“Are you sure you’re feeling better?” the duke asked her.

“Yes, I’ll be fine.”

Selen took a deep breath and followed the duke and Noah as they stepped off the boat. They had agreed that the latter’s grandfather would remain on board. The sun hit her full in the face when they set foot on the island. The first thing they noticed was the enormous ancient stone temple standing at the center of the island.

“I’ve never seen this kind of construction before,” said the duke.

“Neither have I. It looks like it’s been here for several centuries,” Noah replied.

“Either way, I think that’s where we should go,” Selen told them as she walked toward the temple.

There was no door, just a stone frame carved with strange drawings. As they entered, they found statues lining both sides of the walls, framing a long stone corridor. After walking down the corridor, they strangely came upon a wall.

“So that’s the end?” the duke asked, feeling along the wall with his hand.

“There’s clearly something behind it,” Noah replied, pressing his ear against the wall. “I have very sharp hearing,” he added when they gave him questioning looks.

“Well then, we just have to destroy it,” the duke said, drawing his sword.

He infused it with magic and took a step back. Selen had never seen him use magic before, and she had to admit he controlled his energy perfectly. He struck the wall with such force that Selen covered her face to avoid the debris that would fly everywhere—except there were no debris at all, because the wall had not budged.

“How is that possible?” the duke asked. “What the hell kind of wall is this?”

He kept striking it with his sword until he finally gave up.

“May I try?” Selen asked.

“Do you think you’re capable of it?” the duke asked.

“Maybe.”

“I think we should step back,” Noah said to the duke.

“Step back? What do you mean?” the duke asked.

“Do whatever you want.”

Selen saw Noah move a good ten meters away, and she wondered if he wasn’t overdoing it a little. She placed her hand on the wall and strangely felt magic inside it. This wall was reinforced with magic, she realized—and not some low-level magic either. She created two magical swords, concentrated magic into them, and then launched them at the wall, which shattered.

“What was that?” the duke asked, coughing.

“We should go in,” Selen told them when the dust began to settle.

“When it comes to magic, she’s simply far above you,” Noah told the duke, giving him a small comforting pat on the shoulder.

“Get your filthy hands off me,” the duke said as he followed Selen.

Selen walked along another long corridor before emerging into what looked like an enormous blue stone mine. In her entire life she had never seen stone mines, even though she knew her family owned a few. Yet she could tell this one was at least a hundred times larger than an ordinary mine.

“I guess this is the famous treasure,” Noah exclaimed, his eyes full of admiration.

They decided to stay together and moved deeper into one side of the mine. The farther they went, the more Selen felt dark magic in the air, which was completely unusual in a mine.

“Look, there’s someone over there!” Noah shouted.

Selen would have liked to tell him not to shout, but she noticed that there were several other people sitting there, leaning against large crystals of a strange violet color. She approached one of them and was about to touch him to see if he was alive when she realized that a crystal spike connected the inside of his head to the violet stone.

“What the…” she murmured when, upon touching the man’s face, blue veins appeared across it.

“So this is where they were taking all the bodies,” the duke exclaimed, as he too examined one of the people connected to a violet stone.

“What does that mean?”

“You still haven’t understood?” the duke asked, coming closer to where she was standing. “These are the heretics—or at least, this is where they make them.”

Selen looked around her. There were hundreds of other people like the one in front of her. Would all these people become heretics? she wondered as she looked more closely at the man. Yet she could not deny it—he looked like the heretic she had tried to interrogate. The same blue veins, the same corpse-like appearance…

“I don’t understand. Why did you talk about bodies?” she asked the duke.

“You might not have noticed since you were new, but during a heretic attack they never leave bodies behind. In fact, their strategy has always been to set houses on fire so that the villagers leave their homes and can be captured.”

Selen felt as if she had been struck on the head with a hammer. The heretics were nothing but an invention? Puppets?

“Since when have you suspected this?” Selen asked.

“Since always. My father had reached the same conclusion according to his journal, and shortly afterward he became the victim of that assassination. That’s also why I never believed your story about a heretic attack when you arrived at the duchy.”

Selen suddenly felt foolish. Perhaps she should have gathered more information before infiltrating the duchy.

As they walked deeper into the mine, she recognized a face among those connected to the magical stones.

“He’s one of the knights who accompanied me when we were coming to the duchy,” she exclaimed as she looked more closely.

“Yet their bodies were buried at the duchy.”

“No, this one managed to escape. I guess he was captured at some point or another. Do you think he’s still alive?” Selen asked.

“From my experience, some of them are. I’ve already tried to extract information from some, but I think those strange stones wash their brains.”

So that’s what he was doing in the shed behind the castle, Selen thought as she tried to understand the mechanism connecting the people to the stones. Bringing corpses back to life was the pinnacle of dark magic and punishable by death in the empire.

“In your opinion, who is behind all thi—”

“Hey, I think I found living people!” Noah shouted, having gone deeper into the mine.

The duke ran toward him as fast as he could, and Selen resolved to follow. She would have liked to continue their discussion to learn more about the heretics.

When they arrived where Noah was standing, they saw that he was in front of a huge cage where several unconscious people were locked inside.

“Some of them don’t even look like they’re from the empire,” he told them, pointing at a man with sun-darkened skin.

The duke broke the cage’s lock and immediately began searching for his sister among the people lying inside. Selen joined him in looking for her when suddenly he picked up a woman in his arms, tears almost in his eyes.

“Rose, answer me. Can you hear me? Please…”

Selen approached them and noticed that Rose had lost a lot of weight. Those vermin certainly hadn’t fed her.

“I think she’s just dehydrated and starving,” she said, handing a flask to the duke.

He made Rose drink a few sips before checking her pulse.

“She’s alive, but she needs proper care. Magic won’t have any effect on her—she needs to eat and rest.”

“You’re right. We need to take everyone still alive back to the boat, but with just the three of us that’ll be a bit difficult,” Noah said as he stood watching them.

Selen stood up and joined him.

“We should first take out the ones who are here, since at least we know they’re alive and haven’t been exposed to dark magic,” Selen said.

“I’ll take Rose back to the boat first, and then I’ll come back to help you.”

Noah sighed as he watched the duke, Rose in his arms, heading toward the exit.

“So what do we do now?” Noah asked.

“I think I have an idea, but you’ll have to help me,” Selen told him.

She created two enormous chains of magic and wrapped them around the bars of the cage.

“I’m going to cut the roof of the cage to lighten its weight, but you’ll have to pull so we don’t injure the people when I do it,” Selen explained.

“You think the two of us can move that thing?” Noah asked skeptically.

“I’ve used this spell before. It does require physical strength, but I trained a bit—and when I infuse enough magic, the weight of the target doesn’t really matter.”

“If you say so, I’ll believe you,” Noah replied, grabbing one of the chains and preparing to pull.

Selen focused to infuse as much magic as possible into the chains and then created two magical swords to cut the roof of the cage.

“Pull!” Selen shouted.

Halfway to the exit, they stopped to catch their breath.

“You said the weight wouldn’t matter with your magic,” Noah said, out of breath.

“I also said it’s a spell still under development,” Selen replied.

“Need some help?” the duke asked, having returned.

With the duke’s help, they managed to bring all the people out of the mine before going back inside.

“So what do we do to unplug those ones?” Noah asked.

“Most of them are just corpses. We need to identify the ones who are still alive.”

“Yes, but how?” Selen asked.

As she examined one of the heretics, she suddenly turned around in every direction, instantly alert. People were approaching, and they reeked of dark magic. The duke, who had also sensed the presences approaching, drew his sword.

“Heretics?” Selen asked.

“Even worse,” the duke replied.

She was about to ask what he meant when the approaching figures revealed themselves. A dull anger pierced her heart when she saw the prayer robes she hated more than anything in the world.

“I see we have guests.”