Chương 27: The Imperial Bloodline (3)

Beside Teren, Edras stood motionless, his eyes open but seemingly fixed on nothing in front of him. He held one hand slightly raised, with two fingers separated. The people waiting behind them had gone quiet in anticipation. A minute passed. Teren stared at the research hall. Nothing happened. Edras's fingers shifted.

"The golem is inside." Teren waited.

"It has reached the rear testing room." Still nothing. Teren's mouth had gone dry. Edras remained motionless for several more seconds.

"It is descending the stairs." Teren's hands tightened. He remembered following those same steps. The cold basement. The black pedestal. The purple crest floating in the air. Then the red rune circle at the doorway. Edras's fingers moved again.

"It has crossed the lower threshold." Teren stared at the hall. No explosion came. A guard behind him quietly let out a breath. Edras waited another half minute before speaking again.

"It is standing inside the basement chamber. I detect no active mana around it." Teren did not feel relieved. The golem had crossed before the lineage resonator was used. That proved nothing about what had killed him or whether the trap only worked for someone with Corvadryn blood. Edras sent the construct farther into the room, then back toward the stairs. After another long pause, he said, "It has crossed the threshold again." Still nothing.

Soon, the golem emerged from the research hall and began walking back across the courtyard. The assistants exchanged uncertain looks. Edras let the construct stop beside the outer wall. He turned to Teren.

"The golem crossed the doorway in both directions without triggering anything. That doesn't prove there is no danger, but it tells me the threshold does not react to every source of mana." Teren had expected this.

"It still feels wrong." Edras watched him carefully.

"You are certain?" Teren looked toward the hall. He did not need to fake the fear anymore. The thought of walking back toward that basement was enough.

"Absolutely." The old mage considered him for a few seconds. Then he looked at the research hall again.

"You said the feeling became stronger when you walked toward the basement door." Teren nodded.

"So we have learned that the doorway itself is not presently active, as I expected. That does not tell me whether something could change when the resonator is used." Teren was relieved Edras had reached that conclusion himself. The mage turned back toward him.

"I'm going to examine the threshold directly." Teren nodded.

"You are coming with me." The relief disappeared. Teren stared at him.

"But why?"

"If this feeling of yours changes while I approach it, I want to know immediately." Teren almost laughed from sheer disbelief. Of course. He had invented a mysterious warning because he could not admit that he remembered dying there in a previous loop. Now the lie had given Edras an excellent reason to bring him closer to the same trap. For a moment, Teren considered saying the feeling worked just as well from here, but that sounded ridiculous even to him.

I'm going to get myself blown up again because of my own lie. He looked toward the research hall. There was no good way out of it now. Refusing to go anywhere near the building after insisting he could sense a danger would only make Edras question everything else he had said.

"Fine," Teren said.

"But I'm staying as far from that doorway as I can." They entered the empty compound, with the stone golem following behind them. Inside the research hall, nothing had changed. The instruments from the earlier tests remained where Edras had left them. Papers lay neatly stacked on one table. A half-filled tray of mana crystals sat beside the wall. Edras left the main entrance open.

"You stay here. If anything happens, get outside immediately." Teren stopped just inside the doorway. Edras raised one hand. Blue light spread across the hall a few feet in front of Teren, forming a broad translucent barrier between him and the interior of the building. It remained fixed in place after Edras lowered his hand. Teren looked from the barrier to the mage.

"What is this?"

"It's a barrier. Stay behind it until I say otherwise. It should stop debris and weaken any magical discharge coming from that direction. But if you come past it, I can't guarantee your safety." Teren had no intention of testing that. With the open entrance directly behind him and the barrier in front, he at least had somewhere to run if things went wrong. Through the open inner door, he could see Edras approaching the basement entrance. The iron door still stood open from the golem's passage.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. The stone golem stood motionless nearby as Edras stopped before the threshold and formed a new translucent barrier in front of himself. Beyond him, the stone steps descended into darkness. Teren's stomach tightened. Edras did not enter the basement. He remained a few paces back in the testing room, examining the doorway. After a while, he looked back.

"Are you still getting that feeling?" Teren wished there were really such a thing.

"No change," he lied again.

"It still feels wrong." Edras nodded once, then raised his right hand. A point of blue light appeared at the tip of his index finger. Then it stretched. The line became thinner as it extended across the room, until it looked no thicker than a strand of hair. The glowing thread of mana reached the stone beside the basement doorway and touched it. Nothing happened. Edras moved his finger slowly. The thread followed. It passed across the upper corner of the frame, then down one side.

Blue light briefly spread through each point Edras touched with the thread before disappearing again. A minute passed. Then another. Teren shifted his weight but did not leave the doorway. Edras changed the angle of the thread and traced the threshold again. Still nothing. The old mage's brow tightened.

"You're sure this is where you get the feeling from?" Teren was. Just not for the reason Edras thought.

"Yes," he replied.

"Something is wrong with that doorway." Edras crouched several paces from the doorway. The blue thread split into even finer strands. Each moved independently. Teren only stared in awe at the flawless mana control shown by the archmage. One thread traced the stone floor. Another passed through some old marks around the frame. The third touched the wall beside it and moved slowly upward. For a while, nothing changed.

Teren was beginning to think that the explosive runes would never appear again, when a faint red line appeared beneath the stone. Teren straightened. It was so thin he thought at first that he had imagined it. Within a moment, the line faded away.

"Careful!" he called.

"That is what I felt!" Edras stopped moving. The blue strands shifted back toward the same point. The line appeared again as the mage probed it with the threads. This time, more followed. Slowly, hair-thin grooves became visible beneath the surface of the stone, forming curves and angular marks that had not been there a moment earlier. They spread from the lower corner of the doorway into the floor and climbed partway up the frame. Edras did not speak. He moved the blue strands even more slowly now.

Another section appeared. Then another. Teren watched a concealed circle take shape around the threshold. The symbols looked faded rather than glowing red. Dormant. Almost impossible to distinguish from the stone unless Edras's mana passed directly over them. Teren remembered those same lines burning red.

"There really is something there," he said.

"I told you."

"Be quiet. I need to focus." Edras's voice had changed. Not frightened. More serious. He remained crouched and continued probing. The golem stood several paces behind him without moving. After a while, Edras sent it down the steps again. The stone figure crossed the threshold. Nothing happened. Edras closed his eyes briefly while one hand remained connected to the thin blue strands. The golem continued into the basement. Teren could only see its upper body before the stairs carried it below the edge of the doorway.

Several minutes passed. Edras opened his eyes.

"This is not an ordinary runic array." Teren waited. The old mage shifted one of the blue threads toward the lower side of the threshold.

"It is buried beneath my own defensive wards, but it was here long before I placed them. Whoever made this array, they built it within the stonework and concealed it deeply enough that my wards passed over it without detecting another array beneath them." So someone really had gone to this much trouble to kill any Corvadryn who survived. The last known member of the bloodline had died more than a century ago, and the trap was still capable of doing what it had been built to do.

"Do you know when it was made?" Teren asked.

"I cannot tell yet." Edras sent the blue thread farther along one of the newly exposed lines. It disappeared beneath the floor toward the stairs. The mage's expression hardened.

"Hm... The array continues into the basement."

"Toward the device? That resonator thing you mentioned earlier?"

"Possibly." The mage did not guess beyond that. Instead, he spent the next few minutes testing. The golem moved below according to commands Teren could not see. Edras repeatedly shifted the blue strands around the hidden runes, following different branches of the pattern and stopping whenever a new section became visible. Gradually, his uncertainty changed to concern.

"This is..." Teren could not tell what Edras had found. The old mage extended one strand deeper into the doorway without crossing it himself.

"This part is not a trigger. It is a receiving structure."

"Uh... what?"

"It is built to receive mana from somewhere below." The golem moved again. Edras's eyes went unfocused for a few seconds, just as they had when he was looking through the golem before. Then he looked toward Teren.

"Like you somehow guessed already, the runic line terminates at the lineage resonator." Teren's mouth went dry. So that part had been right. Edras looked back at the hidden circle.

"As hard as I find it to believe, the resonator itself is feeding mana into the array." Teren remained by the outer door.

"What would have happened if I had used it?"

"I haven't traced the entire array yet. Give me some time to examine it properly, and try not to distract me again while I'm doing it." The answer came without too much irritation this time. Edras returned to his work. The process took longer than Teren had expected. The old mage traced one part of the array, withdrew, then approached it from another angle. More symbols slowly emerged.

At one point, he formed a second set of blue lines from his other hand and held both patterns at once, comparing two sections of the hidden structure. Teren understood none of it. But he saw the moment Edras found what he had been looking for. The old mage stopped completely. His gaze moved from one group of revealed symbols to another. Then to the stairs. Then back again.

"What?" Edras took a few seconds before answering.

"This array is dormant. For now." Teren looked at the dark runes.

"The golem already proved that, didn't it?"

"No. The golem proved only that crossing the threshold did not activate anything under the present conditions." Edras slowly rose.

"Now I know why." He pointed toward one of the concealed rune clusters.

"This runic array is waiting for a signal from the lineage resonator. Not simply for the resonator to be used. For a specific positive response." Teren's throat tightened.

"A Corvadryn response." Edras nodded and looked back toward the basement.

"If the resonator recognizes a Corvadryn mana signature, this part of the array changes its state and the threshold becomes active." Teren remembered the purple imperial crest floating above the black pedestal in that loop.

"By active, you mean..." Edras followed another line of runes with his eyes.

"The next person with a mana network to cross the threshold causes the array to release its stored energy all at once, creating an explosion large enough to kill anyone in the vicinity." Teren stared at the doorway. If he had gone down there and used the resonator, it would have happened all over again. He remembered Edras stepping across the threshold. The red line flashing beneath his foot. The circle forming around the doorway. The barrier shattering. So this was what had happened last time.

Edras turned toward him.

"Is that what you were feeling?" Teren forced himself to answer carefully.

"I knew the device and the doorway felt connected. I didn't know why." That was close enough to the lie he had already told. Edras looked at him for another moment before returning his attention to the runes. For nearly half an hour, he continued examining them. Teren stayed where he was and made no attempt to step past the barrier. By the end, most of the hidden structure had become visible around the threshold, though large sections remained concealed beneath the floor and walls. Edras finally lowered both hands.

The blue strands of mana vanished.

"I have never seen anything quite like this..." Teren looked at him. That statement meant more coming from an archmage than it would have from almost anyone else.