Page 117 of Vasmora

Dolion raised his hand for a faint glow, summoning a compass that pointed north, putting the east wall to their right. As long as they stayed on path through the adjacent tunnel, they’d find the Archive.

They kept on, winding through the dimly lit passages, until he found another opening in the wall where stones had been removed and piled. A means for workers to escape, should the tunnel collapse, and an entry point to the Archives.

Dolion stepped through first and found himself facing a stone wall. He followed the passage to the left and rounded the corner, relieved to see rows upon rows of shelving where the most ancient books were neatly stacked. Glass cases housed tomes from as far back as the first king and the premogenitor Magestrolian, Theanis.

Dolion marveled at the magnificent trove of information in one single space. How badly he wished he could spend the day perusing the texts, losing himself in history, science, and the arts, the trivium that’d brought him so much joy as a young man.

The archive was mostly quiet and empty, save for the few scholars who sat hunched over books and unbothered by their presence.

Dolion and Allura worked quickly, browsing the shelves and gathering a variety of leather-bound journals. In searching the catalogues, he found Cadavros listed, and he hurried to the far end of the library, where a locked case housed wax tablets and dilapidated journals recovered from the mage’s laboratory years ago. “Hellfyre!” Dolion growled, searching the case for a means of breaking it open, but it had been entirely sealed for good. “There is no way to access them.”

“We did not come all this way to be stopped by a small glass case.”

“I have no doubt it’s warded. The moment we break the glass, it will alert the mages.” Dolion had suspected there might be safeguards, but it seemed the magehood had gone to extremes.

Allura frowned. “One moment please,” she said before disappearing around one of the shelves. Minutes later, she returned with a thick leather-bound book, its ancient cover filled with cracks and fissures like dried dirt. Compendium of Protection Wards.

“We are surrounded by endless tomes of the most powerful magic, and you’re worried about a glass case.”

Of course, the university wouldn’t have made that knowledge so accessible to any student who happened upon the Archives. Only the Magestroli, with unique training in wards, would know what to look for in the tomes. Like a secret code amongst the texts.

“Forgive me. It seems age has softened my brain a small bit.” Dolion chuckled and flipped through the weathered parchment, skimming his fingers over passages that’d been hand quilled then re-quilled by later scholars when the ink had begun to fade. “I don’t quite know which ward has been placed, but I learned of an unwarding many years ago.” He paused on a paragraph, tapping the spell on the page. “Propyllo et qui, eun trez dividz, revelah’ret te mej.” The ward that be, divide in three, reveal yourself to me.

Light shimmered around the case and split the wood along a narrow crack. When the glimmer faded, Dolion lifted the upper half and gathered the journals and tablets from inside. Opting for a round, stone table toward the back of the Archive, he and Allura scattered all of their precious resources and began sifting through the aged pages.

Hours passed, and Dolion stared down at his hands that’d begun to darken to his natural skin tone. The potion Rykaia had given him was fading. He didn’t spend too much time dwelling on that, though, not wanting to waste a moment. Instead, he turned the page to the passage in Cadavros’s journal that he’d been looking for.

In his desperate research to bring dead veins to life, Cadavros had stumbled upon an amulet housed within the rock of the vein. He described having been bitten by a spider, a wound with black veins that wouldn’t heal, and the dreams that followed. It seemed he’d suffered dark visions of blood and gore, and a voice he couldn’t place. One he’d never heard before.

Calling to seek him out.

Dolion skimmed further, reading Cadavros’s accounts of endless research into the Emberforge ritual, which he’d hoped would cure him of the spider’s infection, scribbled in the notes he’d taken during his own attempt to perform it on himself. The notes spoke of how it had transformed his body and stripped him of his blood magic.

Haunting sketches of children and estimations of blood magic and vivicantem levels, the darkness drawn across the page, cast a chill down his spine. “And they called me the mad mage,” he muttered, frowning at the disturbing formulas and what they implied.

“I never called you that. But this is quite unsettling.” Allura lifted a detailed sketch of what looked to be a mancer with the body of a spider.

“Pestilios,” Dolion whispered.

In one image, lines had been drawn between multiple spider mutations and Pestilios, with calculations that Dolion recognized as soundwaves. Vivisection studies on the brains of spiders showed stimulation and response to Cadavros’s voice.

A collective consciousness.

Hive mind.

Still, Dolion read on, skimming through the notes that described mind control through infection and destructive power through the Emberforge ritual. He eased back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose, his head so clouded with information, it ached. “You asked what could possibly rival death? Zevander. I believe he was intended as a weapon. The Emberforge ritual was not the mistake of a mad mage. This is a game of the gods.”

“And so, fate decided it would be brilliant to make Zevander and Maevyth mates? To up the stakes of the game?”

Dolion rubbed a hand down his face. “I can’t imagine it was the gods who chose such a pairing.”

Allura flipped through more pages of her book and shook her head. “What did Cadavros hope to achieve by unleashing Pestilios?”

“Vengeance, first and foremost. It seems, with the right concentration of vivicantem, Cadavros planned to restore his own blood magic that had been stripped in the Emberforge.” Dolion lifted an image of a colossal spider beast that bore the glyphs of all seven bloodlines. “But in truth, I suspect it was Pestilios who chose him. Cadavros possesses the ability to consume the power of other mancers. If Pestilios were to claim him as a vessel and release himself from the amulet’s curse …”

“He would master our defenses. Know every major form of blood magic.” Allura stared off, eyes brimming with horror, as if she could imagine such a thing right then. “We’d be powerless to stop him.”

“Impossible to kill,” Dolion clarified. “The power of Pestilios is in numbers. The more he infects, the more powerful he becomes.”