Lewis stood alone in the darkness. It felt like a roaring storm surrounded him, with heavy gusts pushing against him from every direction. The screams had faded—not gone, but more distant. The smell of smoke drifted to his nostrils, and in the blackness, a pinprick of flickering orange light came into being. He waited, watching it closely.

It hung there, never drawing closer but not fading away. He took a couple of steps forward. The ground beneath his feet felt uneven. Looking down, he watched as battered and broken cobblestones stretched out from where he stood like ripples in a puddle. They wound their way forward, not directly, but in the direction of the orange light. Just as he thought about how flat it was, he felt the cobbles gently beginning to decline. The light shifted, no longer directly ahead but downward and brighter.

The cobbles meandered down towards it, spreading faster and faster. As they reached out, walls began to form, building up out of the darkness. They were like nothing he had seen before; Tristan’s architecture was basic, but here it was elegant and detailed, and it felt old, much older than anything Lewis had ever seen.

Before he could call out, a young man ran past him screaming, seemingly emerging out of nowhere. Lewis turned after him to find him frozen in place, encased in, what looked like ice for a moment but was denser, almost like crystal. He turned back to the burning light, and now there were dozens of people—maybe hundreds—running for a brief moment and then, in an instant, encased in the same crystal. Some of them froze alone; others huddled in a group, all with the same look of terror on their faces and their last screams frozen along with them.

‘What in the world?’ Lewis muttered to himself. More and more of his surroundings began to materialise, as if in answer to his question. The further he walked, the more people he saw, horrified and encased in crystal, all running in the same direction. A gap between the buildings appeared, revealing an enormous crater-like valley and a city ablaze at the centre. Everywhere Lewis looked around him, the ground was scorched and barren.

‘Seeker,’ an omnipresent voice whispered, emotionless and genderless. Lewis looked around for a source but found himself standing alone, aside from the crystal-encapsulated people. Below him, a crumbling city burned in the barren crater. He took it all in, with a niggling feeling in the back of his mind that he had seen it before somewhere but couldn’t place it. ‘Come,’ the voice instructed.

Hesitantly, Lewis stepped forward, dust from the scorched earth plummeting up around his every step. "Where am I?’ He asked. Could the voice even hear him, or was he alone, stuck in some sort of dream or nightmare?

‘When,’ the voice corrected. ‘You are witnessing my birth and my destruction—a time mortals cannot remember and the end of a golden era. A juncture approaches at alarming speed. Only through action now may we tilt the scales of fate in the favour of the light, or the world will burn as Oldiron does before you now.’

The name took a moment to register with Lewis. And then, all at once, the memories that had been tugging at the back of his mind rushed forward. In the blink of an eye, the landscape around him shifted. Gone were the fires and burned earth, replaced by towering ruins in a lush, green valley. They had passed the ruins on their journey to find Thomas and Arthur, which felt like a lifetime ago.

Another blink, and the bright, life-filled landscape vanished, replaced once more by the wasteland. ‘Time is short, and his awakening is almost upon us now. Worlds tethered at a distance are being pulled closer as we speak.’

‘Who’s awakening, George? Anthony?’ Surely it couldn’t be them, could it? They had a habit of appearing wherever Lewis went, though, or at least George did since Anthony had attempted to usurp the throne. Anthony was locked up in the dungeon under constant guard back at the castle, though, and he would surely know if he was up to something.

The voice chuckled, which was somewhat unsettling to Lewis. He looked around him, hoping to pin down where it was coming from now that it had more of a human feel to it, but still nothing. Crystallised people were scattered through the broken streets, their numbers swelling, and Lewis found himself having to pick a path between them. ‘George is but a couple of stitches on a much larger tapestry, and Anthony much less. A snake has been sitting in your nest for far longer, and he is the one who should concern you, but I fear he has already seized his chance to run.’

‘These threads have long since been intertwined across decades, puppet strings at the hand of a Hellbringer. Now he is coming himself; once held firm in the grasp of Illborh, he has wormed his way free of death and prepares to walk among mortals once more. Stopping his return may be possible, but stopping his crusade to burn the world to the ground as he did Oldiron is necessary.’

'How do I know where to start? Who is the Hellbringer, and what do they want?' Lewis asked, the flickering orange light drawing him forward between the crystalized fleeing masses.

'He was a Precursor of extraordinary power and skill. Had he not fled to create the city of his namesake, Arcadia would have turned against him. It did eventually. He sought to conquer death. Not just to postpone it or avoid it as many have before, but to travel beyond the gateway and into her realm,' the voice continued in almost a whisper, as if it were divulging information to Lewis that it should not. 'He, Tristan, sought to slay Illborh, the Goddess of Death herself. With no one to preside over the passage between life and death, death would not be able to claim him, or anyone else for that matter. An endless, undying army at his command for all of eternity.'

'But he was stopped,' Lewis said. 'Arcadia lies in ruins; the world continues on, and the dead still die. If he didn't succeed, then surely by now Tristan is dead?'

'You are correct, Seeker,' the voice said. 'To the vast majority, life and death are something that is clear-cut, black and white. But not to him, not for him. His motivations may have been terrifying and wrong, but he was extremely powerful and clever.'

'Tristan created a failsafe that, in the event that Ilborh defeated him, as one would expect a divine power to, he would not die like any other person would. When someone dies, a devout of Ilborh, or occasionally Ilborh herself, takes the soul of the deceased and accompanies it on its final journey into the unknown that lies beyond life.' The voice sighed, almost as though defeated. 'Tristan found a way—don't ask me how; I don't know—to remove his own soul from his body and conceal it within a single, black gem atop the crown I once wore.'

As he spoke, the voice had descended from omnipresent to human and now, finally, to exhausted. Through the orange glow refracted by the crystalline figures, Lewis saw a slow shadow move. He pushed on, through the last of the people, emerging into a town square, the surrounding buildings engulfed in flame. At its centre stood a lone figure, hunched over an anvil, hammer in hand. 'You wore the crown?' Lewis asked.

'I did.' Looking up from the anvil, a wry smile crossed the weary face of a man Lewis recognised. Covered in soot and sweat, before him stood Arden Vandemark, the first king of Tristan. 'He told me we would look very alike, Koen.'

'Koen, he just fell from the sky in a green star with a sword,' Lewis said, his mind racing to try and keep up with all the new information.

In response, Arden set down the hammer, a leather-gloved hand lifting a sword from the anvil by the hilt and holding it up. It was identical to the one Lewis had touched moments before he found himself here. 'I know. I'm relieved he was able to follow my instructions. I knew Tristan had done something before I set off for Arcadia to try and stop him, but I wasn't sure what. I did my best to protect Lillian inside the tomb, but I had no way of knowing that if I failed, he would not find a way inside one day. Koen would be far beyond his reach until he was able to reach you and bring you here for me.'

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'So, what she was saying is true then: you sealed her inside the tomb in the garden until the time was right for her to be released?' Lewis asked.

'That is correct. A fool puts all of their eggs in one basket. They would be even more of a fool to do so when the fate of our very existence hangs in the balance,' Arden said. 'I believe that if Tristan is to return, then the crown will be needed to release his soul; that much is straight forward. What I have no way of knowing, however, is what will happen once his soul is released. He may be as he was when I knew him, or he may have been changed by the dark power he used to tether himself to existence. I also don't know if he will be able to recreate the power he used to store his soul in the gemstone in the first place.'

'Would destroying the stone stop him?'

'Before he is returned to life, almost certainly. After that, I can only speculate. It would depend on whether any of his soul was left tethered to the stone or not. If you can destroy the stone, then we may have our best shot at stopping him from ever returning. We have no way of knowing what form he will return in, but to take him on in battle would take a tremendous effort.'

'I had so many chances to destroy the stone; the crown has been around me for weeks,' Lewis said. Surely there could have been a way to get this information to him sooner; Arden had said to himself how much hung in the balance.

'I tried to get to you as soon as I could; do not think I didn't try everything within my power, as limited as it is trapped inside this memory,' Arden said, casting his gaze down over the sword as if he were ashamed at not being able to manage it. 'When Koen met you, he called you "Reclaimer" and I addressed you as "Seeker". Those titles are not by accident. The race to stop Tristan's return may not be winnable, try as we might, but that does not mean there are no other ways.'

'In his haste to destroy Oldiron, Tristan did not think to consider the power it once held, only that it held power that threatened him and his views for Arcadia and the rest of our world,' Arden said. 'If you are here, then you have reclaimed the sword from Koen. It is not by accident that you are here; this place holds a great many treasures to seek.'

Around the square, the fires seemed to quell at Arden's words as their surroundings reshaped themselves into a dark, cavernous room. 'Where are we now?' Lewis asked. The ceiling was rugged rock like the inside of a cave, but it was supported by intricately carved pillars like a temple that would have taken a thousand men years to perfect. Whether they held meaning or were simply decorative, Lewis couldn't help but stare at the symbols and pictures etched into the stone and gilded in gold.

Light seemed to filter down around them without a source, with tiny particles of dust floating in the air undisturbed. The room stretched on endlessly in every direction. 'We're in Tristan, far beneath the castle, to be precise,' Arden said. 'While he helped me design the castle, I would like to think I managed to keep some secrets from him, much as he tried to keep his own from me. This is the Aeos Athenaeum; it holds as many ancient texts and items as I could smuggle out of Arcadia without them realising, as well as some other curiosities.'

Arden led the way forward, walking with purpose and leaving Lewis to hurry after him. 'How did you manage to hide all this beneath the castle and not have anyone find it?' he asked.

'I wouldn't say no one has found it. Curious and inquisitive minds are more than capable, especially if they know the castle well,' he said. Arden looked around fondly as they passed aisles of books and cabinets with strange items sitting inside on small cushions. 'As you know, time to prevent Tristan's return is running short, and to catch up to him would be impossible, at least within the bounds of normal travel.'

'Where do we need to go?'

'The Orb of Embers was destroyed; I felt its shockwaves reverberate through time itself, but that was not the last option for Tristan to return. The easiest, for sure, but not the only. He seeks out a ruined temple, lost in the desert through the ages. It was once claimed, when deities walked the world, that it was home to Ziulla, the goddess of the undying. She would sit upon her throne of bones and decide who was worthy to pass through the Gate of Ilborh and who would be damned to spend eternity as the living dead.'

'Oria is the only place in the desert; even if we could get there, how would we find the temple if it has been lost for centuries?' Lewis asked, trailing behind Arden as he tried to take in his surroundings.

'Fortunately for us, the temple was only a small part of the civilization that was lost to the desert all those years ago,' he held out his hands as from between the stacks they emerged to a raised dais, intricate pillars supporting a domed roof gilded with gold. 'Scattered across the world are structures like this, each one a waypoint connected by the leylines of the planet, the pathways that hold the raw power that is a part of everything that has ever existed or will ever exist.'

'The location where the city was built was more than just a prosperous and defensible position I selected. This castle sits directly atop one of the nexuses of the leylines. I couldn't afford to let it fall into Tristan's hands. With enough time, he would begin to figure things out, and then there would be no stopping him on his quest for eternal life.'

'Does he know about the leylines?'

'More than likely. It's not something he ever had a lot of interest in, though. To him, they were just a part of the world like anything else; he didn't understand what they were or the power they held,' Arden said as he approached the dais.

Carved into the raised platform were deep channels cut into the stone in intricate patterns, flowing across the surface and over the sides into the ground around the edges. Hidden from view until you stood beneath the dome was a map that stretched across the ceiling. In the dark room, pinpricks of light marked points on the map, with faint lines connecting them. 'You created this?'

'I can't take all of the credit; I had some expert help from a retired navigator,' he said, stepping over to a plinth that stood to one side, a dusty tome sitting closed atop it. 'I was never able to complete it, but this book contains all the known waypoints I was able to plot. There are likely many more out there, either dormant or buried. Traversing the leylines is a dangerous endeavour, though, especially if you have no set destination.'

'You must make sure you're well prepared for anything. There are many dangers out there—creatures that inhabit the leylines and things beyond them seeking to pull you into the void. Even the elements are chaotic and violent there.' He rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt, offering his arm to Lewis. From his shoulder to the halfway point between his elbow and wrist, the skin looked as though it had been melted, and the scar of the burned flesh tinged a caustic green. 'I was unprepared for the Flare Winds on my first journey through the leylines,' he said, his eyes lingering on the scars for a moment before he withdrew his arm from Lewis' gaze and rolled the sleeve back down.

'How am I supposed to traverse the leylines? You were far more powerful than I'll ever be, and you know so much more about the leylines; I didn't even know they existed until you told me.' Lewis watched on as Arden began to thumb through the pages of the tome.

'Your power, so far, is largely untapped; I know that much, but you have started the course, and it will come in time. A lot of power can also be held in knowledge, but that too takes time and resources. There is much held in the library and even more in the athenaeum,' Arden said as he ran a finger down one of the pages before turning it and scanning the next. 'Fortunately, in the absence of time, we do have a way to cheat a little.'

From the front of his shirt, he produced a fine silver chain with an hourglass pendant filled with bright blue dust dangling from it. 'This will offer you some protection for a limited time, should you need it,' he said, unclasping it and turning to Lewis. Their eyes locked for a brief moment as he reached out, fastening the chain around Lewis' neck. 'It contains the dust of a leyline itself. Once turned, it will fill the space around you with its trace of leyline power, concealing you from anything that might be pursuing you or trying to reach out. To anything else, you will simply appear as a Flare Wind. It won't buy you much time, but it is something if you find yourself in a pinch.'

'Thank you,' he said, letting the pendant settle in his palm. The detail was incredible; the carvings around the metal that held the glass were almost as fine as the leyline dust inside it. 'I hope I won't need it.'

'As do I,' Arden said. 'The tome will have directions on how to use the waypoint. Oria was one of the last places I was able to map on the leylines, but there is a waypoint beyond that I didn't quite manage to reach before I had to return. It wasn't clear like an active waypoint; it was fuzzier, so I believe it has been sitting dormant for a very long time.'

Lewis was desperately trying to keep up, not wanting to forget anything that might be important. 'I don't know how I'm ever going to explain this to everyone. Even then, are they going to believe me?

'Don't worry, I've taken care of that,' Arden said.

Slowly, the darkness in the room closed in on them until all he could see was Arden standing before him, the pair of them illuminated by the blue glow of the leyline dust. Lewis blinked, and, for a moment, Arden remained, and they stood in the crater, the green flames still burning gently. Another blink, and he was gone.

'By the Gods!' Thomas breathed from behind him as Lewis became aware of their presence, the sword still lying on the floor at his feet.