Chương 149: Ch141- Ngaralu

Bathsheda stepped back half a pace.

"You're..."

"Ngaralu," Cassian answered for her. She looked as thrown as the rest of them. Eyes narrowed, lips barely moving as she spoke.

"Centuries must have passed. I felt the bindings weaken long ago. Then the silence. I was forgotten. So was the seal." Her gaze swept the circle, stopping on no one in particular.

"How many lifetimes has it been?" No one answered. No one could. Edevane frowned.

"If it's been that long, why are the creatures only crawling out now?" The woman raised her head.

"We banished them," she said.

"To another plane. Locked them outside. It must've taken them time to remember the way in." Her eyes landed on Cassian first, then flicked to the others.

"My kin..." She froze.

"They are no more. No wonder I am forgotten. I cannot remain long. The Nightcrawlers have drained most of the magic." She lifted a hand, a faint shimmer playing between her fingers. The stone answered her.

"Close your eyes. Absorb what you can." They closed their eyes, barely a breath before a thin thread of light coiled up from the monolith, wound toward their palm, and vanished into their skin. It wasn't painful. Just strange. Cold at first, then warmer. Like magic settling onto old grooves, remembering a pattern it hadn't worn in centuries. They felt it skim just beneath the surface of their thoughts. A breath. A thread. Then it was gone. When Cassian opened his eyes, the glow had faded again.

Ngaralu was still there, standing as before, but thinner now, half-shadow, half-light. The stone pulsed gently behind her. Something had settled in him. In all of them. It wasn't a rush of power or some grand revelation. Just... knowing. The weight of new knowledge curling behind their eyes, like a word on the tip of the tongue suddenly remembered. The shape of arrays. How they'd been drawn into the land. Sealing magic that didn't rely on brute strength but layers, song, will. And the Nightcrawlers.

Their shape, their hunger, the way they slipped through dark, how the Crawlers multiplied, slithered through cracks in the world like rot. Ayda looked pale. Edevane had gone still. Perenelle's hand pressed to her temple. The old hands looked rattled. Cassian didn't realise he was holding his breath until it dragged out of him. Sweat crawled down the back of his neck. Ngaralu's voice cut the silence.

"You carry the flames of the past," she said.

"It is a heavy burden. But one you must bear. For the future of the world." Bathsheda stepped forward slightly.

"Can we stop them?"

"Your world has weakened. The old anchors have faded. And too few remember what held them. But... raw power turned into knowledge," Ngaralu went on.

"The ancients had strength in their bones, yes, but little subtlety. Your age lacks their sheer force, but you wield versatility, tools, and tactics they could not dream of." Her gaze swept across the group.

"You have enough. Enough knowledge. Enough power. Enough leverage." She tilted her head.

"The Crawlers feed on fear, silence, and shadow. They twist memory. They bury truth." They all knew what she meant. The memory showed them not only the arrays but what fueled it, if one were to look closer. Cassian had. So had Bathsheda, from the way her hand dropped from the monolith like it'd burned her. The Crawlers didn't just kill. They snuffed. Burned out the light, the trace, the record. Magic. Memory. Names. Will. Like they'd been built to devour. And the monoliths? They hadn't held that power alone.

They remembered because someone had made them remember. Magicks, ancient ones, had bound their souls to the stone. Anchoring living minds through sacrifice. Watchdogs on the edge of the void, holding the line long after their bodies rotted. They'd let the seal hold by turning themselves into memory. One of those souls had just spoken to them. They looked at each other. No one said it, but the thought hung there, someone had to do it again. Ngaralu smiled.

"Luckily you have a—" She vanished. The light dropped out of the monolith so fast it left a ringing hum behind, like a bell cut short. Bathsheda looked like she'd swallowed a splinter.

"She was about to say something." Ayda straightened, looking at the stone.

"Did she mean a person? A stone? A goat?" Edevane gave him a flat look.

"She said 'luckily.' Doesn't suggest livestock." The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Perenelle circled the base.

"If she's right, and I think she is, we've got a window." Nicolas nodded.

"But not a big one."

"We need to move faster," Bathsheda said.

"Give me some time," Nicolas said.

"I've noticed weak spots in the array. I can improve it." Cassian was about to ask how long it would take, thinking they had to move quickly, but when he noticed Perenelle and the others not reacting, he held his question back. After a night's rest and something that might've counted as breakfast if you squinted hard enough, they split off in pairs. Bathsheda went with Perenelle. Ayda stuck with Edevane.

Nicolas made a vague noise about wanting to "compare array notes" and promptly dragged Cassian along before anyone could object. Not that Cassian minded, he was fairly sure the old alchemists just didn't want to leave the two youngest ones unsupervised. Or maybe they were curious. Hard to say. The Flamels had the sort of polite silence that made Cassian itch. Like they were watching a particularly strange painting, waiting for it to blink. But never about the last mission.

Which, all things considered, was impressive. If he'd had a hole in his memory shaped suspiciously like two professors from a British school with a history of meddling and one very cursed spell between them, he'd be clawing at the seams trying to patch it. Nicolas, though, kept it clean. Danced around it with every other question imaginable but never crossed it. Cassian gave the man a mental round of applause.

He'd probably do everything he could to learn what'd happened, ask of something he couldn't remember but knew happened. Then get Obliviated again for poking too close. But in all honesty, Flamel probably thought Cassian was just as blank. They kept moving. Dry brush crunched underfoot, the trail sloping down toward a patch of open land, cracked and pale like bone. Sparse trees, burnt-out shrubs, and a wind that felt wrong. As they reached a ridge, Nicolas slowed first.

Cassian frowned as he followed, something shifting under his skin. He paused.

"Feels weird," he muttered, brows pinched. Nicolas didn't look surprised.

"It's the absence. Of magic. Think of it like walking out of heat. You don't notice it at first. Then suddenly, it's gone." Cassian didn't answer. He took another step, and his stomach turned slightly. Not from nausea. From the nothing. He glanced around. No birds. No hum. No tug of ley lines underfoot. Even the dust felt hollow. Cassian wiped his hands on his coat.

"This place's been scrubbed." Nicolas nodded.

"We're on the right path. Call the others." Cassian raised his wand and flicked it skyward. Light flew in two other directions. They arrived in an hour. Ayda came first, Edevane behind him. Perenelle and Bathsheda rounded the ridge next.

"We've got something," Nicolas said, already turning back to the open field. They followed the trail, breath getting thinner the further they went. No one talked about the sacrifice yet. That was a conversation they'd all pushed to the back of the line. Soon, they reached a cliffedge, and the trail dropped off into open air. Down below, nestled in the dip of the cliffs, a pack of creatures picked their way across the rock like shadows with teeth.

They walked taller than the ones from the memories Ngaralu had shown them. Lean. Spines like broken glass, jointed legs too long. One paused. Its head jerked sideways. Cassian didn't dare to breathe. He'd seen what these creatures could do. Not even Ngaralu or the others had witnessed it, for the creatures snuffed out the light before they hunted. He doubted anyone but him had ever truly seen it. Their faces, if they had one, didn't turn. Just... twisted.

Darkness stretched thin over bone, a shape of a skull that wasn't made for eyes.

"They're evolving," Ayda muttered behind him.

"Don't say that word," Cassian said, watching as another creature knelt, sniffed the dirt, and dragged a claw along a line of dried magic so faint it barely glowed.

"Every time someone says 'evolving,' things start getting ideas."

"They shouldn't be this big," Perenelle said.

"Not this soon." Bathsheda crouched beside him, pulled out her lens charm, and squinted through it.

"There's more. Back in the shadows. At least twenty." Edevane stood very still, veil fluttering faintly with the wind. Her eyes were fixed on the biggest one. It hadn't moved. Just stood, arms dangling, head cocked as if listening to something they couldn't hear. Then it looked up. Cassian froze. Something in it twitched, like it felt the press of their magic, like a breath caught in its throat. And then, it smiled.

"I hate that one," Cassian said.

"Agreed," Ayda muttered.

"These creatures remind me of Dementors, only worse," Nicolas said, his gaze fixed on them.

"Call up your happiest memories. If the ancients had known the Patronus Charm, their hunts would have been far easier." Others nodded, readying themselves.

"Spread out. We all know what to do," Nicolas said. No one asked questions. Cassian peeled off to the right. Nicolas disappeared like smoke caught the wrong gust, one blink and he was twenty metres ahead. Perenelle folded herself into the air like a floating dandelion, drifting silently across the basin. Wind barely noticed her. Ayda went down. Into the earth. One second standing, next gone, the ground had swallowed him whole. Edevane moved so fast that Cassian nearly missed her entirely.

Bathsheda's was the most normal, if hopping through space and time ever counted as normal. Quick Apparition pops, each jump smoother than the last. Cassian ran. Not gracefully. Not impressively. Definitely not magically. Just... ran. He muttered something about all the show-offs under his breath as he ducked behind a slab of shattered stone, crouched low.

"Right," he muttered.

"History professor, excellent cardio, zero illusions." When they all took their places, each of them moved like they'd been here before, even if it was in someone else's life. They began tracing the sigils Ngaralu had burned into their heads. Six directions was not ideal. Should've been sixteen. They didn't have time to go recruiting, no one could teach a binding array mid-apocalypse, and none of them fancied yelling instructions over the sound of void creatures having a snack. Still. It would do.

Cassian crouched behind a broken slab, finger digging into the dust.

"A," he muttered, "B... backward D. No, that's just a really smug P." He scratched out the mistake and redrew the curve. Up ahead, something screeched. One of the Crawlers spotted a shimmer in the array line, darted towards it, then veered hard when the glyph snapped to life with a hiss.

"Cheers, Ngaralu," he muttered.

"Remind me to name a bloody school after you if we survive this." Bathsheda's hand cut the last mark in her sector. White light flared from the ground, snapped across the gap and linked to Perenelle's. Nicolas snapped his final stroke, and the whole thing locked. More lunged. Straight for the gap between Ayda's and Edevane's arcs, spindly limbs kicking up dirt like it wanted to crawl through the earth instead of over it. It hit the boundary and shrieked. The sigils crackled brighter.

The circle shuddered under the strain, light fraying where no anchors held.

"They'll punch through!" Perenelle called.

"We need the other ten!"

"We don't have ten!" Ayda barked.

"Unless you've got a wand-growing garden in your boot!"

"Hold it!" Nicolas shouted.

"We need to trap them first! If they scatter, the array fails."