They waited until morning.

The night passed without incident, no footsteps in the brush, no eyes glinting beyond the firelight, no sudden shift in the forest that suggested they weren’t alone. Ludger kept the second watch, then the third, dozing only in shallow fragments. Luna didn’t sleep at all. She sat with her back to the broken wall, eyes half-lidded, listening to the ruins breathe.

When the sky began to pale through the canopy, Ludger let the fire die down and waited for Viola to wake up.

Viola stirred, blinked, and sat up too quickly.

For a moment, confusion washed across her face as she took in the moss-covered stone, the vine-choked pillars, and the forest stretching beyond the ruins. No beach. No sea. No familiar camp structures.

“Where—” she started, then stopped.

Memory caught up.

Her eyes widened slightly. “Right. The labyrinth. The other side.”

She rubbed her face and exhaled slowly, forcing the last traces of sleep away.

Ludger didn’t waste time on pleasantries. “Luna found something,” he said.

Viola turned toward Luna immediately. Luna nodded once, then began to explain, voice calm and precise.

“There’s a ruined city not far from here,” she said. “Much larger than these scattered structures. Real streets. District patterns. Central plazas. It looks like it was abandoned centuries ago, maybe longer..”

Viola frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Not burned,” Luna replied. “Not sacked. Not collapsed from war. Just… left. Like the people walked away and never returned.”

She paused, choosing her words.

“And some parts of it look like factories.”

Viola’s expression tightened. “Factories?”

Luna nodded. “Large stone halls. Repeating interior layouts. Metal rails embedded in the floors. Empty mounting frames along the walls. And rune-marked work platforms.”

She looked directly at Ludger, then back to Viola.

“The kind of infrastructure meant to build constructs,” Luna said. “The kind that would make something like runic golems.”

The morning air felt colder all of a sudden.

Viola swallowed. “And you think Lucius was there?”

“I’m sure,” Luna said. “His trail is recent. A camp spot that hasn’t fully settled. Footprints where the moss hasn’t grown back yet.”

Ludger’s gaze sharpened toward the direction Luna had indicated the night before.

And the decision became simple.

They packed quickly, killed the last embers, and stepped out into the forest, moving toward the city that had been abandoned, and toward whatever Lucius had walked into next.

They moved through the forest behind Luna at a steady pace.

The terrain got worse the farther they went. Roots rose like traps, thick enough to twist ankles if you weren’t watching your footing. Broken stone slabs hid under leaves, remnants of old roads that had cracked and buckled as the ground shifted over centuries. In some places, the earth dropped into shallow ravines where rainwater had carved channels through collapsed structures, forcing them to climb over rubble and slick moss-covered rock.

Luna navigated it without hesitation.

She didn’t just follow a direction, she followed a trail. A disturbed patch of moss here. A snapped twig there. The faintest shift in soil where someone had stepped and forced air out of damp ground. She moved like she was reading a language the forest didn’t know it was writing.

Viola kept pace, but the question finally spilled out of her.

“Why didn’t we find any traces of monsters until now?” she asked. “If this place could build runic golems in the past… that would explain why the labyrinth made them too, right?”

Ludger answered without looking away from the path. “To some extent, yes.”

Viola frowned. “To some extent?”

Ludger exhaled slowly.

“We don’t have enough information to claim a direct cause,” he said. “The labyrinth could be copying what exists nearby. It could be inheriting patterns. It could be connected to whatever built them and using that logic as a template.”

He stepped over a fallen column half-buried in soil.

“But runic golems are only part of the question,” Ludger continued. “If this region is tied to the labyrinth, then the sahuagin should be tied to it too.”

Viola slowed slightly. “The sahuagin… came from the coast.”

He glanced at her. “If they’re connected to the same source as the golems, we should’ve seen traces by now. Camps. bones. trails. Something.”

Viola’s brow tightened.

“But we haven’t,” Luna said quietly, without turning. “Not even old traces.”

“Which means,” Ludger finished, “either they’re not from here…”

He stepped over another cracked slab and looked ahead through the trees.

“…or whatever connection exists is more complicated than ‘monsters come from the nearest ruin.’”

Viola swallowed, uneasy. The forest seemed to press in tighter.

And somewhere ahead, through the trees, the first outlines of larger ruins began to appear, straight lines where nature shouldn’t have allowed them, and the faint geometry of a city that had once been alive.

They crested a low ridge of broken stone and roots and the forest suddenly… opened.

Not into a clearing made by nature, but into an absence that felt intentional.

Trees still grew at the edges and in scattered pockets, but the land where the city had been built was too flat, too wide, too evenly spaced to be natural. It looked like an open field that had been carved out long ago, an enormous basin of land cleared for something vast, then abandoned long enough for the forest to creep back in around the borders.

And in the center of that emptiness… Ruins. Not a handful of collapsed buildings like before. A city.

Streets, swallowed by moss and dirt, stretched out in straight lines. Broken avenues cut through the terrain like scars. Wide plazas lay cracked and buckled, their stone tiles split by roots that had grown fat and arrogant with time. Long walls had fallen outward into rubble, forming jagged ridges that hinted at districts and boundaries.

Viola stopped without meaning to. Her eyes widened as she tried to measure the scale and failed. It was enormous.

Bigger than the Empire’s capital. far bigger.

That fact alone made her throat tighten.

If this place had been alive, if these roads had once been filled with people, then it could have housed hundreds of thousands. Maybe more. A population so large it would have required stable agriculture, trade, governance, and infrastructure the Empire would recognize as advanced.

And yet the Empire had no records of anything like this.

Luna didn’t slow. She walked down the slope with the same quiet certainty, but even she turned her head slightly, scanning the city’s layout like she was reading a map drawn by ghosts.

Ludger’s gaze sharpened. The architecture felt… familiar. Not Imperial. Not Torvares. Not Velis.

It looked indigenous, stone shaped in broad, flowing curves rather than sharp angles, buildings designed to blend into terrain instead of dominating it. Pillars were thick and rounded, carved with spiral motifs that echoed the patterns they had seen inside the labyrinth. Even the way the streets were laid out felt like a dungeon: intentional choke points, wide hubs that funneled into narrower passages, elevated platforms that overlooked key intersections.

Then Viola noticed the markings. Tribal signs etched into the stone, stylized animal shapes, geometric patterns, handprint-like symbols repeated in sequences. Some of them looked like decoration. Others looked like runes.

Not clean, academic runes like Velis used, but something older, rune-like language woven into art and identity, carved into walls the same way a tribe might carve a warning into a tree. Viola swallowed.

“It looks like the labyrinth,” she said quietly.

Ludger nodded once, eyes scanning the horizon of ruins.

“Or the labyrinth looks like this,” he replied.

The difference mattered. Because if the labyrinth had been copying… Then this city wasn’t just connected to it. This city might have been its origin.

They moved into the city carefully, stepping over cracked tiles and moss-slick stone as the ruins swallowed them.

The closer they got, the more the markings stood out. Tribal signs carved into pillars and wall faces, spirals, jagged lines, and geometric patterns that repeated in sequences. Some were shallow scratches, others deep grooves that had once been filled with pigment. In places, the symbols looked almost like runes, but not in any language the Empire taught. More like a culture that had discovered runic logic and folded it into art long before anyone decided it belonged in a classroom.

Ludger stopped at one wall and leaned in.

He traced a half-broken symbol with his fingertips, following a groove that had been split by a root and worn down by decades of rain. Several of the markings were destroyed halfway through, leaving only fragments, enough to suggest meaning, not enough to recover it.

He stared for a long moment.

Viola watched him, then asked quietly, “Can you understand any of it?”

Ludger shook his head.

“No,” he said simply.

He straightened and looked around, letting his senses take in the city’s layout instead. The silence here wasn’t peaceful. It was the silence of abandonment, too much space, too many sightlines, too many places for something to watch without being seen.

Then he spotted it.

A patch of ground near a broken pillar where the moss had been flattened and the dirt disturbed. Not a footprint, not a trail, more like a shallow depression, as if someone had sat there for a while. The stone dust had been pushed aside in a way that didn’t match wind or rain.

Ludger crouched.

Luna approached and nodded as soon as she saw it. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I found more like that. Several. Scattered.”

Viola’s eyes sharpened. “So he rested here.”

“Or studied,” Ludger replied.

He inhaled slowly and extended Mana Sense, trying to catch anything left behind, residual aura, a lingering signature, a direction.

For a heartbeat, he thought he felt something. Then he realized the truth.

The ambient mana here was thick, thicker than anywhere outside a labyrinth he’d ever been. It saturated the air, the stone, the soil. It pulsed through the ruins like background radiation, constantly washing over everything.

Any personal trace would be drowned in it. Erased within minutes. He pulled the sense back, expression tightening.

“Mana’s too dense,” Ludger said. “Any signature a person leaves here gets scrubbed almost immediately.”

Luna didn’t look surprised. “As expected.”

Viola exhaled, frustrated. “So we’re blind.”

“Not blind,” Ludger corrected. “Just… limited.”

He stood and scanned the city again, eyes moving across collapsed buildings and broken plazas.

As expected, this wouldn’t be easy.

Ludger’s gaze swept the nearby ruins, then settled on Viola and Luna.

“Be careful,” he said. “But check the buildings close by. Look for anything personal—Lucius’ belongings, or anyone else’s.”

Viola nodded and moved toward a collapsed doorway. Luna slipped off to the side, soundless as always, scanning angles and shadows before she committed to entering any structure.

“Even if centuries passed,” Ludger continued, “someone lived here. Worked here. Built things here. Clues don’t vanish completely.”

They split just enough to cover the immediate area while keeping each other in sight.

Minutes passed. Then more.

They turned over rubble, checked half-buried rooms, peered into collapsed corridors. They found stone and rot and vines. They found broken carvings and cracked tiles. They found evidence of age and weather.

But no personal belongings.

No tools. No pottery. No old weapons. No scrap of cloth. No bone piles. No storage caches.

Nothing.

It was as if the city had been cleaned out with intent.

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