The darkness didn't hold him long.
It tore open.
[WARNING: FRAGMENTED MEMORY OF UNKNOWN ECHO DETECTED]
[INITIATING FORCED SYNCHRONIZATION TO PREVENT SOUL CORRUPTION]
[STABILIZATION COST: -20 SANITY POINTS]
He didn't choose to watch.
The System didn't care.
North. A village. Straw roofs and gray sky and the kind of silence that only exists right before something burns.
The horses came first, then the smoke.
Inquisition armor. The symbol he'd spent three lifetimes learning to hate stamped across every chest.
Raziel had no body here.
No hands, no weight, no way to move or look away, the System had locked him in like a man strapped to a chair, and all he could do was watch.
The village didn't last long.
He'd seen massacres before, he knew how they went. He'd stopped flinching at fire.
But then he saw her.
A woman, running through the smoke with a baby pressed against her chest.
She was fast and she almost made it but she got to the corner of the last standing building before an Inquisitor stepped out and cut her off.
She fought anyway.
She was too small. It didn't matter, she fought anyway.
The baby was ripped from her arms.
And that was when Raziel saw his face.
Six months old, maybe.
Wrapped in cloth that had been white before the smoke got to it.
Not crying just staring, wide-eyed, at the chaos around him with the calm of something that didn't understand yet that it should be afraid.
Azure eyes.
Pale blue, almost silver.
The kind of blue you didn't see in the capital.
The kind of blue that marked you as northern, as foreign, as other.
The kind of blue that followed you your whole life and made strangers look twice and families look away.
Those eyes.
Raziel knew those eyes.
He'd seen them every morning for fifteen years in every reflective surface he'd ever passed.
The vision collapsed.
'The System said Unknown Echo. When did I absorb something like that? I've never been to the north. I've never—'
GASP.
Cold water hit his face.
Raziel coughed, sputtered, and blinked until Lucian's face came into focus.
The idiot was holding an empty canteen and grinning like he'd just performed surgery.
"Told you it would work," Lucian said.
Raziel sat up and his head still rang.
His eyes were wet and he wiped them fast before anyone noticed.
Odessa was already kneeling beside him, her expression somewhere between concern and suspicion.
"What happened? You just dropped."
"I saw something," Raziel said, he kept his voice flat. "A vision of a village in the north, the Inquisitors burning it."
Kiera's hand went to her sword. "Inquisitors don't burn villages."
"I know what I saw."
"It could be the crypt affecting you," Odessa said carefully. "This place has residual dark energy. It can cause hallucinations."
Raziel didn't argue, he let her believe that.
'It wasn't a hallucination, that baby's eyes were real. That memory belonged to someone, and somehow it's inside me now.'
He got to his feet, his legs held.
"We keep going," he said.
"Raziel—" Odessa started.
"We keep going."
They did.
The air got worse the deeper they went. Thick and sweet in a way that turned the stomach.
Kiera named it first.
"Rotting meat," she said. "And something else."
"Old blood," Raziel said. "Dried. The altar's been used recently."
Lucian made a sound that was not quite a word.
They turned a corner and Raziel's shoulder hit the wall. His hand pressed against the stone to steady himself, and a section of the wall moved.
A hidden passage.
Kiera had her sword out before the dust settled.
They went in.
The chamber was small and absolutely wrong.
Jars of organs in murky liquid.
Bones carved with symbols Raziel recognized from the forbidden texts he'd memorized in his previous life.
A stone altar in the center, dark with old blood.
Lucian vomited in the corner.
Nobody commented on it.
Raziel walked to the altar.
The symbol carved into its side was the same one he'd seen scratched into the library wall in blood. The same one that had started all of this.
"It's connected," he said. "Seraphina, the necromancers, the disappearances. It all runs through here."
He found the leather book under the altar's base. His fingers touched the cover.
A scream echoed from the entrance.
They spun.
A figure stood in the doorway, hood pulled back.
Seraphina.
Her eyes glowed with something that wasn't candlelight.
"Don't touch the altar," she said. Her voice had changed; it was deeper and layered.
Odessa raised her sword. "You… You're the necromancer."
Seraphina smiled. "I'm much more than that."
Lucian stepped back until he hit a shelf. "But you were missing. We thought—"
"You thought exactly what I needed you to think." Her eyes moved to Raziel.
Only Raziel.
"Especially you. You played your part perfectly."
"Why?" Raziel asked.
He already knew the answer.
He'd heard it before, in other lives, in other versions of this same room but he needed her to say it, needed to know if this version was different.
"To change the world," she said. "And you, Raziel, are the final piece."
She raised her hand.
The shadows in the room moved like they were alive.
Odessa and Kiera charged.
The darkness hit them like a wall, they slammed into the stone and stayed there, pinned, struggling.
Lucian screamed something.
Raziel's chest cracked open with heat.
[WARNING! HIGHER LEVEL KILLING INTENT DETECTED]
[HOSTILE ENTITY HAS INITIATED SACRIFICE PROTOCOL]
[ACTIVATION CONDITION MET: IMMINENT EXISTENTIAL THREAT]
The golden light came out of him like a broken dam.
No control or warning, just raw power flooding the chamber.
Seraphina didn't flinch.
She smiled wider.
"Just in time," she said. "Just as I planned."