Valerius slumped against the cold, heavy iron of the door, his entire body trembling with the aftershocks of his encounter with the Rime-Bound. The adrenaline that had propelled him past the tragic creature was now draining away, leaving behind a residue of gnawing exhaustion and a profound, chilling pity. He could still hear the scrape-hiss-thump of its eternal patrol in his mind, a rhythm of pure misery. He had survived by exploiting the desperate curiosity of a creature driven mad by eons of solitude. The victory felt unclean, a stain on his already burdened soul.
He forced the emotion down, locking it away in the same icy vault where he kept the ghost of Isolde. Pity was a weakness, a humanizing indulgence he could not afford in this place. Survival was the only morality that mattered here. He took a moment to compose himself, his ragged breathing echoing slightly in the corridor. He had passed through the outer containment block. He had survived the sentinel and evaded the warden. Now, he stood before the threshold of what was clearly a higher-security section of the prison.
He turned his full attention to the door before him. It was fundamentally different from the cell doors that lined the hall. Forged from a single, massive slab of what looked like black iron, it was thicker, heavier, and completely seamless. There was no barred slot, no visible handle or lock. The only features were the runes, carved deep into its surface and arranged in a complex, circular pattern.
He brought his torch closer, the flame flickering and casting dancing shadows. These were not the simple runes of suppression he had seen on the other cells. He recognized the intricate, interlocking sigils from his studies in the royal archives of his lost kingdom. There was the Rune of Negation, designed to unravel magical energies. The Rune of Unmaking, which attacked the very essence of a summoned or constructed being. And at the center, a powerful, master rune he had only ever seen in theoretical texts: the Sigil of Conceptual Severance. It was designed to isolate a pocket of reality, to cut a space off not just physically, but dimensionally.
This was not a door. It was a seal. It was a metaphysical airlock designed to contain entities whose very existence could warp the fabric of the world outside. The thought sent a fresh wave of cold dread through him, a dread that had nothing to do with the ambient chill of the Citadel. The book had not been the only thing imprisoned in this mountain.
He ran his hand over the cold iron, searching for a mechanism. There was none. No keyhole, no pressure plate. Kael had taught him about such seals. They were not opened by physical keys, but by resonance. A specific frequency of magical energy, a unique arcane signature, had to be applied to the central rune to make the internal locks retract. It was a key that could not be stolen or copied. Without his own power, he was helpless to force it. He was a locksmith without his tools, standing before a vault that contained an unknown number of horrors.
He refused to accept defeat. There had to be an override, a manual release. The Old Kingdom's battlemages were powerful, but their military engineers were pragmatists. They always built in a failsafe. He began a meticulous examination of the area around the door.
His eyes were drawn to a single cell, positioned right next to the great iron seal. It was identical to the others in almost every way, except for one crucial detail. The runes above its door were different. Alongside the standard runes of suppression, there was a single, stark sigil he recognized: the Rune of the Custodian. The Warden's Cell.
A cold hypothesis began to form in his mind. The Rime-Bound creature… it patrolled this corridor endlessly. Perhaps it had once been the living warden of this ward, a sentient being tasked with operating the great seal. And as a final, cruel irony, when the Citadel fell into disuse and ruin, he had been trapped here, his own cell becoming his eternal prison, his duty devolving into a mindless, repetitive patrol. The great sphere fused to its wrist might not have been a punishment, but a key—a massive, arcane focus whose unique properties were needed to operate the gate. A key the creature had long since forgotten how to use.
If the warden lived here, then perhaps the control mechanism for the seal was within his cell. It was a long shot, but it was the only one he had.
He approached the Custodian's cell. The door was heavy iron, like the others, with a simple, brutish mechanical lock set beside the barred slot. It was rusted and stiff, but it was not magical. He rummaged in his satchel and produced a thin, hard spike of metal he used for maintaining his armor's buckles. It was a crude tool, but his fingers were nimble, his knowledge of mechanical devices extensive.
He inserted the spike into the keyhole, feeling for the tumblers. The internal mechanism was simple but heavy, clogged with centuries of rust and disuse. He worked patiently, his touch delicate, listening to the faint clicks and scrapes within the lock. The process was tense, every sound amplified in the silence. He froze several times, listening intently for the returning scrape of the Rime-Bound, but the corridor behind him remained silent. The creature was still occupied with the mystery of the thrown stone.
After several minutes of tense manipulation, he felt the final tumbler give way with a loud, grating CLANK that echoed like a gunshot. He winced, his entire body tensing, but no new sounds answered the noise. With a deep groan of protesting metal, he pulled the heavy cell door open.
A wave of profound despair washed over him from the opening, so potent it was almost a physical force. The cell was small, a ten-by-ten-foot cube of bare stone. A single, flat slab of rock served as a bed. A rusted bucket sat in a corner, a testament to bodily needs long since transcended or forgotten. The air was thick with the psychic residue of absolute, undiluted loneliness. This was not just a cell; it was a sensory deprivation chamber designed to scour a mind clean.
He raised his torch, its light pushing back the oppressive gloom. The walls were covered in scratches. At first glance, they seemed to be the random, desperate clawings of a madman. But Valerius looked closer, his analytical mind taking over. There was a pattern. They were not random. They were deliberate.
He ran his fingers over the markings. They were sequences of lines, grouped together. Short lines, long lines, vertical, horizontal. Interspersed were crude drawings of some of the runes he had seen on the great iron door. It was a mnemonic device. A code. The warden, facing an eternity of solitude that would surely rob him of his memory, had scratched the operational sequence for the great seal into the very walls of his prison. It was a desperate act of will, a way to cling to the last shred of his purpose, even as his sanity frayed and his body devolved. It was the saddest, most tragic thing Valerius had ever seen.
He began the arduous task of deciphering the code. It was a complex, multi-layered sequence. A vertical scratch might mean 'press,' a horizontal one 'hold.' The number of lines indicated which rune in the circular pattern to activate. He had to cross-reference the crude drawings with his own memory of the runes on the door. It was a puzzle born of madness and duty, and as he worked, a new sound began to filter through the great iron door.
It was faint at first, so quiet he thought it was a trick of the wind in the ventilation shaft. But as he focused, it became clearer. It was the sound of weeping.
Not a single cry of sorrow, but a chorus. A multitude of soft, heartbreaking sobs, layered one over the other, coming from beyond the iron seal. There was no anger in the sound, no rage or madness. Only a profound, bottomless, and eternal grief. It was the sound of a thousand souls weeping for a thousand different lost worlds. The sound seeped into his bones, a psychic chill far colder than any ice. It resonated with his own buried grief for Isolde, for his kingdom, threatening to pull him down into its despairing depths.
He gritted his teeth, forcing himself to focus on the scratches on the wall. The weeping was a distraction, a weapon in itself. These were the prisoners of the high-security ward. Not beasts of fury, but entities of pure, contagious sorrow. The Weepers.
After nearly an hour of intense concentration, he believed he had the full sequence. A pattern of seven activations. He committed it to memory and stepped out of the warden's tragic cell, closing the door behind him.
He stood before the great iron door, the sound of weeping now a constant, sorrowful murmur in his ears. He found the corresponding runes in the circular pattern, their surfaces worn smooth by time. He took a deep breath, steeling his will against the psychic sorrow seeping through the iron.
He began the sequence. He pressed his palm against the first rune—the Rune of Silence. He felt a deep shudder in the stone, a low thrum of ancient mechanisms awakening. Second, he held his hand on the Rune of Chains for a count of five. Another, deeper vibration answered him. He continued the pattern, a complex dance of presses and holds, his heart pounding with each step. The weeping from beyond the door grew slightly louder, more distinct, as if its containment was beginning to fail.
After pressing the seventh and final rune in the sequence, he stepped back, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword. For a long moment, nothing happened. The silence in the corridor seemed to deepen, holding its breath. He thought he had failed.
Then, a series of deep, heavy sounds began from within the door. THUD. THUD. THUD. It was the sound of immense internal locking bolts, each as thick as a man's arm, retracting from their sockets. The sound was deafening, final. When the last bolt had pulled back, there was a sharp hiss of released pressure, and the great iron door groaned open, just a few inches.
A wave of intensely cold air washed out, but it was not the physical cold of ice. It was a psychic cold, the cold of absolute despair. It carried the scent of salt from ancient, unshed tears and the cloying smell of regret. The sound of weeping was clearer now, a multi-layered symphony of sorrow that threatened to overwhelm his senses, to drown him in a sea of shared grief.
Valerius peered through the crack. He saw only darkness, but he could feel them. Dozens of them. Each a pinpoint of concentrated misery. He pushed away the pity he felt, recognizing it as a weapon they would use against him. He pushed away the memory of the Rime-Bound. He pushed away the ghost of Isolde. He built his walls of ice high, not with magic, but with pure, cold will.
His task was to find the source of the Citadel's power, the heart Kael had spoken of, and destroy it. These prisoners were a tragic obstacle, but an obstacle nonetheless. He had to go through them.
Taking a deep breath that felt like inhaling ground glass, he put his shoulder to the heavy iron door and pushed it open. He readied his torch and his silver-coated sword, and stepped across the threshold, out of the corridor of a single, suffering warden, and into the Ward of a Thousand Tears.