In the weeks that followed, the Architects and their most trusted apprentices worked with an efficiency born of absolute conviction. Their meeting had been the spark. Now came the meticulous forging of the weapon.
The components for the Cube were gathered from the farthest, most desolate corners of the world.
Valtherion and his Pyromancers descended into the heart of the volcano in their kingdom, their chants steady against the roar of the magma, to purify the raw void-iron a metal that existed in the spaces between planes, a substance that devoured magic as a desert devours water.
Zyphara and her Aeromancers braved the silent, storm-wracked peaks of the Sky Reaches to capture the resonant "silence" at their core. It was a harrowing process that cost one apprentice his life: he stepped into the null-zone without proper warding, and his screams were swallowed before they left his lips. His body simply stopped heart, lungs, brain, all ceasing in the same instant and he toppled into the abyss without a sound.
Zyphara did not speak of him again.
Below the ground, Geomancer apprentices worked under the watchful eye of Isolde's Cryomancers in a laboratory carved from permafrost. They used ice to contain the violet null-energy that formed the Cube's core, their breath misting in the frigid air, their fingers numb even through enchanted gloves.
Lady Sylvaris and her biomancers worked alongside the hydromancers of the eastern kingdoms, their understanding of life-force and primal flows allowing them to forge the Cube's outer lattice a perfect matrix of stabilized negation.
And overseeing it all was Kaelen, tireless and exacting, refusing sleep, refusing food, his eyes burning with a cold fire that made his apprentices flinch when he looked at them.
When the final component was fitted into place, when the last seal was inscribed and the last ward woven, Kaelen held the completed Cube of Ossian in his hands.
It was a perfect obsidian cube, no larger than a man's head. Its surface seemed to absorb light, to drink it in and give nothing back. Looking at it for too long made the eyes ache and the stomach churn, as if the mind itself recoiled from what it represented.
"It is perfect," Kaelen whispered.
"But how can we be sure it will even work on such a being?" Lady Sylvaris asked. She stood at a cautious distance from the Cube, her druidic senses screaming warnings she could not quite articulate. "We have theories, but no proof of concept. We are hunting something we have never seen, never measured, never proved exists. What if "
Kaelen silenced her with a raised hand. A grim smile touched his lips.
"We test it."
Kaelen gestured to one of his senior apprentices a young man named Malrik who was monitoring the chamber's energy flows from a shielded alcove.
"Malrik. Step into the center of the room."
The apprentice looked up, confusion flickering across his face. He was perhaps twenty-five, with the pale skin and dark-ringed eyes of a mage who spent too many hours in subterranean laboratories. His hands, ink-stained and calloused from inscribing wards, paused over his instruments.
"Archmage?"
"You have basic nullification magic, do you not?" Kaelen's voice was calm, almost paternal. "You are still learning. I think this is a great opportunity for you to test your abilities. If you can resist the Cube's field, your power may duplicate itself. This is how breakthroughs are made, Malrik. Through courage."
The apprentice hesitated. He looked at the Cube in Kaelen's hands that perfect, light-drinking darkness and something primal in his hindbrain screamed at him to run.
But he was a mage of Ashenvale. He had been trained to obey. And the promise of duplicated power, of recognition, of finally being seen by the master who barely acknowledged his existence...
He stepped into the center of the room.
"Good," Kaelen said. He produced a smaller, palm-sized version of the Cube a test prototype, its surface crawling with the same hungry darkness. "I am activating the null field now. Remember: resist."
He activated the device.
The effect was instantaneous and horrifying.
Malrik's eyes went wide. The light in them the subtle glow of ambient magic that resided in all living things simply... dimmed. He staggered, his hands flying to his head as if trying to hold his skull together.
"I..." His voice was a strained whisper, barely audible. "I can't..."
He tried to take a step back, but his movement was slow, agonizingly slow, as if the weight of the world was pressing in on him from all sides. His face twisted with effort, then with panic as he realized he could no longer feel the magic that had been as natural to him as breath.
He opened his mouth to speak again. No sound came out.
He could not even hear his own voice.
The magical aura that had surrounded him the faint shimmer that marked him as a trained mage simply vanished, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane. He clawed at his chest, at his throat, at his temples. His eyes, wide with a terror beyond language, sought out Kaelen.
Kaelen watched with clinical detachment.
After five seconds, he deactivated the device.
Malrik collapsed to his knees and vomited. His body trembled uncontrollably, wracked by sensory shock and the violent disconnection from the magical field that had sustained him since birth. He gasped for air like a drowning man breaking the surface, and tears streamed down his face not from pain, but from the existential horror of having been, for five seconds, utterly severed from the Song.
For a mage, it was a fate worse than death.
"It works," Kaelen said coldly, not looking at his apprentice. He addressed the other Architects, who had watched the demonstration in varying states of fascination and unease. "It creates a pocket of reality where magic and the fundamental laws of energy do not exist. If our 'gatekeeper' is a being of pure magic or energy which it must be, given its function it will be affected."
"You nearly killed him," Solrian said quietly. His radiance had dimmed during the test, and his face was pale.
"Nearly," Kaelen agreed. "But I did not. And now we know." He gestured to two lesser apprentices, who rushed forward to help the still-trembling Malrik from the chamber. "Take him to the healers. He will recover."
He will never recover, Sylvaris thought, but she said nothing.
The doubt in the room had not evaporated it had been crushed, buried under the weight of what they had just witnessed. Each of them was thinking the same thing: If this is what the Cube does to a trained mage, what will it do to a being whose entire existence is magic?
And each of them, in their own way, decided not to ask the question aloud.
"Very well," Valtherion rumbled. His voice was rougher than usual, and he would not look at the spot where Malrik had collapsed. "The trap works. But how do we bait it? How do we lure this... entity to a specific location?"
Zyphara nodded, her lightning subdued for once. "We cannot simply wander the world hoping to stumble upon a Grim. We need a guaranteed manifestation."
Ophira turned her sightless gaze toward the group. "The celestial paths converge on a death," she said. "A soul of immense power and influence."
Seraphine smiled a knowing, almost hungry smile. "The threads of destiny are woven tightly around the old King of Frosthold. Alaric the Luminescent. He fades by the hour. His palace is built upon the most potent ley-nexus in the northern kingdoms."
Isolde's expression flickered for the first time something that might have been grief, quickly suppressed. Alaric was her king. She had served him for sixty years. She had frozen enemies at his command, preserved his kingdom through blizzards and wars.
And now she was being asked to use his death as bait.
"His passing will be the beacon," Seraphine continued. "A soul of that magnitude, departing... it will draw the Grim like a moth to flame."
Kaelen's eyes were cold and bright. "Perfect. The death of a mighty king the ultimate sacrifice to fuel our ascension." He looked at Isolde. "A banquet is being thrown in his honor, is it not? A celebration of his long reign and victories. We will be there among the guests, mourning with joy and not sadness, as is your people's custom."
Isolde nodded slowly. "It is our way."
"Then we will be there," Kaelen said. "And when Alaric draws his last breath, we will activate the Cube."
He looked around the chamber, at the faces of his co-conspirators.
"We are no longer theorists. We are hunters. And our prey does not know we exist."
— ✦ —