My hands trembled.

  “Are you alright, Sean?” Doyle called from the other side of the door.

  “I’m alright,” I said, though the words came out thin. My eyes drifted to the floor, to where the loose timber had shifted sometime in the night.

  The memory of that hollow laugh still echoed in my mind. What, you are going to invade my dreams now?

  I swung my legs off the bed and crossed the room, opening the door. Doyle stood there, but he was not alone. A tall, grey figure loomed behind him.

  “Jerald?”

  He turned and grinned. “Ah, Sean. Finally awake?” He laughed and clapped a heavy hand on my back.

  “Ouch,” I muttered.

  “You look healthy,” he said, glancing at Doyle. “You been fattening him up?”

  “Hey, it has only been what, two days?” I said.

  Jerald studied me, his eyes lingering just a moment too long, as though he already knew the medallion at my neck had done its work.

  “Nah,” he said with a chuckle. “Looks like you have just been feeding him properly for once. Not the rubbish I always see him living on.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No more boxed dinners and noodles.”

  “Good. Good,” he said. “You have more energy about you too.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ah,” Jerald added, brightening. “Doyle says you found yourself a sword. You will be a hero in no time. Got a blessing yet?”

  The excitement drained from me as I explained what had happened to the soul card I had received. Jerald’s smile faded. He sat down on the edge of the bed, the fervour gone.

  “I will fetch you another,” he said at last. “That will not be difficult.” He glanced at Doyle. “Perhaps I should bring a few.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” Doyle said.

  “You have been training, at least?”

  “It has only been two days,” I said with a sigh.

  “Pish posh,” Jerald replied. “If you were at the barracks, you would have trained night and day.”

  “As a fresh aspirant who has not yet entered a department, he would not,” Doyle said calmly. “Nor does he have the blessing needed to keep pace with the others. Speaking of which, how are the new recruits this year?”

  Jerald grimaced. “Sean has his work cut out for him. There is a lot of potential this year. We have been drilling them relentlessly.”

  “They that good?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It is not the new recruits of the barracks. It is the house of lords. They are demanding we match their new recruits, as if that were an easy thing to do.” He cast a grave look at Doyle.

  “Their base blessings are almost…”

  “Cheating?” Doyle supplied.

  Jerald nodded. “I cannot describe it any other way. All the noble kids arrived looking ordinary enough. Then at the ceremony, they all received high-level blessings out of nowhere.”

  “Must be nice,” I muttered.

  Doyle gave my shoulder a reassuring pat.

  “I slept through the whole celebration,” I added. “Not that I would have gone anyway.”

  “And you absolutely shouldn’t have,” Jerald said the n shook his head in frustration. “That boy you fought…”

  “Nick the prick?”

  Jerald scoffed. “Sir Nicholas is now part of the Lords. And right now, he is in town.”

  “In Brookfield? Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Which means you keep yourself out of sight,” he replied.

  “It is not like he would recognise me,” I said.

  “And if your little magic trick with the troll becomes the talk of the town?” Jerald asked. “Doyle told me everything…. You need to be more careful.”

  “I was,” I said, trying to defend myself.

  “I know,” Jerald replied. “A last resort. And I commend you for what you did. Still, you must be careful.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  I sighed. “Yes, sir. I will.”

  “That’s a good lad.” He ruffled my hair and nudged my shoulder. His thick gloves were old and worn, and the gesture stung more than it soothed.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I am here to investigate this troll business. I will be leading the team.” He grimaced. “Which means I have to babysit that annoying brat.”

  My eyebrows rose.

  “Yeah,” he said with a chuckle. “Turns out the kid is even more irritating than you.”

  “Ha. Thanks.”

  He laughed again. “You are welcome.”

  Jerald straightened and rose to his feet.

  “Hey, Jerald,” I said. “Are there Romans in this realm?”

  He and Doyle both looked at me, puzzled.

  “There were,” Jerald said slowly. “But not for a long time. Hundreds of years ago.” He glanced at Doyle. “If you want to know more, I am fairly sure Doyle has a book or two downstairs that he stole from the college.”

  “I may have borrowed a few,” Doyle said.

  Jerald smiled, then his expression sharpened. “You made sure none of them are runed?”

  “What kind of spirit do you take me for?” Doyle huffed. “Of course I was careful. Still, it has been a right pain to find anything useful that has not been tampered with by the court. Sneaky, overprotective, overgoverning pratts.”

  The edge in his voice caught me off guard.

  Jerald snickered. “Did not mean to strike a nerve.”

  Doyle sighed. “It has been a stressful few days.”

  “You are telling me,” Jerald said.

  I laughed, feeling the weight of it all loosen just a little.

  “How many more days of this?” I asked.

  Doyle pretended to count on his fingers. “At least as many as the days you mean to remain alive.”

  We all laughed.

  “Anyway,” Jerald said, “I will come back for a proper chat once this troll business is sorted and the noble brat scurries back to wherever he came from.”

  I nodded as he punched me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Oh, by the way,” Jerald added with a laugh, “nice work with the training dummy.”

  “You will see to getting another one for us?” Doyle asked.

  “Consider it done.”

  Good, I thought. At least Rob and Amelia would not be sidelined for long.

  It was always hard to say goodbye to Jerald, though it never changed. He looked torn every time he left. But as he liked to remind me, his work was never finished.

  I raised a hand as he headed for the door. He paused just long enough to look back.

  “Train as much as you can, Sean,” he said. “Whatever it takes. Get stronger.”

  The room fell quiet, and I was alone again. Those words lingered, echoing in my mind. Whatever it takes.

  My gaze drifted to the floorboards. I wondered if the voice beneath them had heard every word.

  Pain lingered in my limbs, raw and deep, as if I had been fighting all night without rest. The memory of the Romans still echoed in my mind. Doyle had mentioned a book downstairs. It was time for answers.

  I paused at the door, Jerald’s words pressing in on me. Whatever it takes.

  With a slow breath, I berated myself for fearing a stupid sword and turned back. I knelt and tore the blade from its hiding place beneath the floorboards.

  “Alright,” I said quietly. “No strange laughing this time.”

  The sword remained silent. I fastened it at my hip and grabbed the foundation elixir then headed downstairs to the lower floor, where the stacks of books waited. The air in the training hall felt heavy, and each echo of my steps sounded hollow as I moved through the space.

  To be honest, I half expected the blade to start laughing at any moment. Instead, it stayed quiet. Too quiet. As though it were asleep.

  I searched through the books and pulled two that might offer answers about the vision I had seen. Both were histories. The first made no mention of the Romans at all. The second offered only a brief account.

  According to it, when the portals between the mortal realm and the Mists first opened, allowing passage into Avalon, the Druids were not alone for long. The Romans followed soon after.

  Druids moved here on mass leaving the mortal world behind while a branch of the romans, pagan in origin left the mortal realm in search of their gods. What came next was a war that stretched on for hundreds of years, Druids and spirits set against the Roman legions. In the end, the Romans were wiped out, never seen on this side of the realms again. Lost to time.

  Yet, much like in the old world, their influence outlived them. Roads, fortifications, and the bones of their civil works remained long after the people themselves were gone.

  I scanned the pages for more, but found little else. One passage spoke of a final battle where the world itself swallowed the Romans whole. The tone was too embellished, too eager for wonder, and I dismissed it as little more than a grim fairy tale. A cautionary story for spiritually inclined children, dressed up as history.

  Still, the truth lingered. There had been Romans here. Whoever they were, they were not the same as those of the mortal realm. A separate branch, lost to time. The history fascinated me, yet it answered few of my questions. Perhaps only one. The memory drawn from the sword was old. Which meant the sword itself might be just as ancient.

  I looked down at it. Silent. Asleep.

  A new thought surfaced. The training dummy. It still lay where I had brought it down.

  I crossed the hall and examined the wreckage. Where the blade had struck, the wood had not merely been cut. It had thinned, almost dissolved. And there was no sign of the sword I had destroyed, no fragments left behind.

  Jerald’s words echoed in my mind. “Whatever it takes.”

  It felt as though a wall stood before me, solid and unyielding, with no clear way around it. My gaze drifted to the sealed door at the far end of the hall. The one Doyle had said no one ever used.

  I frowned. I wondered if it, too, was hidden for a reason, like the blade. Maybe it was tied to it in some way. Maybe the answers I was looking for waited on the other side.

  It would not hurt to take a look at the door. I was not about to rush through it or start crawling through ancient foundations today.

  I moved closer. The stone was different from the walls around it, darker and denser, as though it belonged to an older layer of the world. Moss clung to its edges, and fine dust lay undisturbed along the base, as if nothing had stirred here for decades, or longer.

  There was no handle. No latch. Nothing that suggested it was meant to be opened.

  Why was Doyle so afraid of this place? It was not as though there was any way inside.

  My eyes widened as I took in the door more carefully. I ran my hands across its surface, feeling the shallow grooves carved into the stone beneath my fingers. At first, I had thought the markings were nothing more than decoration.

  Now I could see the truth.

  Figures. Soldiers.

  Roman soldiers.

  Time had scratched them down to near nothing, their forms barely recognisable, but the details were still there if you knew how to look. One carried a spatha. Another bore the same standard I had seen in the dream.

  My pulse quickened.

  I brushed away the dirt that had gathered over the door for untold years, working carefully until something different caught my eye. A break in the pattern. A shape hidden beneath a thin crust of dust, carved from the same stone as the rest.

  I wiped it clean.

  It was not a mechanism so much as a hollow, narrow and deliberate.

  My gaze dropped to the blade at my hip. The shape matched perfectly.

  “Seriously?”