The Villain Professor's Second Chance
Chapter 772 - 772: Half a Face, Half a History (4)

A low, sub-ocean gong rolled beneath the morning surf, so deep it seemed to shudder inside bone rather than air. The sound slithered up the salt-stone cliffs in tremors, rattling gull nests and sending old birds shrieking into a pewter sky. Their wings carved frantic crescents over the foam, scattering like pages torn from a sailor's log. Where the cliffs split in jagged seams, a ribbon of azure vapor exhaled. It hissed inland across lichen and boneweed, staining every frost-rimmed leaf in its path the color of cold lightning. The vapor smelled of brine laced with sap—sharp enough to sting eyes, sweet enough to beckon deeper. It was the first breath of something ancient, a sleeper tasting daylight for the first time in epochs, and the stones themselves seemed to pause to listen.

Far west of that echo, Vaelira led her column into a marsh half-stolen by winter. A crust of night-ice shattered beneath each step, then re-froze behind the trampling boots, capturing boot prints like fleeting fossils. Fog clung low, veiling the world below a rider's knee, and every pool they crossed shimmered with the same eerie cerulean as the distant vapor. Soldiers muttered that the water was blessing-kissed. Others whispered the hue matched the ghosts in the valley who'd died screaming.

Captain Marrin nudged his dappled mare closer to Vaelira's destrier. Steam flirted from the horse's nostrils, curling into the brittle air. "Legends say blue water foretells a king's birth," he ventured, trying for levity. His smile cracked when Vaelira did not answer.

She kept her gaze forward, counting the slow, hungry rise and fall of the bog. Her spear-banner perched above the vanguard—a length of storm-green silk edged in silver, now diffusing under an otherworldly blue glow. In that light, even iron appeared soft. She hated it. Too many colors looked like omens after a long campaign; soldiers clung to any scrap of meaning to steady trembling hands.

Hoofbeats splashed behind her—muffled, frantic. A scout broke through a curtain of cattails, mare panting, mud clumped to fetlocks. His cheeks were the color of raw fish.

"Commander," he rasped, sliding from the saddle before it halted. "Weirs, ma'am."

Her single raised brow demanded speed.

"They're moving," he blurted. "Tide-locks at Harrowmouth. Wheels spinning on their own, gates rising and falling like—like some unseen crew works them."

Ancient elven gears, Vaelira recalled, powered by tidal vacuum and sun-tracked crystals. They'd been dead centuries.

"Water levels?"

"Falling upriver, surging seaward. Blue tint in the overflow channels." He shivered though the wind had stilled. "Cycling every thirty-seven counts. Exactly."

Her jaw locked. Thirty-seven—same interval as the distant pulses Korin had measured. Patterns lining up like teeth in a snare. She felt the empty ache behind her sternum that always accompanied realization: Orvath, or the thing he served, was steering the poisoned flow away from the marsh and toward the capital's heart.

She turned in the saddle, projecting calm to lines of men who watched her every breath. "Standard-bearers, flare the order," she commanded. "We march for the weirs at double pace. No fires, no singing. If you value skin, keep river water off it."

Marrin hesitated. "Commander, daylight's fading. If we push hard now—"

Vaelira's stare cut him off. "The capital drinks from those channels," she said. "If they turn blue before we close the gates, General Vostyr will put the torch to every pipe and call it mercy. How many villages lie between here and the palace aqueducts?"

The captain's jaw clicked shut. The column lurched forward, boots and hooves suctioning from muck in ragged unison. Above them, the spear-banner's blue shimmer faded to a hard, martial silver as dawn finally clawed above the fog.

Ash drifted through the capital's boulevards like black snow, dusting statues and soaking into seams of white stone until every heroic carving wore funeral cloth. High on the palace's wind-scoured terrace, Vostyr watched pyres blossom across rooftops. Tar smoke clawed at his throat, but he did not cough. His cloak—wolf-black, singed at the hem—snapped against wrought-iron balusters that trembled from distant gong echoes no one could source.

Below, fire crews dragged fresh barrels of pitch. They moved with grim choreography: unseal, pour, spark, step back. A child's doll surfaced in one gutter run, hair flickering before flames devoured it.

"If the water shows color," Vostyr pronounced, voice rasp on stone, "we drown it in fire. Aqueduct districts first. Then the high cisterns."

A murmur of shock rippled through ministers assembled at a timid distance. One treasurer made the mistake of voicing concern for irreplaceable archives that lay beneath the water tunnels. Vostyr sliced the air with a gloved hand. "Ink is cheaper than coffins."

As questions withered, a thin lieutenant strode forward. His boots left soot prints on marble. The scroll he offered was sealed with wax still warm from a raven's leg.

Vostyr cracked it. Lines of cramped script jumped out: Vaelira marches west. Company strength: six cohorts. Flank escort: Dravis Granger, alias. Suspected rebel.

The general's scarred lip drew back. "Iron Justiciars to horse," he ordered, not bothering to raise his voice—steel carried louder than shouting. "Ride hard, ride quiet. Bring me Vaelira's banner, Granger's head, and proof the water runs clear."

Below, fresh pyres flared, chasing the sun's pale fire with their own hungry light.

High in the observatory's lantern glow, Helyra bent over a parchment that spanned two tables. Constellations danced where she tipped cerulean ink, rearranging themselves in impossible speed—stars plotting answers her math had not yet found. Formation after formation dissolved until one remained: a serpent curled around a gate whose bars resembled tides.

Her pulse drum-beat at her temples. "The amplifier," she breathed. "Alive."

She snatched a quill, scribbling vectors—cliff depth, lunar pull, the mouth of an ancient tunnel yawning beneath a coastal shelf. Figures aligned like grim planets: the listening entity matched these coordinates, its pulse matching the river's unnatural heartbeat. It was drawing stories from the water, feeding on memory itself.

"Atrandil, Breen, up," she called. Two acolytes materialised, eyes wide behind ink-spattered spectacles. She thrust rolled charts into their arms. "Pack astrolabes. Salt sextants. We go to the coast. The sea is about to stand up, and we must greet it on our feet."

Far below those same cliffs, gates older than any human dynasty shuddered. Hinges thick with barnacle and time inhaled for the first time since the Third Eclipse. Brine automatons—pearlescent shells engraved with gleaming runes—clicked awake, their thousands of cilia stirring clouds of silt. They flexed telescoping limbs, tasting the incoming water. Sap-tainted, the analysis whispered. Unfit for the Leviathan Gate.

Protocol spiralled through crystal logic: Siphon. Purify. Return contamination as lesson. Gears ground. Pressure valves hissed. In the dripping dark, a countdown of grinding stone began, each tick older than language.

Twilight descended, bruising the sky violet. On a jagged ridge overlooking the marsh, Draven stood with the stillness of forged steel. To his side, Sylvanna shifted weight between boots, braid flicking in the wind. At her feet, Korin cupped the violet lantern. Every thirty-seven counts, its glass chimed—a faint ring as the distant pulse trickled through the upland rock and kissed the flame.

They had counted together. Thirty-seven. Endless as regret.

When Vaelira's force crested the ridge, silhouettes against a wine-dark sky, Draven noted their exhaustion before their relief—gaits slowed by cold, spear tips dull with frost. Yet the spark behind Vaelira's eyes remained hard as tempered obsidian. She dismounted, leaving her destrier to steam in the chill, and stalked toward Draven. Frost rimed her lashes.

Vaelira's breath smoked in front of her face, hanging a moment before a gust shredded it across the ridge. Under the hush of snow-laden wind, the single word she'd barked—"Report"—still reverberated in the shallow cup of the hillside, as though the land were unwilling to let it die. Horses stamped behind her, iron shoes grinding ice into powder. Somewhere in the dark, a tethered mount screamed at the cold; the noise cut off when a handler soothed it with gloved pats and a murmur that sounded too gentle for a battlefield.

Draven studied the commander in silence, noting the fine tremors in the muscles surrounding her left eye. Not fear—over-extension. She had ridden hard, slept little, and layered command atop grief until the edges frayed. Useful information for later, he filed, already dividing resources in his head: who could be pulled from the ranks to serve as her shadow, who could ensure she actually drank water before dawn. None of it showed on his face. He responded instead with the stripped, essential facts.

"The Archive core is contained," he said, shaping each syllable to carry across the wind without effort. "Orvath withdrew before stone failure. Destination: coast. He's weaponizing tidal weirs to pump corrupted memory into the capital."

A captain standing behind Vaelira flinched at the phrase corrupted memory. Draven could almost taste the swirl of superstition that followed—soldiers imagining nightmares poured into riverwater like ink. He continued, unbothered.

"Pulse frequency accelerating—sea vent is primary amplifier."