The wagon rocked violently as it trundled down the crumbling trail, iron wheels jarring over every stone and rut. Bound hand and foot, Caelum Vey sat hunched among the rattling chains, his breath slow, his heart quieter still.
A cold wind slipped through the gaps in the wood, carrying with it the smell of wet earth and decaying leaves. Somewhere beyond the veil of mist that cloaked the Hollowlands, beasts howled — but the soldiers guarding him only tightened their grips on their weapons, their eyes flitting nervously toward the prisoner they dared not truly look at.
Caelum barely noticed them.
His mind was elsewhere, weaving between memories and things far more dangerous.
In his mind's eye, the Soul-Web stretched infinitely. A vast lattice of glistening threads, too intricate, too alive to ever truly be mapped. It was the foundation of all magic, the breath of life that every magician was taught to honor and never disturb.
Phase One: Recognition.
Phase Two: Initiation.
Phase Three: Minor Binding.
Phase Four: Resonant Synchronization.
Phase Five: Transcendence.
The sacred Phases, carved into law by Solaris itself.
He had once believed in them. Believed that by climbing the Phases, he would become stronger, wiser, a beacon of hope in a crumbling world.
How naïve.
Caelum shifted his wrists subtly, feeling the weight of the nullstone shackles dig into his bones. Even now, with the suppression runes etched deep into the iron, he could feel the faint thrum of power below his skin — fractured, erratic, but still there.
Still his.
They had called it heresy. They had screamed of blasphemy and forbidden arts when he first crossed into that hidden place, beyond Phase Five. When he had torn his own thread from the Web, shattering the bond every magician swore to uphold.
What else could he have done?
The Council had refused to see it — the rotting sectors of the Web, the creeping corruption spreading faster than any healer could mend. To remain bound was death. To obey was to be devoured along with the rest.
He had chosen life.
No…
He had chosen freedom.
Even if it made him a monster.
The wagon lurched again. Caelum's head struck the sidewall, and the pain snapped him back to the present.
One of the guards — a boy not much older than himself — glanced at him, fear sharpening his features. His hand drifted toward the suppression wand at his belt.
Caelum smiled, slow and thin. The boy jerked his gaze away.
They think me powerless. They think the shackles and nullstone will bind me like a common criminal.
How little they understood.
Caelum let his head sag forward, feigning weakness, as he extended his awareness inward — toward the mangled core where his Soul-Thread should have been.
Instead of a pure, resonant thread, he found a snarl of broken strands, twisted and sharp, wrapped around something darker. A shard of stolen power, thrumming with unnatural life.
It pulsed once, sensing his call.
Pain lanced through him, white-hot and pure, but he welcomed it.
The Eidolons bound within him stirred, whispering in voices that grated against sanity. No proper magician could have contained even a fragment of their broken existence. No proper magician would have dared try.
But Caelum Vey was no longer proper. He had embraced the monstrous path, and now, even shackled and wounded, he was more dangerous than ever.
The wagon creaked to a halt.
Booted feet crunched in the dirt outside. Orders were barked in low, urgent voices. The driver was arguing — something about the Hollowlands being cursed, about the mists swallowing entire patrols whole.
Cowards, the lot of them.
And yet, their instincts were not wrong.
The Hollowlands were the scars of an ancient war — a place where the Web had been torn apart beyond repair, leaving a wasteland where normal magic faltered and wild Eidolons roamed free.
It was fitting, Caelum thought, that they would try to execute him here.
A broken magician, abandoned to a broken land.
Poetic, in a cruel way.
He waited, still and patient, as the minutes dragged on. He listened to the guards arguing, to the whinny of frightened horses, to the moaning of the wind through the hollow trees.
He counted each heartbeat, each breath.
He felt the tension in the air twist tighter, until even the guards could not pretend to ignore it.
And when the first scream echoed through the mist — a sound full of terror and something deeper, something primal — Caelum knew his time had come.
The guards scrambled, shouting, drawing weapons and forming a loose ring around the wagon. Their formation was tight, but their discipline had already begun to crumble.
Perfect.
Caelum shifted his hands, testing the shackles once more.
The suppression runes were weakening.
Not through any flaw in their construction — but because the Soul-Web here was too tattered to properly anchor them. The very air fought against the bindings, fraying them thread by thread.
He pulled harder, feeling the threads of nullstone resistance tear against his skin.
Blood welled from his wrists, hot and slick.
The Eidolon shard within him throbbed hungrily.
With a soft exhale, Caelum surrendered himself to it.
Pain exploded through him, raw and searing — and with it, power.
The shackles cracked with a sharp, crystalline snap. The nullstone fragments burned cold against his skin before crumbling to dust.
The guards heard it. They turned, mouths open in shock.
Caelum moved.
It was not elegant. It was not clean. It was instinct, pure and brutal.
He surged forward, tackling the nearest guard with bone-breaking force. The man hit the ground hard, his weapon skittering away.
Another guard shouted and raised his wand — too slow.
Caelum's hand closed around the man's throat, squeezing until the suppression spells fizzled out uselessly into the mist.
He pivoted, snagging the fallen wand as another soldier advanced.
No time for finesse.
Caelum jammed the wand's tip into the ground and forced a surge of broken mana through it. The device shuddered, overloaded, and exploded in a shower of sparks and twisted metal.
The blast threw the guards back, stunning them.
Caelum staggered upright, blood running down his arms, his body screaming in protest.
The Eidolon shard whispered promises of strength, of revenge, of oblivion.
He ignored it for now.
Survival came first.
The mist thickened around him, swallowing the world.
He could hear creatures moving beyond sight, massive and slow and inevitable.
The Hollowlands would claim them all soon.
Better to move.
He stumbled away from the wreckage of the wagon, away from the stunned soldiers, deeper into the mists.
His mind was strangely calm.
Each step he took was another thread severed from the life he had once known.
Solaris.
The Council.
The Phases.
All gone.
Only the broken path remained now.
And he would walk it to its bitter end.