The first-years gathered at the transport terminals in small, tight groups—faces pale, eyes alert.

Elysia stood near the edge of the platform watching Kael tighten the straps on his gear.

Her fingers toyed with the seam of her sleeve where the tiny talisman hid—cold metal folded into a charm and wrapped in poison runes.

It fit under cloth and felt like a second heartbeat. She kept the movement casual, a wink of habit no one would notice.

Her thoughts were far from the mission’s official goal.

In the quiet behind her polite smile there was a steady, ruthless thread: this mission would be the perfect place to end Kael.

Alone, without witnesses, where the ravine’s mists could swallow a body and no one would know the truth.

She had rehearsed the steps in her mind, the way hands would not be seen, the way a fall could be staged as an accident, a casualty of the ravine’s cursed depths.

She looked at Kael and felt a cold settle under her ribs.

He bent to fasten his boot, jaw tight. He had no idea.

Then Elysia approached Kael.

"Oh you are here?" he asked.

Cecelia approached with a small bundle—rations and salves for field wounds.

"Keep close today," she told them. "Reports say the ground there shifts. Watch your step."

"Of course," Kael said. He didn’t look up.

Elysia gave the group a light, cooperative smile.

"We should stick close. The mist here affects visibility."

The words sounded like concern; the eyes that met Kael’s were sharper than her tone allowed.

Kael glanced at her once. "Fine. Just don’t slow down." His reply was short, practical. It kept him safe.

Jin and Edwin joked to shake off tension—Jin’s grin, Edwin’s overconfident arm-clap.

Cracked stone, broken pillars, the hollowed bones of a temple, all reached down into shadow.

As they moved, an uneasy hush followed—like a held breath.

Professor Sylvia led them at first.

She split the class into teams and gave simple orders: sweep the outer rims, check for signs of life, avoid the inner vault unless instructed.

Her eyes lingered on Kael a moment longer than she did on others. He met her look, but offered nothing.

Kael walked a small distance from the main group at times, not from carelessness but by choice.

He followed a line of broken glyphs along the altar stones, fingers nearly brushing the carved symbols as if they could read secrets in the grooves.

While the others rested in a shallow hollow—a place ringed by old roots and a cracked shrine—Kael stood off to the side, listening.

That was how it began: a tiny stiffness at the edge of hearing, a thread of sound like someone whispering under water.

It was almost nothing, but practitioners learn to listen for nothing.

Kael’s hand went to his belt. Mana came to his fingertips like static.

The ruins had a memory. Kael had read the novel.

Something in him recognized the pattern.

In that book it had been called The Abyssal Path: a secret gate hidden under the false altar, a door sealed by saintly wards and blood-swept stones.

He had laughed at it then, the way one laughs at childhood tales.

But now, hearing the faint whisper under the stone, he felt an old map glimmer in his mind.

If this world follows the old flow, he thought quietly, there should be a sealed chamber below here.

He moved away from the hollow like a shadow slipping from shade to shade.

He did not tell the others.

He did not want the mission to change.

He slipped between columns and stepped down a narrow stair.

Unseen in his retreat, Elysia’s eyes tracked him.

She had pretended to sit and rest, taken a bottle of water and sipped slowly while her mind mapped every possible move Kael might make.

When she saw him disappear among the broken altar stones, something fierce and relieved blended inside her.

This was precisely why she had insisted on joining the mission: the ravine’s ancient geometry, its ruined privacy, the way the saints’ old barriers could hide death and make it look like fate.

She waited until the others were a comfortable distance away—Jin and Edwin chatting about the last fight, Cecelia digging in her pack for bandages.

Then she rose, quiet as a thought, and followed Kael.

The air under the altar was colder.

The whispering grew into a chorus of syllables that didn’t belong to a living tongue; it vibrated against Kael’s ribs like distant bells.

He paused and put his hand on the altar’s rim, closing his eyes.

The glyphs below the moss pulsed when he touched them—faint answers to his skin.

He could feel the pull of something sealed.

Elysia slid from stone to stone behind him, talisman snug under her sleeve.

Her breathing was narrow but hidden behind the practiced calm of a hunter.

She imagined the talisman’s trigger—a pinch, a breath, a poisoned thread unraveling and taking life.

Her mouth was dry, not with fear but with the clarity that comes before action.

The world narrowed to Kael’s back and the sound of the sealed place.

Kael murmured under his breath words that were not prayer but memory.

The stair descended into deeper gloom.

A block of carved stone lay askew.

He knelt and pressed a palm to the runed surface.

The runes answered beneath his touch. He did not push with force; he coaxed them, listened for the pattern of seal and key as if remembering a lullaby.

Elysia crouched behind a fallen pillar, heart a steady drum.

Her mind reviewed the steps she had planned: get him alone, strike, make it seem like a slip or a sudden collapse of old stone—an accident.

She pictured the looks that would never come to her because there would be no witness to tie her hands.

She pictured she would be free. The thought steadied her hand.

Below, the altar shifted. A fine dust sighed.

A seam opened like a crease between pages.

Light from Kael’s mana leaked into a tight, black crack, revealing a spiral stair that dug down into the dark like a throat.

(Now) Elysia thought, muscles coiled.