Aurora stepped to the edge of the innermost ring and began to chant. The sound started low in her chest.
"Veth’ra... keth’mor... ul’shan..."
The words were thick and heavy. They did not rise like normal speech. They pressed outward into the air. The language was old. The syllables were not meant to be understood by ordinary ears.
Her eyes opened. They glowed pure white, without any color.
She raised both arms slowly, palms facing up.
"Veth’ra keth’mor... ul’shan drav’kai..."
The candle flames changed at the same time.
Yellow became deep blue across every wick. The blue light filled the room with hard edges and no warmth.
A cold pressure settled over the stone floor.
It made the pale skin of her stomach, the soft curves of her breasts, and the smooth line of her thighs stand out sharply against the black lace.
Her voice rose higher.
"Drav’kai... sol’meth... a’ruun..."
The carved lines of the circle began to glow. First the outer ring. Then the next. The light moved inward toward the centre in steady sequence.
The cold in the room deepened. Breath would have shown if anyone else had been present.
The puddle on the floor moved.
It pulled itself upward against gravity, gathering into a column, then rounding at both ends until it hung in the air as a perfect sphere.
The sphere pulsed faintly and rotated with slow, steady motion. The blue light from the candles reflected across its surface.
Aurora’s voice climbed further.
"A’ruun... veth’ra... keth’mor ul’shan... drav’kai sol’meth..."
The sound filled the chamber until it sat between hearing and feeling. The glowing sigils burned brighter. The sphere rotated faster.
Her voice reached its highest point.
Then she stopped.
Complete silence settled over the chamber.
The blue flames snapped back to ordinary yellow. The pure white light drained from Aurora’s eyes, first turning grey, then silver, then the familiar warm tone of someone standing in candlelight.
The carved sigils across the floor dimmed one by one until the stone looked ordinary again. The room returned to what it had always been. Old walls, the permanent smell of dried blood, and the soft flicker of yellow candlelight.
Only the fluid sphere remained.
It hung motionless in the exact center of the circle, no longer pulsing, no longer glowing. Just a small, pale ball floating in the air.
Aurora walked toward it without hurry.
Her bare feet made almost no sound on the stone. The black lace of her bra shifted with each step, the full weight of her breasts moving inside the cups.
She stopped directly under the sphere and tilted her head back. She opened her mouth.
The sphere drifted downward and slipped between her lips.
She closed her mouth around it.
For several seconds she simply held it on her tongue, expression focused, tasting carefully, waiting for whatever information the ritual was supposed to give her.
The liquid was still faintly warm. It carried a faint, salty undertone she recognised too late.
Her brow furrowed.
She swallowed.
The moment it went down, her face changed.
Disgust flickered across her features, sharp and immediate. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth as if trying to scrape the taste away.
Her throat worked once more.
"Nothing," she said.
The word came out flat. All the usual warmth had left her voice.
"No bloodline signature. No inherited ability. No resonance of any kind."
She turned away from the center of the circle. Her silver hair slid across the bare skin of her back.
She walked to the edge of the room, stopped, and turned around again.
"He was faking it. I knew it. The Guiding Light." A short, humourless pause. "Of course he was faking it. There was nothing to extract. What did I expect?"
Her eyes moved across the chamber — the carefully carved circle, the ranks of candles, the residual heat.
Her jaw tightened. Her face twisted in anger.
She lifted her right foot.
The heel of her boot came down on the stone with a single, precise impact.
CRACK!
The crack started at the point of contact and raced outward in every direction at once.
It tore through the carved sigils, split the floor into a widening web, and climbed the walls on both sides.
The sound of stone dividing filled the room before the echo of the stomp had even finished. When it ended, the entire floor was fractured from wall to wall.
The cracks ran deep — far deeper than any ordinary heel strike should have reached.
Aurora looked down at the destruction.
She looked at her own foot.
Something new moved behind her eyes.
She raised her heel a second time and drove it down harder.
CRACK!
The room shook.
A deep, structural shudder that travelled through the foundations of the palace itself.
Dust rained from the ceiling. Several candles toppled and went out.
The remaining flames jumped wildly, throwing broken shadows across the newly cracked walls. The existing fractures widened with a low grinding sound.
The gaps between the broken sections of stone grew by a visible hair.
The shaking stopped.
Aurora stood in the middle of the wreckage. Silver hair loose down her back.
The floor ruined in every direction beneath her boots. She stared at what she had done.
The annoyance drained from her face.
Something else took its place — not pure excitement, not pure hunger, but a sharp, private mixture of both. The kind of feeling she usually kept locked down because once it started it was difficult to stop.
She laughed.
The sound began quiet and then grew, filling the cracked chamber.
It was genuine and completely unguarded. Nothing like the warm, public laugh she used in front of others.
This one belonged only to the empty room and the broken stone.
She looked at the floor again.
She looked at the heel of her boot.
The laugh faded into a thin smile that held no warmth at all.
"Interesting," she said softly to the silence.
"Very interesting."
Chapter 345: Under the Den
5 min read