THE MAGE OF RUIN

CHAPTER THREE: The Break Of Reality.

Night after night, Clovis hauled over ancient texts, desperately searching for even a single footnote about a blank Book of Fate and he found absolutely nothing.

Every single text insisted on the same thing; the Archive did not leave empty spaces.

Out of frustration, he grabbed the inkpot from his desk and threw it across the room before collapsing into his chair, digging his hands deep into his hair.

Just then, the doors came open, and Chadwick walked in.

Not looking up, Clovis growled, “The library is closed, Mr. Brook. Get out.”

Chadwick stopped in his tracks, immediately raising his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright, I'm going, I just—”

But then he froze, his eyes darting towards the second tier balcony as his face went pale, pointing a shaking finger, “Hey! Who the hell is that?”

Clovis spun to look up and there a dark, hooded silhouette stepped out from the restricted history section.

Clovis's heart ran cold. He could recognize that cloak. The underground guild of Royal Spies from the kingdom he laid waste to. They were mages capable of supreme stealth and if one is spotted, it meant they wanted to be spotted.

That means–

“Hey! Stop!” Chadwick yelled as he bolted past the front desk, sprinting after the intruder.

“Chadwick, wait!” Clovis shouted behind him as he grit his teeth.

The stupid boy was going to get himself killed!

They tore through the history archives and rounded the corner into the deep vaults, but by the time they got there the intruder was nowhere to be found.

The only sign that anyone had been there at all was a single, massive volume lying flat and wide open on the center of the floor, its pages vibrating slightly as if exhaling a final breath.

Clovis shoved past Chadwick so hard the boy staggered into a bookshelf.

“No, no, no,” Clovis muttered under his breath, his eye dropping to the open page as his hands shook looking down at the severed magical binding. The ink on the parchment was dissolving, turning into clear water.

An entity had been released.

Clovis frantically scanned the dark, his magical senses flaring, but there was no residual signature, no sign of whoever had managed to bypass his wards.

He closed his eye, a wave of bitter self-loathing washing over him. He had been so reckless, so entirely consumed by the fear of his own blank fate, so caught up in his own impending death, that he had neglected the one thing he was placed here to do.

Chadwick stepped up behind him, “What happened?”

“An entity has been released,” Clovis said, his voice dropping into a dead tone.

“That's a bad sign right?”

“Worse, because it had been released with a purpose,” Clovis said, “they wanted destruction and now because this cage is empty, history is going to begin rewriting itself.”

Just then, a raw, agonizing shriek tore through the minds of both men as the Archive screamed.

The geometry of the library began to glitch like static as the shelves blurred, snapping left and right.

From the upper tiers, ink began spilling from their bindings, running down.

“Move!” Clovis roared, grabbing Chadwick by the shoulder, practically throwing the boy down the central aisle, forcing him under the counter for cover.

Under the table, a sudden stray blast of arcane pressure shattered the glass lamps above them. Amidst the deafening chaos, Chadwick had to scream at the top of his lungs just to be heard, “What did you mean by history rewriting itself?”

“If a monster that brought down an empire is erased from its pages, then that empire suddenly never fell! Every war it fought, every person it killed, every bloodline it ended all snaps back into existence! Reality has to adjust to the vacuum, and it will tear Vaelenor apart to do it!”

He needed to find out exactly which monster had escaped. If he could identify the missing volume, he could track the entity down in the world outside and force it back into its chains before the chaos became irreversible.

For three agonizing minutes, the library thrashed and then, as abruptly as it had begun it ended.

Clovis immediately shoved himself up from the floor with Chadwick right behind him, his knees shaking as they reached the spot where the intruder had dropped the text.

The book's binding was split. Clovis knelt beside it, his fingers carefully turning the water-logged pages that remained. His eye scanned the fading runes, tracing the residual magic left in the empty binding.

“It's much worse than I thought…” Clovis muttered almost to himself, “The entity that was locked in this volume possesses the authority to edit fate itself. Meaning this beast is actively altering timelines as we speak. That is what caused the Archive to scream. The lock is trying to hold down a history that is being rewritten from the outside, and every second it remains free, the imbalance will grow until the entire world cracks open.”

×××

Outside the sky was already beginning to fracture as jagged, violet fissures rippled across the clouds, mirroring the violent imbalances tearing through the Archive within.

But as the temporal ripples shook the foundation of Vaelenor, the final part of a twenty-year-old trap quietly clicked shut around the Obsidian Academy of Arcane Science.

In the center of the main courtyard, the air tore open and a massive, swirling portal appeared.

A tall woman stepped out of the light, her entire body covered in heavy armor that gleamed with the crest of the fallen empire. She lifted her visor slightly, her eyes scanning the towering spires of the university.

For years she had waited for this moment, for reality and fate to be edited. Because only then would she be able to make this journey between realms.

“Scout the perimeter,” she commanded and behind her, dozens of heavily armed soldiers poured through the rift.

These were the Aethelgard descendants. For twenty long years, while the rest of the world watched films and read cheap novels about the Mage of Ruin, this hidden faction had been bleeding, surviving, and preparing for this exact moment because they hadn't forgotten their fallen kingdom and surely hadn't forgotten the man who fell their sky.

Almost immediately the soldiers returned, aggressively dragging four bound, crying academy students through the dirt and throwing them directly in front of the armored lady.

Terrified, the students looked up at the foreign army.

Without a single word, she drew her sword from its sheath and with one swift fluid strike, she swung the blade across.

The heads of the three boys dropped to the stones in perfect unison, their bodies slumping forward into a rapidly expanding pool of blood.

The fourth student, a young girl, knelt in horror covering her mouth with both hands, her entire body shaking violently as tears rolled freely down her eyes.

The armored lady wiped the flat of her blade on a soldier's cloak and looked down at the surviving girl. “Name?”

The girl stuttered so hard she could barely breathe, “L-Lexi.”

“Now, listen to me carefully, Lexi,” the lady said, her voice entirely devoid of pity as she knelt, her face inches from Lexi's.

“I am going to spare your life because you are going to go back inside and you are going to deliver a message to your High Magisters, along with the heads of your friends.”

She pulled Lexi's face close enough to make it seem like she could stare right into her soul, “And you will tell them they have a monster hiding behind their walls,” the lady whispered, “You will tell them to hand over the Mage of Ruin. If he isn't given, we will bring this entire academy down to the earth, and everyone inside it will burn.”

×××

“Impossible!”

A High Magister’s voice roared through the council chamber, raking his hand through his hair.

In the center of the room, Lexi knelt on the cold floor, her entire body trembling as she struggled to suppress her tears.

The surrounding circle of High Magisters and elite lords stared down at her, their faces pale upon the news and on the long table behind her sat the three bundles she had been forced to carry inside.

“Could it be a hoax?” an elite lord asked, as he looked around the room, “An empty threat to disrupt the semester?”

“An empty threat?” another Magister snapped, slamming his fist onto the council table, before pointing a trembling, ring-covered finger at the bundles. “Three of our finest students had their heads severed right in our own courtyard, and you call it theater? Look at the girl! She is practically choking on her own tongue!”

Lexi buried her face in her hands as a fresh wave of sobs broke from her throat, the memory fresh as a daisy.

“Then who are they?” a younger magister asked, “An army doesn't just materialize out of the Rift without a banner.”

“It is not about who THEY are,” the Grand Magister whispered, he sat at the head of the long table, his eyes fixed on the message written in blood on the parchment Lexi had delivered.

“It is about what they are asking for.”

The silence that fell was deafening.

“That is absurd,” a lady magister scoffed from the back row, “The Mage of Ruin died twenty years ago alongside his own ruin.”

The Grand Magister slowly raised his head, his eyes scanning the room until they settled on the high towers of the central library visible through the glass.

“Or maybe,” he murmured, “he didn't.”