LOGIN(Apollo)Then he saw it.A small triangle of parchment. Barely visible. Poking from a rip along the side of the mattress where the fabric had torn open.Apollo went still. The entire ruined chamber seemed to narrow around that tiny pale edge. No flame moved. No shadow breathed. No bell rang now, or if it did, the sound had retreated beyond relevance.Apollo crossed the room with terrifying care. Broken glass cracked softly beneath his boots. A thin trail of blood followed from his knuckles, dotting the ash-streaked floor. He stood beside the bed and looked down at the tear.The parchment waited. Small. Quiet. Patient as sin.He reached for it. His fingers were almost gentle when they took hold of the exposed edge and pulled.The parchment slid free with a dry whisper. It was old. Older than the mattress. Older than the room’s current arrangement. The edges had softened with age, one corner darkened by heat or time. It had been folded many times, then flattened, then folded again, hidd
(Apollo)Adelaide's scent was faint. Almost gone. But not gone enough.The discovery struck harder than it should have.Her scent lingered across the bedding in fragile traces, woven through the fabric so lightly that another demon might have missed it entirely. Apollo did not. He recognised her instantly. For one brief, terrible moment, relief flooded through him. Because she was there, this was proof that she still existed somewhere in the world beyond his reach.Then the relief died, because another scent emerged beneath it. Smoke. Leather. Cold ash. Shadow.Cael.Apollo's eyes opened. Slowly. Very slowly.The room seemed to tighten around him. The mountain itself felt quieter. Listening. Waiting.His gaze followed the scent toward the narrow space beside the bed where several travel items had been stored. A pack rested against the wall. A weapons case sat beside it. Partially concealed beneath both lay a dark cloak that had likely gone unnoticed for too long.Cael’s cloak.Apollo
(Apollo) By the time Apollo reached the eastern residential wing, the rage had changed shape. It was no longer sharp. It was vast. A red ocean beneath a black sky. The corridors grew quieter the deeper he moved into the palace. Torchlight shivered against dark stone. Ancient shadows gathered between pillars carved from volcanic glass. The servants who saw him coming vanished almost immediately, disappearing through side passages and service doors with the instincts of prey scenting a predator. No one stopped him. No one dared. Because everyone in the palace knew which chambers waited at the end of this corridor. Cael's. The guards outside his doors knelt before he came into view. One pressed his forehead so hard to the floor that blood smeared the stone. Apollo passed without acknowledgment. The doors opened for him, but too slowly. He tore one from its hinges. The sound of it ripping free rolled through the small chamber like thunder beneath the mountain. The door struck t
(Apollo)He found three mentions of Arkael.One placed him dead at the western breach. One placed him fleeing through the lower tunnels with a bloodied hand pressed to his side. One claimed he had been seen carrying a child.Apollo went very still. The vault seemed to tilt around that single line.He read it again. Seen carrying a child.No gender listed. No age. No identifying mark. No witness name. The report was unsigned, marked unreliable in a hand Apollo recognised as his own. A cruel annotation slashed across the margin: fantasy born of panic. Discard.His fingers hovered above the words.He remembered writing that.The war had been chaos then, every corridor wet with blood, every loyalist inventing miracles to comfort themselves, every surviving servant insisting someone had escaped, someone important, someone who would return one day wrapped in prophecy and vengeance. Apollo had dismissed most of it because it was mostly nonsense. Hope made liars of the defeated. He had learne
(Apollo)The deeper he searched, the more the missing places multiplied.Here, a burned census. There, a sealed birth registry with half its pages fused together by ancient fire. A witness ledger where someone had scratched a name out so violently that the parchment had torn. A marriage oath with the final line missing. A ward-tag bearing an Emberborn seal, but no attached record.He read until the chamber smelled of warmed vellum and old dust stirred by wrath, until the torchlight made gold and black dance over his hands, until his eyes ached from lines too small and meanings too incomplete.Nothing.Nothing definitive. Nothing Apollo could hold up to the light and name accusation.That should have pleased him.It did not.The absence had shape. That was what unsettled him. Missing things were rarely clean. Real history bled at the edges. It contradicted itself. It left scars. Yet every path he followed seemed to arrive at the same impossible smoothness, as though someone had careful
(Apollo)The records chamber had not been opened by royal hand in centuries, and the mountain seemed to know it, the stone holding a peculiar stillness around the sealed doors, the sort of silence found in tombs built for kings and abandoned by time.Apollo knew that before the doors groaned apart, before the old hinges shrieked into the corridor with a sound like something waking hungry beneath stone, before the first stale breath of preserved dust, dead ink, and cold vellum slipped out to meet him. He knew because the mountain knew. He felt it in the way the wards around the archway tightened at his approach, recognised him, trembled, then obeyed. Ancient locks uncurled from the door’s black iron bones one by one, sigils flaring dull red beneath centuries of grime before guttering out again, as if even magic resented being dragged from sleep for the sake of an old wound.The corridor behind him lay silent. Too silent.The sort of silence that gathered around the Devil when Hell had
(Apollo)“Nothing… forbidden, my king,” the shadow demon said meekly.“What did happen?” Apollo asked softly. almost too softly.“She…” Aethan’s gaze flicked up, a flicker of something like awe in it. “She lit the runes, Majesty. Wherever she walked. The old ones. The Queen’s marks. The palace… lik
(Apollo)The watching demons stiffened.They felt it before he moved again, that subtle shift in the air when their king went from entertainment to execution. The court’s hunger faltered into caution. Stone seemed to tighten around them. The lava’s restless glow steadied, as if the realm itself lea
(Apollo)The soul screamed like metal being torn in half.The sound wasn’t just noise; it was vibration. It punched through the cavern walls, rattled ancient runes carved into stone, and made loose pebbles skitter across the iron walkways like fleeing insects. Even the lava seemed to flinch, its su
(Caeulm Ashborne)They passed by a balcony where molten rivers poured in slow, impossible arcs—fire falling upward, not down. Adelaide stepped to the railing without hesitation, eyes wide with awe. The glow from below lit her face from beneath, catching in her hair and turning it into a dark halo r







