Episode 3 Sneak Peak #18

We're finally here. 👍

Diradan Tower rises ahead of you, perched on a green knoll beyond the trees. The river widens, curving around the rocky cliff as it flows out into the vibrant waters of Lake Messeida. Behind the tower’s white walls, a dark citadel juts up high above you, its multitude of thin spires cutting jaggedly across the sky. It overshadows the complex below, its pointed arches and flying buttresses a dark anomaly next to the bright mosaics and burnished domes of the buildings below it. Quinn’s replica does not do it justice. There is something uncanny about the citadel, all spikes and black stone. Though it is ancient, it is foreign. Unbelonging.

And it is dreadfully familiar.

You inhale sharply, an eerie homesickness twisting in your gut. The similarities to the Spire—your home, your safe haven until it was gone—are stark, save for one major difference. Where the Spire had been a single stronghold hidden deep in the mountains, Diradan is a monstrosity of a compound. The surrounding complex has been expanded over the centuries, grafting Arathian buildings onto the lower levels to accommodate the Guild’s ever-growing numbers. Their attempts to reshape it into something it is not only calls attention to the incongruity.

An incongruity made all the more evident by the damage.

The boat glides closer, water lapping in your ears as you stare open-mouthed at the complex. It is as if the explosion itself was caught and distilled in time. The blast ripped through the citadel, tearing off chunks of wood and stone as if a monster’s jaws bit through the western wing. A detached turret rotates slowly, suspended stones and broken gargoyles forming a floating path to a balcony in some parody of a bridge. Shattered stained glass from once glorious windows are strewn about the air, glistening like jewels in the morning sun. An oily haze saturates every surface, rippling off the rooves and battlements like smoke. It curls higher and higher into the sky until it fuses with the plume’s dark tail.

“Horrific, isn’t it?”

Veyer sits with their hands in their lap, craning their neck as they stare at the shroud. A disturbed look crosses their face, their upper lip curled with disgust. You watch it together in unnerved silence, mesmerized by its movements. It writhes through the air like a serpent, coiled upon itself one moment and unfurled the next, lashing against the invisible barriers that keep it contained with a mind of its own. From the way it devours the sky, it looks… hungry. Ravenous.

And you’re going to walk into its grasp.

“Oshiro was the first to call it the shroud,” Veyer continues grimly as the boat passes into the tower’s shadow, heading for shore. “A name as good as any, I suppose. What do you call ten thousands years’ worth of impacted magical energy? These were no ordinary wards. They were never designed to be unbound.”

A shiver runs down your spine. You can’t stop looking at the shroud. The thing. When Lethalis spoke of it last night, you imagined it as something akin to the Calanthan Wall—an invisible barrier spanning the whole of the tower, damaging anyone who strayed within its boundaries. But this is no simple barrier.

This is something else.