people talk about him the way they do. Cassius makes everyone look like they’re missing something.”

Lily let her gaze drift up through the tangled branches above. 

“Maybe they are,” she said. “But I’m not them.”

Before Sabinus could comment, Sabinus head whipped to the side and he dove for Lily. Lily couldn’t understand what was happening but felt two bolts pass right where her head had been a moment before. 

The next moment, Sabinus disappeared, and two strangled shouts came from the side of the road. 

The fox-looking young man tossed two corpses on the road and re-sheathed his dagger. 

“Bandits,” he growled, looking at the horses. They had been killed by more bolts. 

He looked around and said, “come out.” 

Two dozen men came out on the road and the heir to the Gens Cornelia frowned. 

“Lily, be careful, they—” 

One had stepped too close to the blonde and Lily had feigned a punch. The man had swung his blade, but then Lily had shot for his legs, tackling him to the ground and leaving the man without breath when his back slammed on the hard ground. 

While using Light Magic to shape a sharp edge to her gauntlets, Lily mounted the man in a second and ripped his throat open, letting him bleed in a matter of seconds. 

She rose, her clothes already stained of the still gushing arterial blood. 

“They’re not high-level,” she said. “Take those.”

Lily pointed at a few that had better equipment than the others. 

“Their Mana is much thicker than everyone else. They’re too strong for me.” 

Sabinus, found himself in the position of taking orders from the blonde girl, could just obey and square up in that direction.

“Don’t die, then. Your mother would probably rip the skin off my flesh if you did.” 

“I don’t plan to,” she replied, taking a step toward the bandits.