Butler lifted Simon's limp body and dragged him into the carriage. Mogan followed with desperate steps, shaking him, muttering his name… No response.
Butler snarled like a beast, roaring at the driver:
"Turn around! Now! Take us back at once!"
But Fayette cut in, her voice sharp as a blade:
"A move like that… pure stupidity. Do you expect a wizard of Paragon rank to intervene? The Emperor himself? Impossible. Simon is no longer one of the Seven Families. There'll be an inquiry they'll flay you alive with questions. And your papers will burn before any help arrives."
Mogan's face twisted in fury as he shouted:
"Then what? Let him die? Bury him alive?!"
Fayette raised a finger, her calm lethally cold:
"I said no such thing, you fool… But what he needs isn't a person. It's a thing. Clonmacnoise. Only there can this be undone."
A heavy silence fell—then Butler's voice tore through it:
"Fine… We move."
Mogan chanted an incantation in an ancient tongue, splitting the air around them. The demonic horses reared, surging forward as if Death itself were at their heels.
But in their eyes… the first flicker of collapse.
"So… what do you think that thing was?" Mogan asked, his voice strangled between curiosity and dread.
Fayette answered without turning to him:
"It answered you… It was the End. The final page, slowly folding in the book of existence. The universe's last breath, the last shudder in creation's dying body.
It is Death—not in form, not in face. Just an idea moving with the weight of all that is, wrapped in darkness like an eternal shroud. Its eyes see nothing but the collapse of time itself. It wears black, the essence of ending.
And in its hands… the keys to death, the secrets of death—ones creation will only discover when it reads its own book on the day it dies."
Mogan swallowed hard, barely daring to ask the next question:
"And those riders…?"
Fayette turned slowly:
"They are its followers… its slaves… the echo of its breath.
In myths long fallen from dead storytellers' memory, they were known as the Wild Hunt.
They come on winds that carry ruin.
Their bodies are twisted, their armor scarred by wars older than this creation. Their masks are split—not to hide their faces, but to shred the souls of those who gaze upon them.
They ride steeds not alive, but *death itself walking on four legs*.
Their neighs are the sound of civilizations dying, of stories and worlds long erased.
The fall of their hooves… a funeral dirge for all things.
Harbingers of Death. They're also called Phantoms of Despair, The Silent Choir, The Hollowed Ones, Whispers of the End, or — in the forbidden texts — The Pale Remnants.
Their faces are veiled in thorned jellyfish masks, symbols of the world's unheard agonies.
Their spears are painted in nightmare hues, etched with the whimpers of widows and forgotten children.
Every step they take extinguishes a star… every appearance heralds mass death.
Wars… famines… cities swallowed whole… That is their omen. That is Death's decree."
Butler, grim-faced and silent the entire journey, finally exploded like a gunshot:
"You could have warned us. If you knew we'd face something like this, why stay silent? Isn't this what you bragged about when we first met? That you *know everything*?"
Fayette didn't even glance at him, her eyes fixed on the horizon as she replied with icy calm:
"And if I had, what would you have done? Drawn your sword? Fled? No one faces Death. Knowing of it grants you no advantage. Only… confusion."
Butler took a step forward, his hand involuntarily gripping his weapon:
"A warning—just one word—would've at least proved you're not another fraud peddling half-truths. Trust is built on actions, not riddles."
Fayette finally turned to him. Her gaze was mocking, as if staring at a child trying to unravel a cosmic riddle:
"I don't need to prove anything to you. I'm not some tour guide here to earn your approval. I said I'd lead you to Clonmacnoise, and that's what I'm doing. As for knowing we'd face Death? Of course. But it's not something you warn about… It's something you wait for."
Silence fell after Fayette's words, with only Butler's angry breaths still echoing in his chest.
Mogan asked cautiously, trying to diffuse the tension:
"So... what do you think He wanted from us? He didn't take our souls."
Fayette exhaled as if the answer were trivial:
"He wanted nothing. He doesn't want. He exists. His mere presence is the omen."
No one replied. Just exchanged glances, brief debates, questions without answers, until dawn's first light began creeping in.
When the carriage stopped, the horses collapsed all at once. They hit the ground with a muffled thud, as if life had suddenly drained from them.
Mogan knelt beside them, whispering an ancient incantation, its words etched in bone rather than air.
A faint glow surrounded their exhausted bodies... but no healing came. Only a fragile hold on the edge of death.
He rose, weary, and looked ahead.
There stood a gate.
A towering golden gate, polished as if forged yesterday - yet it bore the weight of centuries. Its engravings told the story of a family that refused to die.
Butler reached into his inner pocket and produced a key:
"Though my lord renounced the family, he still carries its name. I was given this key to bury my master here when his time came... for no one would attend the funeral of a rebel."
Without another word, he inserted it into the lock. The mechanism turned with a metallic groan, like a dying beast, and the gate swung open.
They all entered except the driver, who sat silently by the horses, stroking them as if mourning fallen comrades. Despite their monstrous appearance, they had been irreplaceable companions.
Inside was a forest of tombs.
Graves of varied sizes and shapes, designed by the deceased before their passing... or by the living who decided what they deserved.
But one stood apart.
A massive mausoleum, dwarfing all others.
Butler stared at the colossal structure and said:
"This is... what we believe to be Lord Wells' tomb. But no one knows for certain. Sealed with seventy-seven ancient locks. Even Archmages have tried - and failed. Not a single one has ever been broken."
Mogan studied it, then turned:
"Alright... so how do we open this thing?"
Fayette stepped forward calmly:
"Don't worry. This door was made to open for me."
She raised her hands, surrounded by a cold blue aura, and began to chant:
"By the dark and the light,
Between time's whispered sighs,
My heart holds the hidden secrets,
In letters written with magic ink,
By the candle's flame awaiting the moment...
Open, secret vault doors below,
To the words of power... and passion's glow."
The tomb split as if its heart had broken. Slowly, it opened - revealing a passage that devoured the light.
They stepped inside.
The first thing that strikes the senses is not sight, nor touch, nor sound—but silence.
Then comes the darkness—but not the kind that merely obscures light.
This is a deeper thing. Not a veil over nothingness, but over knowledge itself.
The walls shimmer faintly with living symbols—breathing, writhing, shifting as though unwilling to settle into a single form. Tiny stars scatter between them, as if the sky itself had fled here to hide.
Mogan carried Simon's limp body, descending carefully. The stairs seemed ordinary at first—then warped. Each step deeper than the last, as if geometry itself bent to some foreign law. The descent became a journey inside a single, endless moment.
Mogan's voice was thin, strained:
"I feel… something wrong here."
Fayette, calm and steady, replied:
"Time flows deeper here. Don't worry. You'll adjust."
She paused, fingertips brushing against the glyph-covered wall.
"These markings… even I can't read them. They feel older than history itself. It would take the greatest linguists centuries just to translate a single line."
She said nothing more, simply continuing downward, her eyes locked on a single point deep below—a point that had not been there before.
When the stairs finally ended—after what felt like descending into the very marrow of the world—a vast chamber unfolded before them.
A cathedral to the infinite.
The walls and ceiling pulsed like living skin stretched across the bones of the cosmos, constellations drifting lazily beneath the surface. Secrets with no names drifted in that astral sea. The entire universe—or perhaps its reflection—seemed to breathe on those surfaces. Beneath their feet was only blackness—not a void, not a reflection, but something worse: an absence that denied light itself.
And in the very center of this celestial sanctum stood a coffin.
White.
So simple in form that it bordered on sacred.
Butler whispered, as if afraid the thing might hear him:
"I don't believe it… That's the Tomb of Lord Wells."
Mogan didn't look at him. His eyes were fixed, sharp, searching:
"Fine. Where's the ship?"
Fayette's answer was soft but absolute:
"We open the tomb first."
Mogan stepped forward, his muscles coiling like wound steel, fingers digging into the edges of the lid. He strained—but it didn't budge. Not even a tremor. Some ancient ward—old and deep—wrapped around it like a second skin, cold to the touch.
"So…" Mogan exhaled. "What now?"
Fayette smiled, that elusive, infuriating smile of hers.
"No need for panic. Why the rush? The ship's not going to fly away without us."
She stepped closer, and in her eyes bloomed a blue too ancient for human names, as though carrying the reflections of long-dead stars.
When she spoke again, it was not in any common tongue. It was invocation, liturgy, a whisper dredged up from the roots of forgotten languages:
"By the strength of spirits, by the counsel of time,
I call upon the hidden forces and the veiled truths,
Open, you ancient gates,
Reveal yourselves, you forgotten secrets.
By candlelight and the breath of wind,
Break, unveil, and yield the truth concealed."
And then it began.
The stars abandoned the walls. Galaxies uncoiled from their spirals, peeling away from their astral prisons, pouring like liquid silver across the black floor. They rose, like pilgrims ascending toward the tomb, encircling it in an ancient, ritualistic dance. The entire room became a single, spiraling pathway to somewhere else, as if the coffin had become the axis around which the entire cosmos spun.
"Did… did it work?" Butler's voice trembled, awe drowning out his doubt.
Fayette nodded once, slow and deliberate.
Mogan stepped forward again, and this time, when his fingers curled around the lid, the resistance was gone. It moved—not with the struggle of muscle against matter, but as though the universe itself had granted permission.
Inside: not treasure.
Not weapons.
Bones.
A skeleton, perfectly decayed, as if embalmed by the erosion of countless centuries. But in the right hand—
—a single ring.
Orange.
Simple.
Radiant.
Fayette plucked it from the skeletal fingers and slid it onto her own. It shrank to fit, metal responding like a loyal beast recognizing its master.
"We have it," she whispered.
Butler blinked, struggling to catch up:
"What do you mean? Where's the ship?"
"Don't rush. It's here. In the ring."
"A ring? A dimensional anchor?"
Fayette tilted her head, considering.
"Something like that… but greater."
She raised her hand, and from the ring unfurled a radiance—not a mere beam of light, but a portal shaped from the very syntax of space and time, a doorway sculpted from the architecture of forgotten mathematics. Its boundaries shimmered in shifting spectrums of unnamed colors, fractal and infinite.
Approaching it was like standing before a mirror that reflected not one's face, but possibility itself. Past and future braided together in waves of impossible symmetry.
"Gods…" Butler breathed. "What… what is that?"
Fayette's voice was soft, reverent:
"The ship cannot exist in this world—not as you know it. It's not matter, not in the way you understand. It's… an idea. A vessel that exceeds the constraints of this dimension. The ring gives us the door. This gate will always lead to it—no matter where or when we stand."
Butler looked lost, his mind beginning to fracture beneath the weight of comprehension.
"A… spatial-temporal gate? This is time-space magic?"
It was Mogan who answered, low and grim:
"No. Ordinary time-space magic is like stepping from one room to another linear, exhausting, predictable. This…" He gestured to the shimmering doorway. "…is a rupture. A hole in the structure of existence itself. It doesn't lead to places to be honest-as I heard-. It leads to… meanings. You don't cast this kind of thing. You invoke it. With relics. With blood. With souls. Only ancient priests or mages who've transcended mortality can shape such passages."
He paused, staring into the shifting brilliance.
"And having one here… that's not just dangerous. It's heresy."
Fear crept into Butler's voice now:
"If this is real, then we're already dead. Time-space magic is forbidden. They'll send a Paragon Mage—or worse, an Archdivine himself."
Fayette answered without looking at him, her voice carrying the weight of something older than rebellion:
"Relax. Remember what I said? Time flows differently here. This chamber is spatially detached from the world above. Their laws don't reach us here. We're safe. For now."
Without another word, Butler hefted Simon's body, and together they stepped through.
But what met them on the other side… wasn't a place.
It was depth itself.
They emerged into the heart of interstellar nothingness, where galaxies clashed and whirled like dancers in some ancient, cosmic waltz. Stars spoke languages of light, symphonies composed for ears that had not yet evolved to hear them.
And before them—anchored in that abyss—floated the ship.
It could not be described in terms of architecture or mechanics.
It was a thought, half-remembered, struggling to take form.
A cathedral woven from starlight and unsung mathematics, hulls reflecting the hues of distant nebulae, engraved with sigils that spoke not of conquest or science—but of creation itself. Each surface shimmered with meaning, each line a prayer.
Butler murmured, voice barely audible:
"It's… it's beautiful. Like the devil wearing an angel's robes."
Mogan spoke next, reverently:
"It's alive. You feel that, don't you? This isn't a vessel. It's the meeting place of history. The intersection of everything that was, is, and will be. Not a ship… a living idea. A heart beating between dimensions."
His breath caught, and in that moment, awe swallowed fear.
"Only God could make something like this."
And Fayette, standing before the impossible, only whispered:
"And yet here we are."
Writer's Corner:
Greetings, travelers.
Thank you all for 10,000 views already I'm truly honored you've joined me on this strange road.
This story is only just beginning, and I'm grateful you're here for it.
If you've enjoyed the ride so far — or even if you're screaming at your screen — I'd love to hear your thoughts below.
Silent readers, I see you too. Say hi, even just once. Let's make this journey ours together.