The Abyss didn't sleep.
Even when Lucian did.
Whispers ran through the roots of the deep rock like veins of blood. Flames flickered from within hollowed tunnels that stretched endlessly downward. And in the center of it all—he stood like a monument made flesh.
Lucian's shadow was no longer just a silhouette.
It was a symbol.
A warning.
---
Two scouts returned at dawn, breathless and bleeding, but alive. "The Sancturm's southern outpost has increased guard numbers. They're searching."
Lucian nodded. "Good. Let them search."
He moved to the edge of the outer caves, where a rusted iron gate led into deeper territory. It was there that he saw her again.
The old woman.
Thin, blind in one eye, her cloak stitched from old Sancturm banners turned to rags.
"You walk like a king," she said to him.
Lucian glanced at her. "What is this place?"
She chuckled. "Not just dirt and silence, if that's what you're thinking."
Lucian paused.
"I've seen power born here. And madness. Both wear the same face."
He crouched before her.
"Tell me."
---
Her name was Kaenra, once a historian of Sancturm's inner circle, exiled when she refused to falsify records.
"The Abyss," she began, her voice echoing faintly, "was once a cradle of the first mages. Before the Sancturm. Before order."
"There were cities here—thriving on chaos-magic, unpredictable but pure. The surface feared it. Feared what couldn't be controlled. So they built the Sancturm."
"And they cast us down."
She pointed at the jagged cavern roof above them. "Not as punishment, but to bury the truth. Over centuries, the Abyss became a myth. A graveyard. But we lived. We adapted. We evolved."
Lucian asked, "Why didn't you rise?"
Kaenra smiled sadly. "Because rising means becoming like them."
He stood slowly. "Not this time."
---
That night, he prepared for the first true test of his new power.
He had selected a target: General Artek Vale, a Sancturm war strategist responsible for the siege of Elaros—the city Lucian once defended.
Lucian sat before the fire, drawing runes with salt and ash in the dirt. He whispered a chant taught to him by Kaenra—a forbidden rite meant to reach through the mind, bypassing wards.
He held a thread of Vale's essence—stolen from the pocket of a captured courier. It was enough.
The world tilted.
Lucian's vision blurred.
Then sharpened.
He was standing in a different body.
Artek Vale's.
He looked around. Grand chamber. Council guards. Maps.
He moved Vale's hand, slowly, carefully, until it reached the inkwell.
He dipped it. Signed false orders that would send Sancturm forces marching in the wrong direction.
Then he turned.
Walked to a mirror.
And whispered through Vale's lips:
> "I'm still here."
---
Back in the Abyss, Lucian opened his eyes.
He was trembling.
Not from exhaustion.
From exhilaration.
He had struck at them.
And they didn't even know it.
---
The Hollowed watched him in silence that night as he forged a new blade—longer than his last, etched with time runes and shadow-silver.
He didn't name it.
Names were for the living.
He wasn't sure he counted anymore.
But his mission did.
And as he stared into the wall of darkness beyond the torchlight, he whispered to himself:
> "Let the world above sleep. I'll wake them with fire."
___
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