Chapter 151 Heed Thy Master

Chapter 151 Heed Thy Master


"Odin's beard..." Zuri caught the curse halfway out of his mouth, half-laughing despite himself even now.

He'd made it.

Barely, and with nothing but the shattered stardust of Night-bringer to show for it, but he'd made it, inside the Temple of Fallen Stars, torchlight flickering to life along a passage that stretched on longer than his eye could measure.

He pushed himself upright, brushed the dust from his armor, and looked around.

Memory flooded back — not his own memories exactly, or not only his own. He remembered every twist of this labyrinth the way a mason remembers the walls he raised with his own hands, because he had.

This maze existed to swallow intruders whole, to spin them in circles until they forgot which direction held daylight. He'd built it that way on purpose, centuries, or was it millennia  ago.

He knew the way through it because the way through it had never belonged to anyone but him.

"Trivia... hold on," he murmured, and didn't register saying it until the words had already left him.

His worry for her had a pulse of its own now, flaring every time her face, her faces, surfaced in his mind. The gold tears. The three voices breaking into one small, human sound at the end.

"Faster," he told himself. "She can't wait."

He moved through corridors lit by torches that had waited centuries for his return, past rows of golden statues — old gods, sculpted by his own hand, all sunk now into a slumber even he couldn't fully explain.

The warding spells etched into the obsidian brickwork still hummed faintly, dormant but alive, the same traps that would have torn a stranger apart in an instant. He felt more like a man wearing borrowed armor than the being who'd built all of this. If a Psych-Beast found him now, he wasn't certain he'd win.

That reversal spell had cost him more than he wanted to admit. If he'd known the price, he might have found another way. Though it's too late for that now.

He didn't slow down. Every step forward meant one less between Yuna and whatever came next.

Then the corridor ended. A wall of solid black rock, flush and unbroken, blocked the way.

He stopped, breath ragged, and then he smiled, because he recognized his own trick when he saw it.

"Not bad," he said to no one, pressing his palm flat against the stone. It hummed back, faint and expectant. "I'd have enjoyed this puzzle, if I weren't the one being tested."

"When is a door no longer a door?" He let the old riddle sit in the air a moment, savoring it despite himself. "It was never a door at all." He answered his own question, the way he always had. "Only a lie built to turn away the small-minded and the light-hearted."

The rock crumbled the instant the words left him, dust sighing outward to reveal a chamber thick with old air and older silence.

Zuri stepped through, breathing it in.

"Smells like power and rot," he muttered. "I'd rather you all weren't mummies yet."

The gemstones set into the far walls caught some hidden light and flared to life one by one, and the Temple of Fallen Stars revealed itself in full — vast, ornate, its ceilings lost somewhere above the reach of torchlight. And utterly deserted.

Cobwebs draped the ceremonial stonework; dust lay thick enough to soften his footsteps. Statues of gods stood sentinel down every wall, beings that had once commanded the tides of the living world, now silent, standing guard over row after row of iron sarcophagi.

The coffins weren't his concern. Not yet.

He needed Khonshu's scepter.

He tore through the chamber searching for it — flipping slabs, wrenching open crypts that hadn't been touched since before some of these gods had names.

Nothing. The staff should have been close, should have called to him the way old, familiar power always did. But he felt nothing.

Panic began climbing up his spine, cold and unfamiliar. Thousands of coffins lined this temple, an entire army sleeping inside stone and iron, and if he couldn't wake them..

No. Impossible. The scepter couldn't simply be gone. Khonshu had left it here during the sealing of the temple, never left with it.

Or... Unless he had.

He forced the thought down and kept moving, reading names carved into sarcophagi as he passed, an old habit resurfacing without his permission.

"Anubis. Seth. Ra. Tawaret. Horus. Osiris. Isis..."

He stopped.

Something in the dust caught his eye — a shape half-buried under a heap of sand that had drifted in over millennia. He crossed to it, dropped to his knees, and dug.

His fingers closed around cold metal.

He pulled it free, breath catching. "At last."

Khonshu's lunar scepter, exactly where memory said it should have been all along.

It was cold. Dead cold, with none of the low hum of power he remembered it carrying. He lifted it anyway, held it high, and let his voice fill the chamber.

"I call to thee, minions of the Darkmoon. Awake from your slumber. Heed the call of your master!"

Nothing answered.

Not a breath of wind, not a flicker of light. He stood there with his eyes shut, waiting for something, anything, to prove the silence wrong.

It didn't.

He lowered the staff, turned it over in his hands, disbelief curdling into something worse.

"What's happened to you? Your power was never in question before, not when I needed it most." His voice cracked, frustration and fear tangled together. "I don't have time for this. The world doesn't have time for this. Trivia is out there right now, holding back everything, waiting on me." He stared at the cold metal like it had betrayed him personally. "Answer me. This is the only card I have left. It's the only chance any of us have."

But silence was what answered him, heavier than before.

Then something in him snapped.

Desperation did what patience couldn't. He raised the scepter and brought it down with everything he had left, a scream tearing loose from somewhere he hadn't visited in ages.

The staff shattered like thin ice, sending a shockwave rattling through the temple, dust sifting down from the ceiling in a slow gray rain.

"It's over," he breathed, letting the broken pieces fall from his hands. He sank onto the nearest slab, all the fight gone out of him at once. "I'm sorry, Yuna. I failed you."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Then, one by one, the iron coffins began to pulse — a slow, deliberate light rising from within each one, spreading d
own the endless rows until the entire temple glowed like something enormous had just opened its eyes.