Chapter 1: Prologue

Magister Aymeir could feel his weathered heart aching in his chest, beating so fast he thought it would explode. He forced himself to keep running as fast as he could, willing his frail legs to push harder.

His thick robes were heavy. They stretched down to his shins where they ended in frayed tatters, making them difficult to run in.

Got to get out, Aymeir repeated in his head. Thankfully, he had been able to get the message out. But was it too late?

Surrounding him on both sides were long rows of dark, timber bookcases, as old and as feeble as his body was. They held centuries-worth of scripts, letters, manuscripts, and other writings, now smothered by cobwebs and degrading into dust. Gloom and dark crevices were abundant amongst the long stretches of bookshelves and cabinets.

The Grand Repository was home to hundreds-of-thousands of artifacts and books, stacked across miles and miles of sturdy bookcases. The Repository was the grandest and most impressive library in all of Eos, and a sacred place for the Magister’s Imperium.

It was a reliquary of knowledge and history.

But on this night, the Grand Repository was a hunting ground. Magister Aymeir was being pursued.

I knew this would happen. I knew it was only a matter of time.

He pattered ahead into the darkness.

The air was stale, still, and thick with mildew. The library was a dank maze that the Magister was desperately trying to flee into.

It was nearly pitch-black. Despite the pale moonlight shining through the stain glass dome several hundred feet above, and some candles still left around, a dark and foreboding aura had taken hold.

He raced down the seemingly never-ending corridor before him, tightly clutching the old tome in his arm. So dim was it that he could not see the way more than a dozen paces ahead.

The further into the labyrinth he went, the darker it became.

The engraved silver candelabrum that Aymeir gripped in his other hand emitted an orange glow around him, like a protective shield. He knew, however, that he was far from safe.

Behind him, in the blackness, he could hear bookshelves smashing and collapsing, the ear-splitting crunch of wood snapping and books toppling. A shriek resonated out from behind, echoing throughout the glass dome of the inner sanctum of the Repository.

It was a horrific scream, cold and mind-numbing, a scream not of this world. Aymeir feared what was after him.

I must get away. I need to get the tome out of here.

Aymeir pushed ahead through the moonlit dust, his leather sandals scuffing along on the marble floors. He drew in short, desperate breaths as he ran; he could feel his knees weakening-

He tripped.

Within a split-second, Aymeir was falling face-first towards the floor. The tome that was pressed tightly in his arm against his chest went flying forwards, smacking onto the floor, and sliding into the malevolent darkness ahead.

As he collapsed, Aymeir pushed his arms out in front of him to absorb the fall. His body weight came down hard.

Crunch.

His left elbow snapped. Pain rocketed up his frail arm like a burst of fire.

Magister Aymeir, now flat on the floor, rolled to his side, clutching his shattered arm in the other.  He cried out; the pain was agonising. It was then he realised what he had tripped over.

Lying frozen on the floor right beside him was a corpse.

Beams of white moonlight broke through the clouds, stripping the darkness away from a lifeless face.

Aymeir recognised the corpse. It was Magister Gideon.

His long white beard had been stained red from the thick blood he had been coughing up as he had lay dying.

His head had nearly been severed whole from his body. The tear through Gideon’s neck was messy and deep, from one side of his jaw down diagonally through his neck. His throat lay exposed, as if something huge had tried ripping the old man’s head off.

Gideon’s eyes were still wide open, his mouth ajar. A mushy, thick pool of red and black coagulated blood surrounded his body.

“Oh, Creator, no,” Aymeir whimpered.

Could Aymeir even believe in the Creator anymore, after all of this? The Imperium had taught him to be open-minded and a critical thinker. He had felt the rampage of speculation grow more intrusive over the years, like an insidious parasite. Every thought he had and everything he learned, he now took with a grain of salt, as he had been trained to do.

Yet, deep down in the pit of his stomach, Aymeir found the last spark of faith he had left and clung on to it like a scared child.

Aymeir closed his eyes solemnly, whispering a quick prayer to the Creator. Forgive me, Gideon. Creator, I hope Lynn is alright.

He gritted his teeth in anguish, tears streaming down his wrinkled face. He used his good arm to prop himself back up to his feet. He knew that the beast that had killed Gideon would soon be upon him if he did not move.

Aymeir came to his senses as he felt the ground beneath him shake. The thing hunting him in the darkness was catching up, fast.

Its footsteps were heavy, determined, shaking the marble floors. It let out another deafening shriek, so loud it made Aymeir wince.

It was then Aymeir remembered.

The tome.

Magister Aymeir grasped for the candelabrum he had dropped, miraculously with one candle still lit. He shuffled ahead to where the tome had been thrown when he had tripped over.

Aymeir drew in another stale breath of unsettled dust as the stomping behind him grew louder.

Where is it? Where is it?

A gust of icy wind blasted through the corridor of bookshelves from behind Aymeir, as chilling as a frozen crypt, and rotten with the stench of decay. It made his eyes water and his breath weak.

Aymeir searched for the old tome, but a myriad of other books and scrolls had made their homes on the floors, some in large piles and others by themselves. It was difficult to find the right one.

“Where did it go?” Aymeir said aloud, swinging the candelabrum back and forth to shine what little light was left onto book after book.

He hunched over as he searched the scattered volumes. The single flame danced in the frigid wind, desperately trying to stay alive. “Come on, come on!”

Magister Aymeir cried out as a huge, clawed hand reached from the darkness behind him and grabbed his frail leg. It squeezed so hard that he heard the bones shatter inside.

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Aymeir lost his grip of the candelabrum as the creature pulled him backwards by the leg. He toppled to the ground, the thing dragging him down the library corridor at an incredible speed.

In the panic, he caught a glimpse of it.

It was enormous, the size of a horse-drawn carriage. Its front two arms were much longer than the hind legs, and it had pale, hairless skin. Protruding from its back were about a dozen white jagged spikes of bone, each the size of a tree branch. Its face looked like that of a rotting hyena with menacing teeth scowling at him and reptilian yellow eyes.

The beast ran at full speed through the maze of books, smashing Aymeir back and forth like a ragdoll into shelves and piles of books.

Aymeir screamed and begged for his life. His old body could not take it.

Suddenly, it stopped dead in its tracks and let out an ear-splitting shriek, like the ones Aymeir had heard earlier. Most frightening of all, when it screamed, the creature’s lower jaw unhinged in the centre, like a python. Its mouth was filled with decaying teeth.

It was unlike anything he had ever seen. This is far worse than I ever feared.

The beast let go of its vice-like grip on Aymeir’s broken leg. He was able to drag his decrepit body away, blood dripping from his face. His jaw ached; somewhere along the way, a tooth had been knocked out of his mouth.

Every muscle was battered and swollen.

Aymeir looked down at the marble floors on which he dragged himself, the floors he had walked on for so many decades before. They were his floors; these were his halls. This was his home, his life. Yet never had he stopped and looked upon the surface on which he walked every single day.

They were beautiful marble floors, swirling with colours, millennia old. How many others like him had stepped upon this very piece of marble?

Aymeir had lived a long and fulfilled life. But he did not want to die, especially not like this. Images and memories flashed in his mind like bolts of lightning. His childhood farmhouse. Studying to become a Magister. Falling in love and losing the only woman he loved. His colleagues and brethren in the Magister’s Imperium. His Disciple, Lynn. Her crimson red hair and pale, freckled face.

Tears dripped from his weak eyes, mixing with the fresh blood flowing from his ripped skin and shattered cheekbone. He could not help but smile, despite the pain.

Aymeir refused to turn back and look at the creature again. He pulled himself forward at a snail’s pace, desperate to live.

He knew what he had to do.

Aymeir’s working hand slipped underneath his collar, grabbing a small glass vial that hung from around his neck. He yanked it hard, pulling it off the chain. He brought it to eye level, grimacing at the black, viscous liquid within.

Popping the vial open, Aymeir was met with the foul stench of the liquid. It made him wince. But he knew there was no other option.

In one swift move, Aymeir sculled the liquid. Instantly, his mouth and throat were met with a horrific burning sensation. The liquid was hot and tasted like metal. Within seconds, he was in agony. The liquid flowed into his body and Aymeir writhed on the ground like a fish out of water. He felt his insides go up in flames, every nerve in his body firing.

Aymeir had never been afflicted with Blight before. He had only ever read about the experience and heard testimony from the Magister Prime. He never imagined that the day would come where he would be forced to consume the liquid inside his Imperium-issued vial.

Aymeir stood up, almost levitating from the ground. He turned to face the beast that had savaged him. His eyes were flooded with blackness, his pupils glowed white, star-shaped and pulsing. The veins in his arms began pulsating from his body, the blood inside growing darker.

Aymeir was Blight-stricken. The power within him was unbearably painful, but this was his only shot at getting away and getting the tome to somebody.

He knew he would not have long.

I only have a few minutes before I am dead, Aymeir realised. He screamed at the top of his lungs; the huge beast screamed back, flesh flying out from the jagged teeth inside its gaping, unhinged jaws. The spines along its grotesque back spasmed in a sort of display.

Aymeir stood his ground, blood dripping from his wounds. The once crimson-red liquid was now black. With Blight surging inside his body, the old man bellowed with all his might, so loud that he thought his larynx would split. He needed to distract the fiend, and screaming was the only thing he could think to do to confuse the monster.

Bringing his hands together as if to catch a ball, ignoring the pain of his broken arm, the Magister willed the Blight within him to concentrate towards the tips of his fingers. It came on like an instinct.

Come on!

Aymeir looked down and saw the black liquid within his blood vessels flooding down through his arms and into his fingers.

In an instant, a huge burst of energy shot out from Aymeir’s fingers. The entire Repository lit up in an explosion of arcane light. The concentrated black liquid had become an almost plasma, shimmering with blue and white electricity as it fired through the air.

The force blew Aymeir backwards off his feet, hitting the beast directly, searing into its hide and knocking it into rows of ancient bookshelves with an enormous boom. Wood, parchments, and dust exploded all around the fiend.

The plasma stuck like glue all over it, burning hot and deep. It writhed around, trying to find any sort of escape from the plasma that was now enveloping it.

Aymeir, too, began to scream once again. The black liquid within was so concentrated that it was tearing his insides apart.

Without a second to waste, Aymeir spun around, crawling away on his hands and knees in the direction of the lost tome he had dropped. He looked down at his wrinkled fingers as they began to fall away from his body, riddled with rot. Chunks of skin fell from his face with a splat on the marbled floors below.

What have I done? Creator, I do not want to die! I am not ready to transcend. Please.

Aymeir peered into the darkness ahead, and there it was on the floor ahead. The old tome he had been trying to escape with. As he urged his body forward, he could feel parts melting and collapsing inside.

He was in agony.

Within arm’s reach of the tome, another monstrous howl came from behind. Like a hungry cat pouncing on a little mouse, the beast howled once more before leaping on top of Aymeir.

Its body was decaying like Aymeir’s was. Bones hung from its open chest cavity, its insides turning black, bubbling, and burning.

Aymeir shrieked, but his screams turned to gargled mutters as the monster’s hinge-like jaws wrapped around the old man’s neck, its teeth piercing his flesh with ease.

Aymeir felt his cold blood pumping from the punctures in his throat as the creature’s bite grew tighter. It crushed his windpipe. His breaths grew shallow as he struggled, before turning into gargles. He was drowning in his own blood.

The beast ripped into his neck again, its serrated teeth severing the arteries and tearing flesh and bone alike.

Aymeir closed his eyes, accepting his fate. He felt the life slipping away from his body. But despite the agony and the horrifying fate that was to come, all he could think about was Lynn.

He had failed.

He felt the pain slowly dissipate.

He saw the darkness consuming him.

And before long, Magister Aymeir sensed nothing but cold and deafening silence.

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