The truth of the pact is laid bare. The cost of breaking it? Everything Velvora has ever been. And Asher's life may not be enough.
A silence thicker than death swallowed the chamber. Glyphs bled across the walls—sickly crimson etched with violet flickers, like veins filled with electric blood. Every surface pulsed, alive and aching. The air itself carried weight, like a funeral hanging mid-procession, unsure if the body in the casket was truly dead.
In the middle of it all, Asher knelt.
Not out of reverence.
Out of survival.
His breath came in broken rhythms. Pupils dilated, then shrank, then dilated again as the final strands of a memory faded—not his own, but something deeper. Carved into bloodlines. Passed down through marrow.
He remembered now. Not the whole truth. No... that would have been mercy.
But enough.
Enough to understand the noose that had always been around Velvora's neck.
Enough to know that he was the final knot.
"The Contract of Velvora was never signed with ink," Asher whispered, almost to himself. "It was etched into bone. Sealed in wombs. Paid forward through every scream that echoed in this damned city."
His voice echoed back at him, sounding less like himself and more like a thousand ghosts speaking in tandem. All the echoes that lived in Velvora's walls. All the names that had never been buried properly.
He looked up.
The Heart chamber had changed.
The walls were bleeding memories.
Ghostly specters began to form—half-glimpsed shapes that flickered in and out of solidity. Each one bore a resemblance to someone Asher had glimpsed in history books, in oil paintings, in haunted dreams: governors, martyrs, monsters. Men and women who had shaped the city. Broken it. Saved it. Sold it.
They whispered together in a language of gasps and hollow flutes.
Then the shadows parted.
And He emerged.
Not the Watcher they had just faced.
But something older.
A Faceless Figure, cloaked in ash-colored threads, towering without truly standing. Where its face should've been was a void—an absence of identity, as if even the pact had no right to a name.
"You," the figure hissed, its voice like gravel dragged across hollow bone. "Are the Heir of Bone. The final signature. The blood that never belonged… and yet belongs to all."
Asher clenched his fists. "What the hell does that mean?"
The figure turned.
At the center of the chamber, a stone tablet—massive, ancient, and cracked—began to shift and slide. As it moved, dust and blood fog lifted into the air. What was revealed beneath it was not just a slab, but a covenant—engraved not with words, but with names.
Dozens of names.
Hundreds.
Some of them burned the eyes to read.
Others were familiar. Uncomfortably so.
Near the bottom, faint but shimmering, were five names that pulsed in unison. One of them glowed the brightest:
Asher Blackwood.
"This… this isn't a contract." Asher's throat went dry. "It's a curse."
The figure nodded slowly.
And then the truth spilled like blood from a slit throat.
Velvora had never been a city meant to survive.It was a pact-born monument, created in the age of burning gods and collapsing realms. In the final days of the Five Root Cities—cities built as magical nexuses during the Age of Erasure—only Velvora escaped complete destruction.
Because it cheated.
Its founders, visionaries desperate to preserve their legacy, had made a deal with The Pale Flame—a forgotten force buried beneath the earth, older than language. They bound the city to its essence. In return, they received protection. Continuity. Defiance against entropy.
But not without price.
A Blood Tithe, renewed every generation.Children born with half-souls.Minds broken at birth.Succubi drawn like moths to flickering, decaying dreams.Masked cults birthed to enforce silence.Sunlight filtered and gray—not dead, but always dying.
Velvora hadn't survived by will.
It had survived by feeding on itself.
And now, the pact was unraveling. Cracks spidered through its bones. The Pale Flame demanded renewal.
But it wasn't just any offering that would do.
It needed a loophole.
It needed someone born outside the system, but bound to its heart.
It needed Asher.
The faceless figure turned fully to him, spreading its arms.
"You are the child born from a broken branch. A name that defied the ledger. You are what the pact never accounted for. And now... you are the bridge. The contract cannot sustain itself without you. It has brought you to this point."
"You're saying the city kept me alive…" Asher's voice trembled, but his hand found the hilt of his blade, "...just to feed me to this?"
"To itself," the figure whispered. "You are the blood that completes the sentence."
Above them, thunder cracked.
BOOM.
Dust rained from the ceiling.
Lucien.
A second explosion rocked the far end of the chamber. A shaft of gray light pierced the smoke as a breach opened in the seal.
"Asher!" Rosa's voice echoed through the opening, frantic and raw. "Answer me—!"
"Don't move!" Lucien snapped. "He's inside the Seal Zone! We could kill him if we break it wrong!"
The figure turned sharply. A ripple of static passed through the chamber like a reversed breath.
"If you step through that breach," the faceless thing warned, "the pact shatters. And Velvora BURNS."
Asher staggered to his feet, lips bloodied. "And if I stay?"
"Then you are devoured. Not body, not mind. Soul. You will forget who you are. Who you were. What you ever loved."
His vision blurred. The glyphs on the floor began to burn upward in a spiral of rotating geometry. Each symbol hovered midair—alive, humming, pleading.
And then…
It appeared.
The contract itself.
Written not in ink, but in floating glyphs made of blood and language.It pulsed like lungs trying to remember how to breathe.It waited.For a drop of his blood.
A vow of pain.
A signature of flesh.
Rosa screamed again—desperate now. "Asher! Please! Don't do this—"
He stared at the glyphs.
They stared back.
His hand trembled. The blade in his grip flickered with unstable violet light.
His voice was a whisper—but filled with defiance.
"Then I choose."
He stepped forward.
A single drop of blood fell—
—
[End Of Chapter 116]
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Next Chapter: Chapter 117 – The City That Feeds on NamesVelvora was never meant to survive. Only devour. And now that the pact teeters, every buried secret starts to claw its way out of the ground.