第 038 Episode| The Stele in the Dream

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 1st · Deep Night · the Gloaming Library, Nova, the Dawn Continent

The city of Nova had no daytime. It was built on an island in the seas off the southwest of the Dawn Continent, where the Dark Elves had raised the whole city within an eternal night—not darkness fallen, but a sky that had never been bright to begin with, moonlight sifting down through a haze that never lifted all year round and staining the streets a sort of grey-blue. To those who lived here, this was daytime.

The Gloaming Library lay in the innermost layer of the city. Hiri.F.Lola had been sitting there a whole night through—to her, this was merely another ordinary stretch of work.

Lola was a young Dark Elf scholar. She was captivated by only one thing: words no one could read. Of the more than eighty scripts of ancient cultures that had long ceased to be spoken or written, her eyes could still just make out the shapes. The people of the city thought her strange—a perfectly good elf who would not study black magic, would not go into trade, but spent her days behind the oldest, least-touched rows of shelves, locked in a contest with a heap of dead words. She did not care. A single line that no one could read was more captivating to her than anything else.

---

That night she was at the very bottom of the oldest row of shelves, and she drew out a book with no title and no author.

The book was old, so old that she had to hold her breath as she turned the pages, afraid a single breath might scatter the paper to dust. Most of the words in it she knew, yet understanding them chilled her spine more than failing to read them ever had. One word recurred again and again throughout the book: the Creator.

The Creator—the one who fashioned this heaven and earth and all things therein.
At the beginning of the world, He set down 3 ancient magics.
The first, the Forest-Soul. The second, black magic. The third—

The third—that page was torn at the corner. Lola brought her face to within an inch of the paper, and made out only four words: the Art of Fate. After that, it broke off.

---

After that night, Lola began to dream the same dream.

In the dream there was none of Nova's grey-blue. It was another place: the mist was thick, so thick she could not see three paces ahead; the trees rose so high they pierced into the clouds, their branches and leaves woven dense, filtering away what little light there was. At the far end of the mist stood a stone stele. The symbols carved upon the stele were of the same "ancient magic of the Creator" as the book with no author. In the dream Lola read down it word by word, and each time she reached the third magic—and then the dream broke off, severed at exactly the same place as the torn corner of that book.

She dreamed this dream several nights in a row. In the end she understood: this was no ordinary dream. Something was calling her to come.

---

Any normal Dark Elf, dreaming of a strange place where the mist was too thick to see the road, would have stayed obediently in the safe eternal night of Nova. Lola was not a normal Dark Elf.

She searched the books, searched the maps, searched the spoken accounts of the few scholars in the city even older than she was. At last she pieced the place-name together: the Netherwood. To the north of the Dawn Continent, a "forgotten land of truth." Almost no one marked it on the maps; those who did had noted: do not go.

Lola packed a small bundle, a magic stone her grandmother had left her, and a few sheets of blank rubbing paper. She set out.

---

From Nova to the north of the Dawn Continent lay a sea, and many days of road besides. She walked more than a day before she truly stood within the mist of the Netherwood.

The Netherwood was exactly as it had been in the dream. The thick mist. The towering trees. The branches and leaves that filtered away the light. The moment Lola stepped in, that chill returned to her spine—she knew this place, yet she had never once been here.

She walked by the bearings she remembered from the dream. Every step through the mist was slow, so slow that she began to suspect she was circling in place. Then the mist parted into a gap.

The stone stele was there. Exactly as in the dream. Upon it were carved the symbols she had spent a lifetime reading, yet beheld in the flesh for the very first time. Lola's hand trembled—not from fear, but with the trembling a scholar meets only once in a lifetime, standing before the answer. She reached out, meaning to touch that line of words.

---

Then she heard the sound.

Not the wind, but human voices. A chant from a crowd pressed very low, coming from behind the stele, from the side where the mist was thicker still. By instinct Lola shrank into the shadow at the stele's edge. Beyond the mist, a ring of figures stood cloaked in black. The things in their hands gave off a black light—not firelight, but the kind of black that devours the light around it. They were intoning a single phrase, once, and again, faster and faster:

Awaken from the long night, O great Sovereign.
Let your shadow spread into every corner of the world.

Lola could understand it. It was a tongue older than any ancient script she had ever read. The instant she understood, her stomach sank clean through—this was no rite, this was the summoning awake of something.

---

She backed away. Too slowly. A dry twig underfoot, snap.

Beyond the mist, the chant stopped. A face wrapped in a black cloak turned, full toward the shadow where she hid.

Lola turned and ran. As she ran she clenched her grandmother's magic stone into her palm and spoke aloud the protection spell carved upon it—a faint light wrapped around her. The first stroke of black magic struck the light, and the light held. The second, and the light cracked. The third passed straight through and struck her left flank.

It was not the pain of being struck, but the chill of a wound that begins, after, to rot inward. The corrosion of the black magic crawled inward along the blood, and with every inch it crawled her steps weakened by a degree. Lola braced against a tree and did not fall, yet she knew she would not run far. In the mist, the footsteps of the black cloaks came on one after another, following after her unhurried and unrushed.

She looked down at the patch of cloth blackening over her left flank. For the first time, nothing she had ever read could save her.

"…So this is the end?"

She heard herself ask it. The sound was very soft, so soft the mist did not even catch it. And then her knees gave out beneath her.

【Ch. 038 End · the Dawn Continent, Nova → the Netherwood】