The stairs leading deeper toward the absolute roots of the temple change shape along the way. While the upper floors still gleam with polished white marble, the steps here become grayer, narrower, and icy cold. The walls transform into brutal, unfinished rock faces where the teeth of time have left deep grooves. Condensation seeps down in slow, viscous drops, glistening in the flickering glow of the brass lantern that Jeshua holds firmly in his hand. The lantern casts long, erratic shadows that dance across the ceiling like terrifying creatures. The air down here is heavy, thick, and pregnant with the pungent scent of ancient, rotting parchment, dry dust, and the iron strong, metallic smell of rusted chains.
When they pass the giant oak door, clad in thick sheets of copper, a space opens up that looks nothing like a traditional reading room. These are the deepest, forbidden archives of the mountain. Gigantic, meters high wooden cabinets of blackened cedarwood stand in endless, suffocating rows. They stand so close together that it forms a claustrophobic labyrinth where daylight has not shone for centuries. Heavy iron chains hang between the massive shelves, rattling loudly with every whisper of wind. These chains hold the most precious, thick leather bound volumes and meters long scrolls firmly in their absolute place, as if the books themselves have a tendency to escape.
Jeshua steps with an almost terrifying, noiseless agility between two gigantic cabinets. He maneuvers as if he could navigate this underground labyrinth in his dreams. He stops at a massive wooden workbench covered with a centimeters thick layer of gray dust. He sets the brass lantern down with a muted tap and looks over his shoulder with a triumphant, highly mischievous gaze at the giant figure of Silarias.
“The master thinks I am dutifully sitting in the great hall all day praying and reciting my mantras,” Jeshua whispers, while he blows some of the dust off the tabletop with a short, powerful breath, sending a suffocating cloud floating through the room. “But when you walk around here for a few weeks, you quickly find out that the real knowledge isn't up there in those pious chats. I have secretly done a lot of snooping around here in places where I absolutely should not stick my nose. Yes, well, I originally came here purely for enlightenment, for spiritual illumination of my mind, but in that short time, I truly learned all sorts of things about the true foundations of the world.”
While he casually utters those words, he indifferently pushes a half opened, yellowed scroll aside with the back of his hand to make some extra space on the table.
The razor sharp gaze of Silarias does not miss that fleeting movement. His eyes fixate immediately like a bird of prey on the exposed parchment that is so carelessly tossed aside. The symbols visible on the edge pulse with a strange, familiar energy.
“What is that?” Silarias asks. His voice sounds heavy, deep, and cuts like a warm knife through the icy cold air of the cellar.
Jeshua glances fleetingly at the pushed aside scroll, pulls an indifferent face, and waves his hand at it dismissively, as if it were an annoying fly. “Oh, no, nothing special. Just some old, dusty texts about reincarnation and souls returning to new vessels. But I still need to decipher a few quite complicated things from it before it makes any sense at all. Most of it is written in a language that has been dead for a thousand years.”
Silarias catches his breath, freezing completely. At the mention of the word 'reincarnation', his internal God burden and his curse immediately begin to gnaw at the deepest part of his soul with a destructive intensity. The pressure in his chest escalates in a fraction of a second. It feels as if a glowing hot iron rod is being forced through his heart. The veins in his neck swell and his breathing grows heavier, but he forces his face into an emotionless expression with brute mental strength.
Keep fucking calm, Silarias rages in a fierce, overheated internal monologue while he digs his nails into his own palms. Do not show anything to this snot nosed brat. Do not twitch a single muscle. Reincarnation… They know. Those monks up there, Shivera, Makala Ah… They knew exactly who and what was standing at their gate when I knocked here. This whole circus is a setup. If I lose control now, if my lion power explodes here in this enclosed cellar, that illusion shattering presence will blow up the entire mountaintop. Stay calm. Control that sun energy. The countdown will still take years, you absolutely cannot use that power now.
Meanwhile, with a soft metallic clinking, Jeshua pulls a hidden key, wrapped in thin iron wire, from the deep folds of his robe. He deftly inserts it into a heavy, rusty padlock of a hermetically sealed cabinet standing in the darkest corner of the room. The lock clicks open with a loud, terrifying echo that resounds through the entire cellar. Cautiously, the boy reaches inside and pulls out a specific, deeply black glossy scroll wrapped in a sturdy golden silk thread.
“Look,” Jeshua says with a sudden, dead serious tone in his voice. “I am actually not supposed to touch this scroll at all according to the laws of the temple. Even Shivera only looks at it during the highest solstice.”
With the utmost care, he spreads the jet black scroll out over the wooden table. As soon as the parchment opens, the visual elements strike Silarias right in the face. The illustrations are terrifyingly detailed: a majestic, frightening lion with gigantic, eagle like wings standing on top of a mountain of skulls, surrounded by a halo of pure, burning sun energy. It is the history and the prophecy of the Bansaday Flying Lion.
The visual escalation in the room is instantly noticeable. The spiritual pressure around the table begins to vibrate. The flame of the brass lantern suddenly turns blue and begins to flicker wildly, as if the presence of the drawn lion affects the physical laws of the space.
Jeshua, completely attributing the deep spiritual shift beside him to the magical power of the scroll itself, leans deep over the text. He begins to read aloud in a soft, rhythmic voice, his finger sliding along the golden letters.
“It is written here… ‘When the world will definitively be blinded by the ultimate, all consuming illusion of the false gods, the Bansaday will rise from the ashes of forgotten eras. His pure presence will cause the lies of reality to split and tear apart, not by brute physical destruction, but by the absolute, divine vibration of his soul. The burden this entity carries is greater than the cosmos itself; a king condemned to the shadow of a mortal, a living legend hidden behind the mask of a nobody…’”
Jeshua stops reading abruptly. The silence that falls is deafening. He looks up from the scroll, fixates his eyes on Silarias, and pushes the jet black parchment a bit further across the dusty table with an inviting, calm gesture.
“Here, take a look, Flamo,” Jeshua says, pointing to a specific complex diagram at the bottom of the page. “This part here goes much deeper into the matter. It explains exactly how that specific lion power floods the spiritual pathways in a body, and how the mana currents of the world run synchronously with his breathing. Read this section yourself, then you will understand what I mean.”
Silarias remains standing like a solid statue of stone. His undercover cloak hangs heavily around his broad shoulders. Very slowly, he looks up from the scroll to the open, questioning face of the young disciple. He stares at him with a bone dry, icy, and utterly awkward gaze.
“Read?” Silarias asks. His voice lacks any form of emotion, cold and bare. “I, uh… I cannot do that. I never learned letters.”
Jeshua freezes for a moment. His extended finger remains hanging in the air and he stares back at the giant warrior before him with the exact same bone dry, astonished gaze. An awkward silence lasting several seconds falls between the two men in the depths of the cellar, until suddenly a broad, generous grin appears on the face of the young disciple.
“Ah! Fantastic! No problem at all, mate!” Jeshua blurs out with a loud laugh that breaks the heavy atmosphere in one blow. He immediately begins to roll up the forbidden scroll again with fast, practiced movements and carefully locks it back behind the heavy padlock of the cedarwood cabinet. “That actually works out incredibly well for both of us. Tomorrow morning, we start right away with manually transcribing the old books for the temple archives. There is no better hardcore training to learn to read and write in this world. Believe me, that way we will hammer those letters right in. Within a week, you'll be reading these forbidden scrolls as if it were the most normal thing in the world.”
He grabs the brass lantern firmly by the handle again and nods his head toward the dark exit of the archive cellar. “Come along, Flamo. That's enough for today. You've had a monstrous climb and your spiritual pathways absolutely need to rest and stabilize before Master Shivera turns you completely inside out during the first real training tomorrow morning.”
Jeshua leads him back up via a hidden, wide stone staircase, away from the oppressive cold of the cellars, straight to the high altitude living quarters of the temple. They walk through a long corridor where the walls are decorated with beautiful silk tapestries. At the absolute end of the corridor, Jeshua stops in front of a massive, double wooden door richly inlaid with gleaming mother of pearl. He pushes the doors open with both hands.
“This is your kingdom for the coming time,” Jeshua says, stepping aside respectfully to let the giant man through.
Silarias steps into the room and his mouth almost drops open in surprise. It is a truly ginormous room, a gigantic chamber reserved specially and exclusively for him alone. The ceiling is meters high, supported by thick wooden beams. But the most impressive feature is located at the back of the room: a gigantic, open stone balcony without any form of glass or shielding.
Silarias walks to the edge of the balcony and looks outside. It offers a truly beautiful, breathtaking, and epic view over the immense courtyard of the temple. The lower, layered roofs of the complex are covered with a thick, pristine layer of glistening snow that lights up under the moon. In the depths, hundreds of torches dance like small, fiery stars in the cold night wind, reflecting on the ice of the central training fields.
“Sleep well, Flamo of Wardia,” Jeshua says behind him. A subtle, knowing emphasis resonates in the way he pronounces the alias.
Before Silarias can turn around to tackle him with a question, the heavy doors click softly into the lock. Silarias is left alone on the balcony, while the icy wind cuts through his hair and he looks out over the hidden world that must save his soul.
Silarias takes a step closer to the edge of the stone balcony. The icy wind cuts mercilessly past his face, but he barely feels it. His gaze reaches far beyond the snowy roofs of the temple, up toward the jet black sky where a bright, silver moon places the mountaintop in a mysterious glow.
Six forms for her, eight for me, Silarias thinks, while his hand unconsciously grips the cold stone balustrade tightly. A deep sigh escapes his lips and turns into a thick, white cloud of vapor. I hope Nyx comes this way soon. With her moon powers, she would feel perfectly at home here. And I hope things are going well with those other two… Aurelius and Beat. They have no idea what kind of absurd grind we have landed in.
Thousands of meters lower, deep underground in the sweltering bathhouse, the situation remains unchanged. Aurelius is still completely knocked out in the deep, fuchsia wax of the massive marble basin. The healing substance gleams softly in the glow of the hundreds of candles, while it tirelessly continues to repair the spiritual damage that the possessed sword inflicted.
At the side, Sergio Waxelton is still sitting on his haunches. His voice has grown hoarse by now from the incessant rambling to the motionless body. He sways gently back and forth, the mug of drink now held dangerously tilted in his hand.
“And that is exactly why the birds fly and we are sitting here in the grease, understand?” Sergio mutters with a slow, philosophical drunkard's logic to the unconscious boy. “It is all a matter of perspective, kid. But anyway, your breathing is already becoming calmer. Sergio will keep watch. That big heart of mine is my greatest curse, truly…”
Meanwhile, somewhere entirely different in the bustling, neon lit streets of the city, the atmosphere is totally different. The night has deeply set in at the place where the roaring engines are getting ready for the brute race. Beat stands on the starting line, adrenaline pumping through his veins, ready to test his brand new form reawakened by the rajin volt anting. He is hyperactive and practically bouncing with pure energy.
Directly in front of him stand the organizers of the race, a pair of identical twins. They look with a bone dry, completely unmoved gaze at the overenthusiastic Beat who is standing there warming up all by himself in the dead of night, surrounded by the high buildings of the city.
The left half of the twins sighs deeply once and puts his hands in his pockets. “You know… it is really bizarrely late.”
The right half nods slowly, his eyes half closed with sleep. “This can easily be done tomorrow. Then everyone will at least be awake. And besides… then we are at our absolute strongest.”
Beat wants to counter immediately, but the left brother already raises his hand soothingly. “We are really not going to start now. But we have prepared a large room for you where you can crash.”
The refusal of the race seems to matter nothing to Beat the moment he hears the word 'room'. His eyes begin to glisten and all the tension drops from him. With a gigantic, almost childlike smile on his face, he happily begins to skip behind the sleepy twins, entirely ready to explore his temporary kingdom.