[POV Liselotte]

Barely twenty-four hours had passed since our private audience with King William Whirikal. The warmth of that nighttime conversation with Leah—where the ghosts of her childhood finally seemed to find a place to rest—still throbbed in my chest like a glowing ember. However, the reality of Whirikal allowed no long reprieves. The King had asked us for a week of discretion, a week to “clear the path” before Leah reclaimed her crown, but that did not mean the world had stopped.

On the contrary, I felt as though the gears of fate were turning faster than ever.

The Adventurers’ Guild of Whirikal rose before us as the same imposing building as always: a mass of stone reinforced with protective runes, banners torn by the wind, and the perpetual scent of cheap beer, cured leather, and metal. Yet every time I crossed those double doors, I had the physical sensation that the space itself was contracting.

It wasn’t the walls that had changed, nor the notice boards crammed with extermination requests. The change lay in the atmosphere. It was the air, growing dense and electric the moment we stepped inside. It was the constant murmur of the common hall, dropping in an unnatural diminuendo as soon as my boots struck the wooden floor.

I walked flanked by Leah and Chloé. I felt the weight of hundreds of eyes drilling into our backs. Some adventurers turned fully around, without pretense, staring at the “Lost Princess” who now wore travel leathers instead of silks. Others suddenly found a deep fascination in their mugs of mead, avoiding eye contact as if looking at Leah—or at us, her saviors—might draw the unwanted attention of the Royal Guard or something far worse.

“I don’t like this at all,” I murmured, keeping my gaze forward. “I feel like an animal in a zoo.”

Leah glanced at me sideways. Despite the tension, her posture was flawless, a remnant of her upbringing that not even years of captivity had managed to erase. She offered a half-smile that failed to hide the unease in her light eyes.

“Neither do I, Lotte. But I suppose after what happened at the palace, we can’t afford the luxury of pretending we’re invisible anymore. The secret has started to leak through the cracks.”

To our right, Chloé moved with that predatory elegance that defined her. Since she had adopted her semi-human form more permanently, her presence was an undeniable force of nature. Her white wolf ears twitched with mechanical precision, catching whispers from ten meters away. Her tail swayed just slightly—a sign of restrained irritation—and her blue eyes scanned the room with a vigilance that bordered on hostile. For Chloé, this place was no longer a refuge, but a potential battlefield.

It didn’t take long to spot the guildmaster’s assistant. He stood near the great spiral staircase, fiddling with a ring of keys. When he saw us, he bowed a little deeper than usual, a gesture that showed he, too, knew who Leah was.

“Master Ronan is expecting you,” he announced solemnly. “Please, follow me. He has cleared his schedule just for you.”

We climbed the stairs in sepulchral silence. Each wooden step creaked beneath our feet, sounding like gunshots in the emptiness of the upper hallway. I felt a persistent tingling at the nape of my neck—that cold vibration my ice magic emitted when it detected an anomaly or a silent warning from the environment.

Ronan’s office was an organized chaos of maps, astrological compasses, and jars containing specimens I didn’t want to identify. Afternoon light poured in through the tall windows, slicing the dust-filled air into golden bands. Ronan stood behind his desk, backlit, his figure turned into an imposing silhouette.

“Close the door,” he said without preamble. His voice was deep, stripped of its usual warmth.

Chloé shut the door and leaned against it, crossing her arms over her chest. Leah and I stepped forward until we stood before the desk.

“I didn’t call you here to congratulate you on the success of your last incursion, nor on your… recent fortune with the royal family,” Ronan began, laying several reports on the desk. “That has already been handled in the official records.”

Leah tensed, her shoulders stiffening. “Then to what do we owe this level of secrecy, Master?”

Ronan let out a long sigh, as if he were about to confess a sin. He leaned on the desk and looked at us one by one, lingering especially on Chloé and me.

“There are things about the mission in the border village that were not made clear in the reports you submitted to the Guild. Things I couldn’t discuss in front of the other adventurers or within earshot of the noble informants crawling all over the common hall. This concerns the artifact you recovered. The one Marcus tried to use.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. I remembered the corrupted glow of that object, the way reality itself seemed to bend around it. “We know Marcus activated it. We thought he wanted to summon something to destroy us.”

“It wasn’t an incorrect activation, Liselotte,” Ronan corrected, his gaze darkening. “It was deliberate. But Marcus was a fool; he didn’t understand the magnitude of the lock he was breaking. That artifact was not created to summon entities, nor to control elementals.”

Chloé stepped forward, her eyes shining with animal curiosity. “Then what was that thing for?”

“To contain,” Ronan stated flatly. He turned to a shelf protected by magical seals and pulled out a book bound in dragonhide, so ancient the pages looked ready to crumble. He opened it on the desk, revealing diagrams that made my head ache just from looking at them: overlapping magic circles, non-Euclidean geometry, and annotations in a language that vibrated with power.

“In that village, there existed what we call a ‘breach.’ A microscopic fissure in the fabric of our reality. A scar between our world and… another dimension.”

Leah went pale. “A demonic dimension? Is that where the captors who held me for years came from?”

Ronan shook his head slowly. “Not exactly. Demons inhabit parallel planes, but this is something far more primordial. It is a dimension where matter does not exist. Everything there is pure magical power—fluid, dense, and terribly unstable. An ocean of energy without shores.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I remembered the sensation of the breach in the forest—the cold that wasn’t ice, but emptiness.

“The beings that exist there have no form,” Ronan continued, pointing to a diagram of an amorphous figure. “They are consciousnesses of energy. To manifest in our world, they need a physical anchor. A vessel capable of withstanding their pressure.”

“A core,” I murmured, recalling the heart of the elemental we had faced.

“Exactly,” the Master nodded. “The artifact Marcus tampered with was actually a stabilizer, a magical plug. By forcing it, Marcus turned it into a focal point. He drew in one of those consciousnesses and forced it to take control of the local earth elemental to create a body. In doing so, the breach was torn wider.”

Leah clenched her fists. “So when we defeated the creature and the artifact broke… the breach didn’t close?”

Ronan fell into a heavy silence before answering. “It stabilized, but the scar remains. What is truly concerning is that during the time it was wide open, it is very likely that other beings crossed over.”

The air in the office seemed to grow heavier, as if oxygen had been replaced with lead. “Where are they now?” I asked, my hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of my ice dagger.

“We don’t know,” Ronan admitted with a frankness that terrified me. “Most of these entities cannot materialize without a suitable core, such as a powerful magical object or a living being with extreme magical affinity. They could be right here, in this very room, existing as shadows of energy—watching, waiting for someone weak enough or strong enough to serve as their bridge.”

Chloé snapped her head up. Her ears went rigid and her eyes locked onto a shadowy corner of the office. “Watching,” she repeated, her voice raising the hairs on my arms.

Ronan looked at her with renewed intensity. “Exactly. And that’s why I called you here. The three of you were at the epicenter of the rupture. You were directly exposed to the radiation of that dimension. Your magical cores were bathed in an energy that does not belong to this world.”

Leah frowned, crossing her arms over her chest. “What are you trying to say, Master? Are we contaminated?”

Ronan didn’t answer immediately. He approached Chloé, who let out a low growl, warning him to keep his distance. The Master did not flinch.

“Tell me, Chloé. When you separated from them in the forest, before the final battle… why did you really do it? The report says you went to scout, but your eyes say otherwise.”

Chloé hesitated. She looked at Leah, then at me. Finally, she lowered her guard.

“It wasn’t just instinct,” she confessed softly. “I felt a call. It wasn’t a voice—it was like a vibration in my bones. Something was drawing me toward the deepest darkness of the forest, away from the village lights. I ran until the trees felt different, as if their bark were made of black velvet.”

Leah and I moved closer, listening with our hearts in our throats. Chloé had never told us the details of that moment.

“It was a place without light, but it wasn’t empty,” the wolf continued. “There was a presence. It wasn’t the elemental. It was something… quadrupedal, made of pure shadows twisting like smoke. It spoke to me. Not with words, but by planting ideas in my mind. It told me that my power wasn’t something ‘new’ or an accident. It said that my lineage and Lotte’s power come from an ancient source. A source on the other side.”

Ronan closed his eyes and nodded, as if a piece of a millennia-old puzzle had just fallen into place. “That confirms it. The breach doesn’t connect to just one dimension of pure energy. There are layers. Different shores. It’s a multiverse of overlapping planes.”

“Confirm what?” I demanded, stepping toward the desk. “Tell us the truth, Ronan!”

“You resonated with one of those planes,” he explained with absolute seriousness. “Liselotte, your ice magic has always been unusually pure, unusually cold. Chloé, your transformation and your instincts… they are more than simple beast traits. The breach recognized you. Or perhaps, you recognized the breach.”

Leah stepped forward, placing herself between us and Ronan in an instinctive gesture of protection. “Is this a threat to them? Are they going to be hunted because of this?”

“Not by me,” Ronan assured. “But it is dangerous. If that energy remains linked to you, you could become beacons for the things that crossed over. If you start feeling anything strange—lucid dreams, calls in the dark, sudden changes in the temperature of your magic, or if you see things others don’t…”

He stared at us with a gravity that made King William look like a child playing at soldiers.

“I want you to inform me immediately. Don’t go to the church. Don’t go to the court mages. Come to me. The Guild is the only place that understands the world is far larger—and far more terrifying—than the scriptures claim.”

I nodded slowly, feeling the weight of a new kind of responsibility settle on my shoulders. Leah’s week of waiting now seemed like child’s play compared to the possibility that something might be tracking us from the shadows of another reality.

When we left the office, the bustle of the Guild was still there. Adventurers were still drinking, missions still hung on the boards, and the sun was still setting over Whirikal. But to me, everything looked different. The colors seemed a little paler, and the shadows in the corners of the building seemed to have a depth I hadn’t noticed before.

We walked together toward the exit, but this time we weren’t alone. I felt as though we were walking a tightrope stretched over an infinite abyss.

“The breach didn’t close completely,” I whispered as we stepped out into the cool afternoon air.

Leah took my arm, giving me strength. “No, Lotte. It just stopped screaming. Now it’s whispering.”

And as the lights of the capital began to ignite one by one, I knew that our struggle for Leah’s crown was only the first act of a much darker play that was just beginning to unfold. The world was breaking, and we were standing right in the crack.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep