At a haunted inn called Fantasy, ten strangers uncover a living map tied to the forgotten name Aetharion. As the inn twists into a realm shaped by their fears and pasts, each is pulled into a personal trial — and something ancient begins to wake beneath them.
CHAPTER TWO
As the scroll unrolled and the name “Aetharion” shimmered across the parchment, Doc Pitoros froze. His breath hitched, the mug in his hand trembled slightly, and for a moment, the inn disappeared around him.
Thirty years earlier…
The air inside the Hall of Varth was thick with incense and secrets. Doc Pitoros, then a young initiate in the Silent Order of Rell, followed behind his master through towering shelves of dust-choked tomes and bone-covered relics.
“Here,” the old master rasped, stopping before a locked case made of obsidian and gold-veined wood. “Aetharion the Forgotten. One of the Five Starbound Names. Speak it only when you must. Think it only when you’re ready.”
Pitoros swallowed hard. “But what was he?”
The master turned slowly. “He is. Not ‘was’.”
A beat. A shadow shifted in the glass behind them, though nothing moved.
“He was a king, a seer, a summoner… and a key. They say he built something beneath the veil of this world. A vault of truths. Or lies. Or both. It’s where wisdom ends — and madness begins.”
“But it’s real?”
His master only smiled, and that smile haunted Pitoros far more than the silence that followed.
Back in the inn…
The vision faded. The fire crackled again. The scroll lay still on the bar, open now, revealing a map, etched in a shifting ink that moved like smoke in water.
Pitoros blinked. The others were watching him.
“That name,” he murmured, his voice hoarse. “Aetharion. It’s not legend. It’s worse.”
Koump’aros leaned forward. “Worse?”
“He was a myth meant to be forgotten. If this is real…” Pitoros turned to Gleg, “…you’re about to have one hell of a tab, my friend.”
Gleg grinned, lifting a mug. “Long as it ends in coin or chaos, I’m paid either way.”
As Doc Pitoros spoke the name Aetharion, Gogos flinched. It was slight — just a twitch of the eye — but in a man who could control his every muscle like a puppeteer, it meant something. His smile wavered.
A face flashed through his mind. Not one he wore. One he lost.
Years earlier, in the city of Galemire…
The underground dueling pits buzzed with the roar of nobles betting secrets and thieves betting blood. The air smelled of sweat, wine, and ambition.
Gogos stood at the edge of the circle, wearing the face of a proud noble from the southern archipelago — someone he’d quietly gagged in an alley the night before.
Across from him, his opponent emerged: cloaked in crimson, faceless, like a shadow given form. The crowd whispered only one name:
“The Voice of Aetharion.”
They fought. Blades flashed. Masks cracked. Gogos was fast — a blur of steel and improvisation — but the Voice knew his moves before he made them.
“You wear faces well,” the Voice hissed mid-duel, “but none are truly yours. That is why you always lose in the end.”
Rage burned in Gogos. He struck wildly — desperate. Clever. Brutal.
But not enough.
He woke later, bruised and beaten, stripped of his mask and pride. Beside him, carved into the wall in blood:
Victory belongs to the one who dares not change — but reveal.
He never saw the Voice again. But from that day forward, “victory” became more than just a goal. It was an obsession. A riddle. A face he could not copy.
Back in the inn…
The flickering light caught Gogos’ current face — a dashing bard — but his eyes were far away.
He looked down at the scroll and whispered to no one, “He was real. The Voice. Aetharion’s prophet.”
Nikiforos tilted his head. “You say that like you lost a bet.”
Gogos chuckled darkly. “No. I lost something worse. A chance to win.”
Sir Kostanto leaned forward. “If this is a second chance… don’t waste it with riddles.”
Gogos’ eyes glinted. “Who said I would?”
s the others pondered the map and muttered about legends, St. Amou remained oddly still. His eyes weren’t on the scroll — they were past it. As if it were a window to something far older. Far worse.
Ten years ago, in the Iron Observatory of Telveron…
Rain lashed the domed glass roof as lightning forked across the sky, illuminating the vast chamber of gears, copper tubes, and echoing incantations.
St. Amou, not yet wearing his mechanical halo or stitched robes, stood atop a spiraling staircase, yelling instructions to robed apprentices below.
“Faster! If the algorithm reaches the sixth plane before the gear convergence, the soul-mirror will rupture!”
They moved in a frenzy, terrified — not of the machine — but of him.
In the center of the room stood his grand invention: The Aetharion Extractor. A device designed to interface with the Conceptual Field, the layer of reality between thought and form. Where ideas are born.
It had taken seven years. Hundreds of failed subjects. One soul too many.
But tonight, it whispered back.
A name — echoing from the coils, through the tubes, into his very bones:
“Aetharion.”
Not spoken.
Burned.
Into the gears. Into the blueprints. Into his dreams.
The machine’s light shifted from silver to something deeper — a shade that didn’t exist on any spectrum, but made everyone in the room weep.
All except Amou.
He laughed.
And kept laughing.
He never shut the machine down.
The observatory did that for him, when it collapsed under its own logic.
Back in the inn…
St. Amou reached up and adjusted the cracked tubing around his neck. “This scroll,” he muttered, “was not written. It was harvested. Pulled from a mind bigger than this world, pressed like wine into parchment.”
Gaslord Nikoko eyed him sideways. “You been drinking engine oil again?”
Amou smiled. “Not yet.”
He finally looked down at the scroll. “But I will.”
