Chapter 125 The Change in Lydian

Chapter 125 The Change in Lydian
Seraph’s POV

For a long moment after Endil disappeared, I did not dare move.

The mist had swallowed him completely, the forest closing around the space he had occupied as though nothing unusual had happened there at all. As if a man had not just stood in front of me, snapped a creature’s neck like a brittle twig, and then walked away after telling me that everything I thought I knew had changed.

The silence that followed felt anything but peaceful, it was blatantly unsettling.

I stood there with my arms still slightly lifted at my sides, the phantom memory of restraint lingering in my muscles. My wrists felt strangely light without the rope biting into them.

Slowly, I lowered my hands and looked down.
The rope lay where it had fallen, coiled loosely against the forest floor.

For a moment I simply stared at it.
Then I crouched and touched my wrist where the fibers had rubbed against my skin. The faint ache remained, a quiet reminder that the last hour had not been some fevered illusion my mind had conjured out of exhaustion.
Endil had been here.

He had killed one of the creatures that supposedly worked for the Shadow Queen.
And then he had let me go.

I frowned slightly as I straightened again.
That part still refused to settle properly in my mind. It shifted and rearranged itself every time I tried to understand it, like a puzzle piece that insisted on fitting somewhere it clearly did not belong.

Why had he helped me?
Why warn me about Anzel?
Why let me walk away when, not long ago, he had seemed more than willing to see me dead?
My gaze drifted toward the place where the mist had swallowed him.

The forest looked completely ordinary again.
If anything, it looked too ordinary.
Too still.

A slow breath left my lungs.

No.
Standing here trying to untangle Endil’s intentions would not get me any closer to the truth. He had said one thing that mattered more than the rest.

‘Go to the castle.’
My jaw tightened slightly.
Anzel.

That was the only answer that mattered right now.

Without another glance at the rope on the ground, I turned and began walking.

The forest path stretched ahead of me in long uneven shadows, branches arching overhead like silent watchers. At first nothing seemed unusual. The same narrow trails. The same clusters of tangled roots and fallen leaves.

But the further I walked, the more something began to feel… off.

It started with the smell.

Something so faint it was barely noticeable at first.
Smoke.

I slowed slightly, my eyes scanning the trees.
The scent grew stronger the deeper I moved through the woods, and then I saw it.

One of the trees ahead stood blackened along its trunk, the bark cracked and brittle as if something hot enough to scar wood had licked across its surface. I stepped closer, brushing my fingers lightly against the charred edge.
Ash flaked away beneath my touch.

My brows pulled together.
Another tree nearby bore the same mark.
Then another.

The forest grew quieter with every step I took. Not the comfortable quiet of nature resting between breaths, but a hollow kind of silence that made the back of my neck prickle.
Then, unrelenting emptiness.

Where were the birds?

Even the wind seemed hesitant to move through these trees.

Fragments of ash drifted lazily through the air now, faint gray specks that caught the light before settling slowly against the ground.
Something had happened here, I thought to myself as I forced myself to keep moving, twigs snapping underfoot.

My thoughts flickered briefly back to Endil’s voice.
Lydian has changed.

At the time I had assumed it was another one of his carefully crafted riddles, or unamusing jokes.

Now I was not so certain.
I quickened my pace.

The ground beneath my feet began to slope upward gradually, the forest thinning just enough to let more light spill through the branches overhead.

A hill appeared before me.
I knew this path.
My pulse began to climb as I moved faster, my boots crunching against scattered debris beneath the leaves.

The smell of smoke thickened the higher I climbed.

My mind began racing ahead of me, assembling possibilities I did not want to examine too closely.

Maybe there had been a battle, a light internal battle for a test of some sort, like the tournament.

Maybe—
No.

My steps slowed near the crest of the hill.
A strange heaviness settled in my chest, the kind that comes when you already know the answer to something but refuse to look directly at it.

The wind shifted then, carrying another swirl of ash through the air.

My stomach tightened.

Endil’s voice echoed again in my memory.
What you find there will be very different from what you know.

I swallowed once and forced myself forward.
One more step.

Then another.

The trees opened.
And I saw it. Standing by the edge, with my cloak dancing in the dense, unbreathable air, was the castle.

The castle stood in the valley below, its dark towers rising against the distant sky.

Except—
My breath caught sharply in my throat.
Something was wrong.

Very wrong.
One of the outer towers had collapsed entirely, the stone structure broken open like a cracked bone. Sections of the great wall lay scattered across the ground beneath it, chunks of blackened rock spilling into the surrounding land.

Smoke curled slowly from several places inside the fortress. Not fresh fire. The dying remains of something that had already burned.
My heart began pounding violently against my ribs.

“No…” I breathed under my breath.
The castle I remembered had stood unbreakable against the horizon.

What I was looking at now looked like the aftermath of war.

My eyes moved frantically across the damaged structures, searching for any sign that this was some kind of mistake.

Then I saw movement.
Small and very distant, so distant that it could have been imagined, but it was unmistakable.
Something moved along the broken inner wall of the castle.

A figure that was too far away to see clearly.
But there was someone there.
My breath hitched as it suddenly turned and was looking straight at me.

I took a cautious step back as Endil’s warning settled fully into place inside my chest.
Lydian had changed.

Now I believe that he was downplaying how badly things had changed.