Chapter 3

A bitter chill against his cheek jolted Edgar out of the endless blackness.

He gasped, the dry, gritty tang of ancient dust clogging his throat. The archives' lower basement remained swathed in dim shadow, with only a thin shaft of pale light filtering through the high, narrow windows—illuminating motes of dust drifting lazily through the air.

He still lay crumpled where he'd collapsed, his body drained and fragile, weighed down by bone-deep exhaustion and throbbing soreness.

It hadn't been a dream.

The thunderous roar lingering in his mind refused to fade, and fractured apocalyptic visions kept flickering at the edges of his sight—lingering phantoms he couldn't outrun.

He saw a catastrophic rift tearing the sky apart, a leviathan roaring amid towering flames, its wail shaking mountains to their core. Countless blurred faces flashed by, reduced to smoldering ash in the blink of an eye.

Edgar clung to the stone wall and hauled himself unsteadily to his feet, his chest tight with a primal fear he'd never known. That clay-sealed teardrop hidden in the forbidden tome had acted like a cursed trigger.

The moment his skin touched it, the long-buried horrors of an erased era had crashed headlong into his consciousness—brutal, unrelenting, and impossible to ignore.

Even more unsettling, Edgar could feel something inside him had irrevocably changed.

His senses had grown unnervingly sharp. He heard the dull metallic tick of an old clock several rooms away, each faint click carrying clearly through the solid stone walls.

He picked up the mildew clinging to yellowed parchment, catching the unique stale scent lingering in every shadowed corner of the archive.

Yet at the same time, a scorching heat pulsed through his veins; his temples throbbed violently, as if two smoldering shards of metal were about to pierce straight through his skull.

The Taint...

The term surfaced cold and unshakable from the back of his mind. He'd caught a glimpse of it once, scrawled in the faded margins of a forbidden text, labeled simply: the forgotten corruption.

Every pamphlet distributed by the Purity Commission painted it as a force of unhinged madness, ruin, and unforgivable heresy.

Was he... tainted?

Dizziness washed over him. He clung to the towering bookshelves for balance and stumbled toward the exit. All he wanted was to escape—to retreat to his cramped, quiet dormitory and pretend this nightmare had never happened.

But when he pushed open the archive's heavy doors and stepped out onto Highcourt's familiar, quiet streets, a sharp sense of alienation washed over him. The world itself felt like it was pushing him away, casting him out.

The sun blazed overhead. Civilians wandered the streets unconcerned, and polished guard armor glinted softly in the daylight. Nothing here resembled the broken, burning apocalypse still haunting his thoughts.

Edgar felt like a monster torn from the abyss, an outcast who had no right to stand beneath the same sun as ordinary people.

Trapped in paralyzing indecision, he suddenly felt the chaotic power raging in his mind yank him toward a faint, unmissable direction. An invisible thread tugged at his temples, guiding him deeper into Highcourt's labyrinthine streets, toward a run-down, isolated district he'd never known existed.

It was an uncanny pull—not a memory, nor a simple hunch, but something primal and instinctive: a resonant call. Somewhere in this forgotten quarter, something waited for him, reaching out to claim one of its own.

Driven by that unseen draw, Edgar pushed down his fear and confusion and followed where it led.

He pulled his hood low to hide his face, blending his slender frame into the crowd, melting into the stream of pedestrians like a single drop lost in a river—quiet, unremarkable, silently drawn toward the city's forgotten edge.

The farther he walked, the older and more weathered the surroundings became. Smooth flagstone roads gave way to rough, uneven cobblestones, and pristine storefronts faded into cramped, dilapidated cottages.

The air hung thick with the mingled scents of dried herbs, aged timber, and damp rot. This was a neglected pocket of Highcourt, left behind by the Silent Dynasty's grandeur, a place where even time dragged sluggishly.

At last, the pull led him to an unassuming shop—one easy for any passerby to miss entirely.

A weathered wooden sign hung above the door, bearing the faded engraving: The Dust Parlour. The entrance stood half-open, thin streams of dim, mystifying light seeping out from within—yet not a single sound escaped the shadowed interior.

Edgar lingered on the threshold for a long, tense moment, his heart pounding wildly in his chest. He had no idea why he'd been led here, nor what waited beyond that door.

Still, the strange resonance inside him only grew more insistent, an unspoken pressure urging him forward, refusing to let him turn back.

Drawing a trembling breath, he reached out and pushed the creaking wooden door open, stepping into the unknown.

Delicate shell chimes jingled softly as he crossed the threshold.

Their tone was crisp and hollow, echoing through the shop's heavy silence.

The parlour was swathed in dim twilight, thick with the accumulated dust of decades—far heavier than anything in the Royal Archives.

Towering shelves filled the space, lined with an odd, eerie collection of relics: rusted clockwork gears, cracked clay idols, unidentifiable creature bones, and rows of sealed glass vials brimming with murky, unknown liquids.

The whole space felt like a graveyard for lost eras—so deathly quiet you could almost hear the dust settle on the floor.

A slow, drawling elderly voice drifted from behind the counter.

"Stare all you want, but keep your hands to yourself. Break anything in here, and you'll be drowning in debt for the rest of your days."