Lyria's Arc

Chapter 13 of 9

Veritas restarted the trials, but Lyria's advantage was slipping. The final trial was coming, and the corrupt judge would come with it. Her plan was simple. Her wolf could sense corrupted souls. When the judge returned, the wolf would warn her first. But that plan needed a calm wolf, and her wolf was not calm. The rose-colored beast paced her chamber like a caged storm. Its runes flickered along its fur. It snapped at nothing. When Lyria reached for it, it shied back, ears flat. She could not read a fight through an animal that would not sit still. "Something is wrong with it," she said. "If it panics during the final trial, I'm blind." Kael leaned in the doorway. He had guided her through the first bond weeks ago, and he watched the wolf now with the flat focus he gave every field problem. "It's not sick," he said. "It's reacting." "To what? There's no one here." "Then it senses something you can't. Yet." Selenya stepped past him without knocking. The soul-seer read people as colors, and she wasted no words on comfort. She stared at the wolf, then past it, at the far wall. "Gray," she said. "Close. Below us." Lyria's stomach dropped. "The judge? He's already back?" "Not him." Selenya's purple eyes narrowed. "Older. Deeper. Something bound in the dark under this hall." Kael grabbed a torch. They followed the wolf, which now pulled hard toward a stairwell behind the bench chambers. Down worn steps, past a shelf marked with glowing star-wards, they reached a low cell of dark stone. A figure waited inside. Bone-white skull. Two red points where eyes should sit. It did not move. A seal glowed on the floor around it, holding it. "You feel me," it said. Its voice was flat and dry. "So does the beast." Lyria kept the wolf behind her leg. "You're what's frightening it." "I frighten everything with a soul. The judge who fled woke me. He wants me loose for your final trial." It tilted its cracked head. "I am Malgoros. I have watched fools die trying to free me. I will watch him fail too." The wolf shook against her leg. Lyria knelt and pressed her palm to its chest, the way Kael taught her long ago. She shared her own steady breath. Slowly, the runes stilled. The wolf sat. "It reacts to corruption," Selenya said. "Now you know its true edge. It felt him through stone and floor." Lyria stood. The wolf held calm beside her, steady at last. "Then it won't just warn me when the judge is close," she said. "It'll warn me from across the whole hall." They climbed back up. Her wolf was calm, and her plan was whole again. But she carried a worse fact now. The corrupt judge did not mean to fight her alone. He meant to unleash the thing chained beneath the trials.