The Shadow Codex trembled again—sharper this time—as if a sleeping god had stirred within its pages. Marcus Valen's fingers twitched beneath his robe, gripping the ancient leather-bound tome. The sensation was unlike anything he'd experienced since the book's reappearance in this life: not just a thrum of power, but a sharp, insistent urgency.
He stood alone in the deepest vault of the Astral Spire's Grand Library, where dust motes danced like ghosts in the thin shafts of light filtering through cracked stone windows. This place reeked of forgotten knowledge and the lingering resentment of scholars who had once sought answers and found only madness. He had bribed, manipulated, and blackmailed his way past every ward and librarian to reach this chamber, past scrolls so old their parchment threatened to crumble under the weight of a single breath.
And now, this.
Before him lay an unmarked, cloth-bound volume, nestled between two crumbling tomes labeled Elements and Embers. No record of it existed in any catalog. Yet as he reached out, the air around it pulsed with a wrongness—a subtle gravity that pulled at the marrow of his bones. He flipped open the cover.
Annihilation Annals
The ink shimmered, almost alive. As he turned the brittle pages, fragments of history bled into his mind—images not written but remembered: burning cities wreathed in violet flame, towers collapsing into void-black abysses, and eyes—too many eyes—watching from places that should not exist.
Then, tucked between the leaves, he found not a map to a distant land, but a cryptic clue—a diagram of the Spire's own foundations, pointing to a sealed entrance deep within the catacombs below. The moment his finger traced the diagram, the Codex surged against his chest. Ink bled across a blank page in wild spirals before settling into legible form:
Void Pact... The Key to the Celestial Vault.
A whisper brushed the edge of his consciousness—not a sound, but an intent. A presence older than memory. For a heartbeat, he saw not the library, but a vast chamber of floating stones and a door sealed with chains of living shadow. This was no coincidence. He had come seeking truths about the Element Wars, but he had found a path leading to the very origin of the world's pain.
He descended into the ruins beneath the Spire, a place rumored to have been sealed since the wars. The air grew cold, thick with the scent of decay and ancient magic. There, he found it: a collapsed tomb marked with the sigils of the Starlight Concord, an ancient pact between human mages and the Starborn—precursors to the legendary Star-Dome Civilization. As he stepped across the threshold, the Codex reacted violently, its pages flipping on their own as a name, unspoken for centuries, echoed through the stone corridors: Nilos Vesta.
"You should not have come here, child of Valen."
The voice came from the shadows. An old man emerged, his robes those of an imperial historian, but his eyes held the weary weight of ages. Nilos Vesta. He was a guardian of this place, his allegiance not to the Crown, but to the suppression of these ancient, dangerous truths.
"The past should remain buried," Nilos said, his voice a low hiss.
"The past is a weapon," Marcus countered. "And it was used to destroy my family. I am simply reclaiming it."
Their verbal duel escalated into a magical one. Nilos employed forbidden Chrono-Seal spells, weaving shimmering nets of temporal energy designed to bind Marcus in stasis. Time itself seemed to slow and thicken around Marcus. But the Shadow Codex, sensing mortal danger, activated instinctively. It pulsed once, hard, absorbing a sliver of Nilos's own power—a concept flashed in Marcus's mind: +2% Fate Resonance.
The stolen resonance granted him a fleeting, fractured vision of the immediate future—Nilos faltering, a crack in the stone behind him. With this newfound clarity, Marcus sidestepped the temporal net and countered with a reconstructed variant of Astral Projection, a technique recorded in the Codex's newly unlocked pages. He didn't strike Nilos's body, but his connection to the tomb's ambient magic.
With a cry of shock, Nilos Vesta vanished, leaving behind only a scorched scroll and the lingering scent of ozone. In the tomb's inner sanctum, Marcus found what the historian had been guarding: a partially intact Star-Dome Tablet Fragment.
Its inscriptions reacted to his touch. A surge of alien energy flooded him, momentarily awakening a dormant ability: Void Affinity. The world fractured. For a terrifying second, he could see the invisible threads of fate connecting everything, the discordant shimmer of lies, the heavy, dark cord of an ancient curse. The sensory overload was agonizing, but it passed, leaving him breathless.
He had just emerged from the catacomb entrance, tablet fragment secured, when he was ambushed. Augustus Glem and his faction blocked his path, with Lena Sering standing slightly behind their leader.
"Going somewhere, Valen?" Augustus sneered. "I have it on good authority you've stolen a restricted artifact from the archives." He gestured to Lena, who stepped forward.
"I saw him," Lena stated, her voice trembling with practiced falsehood. "He was carrying a tablet wrapped in cloth."
But Marcus, bolstered by his new power, could now perceive the faint, ugly flicker of her illusion magic clinging to her words. "An interesting performance, Lena," he said calmly. "But your illusion is flawed. You've forgotten to mask the traces of your own intent." He focused his will, empowered by the faint echo of Void Affinity. "Look closer, Augustus. Can't you see the lie shimmering around her?"
He didn't have the power to reveal it to everyone, but he could project the idea of it. Doubt flickered across the faces of Augustus's followers. Augustus himself, already paranoid, shot a suspicious glare at Lena. Though he stormed off in fury, the damage was done. His authority had suffered another blow, and Marcus had earned the begrudging attention of several neutral onlookers—including Valk Taron, who watched from the shadows with a newfound respect.
That night, alone in his dormitory, Marcus examined the Star-Dome Tablet Fragment. It hummed softly, resonating with the Shadow Codex. A new entry burned itself onto the parchment of his soul-bound book.
Page 31 Unlocked – Fate Echo: Recall of the First Fall
(A historical reenactment of the betrayal that shattered the Starlight Concord)
Before he could activate it, a shadow flickered across his wall—a presence not of this world. Somewhere far away, the Fate Observer watched, whispering into the void:
"Mark one… passed."
And the next trial began to take shape.