Page 266 of House Ignis

“Remind me,” Aether muttered at last, his tail lashing in slow irritation as he descended ahead of me. “Why exactly are we here again?”

He hated this place.

I could feel it through the bond—the way his instincts bristled against the stale magic embedded in the walls, the way something ancient and sour lingered in his senses.

“Because someone tampered with Jax’s journal,” I said quietly, forcing my voice to remain firm.

“Because pages disappeared. Because the ink went… wrong. Like it rotted where it sat.” I swallowed, the memory still turning my stomach.

“If I don’t understand what happened to him, I’ll never stop looking. I need to know everything about the Veyari. Where they came from. What Aelmyra is. And what any of it has to do with Jax.”

My words sounded more certain than I felt. Inside, grief clawed like a living thing.

The staircase finally opened into a long underground corridor. Shelves rose along both sides like the ribs of some massive, buried creature, packed tight with leather-bound tomes and ancient scroll cases layered in sleeping dust.

The air was heavy with vellum and old smoke, but beneath it lingered something metallic and faintly sour—like a wound that had sealed over badly and never truly healed.

Runes flickered weakly along the archways overhead. Old ward-marks. Forgotten protections slowly weakening beneath the weight of time.

“And what,” Aether asked after a moment, his voice lowering until it seemed carved from the stone itself, “do you intend to do once you find these answers?”

I hesitated. The truth rose anyway, jagged and unavoidable.

“Kill them,” I admitted before I could soften the edge.

The word tasted like iron on my tongue.

Aether’s ears flattened instantly. His shoulders rolled with quiet tension as he continued ahead, muscles coiling beneath his sleek fur.

“Careful, Little Flame,” he murmured. “That’s not a thought you bring into places like this lightly. Libraries remember things.”

I dragged the toe of my heel against the flagstone. and exhaled slowly, suddenly aware of how tight my chest had become.

“I haven’t planned past finding them,” I said at last. My fingers tightened around my clutch like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

“But I’ll do whatever I have to.”

For Jax.

The vow settled into the silence like falling ash.

•••

We moved deeper. The lights thinned with every step, the torches growing farther apart until the darkness began to swallow the corridor between them.

The temperature dropped sharply, the cold creeping through the thin fabric of my dress and settling into my bones.

My breath began to fog in the dim light, pale clouds dissolving into the stale underground air.

At the corridor’s end, something glinted.

A brass plaque caught the flame and hurled it back in a dull, burnished reflection.

ARCHIVUM IGNIS: RESTRICTA.

My throat tightened.

“Wards,” Aether murmured, prowling forward.