The Path Of The Buried Light (Part-2)

Ardyn had read about it in forbidden texts, half-whispered histories of the Covenant's darker experiments. A sacred path that had gone terribly, catastrophically wrong.

1. Vein of Eclipse

The black tendrils weren't just corruption—they were conduits. The temple wasn't bleeding; it was digesting. Every surface they touched became part of its network, rewriting reality in slow, creeping increments. That was why Therion's spatial magic faltered—the temple was eating the very fabric of space between points, leaving gaps where his jumps should have been seamless.

2. Gaze of the Drowned Sun

The altar's eye wasn't just watching them. It was recording. Every second they spent in the temple, every panicked breath, every failed escape—it was all being fed back into the darkflame, refining its understanding of them. That was the "singing" Ardyn heard—the echo of countless victims before them, their memories and fears recycled into the temple's pulse.

3. Hunger of the Unmourned

The Path of Buried Light didn't just consume matter. It fed on concepts. Light. Sound. Hope. That was why the air felt so heavy, why every step was a battle—the temple was leaching their will to fight, turning their own resolve against them.

Lyria stared at him. "...You're telling me we're trapped in a temple that eats thoughts?"

Ardyn nodded weakly.

Therion's laugh was sharp, jagged. "Of course we are."

The realization hit Therion like a punch to the gut.

The temple's distortion wasn't random. It was learning. Every time he forced a spatial jump, every time his magic flickered—the darkflame adapted, mirroring his movements but with terrifying precision. Where his power was unstable, wild, the temple's was cold, calculated.

A dark reflection of his own abilities.

Lyria swore violently as another section of the wall crumbled, the black veins surging forward like living things. "Great. So we can't fight it, we can't outrun it—what can we do?"

Ardyn's breath hitched. "...We break the pattern."

The words hung in the thick air, fragile but defiant. For a moment, the temple's pulse stuttered - as if the darkness itself had paused to listen.

Lyria's knife hand twitched. "And how exactly do we do that?" Her voice was all rough edges, but her eyes flickered to the black veins snaking across the walls, calculating.

Therion wiped blood from his split lip, spatial energy crackling along his fingertips in unstable bursts. "Yeah, scholar boy. Unless you've got a magic equation for 'make the evil temple stop eating us'-"

"The Path requires order," Ardyn interrupted, his voice gaining strength as the idea took shape. He pressed a hand to the wall - not recoiling when the darkflame recoiled from him, the aether-sickness in his veins making his touch poison to its hunger. "It consumes in patterns. So we... we feed it chaos."

A beat of silence. Then Lyria's grin cut through the gloom like a blade.

"Oh, I can do chaos."

She moved before the others could react - driving her knife not into the walls, but into the floor, carving a jagged line through the intricate mosaic of Covenant script. The tiles screamed.

Therion barked a laugh, wild and unsteady. "Fuck it. Let's dance."

His next spatial jump wasn't a clean phase - it was a stumble, deliberately messy, leaving behind a spray of blood and strands of hair that the darkflame lunged for greedily. The temple's rhythm faltered, the pulse stuttering like a skipped heartbeat.

Ardyn joined them, reciting prime numbers backwards, his voice shaking but relentless. Each syllable hit the air like a hammer blow, disrupting the whispers that slithered through the stones.

The temple convulsed.

Walls bent at impossible angles. The altar's single eye rolled wildly, its pupil dilating then contracting like a panicked creature. The darkflame veins spasmed, some retreating while others lashed out blindly.

And then -

A wet, ragged gasp from the shadows.

The scholar emerged not with grandeur, but like a man crawling from his own grave. His too-many eyes blinked at them, human and hollow all at once, tears carving paths through the filth on his face.

"You... shouldn't be here," he rasped, his voice a battlefield of man and monster.