The Journey to a Hermit's Peak

The decision to seek out Master Elara was born of desperation, and the journey itself was a race against time. Captain Valerius, seeing the critical state of his best Knight and understanding the strategic importance of Kaelen’s proposed solution, reluctantly sanctioned the mission. He couldn’t spare any Knights for an escort; every available hand was needed to fortify the city and monitor the Syndicate’s movements. So, they would go alone.
Valerius provided them with the fastest transport available: a pair of tamed Gryphons from the Knights’ own aerie. These magnificent beasts, with the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, were far faster than any land-based travel.
Before they left, Kaelen performed one last, desperate procedure on Lyra’s heart. He didn’t have any Starlight Moss, but he used a cooling paste and a weak Aetheric sealant to temporarily stabilize the cracks. It was the alchemical equivalent of using tape and glue on a failing engine. It wouldn’t hold for long—a few days at most—and it severely limited the Aether output. Lyra was forbidden from any strenuous activity, including the use of her Knight abilities. She was, for all intents and purposes, a civilian. A very fragile one.
The Gryphon ride was both breathtaking and terrifying. Kaelen, who was not an experienced rider, clung to the saddle with white knuckles, his face pale green. Lyra, despite her weakened state, sat her mount with the easy confidence of a born rider, though her face was drawn and tight with pain. Rin, tucked securely into a specially designed pouch on Kaelen’s satchel, occasionally poked her head out, her whiskers twitching in the high-altitude wind, before deciding it was much too breezy and retreating back into the warmth.
They flew for hours, leaving the crystalline spires of Aethelburg behind and crossing over rolling green hills and dense forests. The landscape gradually grew more rugged, rising into the jagged, volcanic slopes of the Cinderpeak Mountains. The air grew thin and cold, and the peaks around them were wreathed in smoke and steam from geothermal vents. It was a harsh, desolate, and unwelcoming land.
“Are you sure she’s here?” Lyra shouted over the rush of the wind. “It doesn’t seem like a place anyone would choose to live.”
“That’s the point!” Kaelen yelled back. “Master Elara doesn’t like visitors! She always said the best laboratory is one where you can have an explosion without the neighbors complaining!”
He directed them towards a specific, caldera-like peak, its crater rim venting plumes of sulfurous steam. According to the old maps Kaelen remembered, her hermitage was built into the side of the dormant volcano, harnessing its geothermal energy for her forge and laboratory.
They landed the Gryphons on a wide, flat ledge near the summit. The ground was warm to the touch, and the air smelled strongly of sulfur. A narrow, winding path, barely visible against the dark volcanic rock, led upwards towards a strange structure. It wasn’t so much a building as a collection of domes and towers made of obsidian and brass, seemingly growing out of the mountainside like a cluster of bizarre fungi. Pipes and vents snaked across its surface, occasionally hissing out jets of steam. It was a place of mad, reclusive genius.
“This is it,” Kaelen said, his voice filled with a mixture of nostalgia and dread. He dismounted on shaky legs, his stomach churning from both the flight and his nerves.
Lyra dismounted more gracefully, but she immediately leaned against her Gryphon for support, a hand pressed to her chest. The flight had taken a lot out of her. “Let’s get this over with,” she said, her voice strained.
They approached the entrance, a large, circular door of tarnished brass with no visible handle or lock. Kaelen hesitated before it, the weight of his last conversation with Elara crashing down on him. It had been a shouting match, full of her disappointment and his defensive guilt, ending with her telling him she never wanted to see him again.
“What’s wrong?” Lyra asked, sensing his hesitation.
“The last time I saw her… we didn’t part on good terms,” he admitted. “After the accident with my sister, she told me I had perverted the art. That my arrogance had betrayed everything she taught me. She wasn’t wrong.”
“People change, Kaelen,” Lyra said softly. “You’ve changed. She needs to see that.”
Taking strength from her words, Kaelen stepped forward. He ignored the door and instead turned to a series of brass pipes next to it. Each pipe had a small, bell-like opening. It was a complex pneumatic lock system of Elara’s own design. Kaelen took a deep breath and then whistled a short, complex series of notes into one of the pipes. It was the opening bars of a lullaby his mother used to sing, a tune he and Elara had once used as a secret code for their private experiments.
For a moment, nothing happened. Kaelen’s heart sank. Then, with a loud hiss of steam and a grinding of hidden gears, the circular brass door began to iris open.
The woman standing in the doorway was not what Lyra expected. She had imagined a stern, wizened old crone. Instead, Master Elara looked to be in her late fifties, with a wild mane of graying red hair tied back with a leather strap, and bright, mischievous green eyes that seemed to miss nothing. She wore a heavy leather apron over a soot-stained tunic and trousers, and a pair of complex, multi-lensed goggles were pushed up on her forehead. She held a large, still-glowing metal wrench in one hand.
Her sharp eyes took in the scene: the Aether Knight uniform, the magnificent Gryphons, and finally, her former student. Her expression hardened instantly.
“Kaelen,” she said, her voice a low, dangerous rasp. “You have an incredible amount of nerve showing your face here.”
“Master Elara, please,” Kaelen began, taking a step forward. “I know I’m the last person you want to see, but this is an emergency. We need your help.”
“‘We’?” Elara’s gaze shifted to Lyra, her eyes narrowing as she took in Lyra’s pale face, her hand on her chest, and the faint, discordant ticking that was now audible in the mountain silence. Her expert eyes immediately saw what others missed. “An Aether-Kinetic Core. Valerius’s folly. And it’s failing catastrophically. Let me guess. You broke it, and now you want me to fix your mess. Some things never change.”
“I didn’t break it!” Kaelen protested. “Well, I didn’t make it worse! I patched it, but the patch failed. It’s a long story involving Void Alchemy and a criminal syndicate…”
“Void Alchemy?” Elara’s expression shifted from anger to alarm. She lowered her wrench slightly. “You’ve been meddling with that again? After what happened to Elia?”
“No! Of course not!” Kaelen said, stung by the accusation. “The city is under attack by a group that uses it. They’re called the Shadow Syndicate. Their energy is what’s poisoning her core.”
Just then, Lyra swayed, her knees buckling. The temporary sealant had finally given way. A sharp crack echoed from her chest, and a bright blue spark of Aether arced from her core and struck the brass doorway, leaving a blackened mark. She cried out in pain and collapsed.
“Lyra!” Kaelen shouted, rushing to her side.
Elara’s anger vanished in an instant, replaced by the focused urgency of a master artisan. “Don’t just stand there, you fool! Get her inside! Now!” she barked, her voice all command. She turned and bellowed into the depths of her home, “Ignis! Prep the diagnostic table! Emergency intake!”
Kaelen scooped a surprisingly light Lyra into his arms and followed Elara into the hermitage. The interior was even more chaotic than Kaelen’s own shop. It was a vast, cavernous space, part laboratory, part forge, and part library. Tools were strewn everywhere, diagrams were etched onto metal plates, and in the center of it all was a massive, coal-fired forge that glowed with infernal heat.
A small, clockwork automaton that looked like a metal crab with too many legs scurried over, its single red optic glowing. This was Ignis. It chittered and whirred, unfolding a section of a nearby workbench into a padded diagnostic table.
Kaelen gently laid Lyra down. Her breathing was ragged, and the light from her core was flickering like a dying candle.
Elara was already at her side, her goggles now over her eyes. The lenses whirred and clicked as she examined the damaged core. “Gods below, Kaelen, what did you do to this thing? It’s a mess of failing patches and resonance burns. And this energy signature… it’s not just Void contamination. It’s… familiar.”
She leaned closer, her expression turning from clinical to one of dawning horror. She looked from the core to Kaelen, then back to the core.
“This core design,” she whispered, her voice trembling with a sudden, terrible understanding. “The containment matrix, the energy regulation sequence… it’s not just based on Valerius’s work.” She looked Kaelen straight in the eye, her own green eyes wide with shock and a long-buried grief.
“Kaelen,” she said, her voice barely audible. “This core… it’s based on the same principles as the experiment that hurt Elia. It’s a prototype designed not just to channel Aether, but to contain and control Void energy.”