Chương 116: The Black Road

The convoy left Ghelkar like a shameful beast. Not by the great roads. Not by the visible arches. Not by the black avenues where merchants shouted their prices with scavenger smiles. It left from below. Beneath the Black Port docks. Beneath the warehouses of the Vault District. Beneath the chains of the Debt Docks. Where things too filthy, too alive, or too compromising traveled far from sight. The wagon shook at every turn. Elyra kept one hand on the wall and the other on the map she had pulled from her cloak.

The pale light of her spirit slid over the parchment, just enough to reveal the lines.

"We're definitely leaving Ghelkar to the east," she murmured.

"Not toward the human border. Not toward the Obsidian Mines." Zayn barely looked up.

"Good. I didn't go through all this just to visit rocks." The scythe, resting against his shoulder, laughed in its black bone throat.

"And yet, you're a little bit of a rock too. A very aggressive rock, but a rock all the same."

"Shut up." Elyra kept studying the map.

"The line cuts inland. If it matches the continent's routes, then Velkar-Morne can't be too far from the roads leading back up toward the Black Throne… but far enough away to stay invisible." Zayn gave a faint smile.

"So, the perfect place to hide a rat who thinks he matters."

"Elvarin isn't important because he's strong," Elyra replied.

"He's important because he knows things."

"Then I'll cut his throat open after I hear them." She did not answer right away. The convoy plunged deeper into the tunnel. Chains scraped outside. Metal groaned. Then Lumeï suddenly lifted his head. The little pale fox arched his entire back.

"There's a problem." Zayn turned his eyes toward the cages draped in black cloth. One of them was moving. Not from the motion of the ride. Not like a badly secured crate. Something inside was trying to get out. Elyra straightened at once.

"Zayn—" The cage exploded. The bars twisted apart in a sharp snap, as if an invisible hand had torn them open from the inside. A long, thin, whitish mass leapt into the wagon. It had four overlong limbs, a ribcage split open like a diseased flower, and in place of a face, a translucent membrane stretched across bone. The smell that came with it reminded Elyra immediately of Elvarin. Preservation. Treated flesh. A living mistake. The thing let out a wet sound and lunged. Zayn did not dodge.

He rose at the exact moment it reached him and brought the scythe down diagonally. The black blade cut through the monster from the top of the shoulder to the flank. The creature did not die. The two halves crashed to the floor… and kept dragging themselves forward. The upper half opened its false-skin membrane and showed, underneath, a round mouth lined with small teeth. The scythe burst out laughing.

"Oh, I like this one. It refuses to die properly too." The lower half threw itself at Elyra. She pivoted, her blade of light tracing a clear arc, and the thing was hurled against the wall in a spray of black fluid. But instead of collapsing, it contracted as if each piece were trying to pull itself back together.

"They're reforming!" Zayn crushed the upper half under his boot. His clavicle pulsed. For an instant, Envy stirred in his soul with that familiar hunger. Not to eat it. Not yet. To understand. Then he saw the lines stitched into the monster's flesh. Fastenings. Anchor points. A method. Someone had tried to hold together pieces that should never have been held together. His gaze hardened.

"Velkar-Morne," he said. Elyra looked at him.

"What?" He gave a horizontal swing of the scythe. This time, he cut not the flesh, but the black sutures linking the fragments. The effect was immediate. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. The monster emptied all at once. As if something had left it. The shapeless mass finally fell still. Dead. The wagon went silent again, aside from the grinding of the rails. Lumeï approached cautiously.

"I hate being right when it bleeds." Elyra stared at the scattered corpse.

"That wasn't an ordinary demon."

"No," Zayn said.

"It was a trial run." He crouched beside the open torso. Between two ribs, a small metal plate had been hammered in. Not an emblem. Not a fine inscription. Just a number and a burned mark: V. M. -7 He ripped it out. Elyra went slightly pale.

"They were transporting that thing there… or from there."

"Doesn't matter." Zayn turned the plate between his fingers, then squeezed until the metal bent.

"It means we're close." The convoy continued on for a long time. At times, it climbed high enough for them to glimpse the outside through narrow slits in the wagon hull. Once, Elyra saw the twisted silhouettes of Ghelkar's towers shrinking behind them. Later, she saw black lands split with cracks, without towns or fire, only crossed by red roads winding through the darkness toward the continent's heart. Elsewhere, she caught sight of dead marshes where gray trees seemed to have grown upside down.

They were not taking the road to the Black Throne. They were going around it. They were passing through a hinge-zone. Not truly Ghelkar. Not truly the kingdom's center. A place where the great powers dumped their waste, their experiments, and their secrets. The wagon slowed abruptly. Then stopped. No station. No platform. Just a heavy jolt, a hiss, then the sound of bolts being pulled somewhere in the distance. The scythe spoke first.

"Finally. I was starting to want to kill the transport itself." Zayn stood. Elyra sheathed her blade of light, without relaxing her shoulders.

"We're getting out?" He looked at her as if the question were pointless.

"We kill the road. Now we kill what it was hiding at the end." The wagon door opened onto Velkar-Morne. Elyra understood at once why even Ghelkar had hidden it beneath the earth. Velkar-Morne was not a city. It was a cultivated wound. The whole place sprawled across a vast rocky basin, far from the coasts, beneath a low sky heavy with smoke. Immense black hothouses stood in rows like cathedrals of burned glass, linked by iron walkways, organic conduits, and secondary rails.

Between them, basins of dark liquid reflected red glows. Farther off, thin towers expelled gray vapor that fell again as rain over gardens of frozen flesh. There were walls. Guard posts. Projectors. But above all, there was a laboratory discipline to it. This was not a place of commerce. This was a place of trials. Armored figures moved between the hothouses. Some wore the marks of Ghelkar. Others carried organic pieces more akin to the monstrosities of Ulkar's Belly. Lorran had not lied.

Several domains had put their fingers into this place. Zayn climbed down first. The convoy's driver, waiting farther off with two guards, saw him coming and went pale enough to look sick.

"You… you weren't supposed to get off here without an escort." Zayn walked toward him.

"And yet." The guard at his right put a hand on his weapon. Mistake. The scythe came out. Not with a grand dramatic motion. Not with an announcement. It simply appeared, as if Zayn's hatred had decided it was time. The black skull smiled at the guard.

"Hello." The guard died before he could pull his hand away. A black line crossed his throat. The second stepped back. Elyra closed her eyes for one second. Not in surprise. Just in that growingly familiar fatigue at how easily Zayn chose violence. The driver raised both hands.

"I don't fight!"

"Then talk."

"The Black Hothouses have been on alert for an hour!"

"Good. Keep going."

"The elven researcher was moved into the central hothouse, above the stabilization basins. He was ordered to finish a protocol before dawn." Zayn stopped.

"What protocol?" The driver hesitated. The scythe leaned a little closer.

"Short answer. I don't like it when they build momentum before they beg."

"Spir… spirit remnants," he stammered.

"Pieces of elves. Living relics. They're trying to bind them to something else without immediate collapse." Elyra went cold. Lumeï made a very low sound, almost animal. Zayn, meanwhile, grew even calmer. That kind of calm. The worst kind.

"Where?" The driver pointed at the tallest structure in the complex. At the center. An enormous hothouse veined with black metal, above which a foul light was circling.

"There. The Glass Tower." Zayn looked at the central hothouse. Then at the rest of the complex. Walkways. Roofs. Basins. Guards. Cages. Chimneys. Finally, something interesting. Not a room where people talked. Not a counter. Not a bureau. A place that could break. He smiled. Elyra saw it and understood immediately that no clean infiltration was going to last very long.

"Zayn."

"Yes?"

"If we charge straight to the center, the whole complex will close around us." He tilted his head slightly.

"You have a better idea?" She looked at the side hothouses, then at the conduits connecting them to the core.

"Yes." He waited.

"The conduits. The basins feed the central system. If we go in through the secondary structures, we avoid the main courtyard and reach the base of the central hothouse without announcing our presence to everyone." The scythe sounded offended.

"What a terrible sentence. Announcing your presence is one of the best parts." Elyra ignored it. Zayn, however, studied the complex for a few more seconds. Then he shrugged.

"Fine." Elyra blinked.

"Fine?"

"Don't get used to it. If your plan becomes boring, I kill the middle." Lumeï sighed.

"That is probably the most reasonable compromise we're going to get from him today." Zayn tore up the V. M. -7 plate he was still holding and threw it to the ground. Then he crushed it under his heel.

"Show the way, princess." At the same moment, inside the central hothouse, Elvarin Soreth had long since stopped feeling his hands. The table in front of him was covered with materials he was refusing, mentally, to call by their real names. Fragments. Residues. Partial presences. The device at the center hummed faintly. Around it, three demonic technicians observed. And behind them, Lorran Veyx slowly turned the pages of a file as though attending a lecture.

"Continue," he said. Elvarin was trembling.

"It's going to collapse."

"Probably. Continue anyway."

"The signatures won't hold. They reject the anchoring."

"Then force it. That is precisely why you are being kept." Elvarin gritted his teeth. His burned arm throbbed with every movement. In the basin just below the glass platform, something shifted under the black liquid. He did not look. He already knew he would regret it. Then an alarm went off. Not the long general alarm. A single note. Short. Ugly. A guard burst in.

"Incident at the lower quay." Lorran did not even raise his eyes immediately.

"What kind?" The guard swallowed.

"The freight convoy arrived with… with the two intruders. They killed the reception team at the north quay of the hothouses." Elvarin felt his stomach drop. No. No. Not here. Not already. Lorran slowly closed his file.

"How many are they?"

"Two. The human and the elf." Silence. Then Lorran smiled a little. Not from joy. Just with that curve of someone who finally saw the interesting part begin.

"So he is punctual." Elvarin took a step back despite his chains.

"You let him come." Lorran turned his head toward him.

"Of course." The alarm rang a second time. Closer. This time, even the demonic technicians looked up. Another sound followed. Metal being ripped apart. A scream cut short. Then, very far away, through the black glass walls of the central hothouse, a streak of light crossed one of the secondary structures. Not an explosion. A line. Black. Fast. Something had just quite literally opened a path through a walkway. Elvarin closed his eyes for one second. He saw it without seeing it. The road. The blood. The half-mask.

That sense of a catastrophe that did not arrive screaming, but walking. When he opened his eyes again, his voice was no more than a breath.

"He's here." Lorran followed the new smoke rising outside. Then he answered calmly,"Yes." And this time, even he had stopped smiling. In a secondary hothouse, three bodies were already lying on the wet floor. Elyra wiped her blade clean. Zayn stepped over a guard still twitching and raised his eyes toward the Glass Tower dominating all of Velkar-Morne. Figures were already running along the upper walkways. Metal bells had begun to ring. Red lanterns lit one after another. The entire complex was finally waking up.

The scythe shivered in his hand.

"Ah. There. Now this looks more like a proper evening." Zayn smiled. A thin smile. Dirty. Happy for all the wrong reasons.

"Let's go get Elvarin." Then he raised the scythe toward the central hothouse.

"And if they want to stop us… let them at least have the courtesy to try."