The descent was a journey through my own forgotten history. Each step down the spiraling stone staircase took me deeper into the foundations of my palace, and deeper into the bedrock of my power—a power I now understood had been a monstrous loan. The air grew cold, not with a natural chill, but with the dead, sterile cold of sealed-away magic. The torches in their sconces burned with a sickly, purple light, casting shadows that writhed like tormented souls. This was the way to the Black Archives.
I had not set foot in this place for two hundred years. Elara and I had sealed it together, in an age when our love felt as unassailable as our immortality. We had deemed the knowledge within too corrosive, too hungry. We were building a new order, one of pristine, unshakeable authority, not one
