Argent Sanctum Archive - 0

The Argent Sanctum's training yard lay silent under a bruised twilight sky, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood and the lingering musk of wyvern ichor. Aden Vasco stood at its center, his body a map of fresh scars and fading bruises, his breaths shallow but steady. Ser Varek loomed beside him, a monolith of weathered muscle and coiled tension, his lone eye glinting like a shard of flint in the fading light. 

"You survived," Varek grunted, his voice roughened by decades of shouting over clashing steel. He circled Aden, his gaze clinical, assessing. "Bones harder. Reflexes sharper. Your body's crossed into rank of a Black Knight. Congratulations, boy. Most don't last a week." 

Aden said nothing. His hands flexed at his sides, still trembling from the morning's trial—a sparring match against twin wyverns, their claws shearing grooves into the arena's ancient stone. He'd won. Barely. 

Varek stopped in front of him, close enough that Aden could smell the stale ale on his breath. "But your aura?" The old gladiator snorted. "Weak. Flickers like a guttered candle. A common knight could crush you with a glance." 

Aden's jaw tightened. He knew it was true. Though his muscles now carried the density of forged iron and his bones the resilience of Sanctum steel, his spiritual presence—the invisible force that could paralyze foes or shatter shields—remained pitiful. A flaw his father would have sneered at. A weakness Kairus Varkaine would exploit. 

Varek clapped a calloused hand on his shoulder, the weight deliberate, almost paternal. "Rest. Two days, we begin sword training. Whatever's left of your aura… we'll scrape it together." 

The hand withdrew, leaving a phantom pressure. Varek strode toward the Sanctum's iron gates, his shadow stretching long and jagged across the sand. "Don't wander," he called over his shoulder. "This place eats the curious." 

Alone, Aden stared at his reflection in a pool of wyvern blood. His face stared back—hollow-cheeked, eyes sunken and bruise-dark. A stranger's face. 'Pathetic', Ed Vasco's voice hissed in his memory. 'You inherit our name, yet you wield it like a beggar.' 

He turned away. 

The Sanctum's corridors swallowed him whole, their walls hewn from basalt so black it seemed to drink the torchlight. Aden moved like a ghost, his footsteps silent against the uneven stone. Rest was impossible. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw them—Kairus's cold, calculating gaze; his own men's bodies strewn across the Dahaka wastes; Egmund's chains rattling in the depths of his mind. 

*'Something more.' 

The thought coiled, venomous, in his chest. He needed power—not just the crude strength of flesh, but the kind that carved legends. The kind that made empires kneel. 

He found himself at the foot of a spiraling staircase, its steps worn smooth by centuries of desperate feet. Above, a rusted iron door loomed, its surface etched with the Vasco crest: a serpent coiled around a shattered crown. The air here was colder, sharper, laced with the scent of mildew and something older—parchment, ink, and the faint, sweet rot of decaying leather. 

'The Sanctum's Archive.' 

The Vasco family's trove of secrets. Forbidden techniques, battle strategies, records of every pact made with the abyss. Ed Vasco had once boasted that its shelves held the answers to any question, provided one was willing to bleed for them. 

Aden climbed. 

The door groaned open, its hinges screaming. Inside, the archive stretched into darkness, a labyrinth of towering shelves crammed with scrolls, tomes, and artifacts that glinted dully in the flicker of Aden's torch. Cobwebs draped the ceiling like burial shrouds, and the floor was a mosaic of cracked tiles, each inscribed with runes that prickled against his boots. 

He stepped inside, the door slamming shut behind him. The air thickened, pressing against his lungs. Somewhere in the shadows, something scuttled—a rat, perhaps, or something less natural. 

Aden's torchlight danced over spines of leather and vellum. Titles glared back: 'The Eighteen Curses of the Southern Sword. Blood Oaths of the First Swordsmen. On the Cultivation of Wrath.' He trailed his fingers over the texts, dust swirling in his wake. His father's voice slithered through his mind, sharp with disdain. 

'Weakness is a choice. Power is taken.' 

At the archive's heart stood a stone pedestal, its surface scarred by deep grooves. Resting atop it was a tome bound in cracked leather, its pages swollen with humidity. The Vasco crest adorned its cover, the serpent's eyes inlaid with chips of obsidian that seemed to follow Aden's movements. 

He reached for it. 

The shadows recoiled. The torch flared back to life. 

The tome fell open to a page warped by time. Faded ink depicted a swordsman mid-strike, his blade arcing in a crescent of fire. Beneath it, a single phrase: 

"The Path of Sundered Skies: To wield this technique is to court annihilation. Let the unworthy turn back." 

Aden's pulse quickened. He'd heard whispers of this—a Vasco heirloom technique, lost after the Blood Purge. It required immense amounts of training. 

Footsteps echoed. Aden snapped the tome shut, but it was too late. 

"Fool." 

Varek stood in the doorway, his face carved from stone. "You think you're the first to skulk here? The first to dig up corpses for power?" He strode forward, his gaze locked on the tome. "That technique butchered three generations of Vasco swordsmen. Drove them mad. Reduced their bodies to ash." 

Aden didn't flinch. "Then why keep it?" 

Varek's eye narrowed. For a moment, Aden thought he saw something flicker—regret? Fear? 

"Because," Varek said quietly, "the Vasco curse is hunger. To gnaw at the bones of the past, even as they poison you." He snatched the tome, his knuckles whitening. "This isn't the way. Not for you." 

"Why?" Aden's voice rose, sharp with desperation. "Because I'm weak? Because my father—" 

"Because you're alive!" Varek's roar shook the shelves. Dust rained down. "The Patriarch doesn't have time for the like of you. I do. And you'll train as I say, when I say." 

Silence fell, heavy and suffocating. Somewhere, a droplet of water struck stone. 'Plink. Plink. Plink.' 

Varek exhaled, the anger draining from him. "Two days. Rest. Or I'll drag you to the arena unconscious." He turned, the tome tucked under his arm. "The archive isn't your answer, boy. Only more teeth." 

The door slammed. Aden stood alone, the shadows pressing closer. 

But he didn't just leave. 

Deep into the night, he retuned, he combed the shelves, his fingers raw from crumbling parchment. He found nothing—only fragments, half-truths, riddles. The archive mocked him, its secrets guarded by decay. 

Then, as the torch burned low, he spotted it: a gap between shelves, hidden behind a tapestry frayed to threads. Beyond it, a narrow staircase descended into blackness. 

The air here was different—thicker, colder. The walls wept moisture that glistened like oil. At the bottom, a chamber waited, its floor littered with bones. Human? Animal? Aden didn't look closely. 

The room only contained a few number of scrolls.

At its center stood an altar of black stone, its surface etched with spiraling runes. Upon it lay a single scroll, its seal unbroken—a drop of wax imprinted a strange sigil: an eye within a sunless crown. 

Aden broke the seal. 

The scroll unfurled, its parchment unnaturally smooth, cold as a corpse's skin. The ink shimmered, not black, but a deep, venomous green. 

"To the Unworthy Heir," he read. "You have tasted Wrath. Now swallow it whole." 

Diagrams followed. A sword stance that bent the spine into impossible angles. Incantations in a tongue that burned Aden's eyes. And at the bottom, a warning: 

"The Seventh Wrath consumes all. Flesh. Memory. Soul. Proceed, and be unmade." 

Aden's hands shook. Egmund smirked, the chains that pulled in down clacked. 

Images flooded Aden's mind—a sword cleaving mountains, shadows devouring armies, a throne of bones beneath a starless sky. Power. Glory. 'Ascension.' 

But beneath it, faint, he heard screams. 

He hesitated. 

'Weakness is a choice,' Ed Vasco sneered. 

Aden's fingers tightened on the scroll. He began to read.