The silence beneath the Spire was unnatural.
No echoes. No wind. No shifting stone. Just breath, and magic—raw and ancient, coiled like a sleeping serpent in the dark.
Minus followed Serie without speaking. She'd long since stopped counting the steps downward. The halls deep in the Spire didn't feel made—they felt grown, as though magic had shaped the stone itself from the roots of the world. Every wall pulsed faintly, whispering with dormant enchantments far older than either of them.
They passed into a chamber—circular, vast, lit only by the low golden glow of floating pylons. Six of them, levitating in a wide ring. The glyphs above the ceiling shimmered in constant rearrangement, an eternal equation scribbled in divine language.
Serie came to a stop at the center, robes falling still.
Minus stared at the room. It felt familiar.
No—not this exact place. But something in its rhythm. The emptiness. The tension in the air before something ancient was called forth.
It reminded her of where they began.
"This is how we started, isn't it," she said.
Serie didn't respond.
"You, standing just like that. In the obsidian grove. You'd always turn your back when I cast. Said if the spell couldn't impress you without seeing it, it wasn't worth keeping."
Serie tilted her head. "And you'd always try to cheat."
Minus grinned faintly. "Yeah. I was good at shortcutting things."
"No," Serie corrected, calmly. "You were good at breaking things. You couldn't stand that the world worked a certain way, so you tore it apart until it bled something new."
Minus laughed softly. "Still flattered."
"I didn't say it was a compliment."
One of the pylons lit with a soft thrum. Floating above it was a projection—shimmering strands of broken mana structure, coiling midair like shattered thread.
Minus stiffened. She recognized it.
A shattered version of Scharlachbrand—her signature incineration spell. Unstable. Incomplete. Like a fragment of memory, misremembered.
"You're expecting me to piece that back together?" Minus asked.
"No," Serie said. "I expect you to rebuild it. From instinct. Not memory. Not formula. Mana."
She raised her hand. "Your body was preserved. Your soul was scattered. When you were reborn, the spell I created latched onto the strongest vessel it could. That preserved elf—the one you wear now—matched your structure, yes."
Minus looked down at her hands. Milirade's hands.
"She matched," Serie added, "because she chose to."
Minus said nothing.
"Magic is not just technique. It is memory. Movement. The way your soul breathes through mana. That was fractured. What you once did easily, you now have to earn."
Another pylon flared.
A different spell—twisting in the air, half-formed, pulsing erratically.
Minus recognized it too. One of her originals.
Eislanze. The ice lance spell she'd reverse-engineered from a human funeral ward. She'd flipped it, sped up the shaping, turned it into a spear of freezing death. It was crude. Violent. Beautiful.
And now it looked… wrong. Lopsided. Clumsy.
"You kept this one?" Minus asked quietly.
"No. The body remembered it. A single casting left a wound in the mana flow. That's how I found it."
Minus stared at the projection.
It was her. Her mistakes. Her instinct. Her arrogance.
It hurt.
Back then, she'd made magic not by reading scrolls, but by watching, copying, tearing apart what others had done. She didn't study. She gutted. Reassembled. Weaponized.
Seeing those flawed, borrowed spells now—stripped of all their former power—felt like looking at old scars.
"I forgot what it felt like," she muttered. "To build something. Not steal it. Not shortcut it."
Serie glanced at her, unreadable. "I didn't think you'd feel nostalgia."
"I didn't think I could."
For a moment, they stood in silence. Not the cold silence of strangers, but the deep, strange quiet of people who once understood each other.
Once.
"You will rebuild these," Serie said. "All of them. Not for pride. For survival. You were defeated because you relied on power you didn't understand. That cannot happen again."
"And after that?"
Serie turned away, walking to another pylon. This one flared to life—not a fragment, but a spell neither of them had spoken aloud. The projection shimmered, alien and complex, layered with ancient glyphs.
Minus took a step forward, eyes narrowing. "That's not mine."
"It's mine," Serie replied. "An old technique. One I've never taught. Until now."
"Why me?"
"Because the one you need to kill has seen everything else."
Minus said nothing. Her fingers tightened around her staff.
New magic. Old spells. Lost instincts.
A path forward, paved in fragments of a witch who once broke the world just to see how it fit back together.
She shaped her mana—slow, careful, honest.
The spell bloomed. Just a flicker.
But it was stable.
This time, Serie nodded.
No praise. Just acknowledgment.
And for Minus, that was enough.