Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four: A Price Already Paid

  The early morning sunlight filtered weakly through the curtains of the hotel room, casting pale stripes across the worn wooden floor. Jace sat hunched on the edge of his bed, his shoulders weighed down by thoughts far heavier than the flimsy excuse he’d given the others. They’d left in a flurry of laughter and anticipation, their voices echoing in the hallway, bound for the carnival. He’d murmured something about needing more rest, but the truth was harder to share. The revelations from the night before clung to him like shadows, every unanswered question pressing like a stone in his chest.

  The night before, they had settled on a plan: comb through the last of Roandia’s libraries—what few still stood. Once, this city had been a monument to knowledge, a treasury of the world’s wisdom. Now, it was a carcass picked clean by war and time. Most of its secrets had been lost, but scraps remained, buried in dust and silence. If there was anything left—anything on this place, on why Faterenders kept surfacing here, or whatever rot festered beneath the surface—it would be hidden in those pages.

  Three libraries. That’s all that remained. They agreed to split up, and no one questioned when Jace chose to go alone.

  An odd feeling pressed against him, a weight he couldn’t yet name. It had been gnawing at him, just out of reach. He needed the quiet to unravel it, to follow the thread of unease winding through his gut.

  Jace stood, pulling his cloak tightly around him as he slipped into the town’s bustling streets. The air was crisp, the faint chill of early morning biting at his cheeks. He moved with purpose, his boots striking the cobblestones in a steady rhythm. The hotel receptionist’s casual mention of a library tucked away in the Merchant District had lodged itself in his mind. A quiet place, rarely frequented by Travelers. That suited him just fine.

  He needed answers—about Roandia, about his mother’s kingdom, about the intricate, invisible threads that bound Terra Mythica together. Roandia was just one thread in the tapestry, but it was a noose tightening around his neck.

  The streets of the Merchant District felt alive, but the wrong kind of alive. The hum of enchantments prickled at his senses, faint but constant. Merchants called out in bright, rehearsed tones, their wares glittering under illusory sunlight. The aroma of spiced pastries and roasted chestnuts mingled with the metallic tang of magic in the air, but the cheer felt brittle, like porcelain painted to hide cracks.

  The library loomed, an ancient beast of stone and silence. Its grand fa?ade, half-swallowed by creeping ivy, bore the scars of war—cracked pillars, scorched engravings, the ghost of something once mighty now teetering on the edge of ruin. It sat at the end of a street where the wind had forgotten how to move, where even the dust seemed hesitant to stir.

  Jace climbed the steps, boots scuffing against weathered stone. The doors before him were thick, old wood reinforced with iron bands, the once-proud insignia above them too marred by time to be legible. He pressed his palm against the handle. Cold. Solid. It took a hard shove to get them moving, and when they did, the hinges groaned loud enough to drown out the street behind him. A sound too alive for something so abandoned.

  Inside, the air was filled with dust and the scent of old parchment, heavy and cloying, as if the past itself had settled into the walls. Moonlight spilled through broken stained glass, casting jagged streaks of red and gold across a floor littered with forgotten knowledge. Pages curled like dried leaves. Books lay broken-backed on desks, their spines cracked and weeping loose threads.

  Jace took a slow breath, letting the hush settle around him. There was something sacred about a library, even one as gutted as this. A place meant for words, for learning, now left to rot.

  He adjusted his grip on Alice’s list, the parchment crinkling in his fingers. Faterenders. Roandia after the War. Rita Nutkins. Names and subjects, leads that might unravel something—if there was anything left to find.

  A wooden counter stretched across the main hall, its surface buried beneath scattered papers and an overturned lantern, long burned dry. Behind it, the catalog system stood in a state of quiet destruction. Some drawers hung open, their labels faded, their contents spilled into heaps of yellowed cards. Others had been yanked from their slots entirely, thrown aside like someone had been searching in a hurry—or searching without care.

  Jace dragged a finger through the mess, tracing over old ink and brittle edges. He flipped through a handful, hoping for a spark of recognition.

  Nothing.

  Moving deeper, he wove through rows of towering shelves, their wooden frames dark with age, some leaning precariously. Here, the books still stood—somehow. Not many. But enough to make the search feel worthwhile. He ran his fingers along the spines, whispering their titles under his breath. A crumbling book of legal codes. Agricultural reports. A faded tome on medicinal herbs with whole sections eaten through by some long-gone pest.

  His hand hovered over a leather-bound volume, its cover embossed with an unfamiliar sigil. He pulled it free, sending a puff of dust into the air. The spine cracked as he eased it open, flipping through brittle pages by candlelight.

  Historical census records. Trade agreements. Treatises on forgotten philosophies.

  Nothing on the city itself. No mention of Faterenders. No trace of Rita Nutkins.

  Jace exhaled sharply, rubbing a hand down his face. He pressed on.

  Past the shelves, past the rows of abandoned desks, deeper into the shadows where the air turned colder. A reading alcove, its chairs draped in dust, their cushions torn and flattened by time. A librarian’s station, its drawers still locked, the key long lost.

  Something about this place felt… hollow. Not just empty. Not just abandoned. Hollow.

  He turned a slow circle, eyes scanning the dark corners where the candlelight didn’t reach. Silence clung to the air, thick as fog. It felt like a place where people had whispered, once. Where knowledge had been passed hand to hand, where scholars had hunched over desks, scratching ink onto parchment. That kind of silence didn’t go away. It left echoes.

  But here, there was nothing.

  No lingering knowledge. No secrets waiting to be found. Only the remains of something that had already been picked clean.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Time blurred as he searched, rifling through pages, pushing past overturned chairs, scanning the walls for hidden compartments. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  A cold frustration coiled in his gut. He wasn’t sure how long he had been here, but the ache in his back and the burn behind his eyes suggested hours. Maybe more.

  At last, he gave up.

  Jace stepped outside the library, the air crisp against his skin. The city lay quiet, its streets washed in the pale glow of the late sun. Somewhere, a bell chimed the hour—faint and solitary, its sound fading into the orange-stained sky.

  He rolled his shoulders, shaking off the tension. This had been a dead end. A waste of time. But the pressure in his chest told him otherwise.

  There was something in the silence. In the emptiness. Someone had gotten here first.

  The sensation hit him as he descended the worn stone steps—an invisible hook catching somewhere deep in his chest. It wasn’t a sharp pull, not at first. More like a whisper, a shift in the air that curled around him and tugged, gentle but insistent.

  He paused, breath frosting faintly in the cool air. The city was still, the distant glow of newly awakened lanterns painting soft halos on cracked cobblestones. A breeze stirred the dust at his feet, cold and restless, but that wasn’t what unsettled him.

  It was that feeling.

  The one that had saved his life more times than he could count.

  The one that had led him here in the first place.

  Truthsense.

  Jace tensed, a flicker sparking in his ribs—less a skill than something etched deep in his bones. It didn’t always make sense. It didn’t come when he called. But when it did—when it wanted him to see something—it wasn’t wise to ignore it.

  His feet had already started moving.

  The pull guided him down unfamiliar streets, deeper into Roandia’s underbelly, where the air grew thick with the weight of forgotten things. Narrow alleyways twisted around him like veins in a corpse, leading him away from the city’s dwindling lights and into a district that had no name. He should have turned back. Should have questioned why this part of town had gone silent, why even the usual rats and scavengers had fled.

  But he knew where he was going.

  Even before he saw it, he knew.

  The building loomed at the end of a winding street, stark and defiant against the dark sky. Its spires jutted at impossible angles, crooked and sharp like bones breaking under their own weight. The walls pulsed faintly, as though alive, shifting in his vision when he tried to pin them down. The iron door knocker—twisted into the grotesque visage of a smirking man—seemed to sneer at him.

  Jace froze. Unease prickled at his skin.

  He knew this place.

  The White Raven Ring. His first major artifact, the one that had felt more curse than gift. The memory of acquiring it had dulled over time, buried beneath the chaos of survival and the endless climb for power. But now, standing before this place again, every detail resurfaced with razor clarity. The smell of damp stone. The press of old magic in the air. The way the shopkeeper’s gaze had lingered, as if expecting him.

  Had that been a coincidence?

  Or had this place been waiting?

  He stepped forward, reaching for the knocker. The metal was ice-cold beneath his fingers, but before he could lift it, the smirking face moved. The twisted iron lips stretched into a wider grin.

  “Welcome back,“ it rasped, the sound like gravel scraping against steel.

  Jace’s jaw clenched. He didn’t respond. The door creaked open on its own.

  The air inside hit him—a thick wave of damp earth and something older, something metallic and sharp. Blood and parchment. Decay and ink. The scent of things that should have crumbled to dust but never did.

  Shelves stretched endlessly into the gloom, crammed with artifacts that pulsed with sickly light. They seemed to watch him, their forms shifting at the edges of his vision. Daggers that bled rust, mirrors that refused to show reflections, tomes bound in something not quite leather.

  And from the shadows, a figure emerged.

  Thin. Angular. The shopkeeper’s face was unchanged—too pale, too sharp, as if carved from wax and left too long in the cold. His eyes, the color of frozen ponds, locked onto Jace with an unsettling familiarity.

  “You took your time,“ the man said. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t find your way back.”

  Jace’s pulse thrummed, but he kept his expression neutral. “Didn’t plan to.”

  A slow, knowing smile curled the man’s lips. “Ah. But plans change, don’t they?”

  Jace didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Because now that he was standing here, now that his Truthsense was thrumming so violently he could feel it in his teeth, he realized something else.

  Jace stepped back, pulse hammering. What the hell was he doing here?

  The realization hit him like cold water. The last time he had stood in this place, he had made a deal. A blood pact—foolish, desperate, the kind of mistake only the green and reckless could make. Back when he was still reeling from the reality of Mythica, still thinking like a player instead of someone who actually had to live in this world.

  Something within reach and of equal value.

  That had been the price. A vague, open-ended clause. A trap, though he hadn’t seen it at the time. Because back then, all he had seen was power.

  The White Raven Ring had been worth it. Or so he had told himself. It had gotten him out of more than one impossible jam, saved his ass when nothing else could. But the more he learned about what it could really do, the more uneasy he became.

  What had he traded?

  What had the shopkeeper taken?

  He clenched his jaw, muscles locking. No. He didn’t need to be here. Shouldn’t be here. He turned on his heel, every instinct screaming at him to leave before he got sucked back in.

  Then the man spoke.

  “You always were in a hurry to leave,” the words were smooth, almost amused. “And yet, you keep coming back.”

  Jace went still.

  The voice wasn’t loud, but it filled the space, seeping into the walls like ink sinking into parchment.

  A slow chill slithered down his spine.

  He turned his head just enough to catch the shopkeeper’s gaze from the corner of his eye.

  “This place,” the man continued, stepping forward with impossible grace, “was never just a shop.”

  The words sank deep, and Jace felt his Truthsense flare hot in his ribs, crackling like static at the back of awareness.

  “It never had been.”

  Jace’s fingers flexed at his sides. The walls felt closer now, the shelves darker, their contents shifting when he wasn’t looking.

  “And I…” the shopkeeper smiled, thin and knowing, “am not just a shopkeeper.”

  The Truthsense pulsed again, nearly knocking the air from his lungs.

  This man—this thing—was not separate from the building. He was part of it. A fixture. A keeper of things long lost.

  Jace’s throat went dry.

  The man’s pale eyes gleamed like ice catching the sun. “And I know the truth, Jace.”

  Jace exhaled sharply. “Truth about what?”

  “About this place.”

  Jace’s fingers twitched.

  “About the artifacts.”

  Something cold curled in his gut.

  “And…” the man’s smile widened, slow and deliberate, “about your parents.”

  Silence. Heavy. Crushing.

  Jace’s breath caught. His heart stuttered in his chest.

  His parents.

  A dozen half-formed thoughts slammed into him at once. He barely managed to get out the words. “You knew my parents?”

  The man inclined his head slightly, as if Jace had finally asked the right question. “Ah, yes. Quite indeed.”

  The words sent a pulse of something through the room. The walls groaned, the floorboards shifting underfoot. And for the first time, Jace saw.

  Not just with his eyes. With his Truthsense.

  His gaze dropped behind the counter—something he had never thought to look at before.

  And he saw wood.

  Not clothing. Not the smooth fall of robes or the slight shift of fabric. Wood. Dark, gnarled, twisted like the ancient roots of a tree, merging seamlessly with the floor, stretching into the walls.

  The shopkeeper wasn’t in the building.

  He was the building.

  The realization punched through Jace’s ribs, a sickening twist of understanding snapping into place.

  Somewhere in the darkness, the structure moaned, deep and shuddering, as if exhaling from the depths of its bones.

  The shopkeeper smiled.

  Odd. Too pleased. Too knowing.

  And Jace wasn’t sure if he had walked into a conversation…

  …or a trap he had set for himself long ago.