Chương 1: Prologue

~ Tiger ~ ~ Year 84 of the Third Era, 14 years before the present day ~ ~ Near Sannai's Tea House, Undisclosed Country ~ Tiger had come to this town in winter before, but that had not made trudging through deep snow any less miserable. It swallowed his boots with every step, while storm winds tried to scrape the skin from his face. Beyond the town's roofs, the mountains were only a dark blur through the heavy snowfall.

Tiger moved through the storm at the pace of a frail old man in his seventies, wrapped in a heavy winter cloak that seemed too large for him. His back was bent. His steps were cautious. His gloved hands trembled whenever the wind caught the loose sleeves of his cloak. The face he wore tonight was wrinkled, tired, and harmless enough that most people forgot him the moment they looked away. An old man out too late in the snow was not strange in this poor town. Only sad, perhaps.

By the time Tiger settled into his private room at the tea house, no one had questioned the grieving old widower he appeared to be. He had used the same room and the same lie for years. The staff believed he had returned to mourn his dead wife, and grief made an excellent shield against curiosity. Tiger tapped one finger against the low wooden table. A controlled pulse of mana passed through the floorboards, walls, and surrounding rooms.

The returning echoes revealed the matron near the front of the building, a servant farther back, several ordinary customers, and no manaweaver within range. Tiger rose and tapped his foot once against the floor, driving a far stronger pulse of mana into the wood. Wood stirred beneath him. The planks rose silently, gathering into the shape of a seated man. Limbs formed first, then shoulders, a bowed head, a bent spine, and loose clothing. Color spread across its surface. Wrinkles appeared on its face.

Within moments, a second Master Vahel sat beside the table. Most manaweavers believed wood could not be shaped into a living duplicate through a mana technique. Tiger had always found that belief useful. The clone settled its hands in its lap. It could not hold a conversation, but it could dismiss an unwanted visitor and prevent a persistent one from raising an alarm. He moved to the fireplace and pushed a practiced sequence of mana pulses into a slight depression in the stone.

Runes appeared around his hand, brightened as they recognized his mana signature, then faded. Stone shifted faintly beneath the room. The returning mana pulses revealed the opening under the mat. Tiger dropped through it and landed lightly on the stone floor below. Above him, the wood clone crossed the room and pulled the mat back into place. The entrance sealed overhead. Only then did Tiger let the Mirage of the elderly man fall away. The bent spine straightened. The wrinkles smoothed. The tremor left his hands.

The man beneath the town was Tiger again, alone at the mouth of the long tunnel leading to the Conclave chamber.

The heavy stone door before Tiger was the last of many obstacles separating the Conclave from the world outside: a maze of tunnels, layered rune barriers, and various mana-signature checks. He placed his palm against the hand-shaped depression at its center and sent mana into the stone. Runes spread across the door, glowing with a cold light as they recognized his mana signature. After a few breaths, the runes dimmed and the stone groaned upward. Tiger stepped through and entered the Conclave chamber.

The cavern was vast enough that its ceiling disappeared into darkness. Twelve stone doors stood around its outer edge, each assigned to a different emissary and a different hidden route into the mountain. Twelve pale rune circles marked the floor. At the far end of the cavern, seven seats had been carved into the stone wall. Only four were occupied. The surviving members of the Original Seven sat beneath heavy rune-marked cloaks, almost motionless in the low light.

The other three seats had remained empty since the time Tiger had first come into this chamber. At their center sat the figure wearing the owl-painted mask. Tiger crossed the chamber and lowered himself to one knee before them. Once all twelve circles were occupied by masked emissaries, Owl raised his head.

"Report." The first reports were brief—minor fluctuations, uneven readings, nothing beyond the accepted range. Tiger's own monitoring post had shown nothing abnormal. Then Owl turned toward the only emissary who had not spoken.

"Deer." Deer lowered his head.

"Something is wrong at my post."

"Explain," Owl ordered.

"My monitoring post recorded repeated fluctuations in ambient mana density," Deer began.

"The highest shift reached around seven hundred percent above baseline." Rat turned sharply.

"Seven hundred?"

"The reading was verified three times." Seven hundred percent. That number did not belong in a yearly monitoring report. It belonged in damaged records, ancient warnings, and theories written by people who had hoped never to see them proven. Nightingale's voice came from another rune circle.

"That is not a fluctuation. That is a... rupture." Deer continued before anyone else could interrupt.

"There was no sign of a rupture, no inward surge, and no damage to the monitoring post itself. The density rose, held for less than a minute, then fell close to baseline. The pattern repeated twice at lower intensity." Another of the Original Seven shifted for the first time.

"A harbinger of the—" Owl raised one hand. The cowled figure stopped. Tiger had never been told what the Original Seven seemed to know, but even from the little he understood, the situation had looked dire before Deer's impossible report. The continent's rifts had already remained dormant for two years. No new monsters had emerged from them, but that also meant no new mana cores could be harvested from them. Cities depended on those cores for barriers, electricity grids, and countless other arrays.

Reserves were shrinking, prices were rising, and fear of empty stockpiles could soon become more dangerous than the shortage itself. Owl let the silence stretch before he finally spoke.

"Intervals between rift openings have happened before. Long ones, too. But never like this. Not across the whole continent. Not with every known rift falling dormant around the same time. Not beside mana-density fluctuations of this scale." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"The assumptions we have relied upon are failing," Owl added.

"The Great Barrier may be weakening faster than we believed." Tiger had heard the name before, always spoken carefully and never explained in full. He knew only that it was older than the manaweaver cities and that the Original Seven had spent generations watching for signs of its decline.

"How long?" Nightingale asked. Owl glanced toward the three rune-cloaked figures seated beside him. For the first time that night, Tiger wondered whether the old man was weighing truth against mercy.

"We have compared the current readings with what remains of the old records," Owl said at last.

"The same patterns are appearing again. Deer's report only confirms what we had already begun to suspect." He looked across the twelve glowing circles.

"If the readings continue along their present course, the Great Barrier may have as little as twenty years remaining. Twenty-five, if the gods have not abandoned us completely. But no more." Twenty years. Twenty-five if they were fortunate. Tiger had expected a warning measured in generations. In his work for Korsivir, years usually marked dates on reports, intervals between missions, or the distance between one war and the next. Now twenty years sounded less like a span of time than a deadline.

"Can it be repaired?" Rat asked. One of the other Original Seven answered.

"Not fully. Some sections can be strengthened. Some failures can be delayed or directed away from the weakest points. But the barrier cannot be restored to what it once was." The figure's hood turned slightly toward the three empty seats.

"Not with so few of us left." Nightingale's voice was far less steady than before.

"Then what do we do?" Owl looked at the twelve emissaries.

"We can only do what we can," Owl said quietly.

"We will prepare for the day it fails. Until then, tell your sovereigns and city leaders to draw from their core reserves rather than hoard them. Suppress panic where you can, and do not let the shortage become the spark for yet another continental war." Elephant's shoulders shifted beneath his cloak.

"And if they want to start a new war over mana cores anyway?"

"Then prevent it," Owl said.

"Caution those with sense. Bend those who can be bent. Silence those who would turn fear into armies." The emissaries remained silent. It was not obedience. It was calculation. None of them could promise that kings, clans, city councils, or desperate men staring at empty core vaults would choose caution over panic. Tiger had crossed borders under faces that did not belong to him and buried names that would never appear in any report.

He could warn Korsivir's leaders, bury early reports of the shortage, expose hoarders, threaten the right officials, kill the wrong ones, and arrange a dozen quiet corrections before anyone knew he had moved. But he could not stop fear from becoming policy everywhere. Not alone. Not even with the city of Korsivir behind him. Owl's voice lowered.

"If the barrier fails, the old enemy will no longer remain confined to records and warnings. Do not let the west shatter itself before that day arrives." The old enemy. The west. Tiger had heard both phrases before, though never with enough explanation to satisfy him. Each time one of the Original Seven used it, the words seemed to carry the weight of graves no map remembered. Owl looked across the twelve glowing circles.

"The reports are received. Unless another matter concerns all present, this gathering is ended." The emissaries rose from their circles. Tiger remained on one knee.

"I ask to speak with the Original Seven in private." Owl inclined his head. One by one, the rune circles dimmed as the others departed through their assigned doors until Tiger alone remained before the raised seats. Owl faced him from behind the pale mask.

"Speak." Tiger had known what he would say before even leaving Korsivir. But after hearing that the Great Barrier might fail within twenty years, the report no longer felt like an opportunity. It felt like a necessity.

"Korsivir has found a viable candidate," Tiger said. For several breaths, none of the Original Seven moved. Then one of the cowled figures beside Owl leaned forward.

"For that artifact?"

"Yes." Tiger kept his voice even.

"The child's reserves already show unusual growth, and his mana pathways are far more developed than expected for an infant. We performed every compatibility test named in the bonding-rite scroll. All eighty-seven of them. The child met every requirement."

"We repeated the entire process with fresh materials and a new rune arrangement. Then we repeated it a third time. Each sequence gave the same result."

"All eighty-seven tests," one of the Original Seven said.

"Three complete sequences?" Tiger nodded. Owl lowered his head and remained still for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before.

"I have lived long enough to hear many impossible things. I did not expect this to be one of them." Another rune-cloaked figure murmured, "If that artifact bonds with the candidate successfully... then perhaps the west may yet have a chance."

"There is one concern," Tiger said.

"The scroll lists the compatibility requirements, the bonding rite, the risks, and the known failure conditions. But where the artifact's function should have been described, there is nothing." Owl was quiet long enough for Tiger to realize the answer would not be comforting.

"Until now, no viable candidate had ever been found for it," he said.

"No surviving account tells us what the artifact does after bonding. All we know is that it was given a place of its own in records far older than the current vaults and the manaweaver cities that now guard the artifacts. If it ever accepted a bearer, those records called it the last hope." The last hope. An artifact older than Korsivir itself, with no recorded bearer and no surviving account of its power. The thought should have ended the matter.

Instead, after everything he had heard tonight, it only made the burden heavier.

"The bonding rite must be followed exactly as written," Owl said.

"No substitutions. No shortened sequence. No clever interpretation by Qanza rune masters who think their clan name makes them wiser than the scroll."

"I will make sure of it," Tiger replied. Owl's next words came more quietly.

"The parents must know enough to choose." Tiger's hands tightened inside his sleeves. Until that moment, the report had been numbers, tests, rites, and vaults. The mention of parents dragged it back to blood. The life force of both parents would be needed to complete the bonding. That was how the bonding-rite scroll named it. Life force. A clean phrase, almost gentle, for a cost that would leave the child alive and both his parents dead.

Tiger pictured the mother, exhausted after childbirth but still watchful, her eyes following everyone who came near the cradle. The father had stood beside her, one hand always close to the child, as if proximity alone could protect him from the world. Then there was the child's older sister, Perilia—too young to be handed another life, yet too stubborn, even at five, to let go once her baby brother was placed in her arms.

"They may hate me for asking," Tiger said, "but if they understand what refusal could mean, I believe they will agree." The chamber stayed silent for a while.

"Do not make the choice sound smaller than it is," Owl said.

"Do not bury it under service to Korsivir, or honor, or any other word cities use when they want grief to look clean. If they give their lives, let them know they are giving them for more than Korsivir. Let them understand that refusal may keep their family together, but not the world their child must live in."

"I will tell them enough," Tiger said after a moment. Owl nodded.

"The child will not understand why his own mind fights him. Even those who raise him are not to be given enough truth to explain it." If the bonding succeeded, the artifact could interfere with the child's focus, memory, and sustained concentration throughout his early development. Pain might come without warning. Lessons could break apart in his mind. The worst effects should fade as the bond stabilized, perhaps by adolescence, but until then the boy would struggle.

A manageable side effect, the ancient scroll suggested, compared to what the child might become. But costs always looked manageable when written by someone who did not have to bear them.

"Korsivir will arrange protection for the child," Tiger said.

"And care." But protection was not the same as kindness. Care was not the same as comfort. Any help Korsivir gave him would have to remain small and ordinary, giving no clan or enemy spy a reason to look too closely at the boy. Anonymity was the safest protection the city could offer. Training him too soon or pushing him too hard could do more harm than good. Until the bond became stable enough, it was safer to let the boy grow at his own pace than to interfere with something no one understood.

"Then return to Korsivir. Prepare carefully. If the bonding fails, the loss will not belong to one city alone. If it succeeds, the responsibility will not end with success." Tiger rose from his circle and bowed toward the stone seats.

"It will be done." Tiger turned and walked to his door. The stone recognized his mana and rose into the cavern wall. Once the door closed behind him, Tiger braced one hand against the rough stone wall and drew a slow breath. He had a reason to ask for the lives of the child's parents. It did not make the request any less cruel. It only left his guilt with something to hold on to. Tiger pressed his palm into the depression in the outer door, pushed mana into it, and stepped back into the long tunnel.

Far above and far away, the tea house waited with its warm room, his wood clone, and the harmless story of an old widower grieving while a snowstorm buried the streets outside. After that came the city of Korsivir. And the child. And the parents. And the choice waiting for them. Tiger began to run. It was not only Korsivir that might one day depend on the child. If Owl was right, humanity itself might need him when the old enemy finally returned.