The chamber was quiet. Too quiet for a room full of people.
If one could call them that.
The holding cells had been repurposed from an abandoned section beneath Cael Varn's east wing of the transmutation department—originally meant for dangerous magical creatures or failed summoning remnants. Now, they served a different function.
Alaric stood before the reinforced glass, hands clasped behind his back, expression unreadable. His gaze swept slowly across the row of cells. Each held a single subject—some older, some younger, none native to the Silver Cities. Wanderers, criminals, failed apprentices. People who wouldn't be missed.
He hadn't abducted them. No—he'd acquired them, through legal ways and shady backchannels. Debtors offered in trade, failed students exiled and sold quietly by their own families. This world, like so many others, pretended morality while selling desperation to the highest bidder.
The city wouldn't care. After all, who should they test substances and spell on – themselves?
And Alaric paid well.
The city even encouraged it. It kept the running costs of prisons low and meant that the prisoners were being used for a good purpose. And with a little bit of luck, they might even receive a good piece of knowledge in exchange for it.
James stood behind him, silent. A modified chalkboard hung from the golem's shoulder, tracking data points in perfect lines: heart rate, mana resonance, spiritual feedback, hallucinatory deviation curves.
"Subject Four," Alaric said.
The golem activated the internal glyph. A small, near-invisible cloud of ground spice was released into the subject's cell. The man—a thin, wiry mage dropout in his late twenties—jerked slightly, then went still.
Alaric watched.
The Vault pulsed once, faint and observing.
After sixty seconds, the subject's pupils dilated. He blinked rapidly. Then he began to speak—but not in words. Just symbols. Ancient ones, traced with his fingers in the air. Alaric leaned closer.
"Interesting," he murmured. "Unconscious glyph association."
He scribbled a note in his personal logbook:
Subject Four: 0.3mg dose. Onset: 63s. Behavior: nonverbal semi-conscious glyph tracing. Possible echo recognition. Vault pulse: minor. No mutation observed.
He moved on.
Subject Seven had been dosed the day before—0.7mg, orally, mixed into water. She was curled in the corner, humming to herself. A slow, eerie tune with no words. When her eyes met Alaric's, he froze.
They were blue.
Fully, unmistakably spice-touched.
But the effect had stabilized. No mental decay yet. No signs of overload.
"I'll need to test projection resistance next," Alaric said aloud.
James nodded and noted it down.
The further he went, the clearer it became: the spice wasn't just a drug. Not here. Not in his hands. It was a lens. And these people, cruel as it may be, were the test subjects for a greater truth.
He paused at the final cell. Subject Twelve.
A child.
Eight years old. Same age as him.
She didn't cry. Not anymore. She just stared, wide-eyed, breathing shallow. She hadn't been dosed yet. He was still calibrating.
Alaric hesitated.
Then he turned away.
"James," he said quietly. "Flag Subject Twelve for observation only. No dosing. Yet."
"Understood, sir."
He returned to his workbench, where three glowing crystals pulsed faintly with stored spice energy—distilled and purified. The entire operation ran off a closed-loop filtration ward powered by a micro-ley battery. Silent. Hidden.
He looked back once more at the quiet line of cages. At the silence. At the future he was building, brick by brick, rune by rune.
They would scream again.
In pain, as well as in revelation.
Because if knowledge required blood, then the path to ascension would be paved with it.
And he would walk that path, alone. No, he would personally color it with blood till it turned pitch-black, if there was even the slightest change of giving him what he wanted.
He sat back down at the central desk, fingers resting on the rim of the crystal dish containing the most stable spice compound he'd managed so far. The resonance matrix etched into the base hummed softly, pulsing in sync with his heartbeat.
For a moment, Alaric simply stared at it.
The spice was... temperamental. That was the word he kept circling back to in his notes. Not inherently unstable — in fact, chemically it was among the most stubborn substances he'd ever worked with. But its effects were slippery. Sometimes immediate. Sometimes delayed. Sometimes profound, and sometimes disappointingly dull.
He needed consistency.
"James," he said, voice low, "begin rotation protocol. Let's try long-term exposure on Subject Eight. Same ambient saturation as test run five, with an extra mana thread infused through the filtration grid."
"Confirmed," James replied, the chalkboard at his shoulder already updating with neat script and energy flow diagrams.
Alaric didn't move to observe. He'd seen enough today.
Instead, he opened his notebook to a half-filled page titled Spice Interaction with the Mind and began to write.
Spice appears to reduce internal resistance to abstract magical concepts.Subjects with pre-existing magical training show up to 70% increase in spell precision post-exposure.Subjects with no training either collapse or begin developing what may be described as synthetic instincts – Dune's Mentats?Psychic feedback is still the main issue. Once the brain starts seeing too much, it collapses. Fast.
He tapped the quill once against his lip.
"So, what if," he murmured, "I apply external occlumency layers... like magical blindfolds? Filter what the mind perceives, rather than blocking the spice's effect entirely? To concentrate on what matters in the mind then just needlessly fill it up…"
He stood, crossed the room, and opened the reinforced crate marked Runic Overlays - Mental Structuring. It had taken a week to get this one. Traded three spell framework drafts to a rogue scholar who'd been barred from research after melting half a tower.
Worth it.
He laid out the metal crown-like objects on the secondary table, each one a dull silver etched with fractal spellwork. A type of mental exoskeleton — meant to overlay onto a subject's mind like a second set of thoughts. Rigid, but structured. Enough to hold a chaotic flow steady for a while.
"James," Alaric called again, "begin preparations for neural overlay testing. Start with Subject Five. Moderate exposure. If the runes hold, move to sustained spell-loop induction."
The golem's head tilted in acknowledgment. Another glyph flared to life.
Minutes passed. Then a low, echoing hum filled the chamber as the runic disc pulsed once and latched onto the barrier of Subject Five's cell. The man inside convulsed — not violently, but enough to indicate something was happening. The overlay flickered, struggled... then stabilized.
The Vault pulsed.
Hard.
Alaric grinned, lips curling into something that might've once resembled joy, but now resembled nothing so much as satisfaction distilled into flesh.
He turned away and returned to his seat, resting his elbows on the armrests like a young prince on a crumbling throne.
"I'm close," he whispered. "Closer than anyone in this world would believe."
Above him, the arcane lamps dimmed slightly — a warning signal. It meant curfew was approaching. Most students would be in bed or in the common halls, discussing spell theory and making up romantic rumors about upper-tier professors.
And he?
He was building a gate.
No.
A key.
To understanding.
To ascendancy.
To truth.
He cast one more look at Subject Twelve's cell. The girl still sat quietly, her small hands clasped in her lap. Still untested. Still unspoiled.
"Maybe," Alaric said under his breath, "you'll be the one who sees clearly."
And with that, he leaned forward and began the next page in his notes.