Viola emerged from one building and shook her head. “Empty.”

Luna returned from another, expression unreadable. “…Same.”

Ludger frowned.

The emptiness felt wrong. Even a city abandoned in peace would leave behind something. People forgot. People died. People couldn’t carry everything. This place looked stripped. Sacked.

Either over years by scavengers… Or all at once by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

Ludger wandered into a half-destroyed structure that still had partial walls standing. The roof had collapsed, letting trees grow in through the gaps, but something inside caught his attention.

A furnace. Or something like one. He stepped closer and studied its shape, eyes narrowing.

The base had a round slot carved into the floor, wide enough for firewood, the cavity blackened and stained as if it had been used repeatedly. Above it, the body of the furnace rose in a thick, curved column, the interior shaped to channel heat upward.

But the chimney was the interesting part.

Instead of narrowing as it rose, the exit grew larger the higher it went, like a funnel inverted, designed to draw air efficiently, not trap it. The venting channels were too smooth, too intentional, carved for sustained high temperature.

Not a cooking fire. Not a household hearth. This was industrial.

Ludger rested a hand on the stone and held his chin with the other, thinking.

A city this empty, with infrastructure like this… and a labyrinth producing runic golems on the other side of a sealed gate. His eyes traced the chimney’s widening throat.

“Someone built things here,” he murmured. “No, shit. Sherlock.”

And whatever they built, it wasn’t meant to be small.

Ludger’s thoughts snapped off when he heard Viola call his name.

“Ludger—! Over here!”

He moved instantly, wind slipping under his boots for a short burst that carried him across broken stone and tangled roots without losing balance. Luna was already moving too, silent and fast, coming in from a different angle.

They found Viola in what looked like an overgrown service lane between two collapsed buildings.

She was staring down at something half-buried in the earth.

At first, Ludger didn’t recognize it. Then his eyes adjusted and the shape resolved. A conveyor belt. Or what remained of one.

It ran low to the ground, almost flush with the broken tiles, and it was so swallowed by thick grass that it was nearly invisible unless you were standing right on top of it. Moss coated most of the surface, and rust had eaten through sections of the metal frame, leaving jagged holes and flaking edges.

Viola crouched and brushed away a layer of damp leaves.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the side of the frame.

There was a symbol etched into the metal. Not a word. Not a letter.

More like a drawing, angular and curved lines intertwined, almost tribal in style, but arranged with the deliberate symmetry of a functional mark rather than decoration.

Viola looked up at Ludger. “Is that a rune?”

Ludger crouched beside it and traced the symbol with a fingertip. He nodded.

“Yes.”

Viola’s eyebrows lifted. “But it doesn’t look like a runic script.”

“Runic language can look like anything,” Ludger said quietly. “Shape doesn’t matter. Rules do.”

He kept his eyes on the symbol. “The creators decide the logic. The laws. The way intent is encoded. If their creator uses pictographs, spirals, or animal shapes—then that’s their runic script.”

Luna leaned closer, eyes narrowing. “So this wasn’t just… primitive art.”

“No,” Ludger replied.

He looked up at the ruins around them, at the thick pillars, the broad stone halls, the funnels and vents, the empty shells.

“The buildings look ancient,” he said. “But this was an advanced society. They had infrastructure. Manufacturing. Automation.”

His gaze dropped back to the belt.

“And technology like this,” Ludger continued, “paired with rune systems… is exactly how you mass-produce runic golems.”

Viola swallowed, staring at the rusted conveyor as if it might start moving again.

“So the labyrinth didn’t invent them,” she murmured.

“It copied,” Ludger said.

Or inherited. Either way, the answer had teeth. 

They spread out again, this time with a clearer purpose.

Not random searching, patterned searching.

Wherever they found a symbol, they looked for disturbance nearby. Flattened grass. Scuffed moss. A stone moved slightly out of place. Places where someone had knelt, sat, or lingered long enough to leave an imprint.

And there were signs.

Subtle ones, but consistent. Near the rune-marked conveyor frame, the grass was pressed down in a small oval, like someone had crouched there for a while. At another etched symbol on a broken beam, there were scratches in the moss where fingers had brushed repeatedly. Lucius had been close. Recently. Studying.

Viola walked up beside Ludger while he examined another half-buried marking.

“It looks like he came to study these runes,” she said quietly. “He kept stopping near them. Like he was… reading.”

Ludger didn’t look up.

“If this was an advanced society,” Viola continued, “do you think he’ll actually find what he wanted? Knowledge. Power. Something from the other side?”

Ludger scoffed. A short, humorless sound.

“No,” he said.

Viola frowned. “Why not?”

Ludger finally lifted his gaze and gestured broadly at the empty city.

“Because if the knowledge was just sitting here waiting,” he said flatly, “this place wouldn’t look like a corpse.”

He tapped the ruined wall with his knuckles.

“Advanced doesn’t mean safe,” Ludger continued. “And it doesn’t mean accessible. Whatever they built, whatever they learned, it either destroyed them, or someone destroyed them for it.”

Ludger kept his eyes on the rune-marked frame as he spoke, voice calm but edged.

“Runic language is only as powerful as the user’s understanding,” he said. “People treat it like a shortcut, like you can just write a word and reality will obey. That’s not how it works.”

Viola frowned. “But the symbols—”

“You can write Revive,” Ludger continued, cutting in gently. “Or Rebirth. Or any pretty concept you want.”

He tapped the metal where the rune was carved.

“But unless you understand the process behind that word, deeply, your rune won’t do what you think it does. At best it fails. At worst it does something adjacent and horrible.”

Because “revival” wasn’t a single action. It was a chain. A system.

A body that had stopped. A core that had quieted. Neural patterns that had degraded. A soul, no longer anchored. Restoring one piece without the others didn’t create life. It created a mistake.

“And if Lucius wanted to bring someone back,” Ludger said, “he’d need knowledge on the level of a master healer, an alchemist, a soul theorist, and an enchanter at once. You don’t find that written on a wall in an abandoned city.”

Viola’s expression tightened. “Why not? If they had this kind of technology, wouldn’t they preserve their greatest discoveries?”

Ludger exhaled through his nose.

“Because that kind of knowledge doesn’t spread,” he said. “Not freely.”

Viola tilted her head. “Why not?”

“Because people would use it as leverage,” Ludger replied simply. “If they didn’t, someone else eventually would.”

He gestured around the empty ruins, the stripped buildings, the scavenged halls, the silence where a city should have left bones.

“Power like that doesn’t stay communal,” he continued. “It becomes currency. A monopoly. A threat.”

One group hoards it to stay above others. Another group tries to steal it. Then someone weaponizes it, someone retaliates, and society stops being a society, it becomes factions with knives hidden under treaties.

“Eventually,” Ludger said quietly, “it collapses. Either from internal struggle… or because an outside force decides they can’t allow it to exist.”

Viola stared at the runes again, the excitement in her eyes fading into something more sober.

“So even if Lucius finds something,” she murmured, “it might not be a gift.”

Ludger nodded once.

“It won’t be.”

Luna kept her head lowered as if she were studying the markings on the metal.

But her eyes weren’t fixed on the rune.

They kept shifting, small, precise movements that tracked the periphery. The gaps between collapsed buildings. The shadow under a broken archway. The line of trees beyond the city’s edge.

Ludger noticed. She’d sensed something.

He didn’t react outwardly. Not yet. If something was watching, giving it confirmation that it had been noticed would only tighten the noose. So he kept his posture relaxed, his tone steady, and continued speaking as if nothing had changed.

“Even if knowledge like that spreads,” Ludger said, “it still destroys civilizations.”

Viola frowned. “How?”

Ludger’s gaze stayed on the ruined structures around them, as if the city itself was the answer.

“Because death is pressure,” he said. “It forces people to move. To build. To pass something on. To care about what comes after them, because they know they won’t be there.”

He tapped the rusted conveyor frame lightly.

“If you remove that pressure, if people believe they can ignore death, then urgency collapses,” Ludger continued. “Legacy becomes optional. Responsibility becomes negotiable. You stop thinking about the next generation, because you start assuming you’ll always be here.”

Viola’s expression tightened.

“And once you start thinking like that,” Ludger said quietly, “you stop caring about others.”

His voice stayed calm, but the words were sharp.

“You stop seeing people as successors or equals,” he went on. “You start seeing them as temporary. Replaceable. Tools. Pieces.”

He lifted his eyes to meet hers.

“And if everyone around you is just a piece,” Ludger finished, “then eventually you start moving them. Sacrificing them. Rearranging them. Because the only thing that matters is the one person who plans to be here forever.”

Viola went still.

The city’s emptiness seemed louder around them. The stripped buildings and dead streets suddenly felt less like abandonment and more like a warning carved into the world.

She didn’t speak.

Her eyes dropped, and Ludger could see the thought forming behind them, whether Lucius had started down that path. Whether the grief had turned into obsession. Whether the hunger for answers had begun to erase the parts of him that cared about anyone else.

Then Ludger felt it. Not through Seismic Sense. Through intent.

A spike of anger directed at him, sharp, focused, close.

His body shifted before his mind fully finished the calculation.

“Got you,” Ludger said quietly and smirked.

Earth answered.

A low groan echoed through the ruins.

Then another.

Stone shifted as earth surged up from the cracked tiles and moss-covered ground, rising in thick coils that wrapped around… nothing. At least, nothing any of them could see.

Ludger turned his head slowly and watched his own earth magic tighten, compressing around an invisible shape. The stone and soil formed a lumpy cluster the size of a person, hardening as it constricted, pinning whatever was inside without crushing it.

Viola spun, eyes wide.

Luna’s knives were already in her hands, posture razor-tight.

They all stared at the same spot—an earth cocoon wrapped around empty air.

Ludger’s voice cut through the silence.

“It’s time to stop hiding,” he said flatly. “Lucius.”

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then they heard it.

A click of tongue against teeth—soft, irritated, almost amused.

And the air inside the earth cluster shimmered.

A figure resolved as if someone had wiped fog off glass.

Lucius appeared.

Pinned.

Breathing hard.

He looked nothing like the careful noble from the manor.

His hair was longer, messier, damp with sweat. His clothes were practical delver gear, scuffed leather, layered fabric, reinforced seams, stained with dust and grime. His face was drawn, eyes shadowed like he hadn’t slept properly in weeks. He wasn’t injured, not visibly, but he carried the exhausted tension of someone who had been running in desperation for too long.

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