Chapter 411:A snake among them.
"Klaith?"
It was the librarian, one of the oldest Dark Elves in the kingdom. The man responsible for maintaining enormous portions of the royal archives, recording history, preserving documents, and protecting records that went back centuries.
Klaith was quiet, patient, and trusted. Lilith trusted him. Atheline had spoken to him more than once whenever he needed obscure information from the royal library.
But Klaith wasn’t wearing his usual robes.
Atheline’s expression slowly changed.
"No..."
He knew that garment.
He had seen it before. Long dark cloth covered Klaith’s body, its shape deliberately designed to obscure the person beneath it. Strange patterns ran along the edges, almost invisible unless one knew where to look.
Atheline knew.
The Protector.
His attention completely left Caius and Yander. He stared at Klaith.
"What are you wearing?"
Nobody reacted.
Klaith simply stood among the ruins, watching. Atheline moved toward him.
"No."
The Protector had been one of Lilith’s most persistent enemies. A hidden figure operating from the shadows.
A fanatic.
Someone devoted to the restoration of the old order and, above everything else, an advocate for the resurrection of Lilith’s brother.
The same Protector whose influence had reached deep into the Dark Elven Kingdom. The same hidden enemy who had arranged deaths and manipulated people without exposing their identity.
Atheline remembered the councillor who had been murdered inside his cell.
His eyes returned to Klaith.
"You’re the Protector?"
Klaith’s face was calm. There was no anger, no grief and not even satisfaction. He simply watched Lilith.
Atheline looked back toward her, then toward the corpses. There were too many events andcoincidences. Atheline slowly turned back toward Klaith.
"What did you do?"
Klaith didn’t answer, of course he didn’t. This was whatever vision the ruin wanted Atheline to witness, yet something was different.
Atheline approached until he stood directly in front of the old librarian. Klaith’s gaze remained fixed beyond him which Atheline followed.
Lilith.
Then, slowly, Klaith smiled, it was tiny, barely noticeable, nut Atheline saw it. His blood ran cold.
Behind him, Caius raised his sword again. Lilith remained kneeling.
Atheline looked from the blade to Klaith, and suddenly the ending he’d once accepted as the conclusion of a villainess’s story no longer looked like an ending at all.
It looked planned.
.
.
.
Atheline didn’t get to see Caius’s sword fall.
The battlefield disappeared before the blade could move another inch, taking Lilith, Yander, Caius, the dead councillors and the ruined landscape with it.
There was no gradual transition and no return to the endless corridor of darkness. For one disorienting instant, Atheline felt as though the entire world had been pulled out from beneath him, and when his vision returned, he was standing somewhere else entirely.
It was underground, at least, that was his first assumption.
A vast stone chamber stretched before him, its walls disappearing into darkness far beyond what the dim illumination could reach.
Ancient symbols covered almost every visible surface, and unlike the carvings he’d encountered in ordinary ruins, these weren’t decorative.
They formed an enormous interconnected formation, thousands upon thousands of symbols feeding toward the center of the chamber where something had been sealed beneath the floor.
Atheline stared at it. Even through the vision, he could feel something wrong. This was something older, something restrained.
Enormous chains of light stretched across the central formation, crossing one another repeatedly before disappearing beneath the stone.
Every few seconds the chains trembled, and the entire chamber responded with a low vibration that Atheline felt beneath his feet.
Then he saw the man standing before it.
"Klaith."
The old librarian stood alone. He was still wearing the Protector’s garments but there was no mask this time. No attempt to hide his identity.
Klaith simply stood before the enormous seal as though there was no longer anyone alive whose discovery he needed to fear.
Something rested in his hand.
A core.
Atheline’s expression immediately became serious. The core was unlike the Sovereign of Darkness’s core that he and Lilith had obtained on the Storm Islands.
It was smaller and horribly unstable, its surface almost black except for thin gray veins moving through it like smoke trapped beneath glass.
Klaith raised it.
"So little remains."
His voice echoed through the chamber.
Atheline moved closer. Klaith stared at the core.
"A Death Core."
Atheline stopped.
The words immediately caught his attention. Klaith slowly turned the object between his fingers.
"Not enough for resurrection. Not yet. The concentration is still insufficient, and too much of what remains has been contaminated by lesser vessels."
He looked toward the seal.
"But the method works."
Atheline frowned.
"What method?"
Klaith couldn’t hear him. The old Dark Elf continued speaking to whatever existed beyond the seal.
"The ones with the highest potential have been killed."
Atheline’s expression changed.
Highest potential?
Klaith smiled faintly.
"Some were more difficult than expected. Others eliminated themselves without understanding that they were doing exactly what was required of them."
Atheline felt a chill. His mind immediately returned to the battlefield. Too many powerful people had died.
Before Atheline could connect those thoughts properly, Klaith extended the Death Core toward the seal. Something reacted, a flame appeared.
Atheline’s eyes widened.
It was only there for an instant. A strange flame burned somewhere beyond the chains, but the moment Atheline focused on it, the chamber fractured.
He saw someone. A figure surrounded by flames holding a spear and the impression of another person falling.
Then... nothing.
The vision vanished so quickly that Atheline couldn’t determine whether he’d genuinely seen those things or whether his mind had tried to construct an image from fragments he’d already witnessed in the ancient memory.
"Wait!"
Atheline stepped forward but the seal disappeared.
"Klaith!"
The entire chamber collapsed into white. Atheline raised his arm over his face as light surrounded him.
Then he heard something completely impossible.
Traffic.
A car horn sounded somewhere outside. Atheline froze but another horn followed, then the distant rumble of an engine.
There were voices, footsteps and air conditioning. His eyes slowly widened.
"No..."