Chapter 26: The Eclipse Ring
Caelus woke with the taste of blood still lingering in his mouth.
For several seconds, he kept his eyes closed, feeling the cold stone against his back and the faint warmth of the chamber against his skin. Beneath both sensations lay a deeper exhaustion, one that seemed to have settled into his bones and turned every muscle into dead weight.
When he finally opened his eyes, golden light blurred across his vision.
It took him a moment to recognize the Sun chamber, and another for the memories to return in fragments: entering the Eclipse chamber, the statues emerging from their blank faces, the chanting, and finally the Ring.
After that, there was nothing.
Caelus tried to sit up.
Pain immediately answered.
His body refused the command halfway through, forcing him back against the wall.
"Don’t move."
Veyra’s voice came from nearby.
Caelus turned his head toward her.
She stood several steps away, watching him with the same guarded expression she had worn since entering the labyrinth.
For a moment, Caelus simply stared at her.
Something about her appearance seemed unfamiliar until he remembered the disguise.
Right. Veyra.
His gaze drifted lower, toward her shadow. It moved subtly against the stone, a faint ripple that didn’t correspond with the movement of the light.
Caelus’s eyes narrowed.
Eve.
The movement lasted only a moment before the shadow became still again.
Whether Eve had deliberately acknowledged him or had simply moved by chance, Caelus couldn’t tell. Either way, he decided not to test it.
"Don’t speak either," Veyra said. "Your body is strained badly enough without you making it worse."
Caelus ignored her warning.
"What happened?"
His voice came out rough enough that it barely sounded like his own.
Veyra’s eyes narrowed, but she answered.
"The chamber began shaking shortly after you entered. I tried opening the door normally, but the barrier wouldn’t respond, so I destroyed it."
Her expression hardened slightly.
"By the time I reached the other side, the chamber was collapsing. The ceiling had already begun coming down."
Caelus remained silent.
"I found you beneath the rubble," she continued. "Unconscious. I pulled you out and brought you back here."
Caelus glanced toward the passage behind them, but there was no sign of the Eclipse chamber.
"The entire thing collapsed?"
"Enough of it."
Veyra’s gaze hardened. "Whatever happened in there, it wasn’t normal."
He glanced toward the passage where the Eclipse chamber had been.
"How long was I unconscious?"
Veyra shook her head. "I don’t know exactly. Long enough for me to stop expecting you to wake up."
Her gaze moved over him.
"And before you ask, no. I didn’t see what happened inside."
Caelus looked down at himself.
His clothes were torn, and dried blood covered his skin, but the injuries themselves were strangely shallow. His ribs and shoulders were bruised badly enough to ache with every breath, yet nothing felt broken.
That made no sense.
He remembered what the Ring had done to him.
He remembered blood pouring from every opening in his body and the sensation of something tearing through him from the inside.
Then the chamber had collapsed.
Yet here he was.
Veyra seemed to arrive at the same conclusion.
"Your body shouldn’t be intact."
Caelus looked at her.
She wasn’t joking.
His gaze dropped to his hand.
The Eclipse Ring was still there.
Pale gold, almost disappointingly ordinary.
Yet he knew what had happened when he put it on.
Blood.
Pain.
Something inside him being forced open.
His fingers curled slightly.
He didn’t know whether the Ring had accepted him or nearly killed him.
Maybe both were true.
Then Veyra spoke again.
"What happened inside?"
Caelus said nothing.
He could not explain the statues, the chanting, or the shrouded figure without revealing far more than he was willing to admit.
Veyra watched him for several seconds before finally letting the question go.
Her gaze eventually settled on the ring.
She reached toward his hand, stopping just short of touching the band. Her expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
"Strange."
Caelus glanced at her. "What?"
"I can barely sense anything from it."
Her fingers hovered above the pale-gold band.
"You dragged me through half this labyrinth for something that feels like an ordinary piece of jewelry."
Caelus looked down at it.
"Is that what you wanted?"
He nodded.
Veyra studied his face.
"Was it worth it?"
Caelus nodded again, but this time he wasn’t really answering her.
His attention had already turned inward.
Something was different. Caelus closed his eyes and focused inward, searching for the familiar sensation of his affinity.
At first, he noticed nothing unusual.
Then he felt the moisture in the air.
Tiny traces of water suspended throughout the chamber, carried within the air and clinging to the stone walls.
His awareness shifted, and suddenly he could distinguish things that had always been present but had never registered in his mind with such clarity: pressure, temperature, flow, and cohesion.
The sensations overlapped until the chamber no longer felt like an empty room.
He could sense moisture gathering in the cracks between stones, air circulating around the columns, heat altering its movement, and tiny differences in pressure wherever the flow changed.
Even Veyra’s presence registered differently.
He could sense the moisture carried by her breath, the faint movement of air around her body, and the way her movements disturbed the surrounding flow.
Caelus opened his eyes.
He hadn’t gained more power.
But he had gained awareness.
Caelus opened his eyes.
His breathing slowed.
This wasn’t there before.
His attention returned to the Ring, and the answer became obvious.
The Ring wasn’t simply increasing the amount of power he could draw from his affinity. It was changing the relationship between him and the affinity itself.
Water was no longer merely something he could manipulate.
He could sense its presence.
Its movement.
Its relationship with everything around it.
Curious, Caelus pushed the sensation deeper, trying to extend his awareness beyond the immediate space around him. Pain immediately tore through his body, forcing the connection to collapse before he could explore it further.
He leaned his head against the wall and waited for the pain to subside.
His body couldn’t handle it.
That was the problem.
The Ring had given him access to something his current body wasn’t capable of supporting.
Caelus looked at his hand.
Then I need a better body.
His current body was the bottleneck. If the Ring could grant him this level of perception without even being fully awakened, then reaching C-rank was no longer simply a matter of becoming stronger. He needed a foundation capable of carrying what he intended to obtain.
Yet the Eclipse chamber refused to stay buried in the back of his mind.
The faceless statues, the chanting, the blood running from their eyes, and finally the shrouded figure all returned with uncomfortable clarity.
Caelus’s fingers tightened around his knee.
He had written that labyrinth. He knew exactly what was supposed to be there.
The path should have been empty until the altar. There should have been no statues, no ritual, and certainly no figure waiting beneath a shroud.
But there had been statues.
And something else.
Something that had looked like—
Lark.
His breathing slowed as the memory surfaced again, followed by the one sentence he had been trying not to think about.
You are not mortal.
Caelus immediately suppressed the thought.
Whatever the Goddess had meant, he wasn’t going to unravel it while lying half-dead against a wall.
More troubling was what the Eclipse chamber meant for everything else.
The labyrinth had changed.
That alone shouldn’t have been possible.
He had written it himself. Every section, every obstacle, every reward had existed for a reason. Yet something had been added to a place that, in his memories, had never contained it.
If one part of the world could deviate from what he remembered, then the rest of his knowledge could no longer be treated as certainty.
The story he had once known was becoming a map with missing roads.
Caelus stared at the Ring for a long moment.
He had once considered his knowledge of the novel his greatest advantage. It had allowed him to recognize opportunities before they appeared, avoid dangers before they revealed themselves, and plan several steps ahead of people who had no idea what was coming.
That advantage hadn’t disappeared, but it had become unreliable.
And an unreliable advantage could be more dangerous than having none at all.
Veyra was still watching him.
"You have that look again."
Caelus glanced toward her. "What look?"
"The one that says you’re thinking about something you have no intention of telling me."
Caelus almost smiled.
"You notice too much."
"It’s part of being stronger than you."
"Convenient."
"Extremely."
Caelus exhaled slowly.
He had spent too much of his previous life believing that knowing the story meant knowing the outcome.
That advantage was gone.
From now on, he would have to observe the world as it actually was.
Caelus lowered his gaze to the Eclipse Ring.
There were too many questions surrounding it, but at least one of them could be answered without relying on memories that were becoming less trustworthy by the minute.
He had inspected the bracelet before. If the Eclipse Ring was recognized by the same system, its properties should be accessible as well.
Right now, he needed information.
Caelus steadied his breathing and focused entirely on the pale-gold band.
His surroundings faded into the background.
He appraised the ring.