The Hunt for Aegis

All night, rain hammered the rooftops of Constantinople. When morning came, the city gleamed beneath a heavy sky. Water pooled on every marble street, and the air smelled clean, scoured by the storm. Inside the palace, the quiet had a weight to it, as if secrets lingered in the shadows, left over from the night.

Constantine did not rest. Instead, he studied maps and records, reading old travelogues and copying the runes from the relic again and again. With each passing hour, he pieced together the scattered clues: tales of monks who vanished, villages that whispered of forbidden caves, strange lights in the hills. No single map gave an answer, but every story pointed toward the borderlands of ancient Phrygia-a region where law ended and legend began.