The midnight wind hissed through the casement, carrying the sharp sting of ice into the tavern room.
Will sat motionless by the table, nursing the cold dregs of his cider.
He had left the shutters wide open on purpose, offering no excuse for surprise visits or clandestine tricks.
The Squirrels were running out of sand in their hourglass.
While the noble lords of the Order dragged their boots through bureaucratic debates, once Grand Master Valerius laid down a formal seal, every gatehouse and drainage grate would be bolted shut with cold iron.
This was a war of missing pieces and stolen hours.
Salat had already submitted an official requisition to survey the lower sluices as cover.
If the venture turned into an abattoir, the paperwork offered a clean retreat.
Knock, knock, knock.
Three light raps stirred the timber.
In Will’s inner awareness, a single emerald light hovered just beyond the threshold.
He pulled the bolt, revealing Dayne’s slender silhouette wrapped in dark wool.
“Decided, have we?”
A faint smile touched the elf’s pale lips as he stepped inside.
He had made up his mind hours ago, but lingering too long in negotiations only invited weaker terms.
“We have. We need to settle the toll.”
“Speak your piece,” Will said, gesturing toward the settee.
“My scouts checked the collapsed shaft; the drowner nests haven’t crept back into the blasted passage. The road is clear.”
They hashed out the terms over the grease-stained pine.
Both agreed to strike at midnight, keeping their companies apart until the torches were lit to prevent itchy fingers from drawing steel.
First, the drainage breach had to be sealed.
Will’s price was non-negotiable: unrestricted access to any elven manuscripts recovered, the return of the White Rose mail coats seized during the road ambushes, one Scoia’tael field cap, and two hundred Novigrad crowns in hard silver.
Whatever gold and relics lay locked in the inner sanctuary belonged entirely to Dayne’s war chest.
Late the following night, beneath the ruined bridge of the ancient palace in the Temple Quarter, thirty paces of cracked limestone steps spiraled down into the dark.
It was a forgotten passage, carved long before Temeria had laid its first timber palisade, uncovered by elven scouts days prior.
A handful of pitch-soaked pine torches cast flickering orange light across the stone flags.
The silence was thick and brittle.
The Scoia’tael held the left bank while the White Rose knights held the right, keeping two distinct cordons before the archway as men ran cold thumbs over whetted edges.
The elven raiders wore blackened leather harness, short recurve bows unstrung across their backs, and longswords slung low along their hips.
Three stocky dwarves cradled iron sledgehammers and heavy round shields, wearing only studded jerkins over wool to keep their swing clean, hauling ropes and mortar to plug the ruptured wall.
None of the sixteen rebels wore their signature squirrel tails tonight.
Every man’s lower face was wrapped tight in dark linen, a precaution Will’s retinue matched to the letter.
Will stepped down the line, running an eye over the heavy iron pavises, plate pauldrons, and the wooden crates of Zerrikanian petards Salat’s kinsmen carried.
He needed to be certain they held the teeth to hold a line if things went sour.
Crossing the flagstones, Will halted before Dayne, indifferent to the dozen hostile stares boring into his back.
“If the kit is in order, let us descend.”
Dayne gave a slow nod.
He had bled too much for this threshold to stall now.
What he had concealed from the human youth was far grimmer: the sanctuary was real, and his company had already seen its gates.
A month earlier, an entire vanguard had vanished into the wet gloom.
When Dayne led reinforcements into the deep pipes, three more fighters had been torn apart in the mire.
In their frantic flight, a wayward bomb had cracked the wall of the outer wetlands, opening the cisterns to a flood of drowners and drawing the heavy lances of the White Rose down upon their heads.
They had reached the threshold, only to find the ancient portal barred by an impenetrable seal, impervious to picks and blade alike unless Dana Mébiad herself breathed upon the stone.
Until a boy carrying the raw scent of the deep earth had crossed his path outside Ellander. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Dayne was willing to play this hand to the river; if the boy’s blood failed to turn the latch, every human breathing down here would feed the mud.
The elf’s eyes lingered on Will’s face for two heartbeats before he raised an arm, leading his raiders down into the maw of the earth.
Will’s squad fell in behind their wake, iron boots scraping rhythmically on the slippery stone.
The lower galleries bore no kinship to the modern city above.
The flagged avenue opened wide and arched high, reminiscent of an ancient thoroughfare beneath a proud Aen Seidhe citadel.
The arched timber storefronts that once lined the street had long since been reinforced with heavy wrought-iron portcullises, bolted fast centuries ago to hold back the encroaching horrors of the swamp.
Will’s senses twitched.
A scattering of dull green lights lay coiled in the stagnant puddles along the walls.
Low-level scavengers.
He said nothing, curious to see how the rebels handled the mire.
Hissss!
Three drowners burst from the foul water, claws outstretched toward the elven bowmen.
Moving with eerie, predator grace, the elves dropped their center, rolled beneath the sprays of black muck, and severed the webbed throats before the scavengers could find their footing.
Will tapped Monte’s breastplate, signaling for his men to watch the speed of their recovery.
At the same time, he noted that Dayne navigated the flooded maze without a second glance at the masonry, his stride purposeful and sure.
In a subterranean labyrinth that resembled an imperial catacomb, that kind of confidence was bought with blood.
Salat’s eyes stayed sharp, catching the muffled glint of an amber cabochon resting against a rebel’s linen collar.
An elven sorcerer, hiding among the archers with his magical aura masked.
With no way to whisper safely, Salat tapped his gauntlet against his pommel, marking the mage’s position for his kinsmen.
The deeper they pressed, the thicker the swamp corpses gathered.
Two elves took raking gashes across their forearms, forcing Salat’s wedge forward to take the brunt of the assault with heavy iron.
Will trailed the seam, discreetly siphoning the dying carcasses through Life Drain; the yields were meager, but free essence was never turned away.
Reaching a grand crossroad of vaulted arches, Dayne called a halt.
His fingers traced a sequence of concealed glyphs along the mortar, and a massive granite slab ground open without a squeak of rusted hinges.
Will’s eyebrows arched.
Flawless elven joinery, or ancient transmutation?
Dayne stepped back, his voice dropping into a stern murmur.
“Mind your boots beyond this sill. The left flank borders the old lakebed. We traced the shoreline from above, but the water entrance is collapsed; our only route to the vault runs through these stones.”
He pointed to a cracked tunnel ahead.
“We plug the breach first. If scavengers flank us while the seal is tested, we rot together.”
They followed the rebels into the cracked gallery.
Massive limestone ashlar lay strewn across the muck like broken ribs.
To Will’s inner sight, the corridor was barren of living beasts.
His eyes scanned the gaping jagged maw in the masonry.
Several gnawed skeletons in shredded wool and rusted mail lay half-submerged in the silt, marked by elven brow ridges and dwarven proportions.
The grim price of their earlier retreat.
The dwarven sappers went to work without a word, hoisting stone blocks into the gap with rhythmic grunts, sealing the joints with a foul, sulfurous paste designed to repel carrion-feeders.
Beyond the barricade, the gallery terminated before a blank, pristine wall of white stone, standing luminous and untouched against the sewer damp.
The Scoia’tael froze in their tracks, sixteen pairs of eyes locking onto Will.
Will drew a slow breath, stepping toward the pale marble.
Salat’s five men adjusted their grips, forming an iron wall at his back, their pavises raised to shield his ribs.
Will reached out, pressing his bare palm against the smooth stone.
Closing his eyes, he unfurled his perception into the mineral weave.
For three seconds, his mind refused to process the feed.
The wall was breathing.
He looked closer through his inner sight.
The masonry was smothered in thousands of dense, overlapping emerald nodes, a microscopic carpet of living lichen and symbiotic flora bound into the stone itself, providing unbreakable structural rigidity while grounding magical discharge like a lightning rod.
An alchemical defense designed to laugh at dimeritium and common demolition.
Ingenious craft…
but wait.
If it breathes, it has vitality.
Will extended his will, testing the siphon on the closest cluster.
A chime echoed behind his eyes:
[Experience +1]
Will’s eyes widened, a wild heat rising in his chest.
These countless nodes were not stone at all; they were an ocean of unharvested essence.
[Experience +1, +1, +1…]
Ten minutes slipped away in total silence.
Not an elf nor a knight dared breathe too loud, watching the boy stand motionless against the pale wall, the air around his fingers shimmering with a faint, unearthly emerald mist.
[Life Drain x 134, Experience +134]
[Experience: 364/500]
Magnificent.
Combined with the drowner carcasses siphoned along the march, he was a stone’s throw from Level 6.
The faint green hue bleeding through the stone faded away, leaving the masonry cold, dull, and brittle as chalk.
The structural bond was severed; the slab could now be cracked by an ordinary pick.
Yet through the dead stone, his senses caught something else: a deep, rhythmic vibration waiting in the dark beyond.
Ancient tombs and royal crypts were rarely left without a hound at the gate.
A faint, merciless smirk touched Will’s lips.
He stepped back from the wall, turned to face the company, and gave Dayne a polite nod.
A collective gasp broke from the elven ranks.
After weeks of butchery, blown powder, and dead kin, the boy had dispelled the ward with his bare hands in ten minutes flat.
Dayne’s breath came short, a holy fervor lighting his sharp features as he stepped toward the threshold.
“Will! By our covenant, the White Rose has no right to tread within the ancient halls. From this breath onward, our people claim the portal!”
Will offered no argument, stepping smoothly behind the rim of Salat’s pavise.
The rebels watched the human squad pull back, their eyes glinting with feverish possessiveness.
They were drunk on the past.
Will extended an open palm, gesturing toward the white slab with ironic deference.
“Cairn!” Dayne barked.
A broad-shouldered dwarf stepped out from the rear, dragging a heavy two-handed iron sledge with a feral grin.
Will leaned his chin toward Salat’s ear, his whisper barely disturbing the dust.
“The moment that stone cracks, lock into a full testudo.”
Salat gave an imperceptible nod, his hand resting on the safety pin of a Zerrikanian bomb.
They had drilled the maneuver at length.
If whatever lived behind that rock hit harder than expected, the knights would form an iron shell, let the petards scramble the field, and reap the scraps.
Crack.
The iron sledge smashed into the brittle marble.
The white wall shattered like rotten ice.