Veins of Power

---

The air beyond the root-woven arch shimmered with chill, then fell away into a weightless hush. The steps turned from rough earth to cool, worked stone: slabs patterned with luminous veins, filigreed like frost. Their footfalls echoed, strange and faint, absorbed by vastness ahead.

Eiran paused at the edge, heart pounding, the last touch of root yielding to emptiness. When he raised the star stone for light, it pulsed of its own accord, waking rivers of blue-white beneath their feet—paths streaming outward into the dark. The light flickered, casting patterns more ancient than any human craft.

The tunnel bloomed open on a city of the dead: vaults, domes, and spires lost in layered gloom. Columns rose like petrified trees, their surfaces inset with shifting constellations, and everywhere, bands of crystal sent pale radiance racing along the walls and up the heights. Plinths bearing sigils of star and sun studded the causeways, half-shattered and aglow with memory. Dust motes shone in the air, falling like slow snow.

For a long, trembling moment, they simply looked—each soul weighed by the silence, awed and dwarfed by the magnitude of what time had hidden.

"By every oath I ever broke," Talin said under his breath, voice touched with reverence, "No living map holds record of this."

Narsa's lips parted, breath shallow. "The Aeldran... their glyphs—see there? These patterns are not a warning. They're an invitation. This was a haven once. For scholars, thinkers—something more."

Mira stepped forward, running her fingers along a pillar. At her touch, grooves lit gold, projection unfolding like a web: dioramas spun from starlight, showing figures dressed in layered robes, drawing gleaming strands into the air—sculpting light as stone. One figure, adorned in a circlet of seven points, pressed their palm to a pedestal, and crystal arrays bloomed, weaving images into reality.

"They must have channeled the Star’s power directly," Mira breathed. "Not as priests or warlocks, but as a people—this whole city is a conduit."

Eiran moved in a daze through the soft glow, the star stone in his hand resonating with the lines beneath him. Visions pressed at the edge of thought—fragments of memories too old to belong to him. He glimpsed laughter, voices discussing the dance of worlds, and a sensation of purpose: this city was built to remember—and to prepare.

They followed the main avenue, skirting collapsed walls and pools where glassy waters reflected impossible lights. As they passed, pulsing lines branched upward, tracing runes in the air. A chamber ahead drew them: one vast as a cathedral, with a dais at its heart, and three tall devices circling it—impossibly delicate, all wires and prism facets, focused on a floating sphere the color of molten silver.

Narsa approached first, breathless. "Careful," she cautioned, though her hand itched to touch. The others fanned out, scanning for threats.

Eiran knelt at the edge of the dais, eyes caught by an inscription in old glyph. He read haltingly, helped by pulses in the star stone, the meaning crawling into his bones:

To heal the fracture, We gave what we could not keep. The Light asks its price, But the Path endures beyond shadow.

Mira ran a finger over one of the artifacts—a lens hooded in crystal—and it came alive in her hands, reconfiguring with soft clicks. Symbols coalesced, showing a map: star-shards fallen across the world, each point glowing in distant darkness. The next step in their journey shivered into stark relief before them—a path leading east, marked by two interlaced circles of fire and night.

Talin caught a glimmer at the chamber’s edge: a case, untouched by rot. Inside, a set of small, pronged rods—keys, or tools—rested upon velvet faded to shadow. Above the case hovered a disk, inscribed with stars identical to Eiran’s stone.

“Tools for barriers, I’d wager. Or locks that only heed their own,” Talin mused, pocketing the rods. "They may be useful. Or lethal."

But it was Narsa who transfixed them, caught beneath the floating sphere. Her eyes shone, reflecting the silver like liquid hope. She reached out, trembling. The device responded, bands of light extending toward her palm.

“Narsa, wait—” Mira warned, but the mage ignored her, breath hitching with awe.

The sphere pulsed brighter, threads of power snaking up Narsa’s arms. Her expression transformed from wonder to ecstasy to sudden terror—her body taut, eyes and veins glowing with radiant star-fire. Magic poured into her, merging, reshaping—her will and the sphere’s design locked in battle. Memories that were not hers pressed into her mind: the founding oaths of the city, the smashing of the star, the final, desperate weaving of magic into roots.

Eiran leaped forward, heedless of pain, grabbing her wrist. “Narsa! Let go—look at me! It’s devouring you!”

Light burst between them—his star stone sparking against the silver sphere’s tendrils. The air snapped with white agony; Narsa screamed, a sound of shattering boundaries. The current shifted, power bleeding out between their locked hands until, with a deafening pop, the sphere’s light flickered and snapped back, retreating like water rushing from a breached dam.

Narsa crumpled, breath wheezing, eyes rimmed with silver fire. Mira rushed in, supporting her shoulders, murmuring comfort. For a moment, none spoke, too shaken even for fear.

When Narsa looked up, the silver glow lingered in her gaze, but she seemed present, her own self once more. “I—It offered me... everything. Knowledge, power, solace. I could’ve burned through every lock, healed the land—or broken it.”

“But it would’ve hollowed you out,” Mira finished softly. “Left nothing but the magic wearing your skin.”

Eiran’s hand still tingled from the jolt, but the pact between all three—born of trust, pain, and rescue—settled like a balm over wounds not yet mended.

They gathered the artifacts: Mira’s lens, Talin’s keys, Eiran’s ever-pulsing stone, and a slender rod of etched crystal Narsa found by her side. The moment each item was claimed, a tremor scrolled through the city—stone and crystal groaning, conduits darkening by slow degrees. Somewhere, a chime sounded, reverberating deep in the earth, and shadows thickened at the periphery as if the act of taking had awakened something else.

A shadow rippled across one ruined dome, its form too fluid for flesh but too weighty for mist. Where it passed, the veins of light guttered and died. Eiran felt cold fingers brush the back of his mind, a memory of hunger and betrayal woken anew.

“We’re not alone,” Talin hissed, bow raised. “Something comes, drawn by what we’ve disturbed.”

Narsa, eyes serious now, pushed herself upright. “We need to go. Whatever built this place left guardians. Or left it as bait for things much worse.”

Mira nodded, finger tightening on a hilt. “To the far passage—the map showed the next path east. Quickly—before the past’s shadows grow teeth.”

They slipped from the dais, the machinery closing behind them with a hiss and the city trembling as if in slow-breathing pain. As they ran, stars flickered wanly in the corridors and the tremor behind them grew. The shadow’s echo kept pace in darkness, patient, endlessly hungry, waiting for a moment of weakness.

At last, through a spiral gate sharp with failing light, the party scrambled into an upper tunnel. Behind them, the dome’s heart went dim—city sinking again into true, silent dark. At the last threshold, Eiran lingered, feeling both loss and the certainty that the world’s oldest wounds never truly close. Mira paused with him, hand brushing his, grounding him, their gazes meeting in a hush thick with gratitude and something tenderer, unspoken but growing strong enough to outlast even magic and ruin.

They pressed onward, heavier with gifts and ghosts. Beneath roots and memory, the world’s veins of power pulsed—some spent, some still dangerous, all promising the cost of hope before the coming storms gave way to dawn.

---