Hope you like the chapter!
Hump looked around the unfamiliar rune room. Whoever had created this understood spell formations and magic that was as intricate and precise as any he had ever seen. Even when compared to the Maker’s Tower, he felt like he was looking upon a masterpiece.
He stepped into the room tentatively, pausing only to instruct Nishari to remain outside. There was no telling what defences might still be active if he wasn’t careful—or worse, something he might trigger by accident. Assuming this place had been abandoned since the War of the Firmament, a thousand years might have passed since anyone had set foot here. That was a long time for spell formations to wear down and develop faults. Even in something as masterfully created as this, channels and runes required maintenance. Essence by its nature constantly shifted, and even the most resilient materials could not resist that entirely.
There was a ladder against the wall, leading upward through the tower. The floor and walls were covered in runes, all of them etched into artifacts that had been mounted in place. Most prominent of all was a spell formation at the centre with a crystal lattice of floating rings suspended above it, spiralling slowly in the air.
Looking around, Hump had to admit the place was making him wonder how true that was. So much of it seemed unmarred by time.
But there were flaws.
He had seen splutters of essence and leaks throughout the fortress when the tower had first activated, reacting to the demon rift in the sky. It had sputtered and pulsed unevenly. Something wasn’t working as it should, but if Hump could find the fault and restore it, even temporarily, he might be able to delay Karlac and his demons.
“What are you making of all this?” Dylan asked.
Hump gave a bewildered shake of his head. He pointed to the largest of the spell formations, and the complex crystal lattice above. This one was active, at least in part. A few runes were dull, and some of the channels were broken or clogged with dust, but he could still sense intent flowing through it. It had to be quite considerable to keep the physical component floating in the air.
“This formation is active,” Hump said, studying its runes. “I expect it’s integral to whatever activated earlier considering how much floor space it’s taking up. But judging by how many runes aren’t responding properly, I highly doubt it’s functioning at full capacity. It would explain why the essence was behaving so erratically.”
Dylan took a step closer, leaning over it. “Does it look dull to you? I feel like runes usually glow with more light, especially in a spell formation of this power. The essence doesn’t feel very intense.”
Hump tilted his head, studying the runes. He could see what Dylan meant. Activating Spirit Sight, the channels especially looked weak. Essence flowed through them, but it was thin and frail. “It’s been a long time. Maybe the fuel source is running low.”
Dylan circled the formation, scanning it carefully. He picked out a channel and followed it to the tower wall where a thick metal pipe ran up the spine of the tower. It was etched with runes.
“This looks like the essence source to me,” Dylan said. He pressed one of the runes and fed it a touch of intent. Essence pulsed through the runes, spreading until light rippled up the entire pipe. There was a click, and an outline of essence formed around a section of the pipe. It split open along the line, revealing a churning beam of essence that ran straight up the pipe. Spirit Sight distinguished the many channels contained within like pieces of string clustered together. Some were thick and still filled with power, while others had become thin and weak.
“I’m guessing the essence source is underground,” Hump said. “Seems weak to me though. Could be that it’s almost out.”
“I’m amazed its still functioning at all after all this time,” Dylan said.
Hump nodded. He tried to find a sign of it, but his eyes couldn’t make out any essence through the ground. It seemed to be made out of some kind of resistant material. The ladder didn’t lead down either. Perhaps it was stored elsewhere. Somewhere an enemy couldn’t so easily access. Or maybe it was a redundancy measure to avoid a single point of failure.
Hump turned slightly. “Celaine, can you see if you can find a way underground? Take Emilia with you.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“A big essence store. A room full of essence stones perhaps, or some sort of artifact. I’d expect it to be a fairly small room, quite possibly in a secure location.”
“Got it.”
“What about me?” Bud asked.
“Stay on guard here,” Hump said. “I don’t think we can assume this place is entirely abandoned. If something triggers, we may need you.”
Bud nodded, hand rested on the hilt of his sword.
Hump and Dylan continued their inspection.
A ladder along the far wall led upward through the tower, and they climbed it cautiously, moving from chamber to chamber. Each room mirrored the last in design—walls and floors etched with intricate formations, artefacts mounted with deliberate precision—but none of them were intact. Some had fractured runes. Others had entire sections of channels carved through or blackened by whatever had torn through the fortress.
In one chamber, a large table stood at the centre. Its surface was etched with a map of the fortress. Every wall, every tier, every gate represented in fine detail. Runes and channels spread out from it like veins, branching across the room and linking into the wider system. It was clearly of magical design, yet no matter what Hump tried, it remained unresponsive to his intent. Where the lower chamber had still held faint traces of power, here there was nothing at all.
He glanced upward, following the flow he could barely feel.
“The tower’s still receiving power,” he said. “But it’s not being distributed properly.”
“The beacon?” Dylan asked.
Hump nodded. “It’s getting more than anything else. Maybe it takes priority over everything else, effectively starving the other magic from essence.”
They descended again, regrouping just as Celaine and Emilia returned.
“It’s not underground,” Celaine said. “Come and see.”
They followed her out of the tower and into a separate structure nearby—a vault set slightly apart, its walls thicker, its design more defensive. Whatever it had once held, it had been meant to be protected.
The door stood open. No resistance. No traps. This place had long since been breached.
Hump stepped through and stopped. The fortress didn’t rely on essence stones at all, but a rift. It hung in the centre of the chamber, a tear in reality itself, contained within a spell formation that circled it like a cage. Essence poured from it in a steady, controlled stream. It brushed against Hump’s senses. Raw, dangerous, and so vast that it should have been enough to power everything he had seen in the fortress so far.
“That explains why the fortress still has fuel after all this time,” Dylan said quietly.
Hump nodded. “And why they keep it away from the tower. Can’t imagine it’s easy keeping a rift open inside something designed to suppress them.” His gaze narrowed. “Raises a new question though.” He shared a look with Dylan. “If there’s this much essence, where’s it all going?”
“A broken connection somewhere?” Dylan suggested. “Some sort of inefficiency.”
“Something like that.”
They started with the obvious.
Hump traced the channels from the rift, following the flow with Spirit Sight. The system was elegant in its simplicity. A containment formation surrounded the tear, stabilising it and regulating the flow of essence. From there, the energy was directed into carved channels that fed into a nearby artifact, likely something to either store or regulate it before being sent onward through the fortress network.
It should have worked, and at first glance, it did. The channels were intact. The formation was stable. The artifact responded as expected when Hump probed it. Essence flowed from the rift in a steady stream, guided cleanly into the system. There were a few channels that were worn out, but nothing egregious.
Yet something was wrong.
They tried following the flow of essence, searching for any leak they might have missed. All Hump could find were points of weakness. Not a full on leak or rupture, but the essence simply… diminished. Its concentration faded, somehow thinned out before ever reaching the tower.
Hump frowned. “I don’t get it. There’s no damage here. Nothing broken.”
“Then why isn’t it working?” Dylan asked.
Hump didn’t answer. Instead, he looked back at the rift, his mind turning. If the existing channels weren’t the problem, then he would remove them from the equation.
“I have an idea,” Hump said.
“A safe one?” Celaine asked from the door.
“Relatively safe,” Hump said. “I’m just going to try to harness the power of the rift through channels of my own.”
“What’s that relative to?” Emilia asked.
Hump shrugged. “Safer than fighting Karlac, right?”
The two girls gave a sigh.
Hump stepped forward and drove his staff into the stone. Essence flowed from him, feeding into the ground as he began carving out a new formation. This one was simple. Nothing like the ancient complexity surrounding the rift. Just enough structure to stabilise the flow and guide it where he needed it to go.
He gouged deep grooves into the stone floor, the rock parting under his will. With a second pulse of essence, he hardened the channels, reinforcing them with Transform Earth so they would not collapse under the strain.
The design was crude, but it would work. Its only purpose was to move essence from one point to another. When the final channel was carved, Hump extended it toward the main pipe that fed into the tower.
The moment he connected them, the change was immediate. Essence surged. The flow thickened, no longer thin and strained but full and forceful, flooding into the pipe with renewed strength. Light flared along the runes, racing upward through the structure. The channels within the pipe brightened until they blurred together, indistinguishable to the naked eye. Only through Spirit Sight could Hump still pick them apart.
He let out a slow breath.
“It’s working,” Dylan said, a note of surprise in his voice.
Hump nodded, though his expression remained tight. “Don’t sound so surprised!” His gaze drifted back toward the original channels. “I didn’t fix the problem though, only skirted around it. I don’t think anything in here is broken. If I’m right, it’s being drained.”
“By what?” Dylan asked.
Hump shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Let’s return to the tower and see if anything new is functioning.”
Returning upstairs, the runes of the tower were filled with renewed light. Channels that had carried only a trickle of essence now pulsed with steady flow.
At the centre of the main chamber, the crystal lattice had been reawakened. Where before it had slowly spiralled, now the pieces spun fast enough to blur, filling the structure with a constant hum. Intent surged from within, difficult to read, for it was not focused here but far out around the fortress. A column of pale light now surged upward from its core, shooting through the open shaft of the tower toward the beacon far above.
Hump paused at the edge of it, watching.
“Looks like you did it,” Dylan said quietly.
“For now,” Hump replied. His eyes tracked the beam as it climbed out of sight. “We’ve restored the supply, but that doesn’t mean everything’s functioning as intended. We need to see the beacon. I don’t even know if this is slowing down the rift.”
Still, it was more than they’d had before. They began climbing. The higher they went, the stronger the flow became. Essence thickened in the air, brushing against Hump’s senses like a rising tide. The tower was drawing power again—whether for defence, for signalling, or something else entirely, he couldn’t yet tell.
They found Celaine, Emilia, and Bud gathered around the map chamber.
The table that had once been dark was now alive with light. Lines of essence spread across its surface, illuminating the fortress in intricate detail. Layers of walls, gates, and structures glowed faintly, while brighter threads pulsed between them like arteries.
But it was not the fortress that held their attention. Around all of it was a bubble of essence—a barrier of some sort. And something more.
“What is it?” Hump asked, stepping closer.
“The map has activated,” Emilia said, not looking away. She pointed to a pulsing tear of red light hovering above the outer wall. “That’s the demon rift, right?”
Hump studied it, comparing it to what he had sensed outside. “Looks about right.”
“Then what are these?” Her finger shifted.
Two more points flared into focus, fainter than the first, but unmistakable. They hovered over different sections of the outer wall, each one a knot of concentrated essence pressing against the fragment. One was inside a tower, while another on the streets in a large courtyard.
Hump’s stomach tightened. “Three rifts?”
“Looks that way,” Celaine replied. Her voice was calm, but her posture had gone rigid. “I was just about to go to the top of the tower to check.”
Bud folded his arms, staring down at the map. “They could be spreading out to surround us or test the defences.”
“Or it’s no longer just Karlac that we’re dealing with,” Hump said.
Neither option was good.
The climb to the top of the tower was quick, but it felt longer. The higher they went, the stronger the essence became. The air itself seemed to vibrate, pulsing in time with the structure around them. By the time they reached the beacon chamber, the light was almost blinding.
At the centre stood the beacon. A pillar of condensed essence, anchored within a ring of ancient runes. It pulsed rhythmically, sending waves of power outward—through the tower, through the fortress, and into the barrier beyond.
Hump could feel the defence was activated even if he couldn’t read the runes. Their intent was clear—keep out.
He stepped to the edge and looked out across the fortress. The demon rift in the sky was larger than before. A jagged wound in the sky, bleeding red light into the fragment.
The second source of concentrated essence was in the fortress itself, between the two most outer walls.
A Tree of Damnation.
Its trunk twisted upward in unnatural spirals, bark splitting and reforming as it grew. Dark branches stretched outward, already pushing above the walls, their leaves red like blood.
The third point on the map remained hidden from this angle, somewhere within one of the towers on the outer walls. Perhaps another gateway like the one they had arrived from.
He turned back to the beacon. “It should be slowing them. That might have bought us more time.”
“Where does that leave us though?” Bud asked. “There are no gods here. No where to go. The fortress is empty.”
Hump frowned at the knight. Something was niggling at him. Something wrong. He stepped closer to the formation, eyes scanning the runes, searching for a fault. A source of the draining essence he’d seen throughout the tower and fuel reserve.
Then he stopped. Up close, it was so clear. The original formation was there, deeply etched, precise, geometric.
But something had been layered over the top. Sharper lines, like those of a blade.
They wove through the ancient design like invasive roots, intersecting the original channels at deliberate points. In some places, they didn’t just overlap but carved new pathways that twisted the flow of essence away from its intended course.
Hump recognised them.
“These are runes of Loften,” Hump said.
The others turned to him.
“He’s been here?” Bud asked.
“Not recently,” Hump said. “I think. These don’t look new.” Hump’s eyes widened, the pieces falling into place. “The missing essence…” His gaze flicked toward the fortress. Toward the rifts. Toward the growing tree. “What if it’s not just being diverted away? What if it’s being used for something else entirely?”