PROLOGUE: DESCENT
Three Nights Earlier
Deep beneath the Spatial Fortress, the hidden training hall was silent save for the low, constant thrum of spatial rifts.
Tor stood alone at its centre.
He wore only loose black pants, feet bare against the cold stone. Silver bracelets locked around wrists and ankles glowed with intricate runes that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Sweat traced faint lines down his chest, yet his breathing remained even, almost bored.
In the air before him floated a perfect sphere of compressed space: black, motionless, large enough to swallow a mansion whole.
Tor raised one small hand.
The sphere collapsed to a single, impossible point.
Then it detonated.
Reality screamed.
The entire chamber folded inward as though crushed by an invisible fist. Stone walls bent like wet clay. Protective runes flared white-hot and shattered. The floor cracked in perfect concentric rings that raced outward for hundreds of metres.
Light and pressure erupted upward, punching a clean cylinder through layer after layer of the fortress’s foundations until it burst into open sky far above.
When the glare faded, the training hall no longer existed.
In its place yawned a crater three hundred metres deep, its edges fused to glass by the sheer heat of spatial collapse.
Tor stood untouched at the very bottom, staring up at the circle of dawn sky visible through the new skylight he had accidentally carved into the mountain.
He sighed.
“Still not enough.”
From the crater’s rim, Great Elder Ter observed with arms folded, crown tilted as always.
“You’re getting closer,” he called down, voice calm.
Tor glanced upward, expression flat.
“Closer to breaking your mountain, or closer to breaking your rules?”
Ter’s smile was thin, almost proud.
“Both, if you keep this up.”
Tor cracked his neck once and started walking toward the carved stairs that spiralled up the crater wall.
“Then maybe it’s time I left,” he said, “before I delete the whole thing by mistake.”
Far above, unseen by either of them, a single recording crystal (planted by Elder Mak’s faction) captured every impossible second.
Three nights later, that crystal would become the cornerstone of an assassination plan built on one fatal assumption:
That a ten-year-old boy would be easy prey.
