Chapter 7: The Crown of Broken Equations
The Tower's fear had a sound.
It was the groan of buckling stone, the hiss of unraveling magic—the death rattle of an ancient machine realizing, for the first time, that it could bleed.
Elias stood on shaking legs, his scarred arm hanging limp at his side. The corruption had receded, but it hadn't vanished. It slept beneath his skin now, coiled like a serpent in winter.
Illana wiped blood from her lip. "They'll come for you harder now."
Above them, the ceiling rippled, equations dissolving and reforming like panicked ants.
"Let them," Elias said.
A wet chuckle echoed from the darkness.
Orthen's corpse stood at the edge of the chamber, his sewn-shut mouth straining against the wires. The golden threads moved on their own, stitching new words into his flesh:
[RECALIBRATE. TERMINATE. OBLITERATE.]
The Grand Magister's corpse lunged.
The Godslayer Algorithm
Orthen wasn't a man anymore. He was a weapon—a living spell wearing dead skin.
His fingers elongated into silver blades, each etched with kill-commands. Every strike left afterimages of glowing runes in the air, equations designed to unmake whatever they touched.
Illana dodged, her dagger scraping harmlessly off his ribs. "He's not alive! You can't kill what's already—"
Elias caught Orthen's wrist.
The moment his scarred fingers made contact, the corpse's kill-commands stuttered, the runes flickering like faulty code.
"No," Elias murmured. "But I can debug him."
He pushed—not with force, but with logic—feeding the corruption into Orthen's spellwork like a virus.
The corpse screamed as its own equations turned against it, the golden threads snapping one by one—
—until all that remained was a pile of twitching limbs and a single, spiraling rune:
[ERROR]
The Archivist's Secret
Silence.
Then—slow, mocking applause.
Illana stood with her arms crossed, her eyepatch askew. Beneath it, Elias saw the truth:
Her left eye wasn't missing.
It was black. Not the void-black of the Hollow King's whispers, but the exact same scarred corruption Elias now bore.
"Took you long enough," she said.
Elias stared. "You're a Keybearer."
"Was." She tapped her dead eye. "The Tower cut my connection when I tried to burn it down. But you—" Her grin was all teeth. "You they can't stop."
A tremor shook the chamber. Somewhere above, the Tower was rewriting its own architecture, sealing exits, birthing new horrors.
Illana tossed Elias a bloodstained notebook. "Time to choose. Run and hide—or finish what I started."
The notebook's first page bore a single line:
"How to Kill a God: A Primer."
The Hollow Church Kneels
They emerged into a ruined chapel. The cultists were waiting.
But they weren't attacking.
Every single one knelt, their featureless masks tilted upward in reverence. At their forefront lay a corpse in tattered robes—the cultist Elias had erased in Chapter 3.
His mask was gone, his face frozen in a smile.
Carved into his chest was a message:
"WE WERE WRONG. YOU ARE NOT THE KEYBEARER."
"YOU ARE THE LOCKSMITH."
Illana hissed. "Fanatics. They think you'll free the Hollow King."
Elias stepped forward. The cultists didn't move.
"You want a god?" he said quietly. "Fine."
He raised his scarred hand—
—and tore a hole in reality.
Not to the Hollow King's prison.
To the Tower's core.
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End Chapter 7