In Verlion, three friends slip into the royal library by moonlight to claim a legendary relic, only to discover that someone else has reached it first.
In the old quarter of Verlion, where cobbled streets glimmered under purple lanternlight, three friends met in the shadow of a leaning house. Alia rested both hands on her amethyst staff. Ilan kept to the dark, listening. Vera, who knew every hidden stair and blind alley in the city, watched the street with a thief’s patience and a guard’s caution.
They had chosen this night for a reason. Under the double moon, the Eye of the Dragon was said to awaken in the vaults beneath the abandoned royal library, and if the stories were true, the relic would only reveal itself for a few brief minutes before the night closed over it again.
The legends were worse than the treasure. The Eye was said to show a person the deepest memory they had ever buried. Some called it a gift. Others called it a curse. All of them agreed on one thing: something guarded it, and no one who had seen that guardian had lived long enough to describe it.
Vera led them through a narrow passage between two merchant houses, where the stone walls sweated cold and the air tasted of dust and rain. Alia murmured under her breath, and the faint shimmer of a ward dissolved before it could bite into their skin. Ilan followed last, one hand near his blade, his head angled toward the dark behind them.
Not once, as they crossed the sleeping city, did he stop listening.
The royal library rose at the end of the street like a ruin that had forgotten how to die. Its windows were black pits. Its high doors were chained shut, but Vera had already found another way in. She hauled down an old gutter, and one by one they climbed through a cracked window into a chamber thick with stale air and old ash.
Inside, silence pressed on them like a hand.
They moved through the dead halls in a tight formation, past burnt candlesticks, splintered shelves, and scrolls reduced to brittle curls of blackened paper. At the heart of the library, they found the sunken floor that led down to the vaults below. The stairs vanished into darkness so deep it seemed to swallow their lanternlight whole.
At the bottom, the vault opened into a vast chamber. In the centre stood a low stone dais. Hovering above it was a crystal the size of a human head, lit from within by a steady golden pulse.
The Eye of the Dragon.
Then Vera stopped so abruptly that Ilan nearly collided with her.
A figure stood beside the dais, half turned toward them, wrapped in a dark blue cloak. In one gloved hand he held a long dagger. The blade caught the relic’s light and flashed once, cold and sharp.
No one spoke. Even Alia’s breathing seemed too loud.
The stranger lifted his head, and the faint gleam in his eyes was not fear.
It was recognition.
Behind the crystal, in the shadows where no lantern should have reached, something stirred.