The convoy was cutting through Parisian arteries like a tallic predator, gliding between the moving shadows of early morning. Dawn had not yet torn the veil of night, and the entire city seed to hold its breath, as if aware of the danger being transported within its midst.
Three armored vehicles closed the march, their matte black bodywork absorbing the light from the few streetlamps still lit. Two others cleared the way, chasing away the last night owls with silent authority. At the center of this military formation, an anti-gravitational armored capsule floated thirty centiters above the paved ground, maintained by an oscillating field that emitted an almost imperceptible humming. Pale blue ergency lights swept across Haussmannian facades like anxious ghosts, projecting furtive shadows that seed to dance on the listone. On the rooftops, concealed in the folds of shadow, masked silhouettes Bureau elite snipers followed the convoy’s progression, their thermal sights locked on the prisoner’s infrared signature.
Isaac Draven.
The man the dia had dubbed "the Traitor of the Century." The Executor of Portals. The Assassin of Lazarus Korr.
Inside the hertic capsule, Isaac was bathed in total darkness. His body touched neither floor nor wall; he remained suspended in a magnetic field calibrated to the milliter, his limbs spread in a cruciform position. Adaptive runic chains gripped his wrists and ankles, their glyphs pulsing with a bluish glow synchronized with his heartbeat. Each link was connected to integrated neural surveillance systems, capable of detecting the slightest intention of resistance before it could manifest. His neck, immobilized by a technomantic obsidian collar, was traversed by engraved microcircuits that neutralized all magical activity down to the molecular level.
This capsule was not a simple ans of transport. It was an instrunt of absolute submission, designed by the Bureau’s best technomagical engineers to annihilate any inclination to resist whether physical, psychic, or mystical. At the slightest elevation of the mana rate in his body, an electromagnetic discharge would strike directly at his motor cortex, leaving him paralyzed for hours, a conscious prisoner of flesh turned foreign.
The convoy deliberately avoided the ring road. It was heading neither to any official military base nor to any registered court. Instead, it plunged into the winding streets of the 5th arrondissent, its passage making the windows of century-old buildings vibrate. The vehicles slid under the arches of the Latin Quarter before engaging in the forbidden anders of rue Denfert-Rochereau. There, in front of the entrance to the official Catacombs, an anonymous manhole but engraved with a technomagical seal invisible to the naked eye silently opened, revealing an access ramp plunging toward unsuspected depths.
Only a handful of high-ranking governnt officials and senior Bureau officers knew of the existence of this descent to the Rock Heart, code na for an ultra-secret prison embedded in the millennial entrails of Paris. This facility was concealed behind several layers of altered reality, accessible only through twisted passages that seed to defy the laws of physics, split between the strata of history and the abysses of oblivion.
The convoy plunged into this passage, abandoning the surface world. As they progressed, the environnt subtly tamorphosed. Concrete walls gave way to raw stone. Artificial lights beca scarcer, replaced by orbs of cold light suspended at regular intervals. The architecture itself seed to change in nature: the paving stones beca ossuaries, the arches transford into vaults of bones, and the corridors stretched like entrails of rock resonating with ancestral whispers.
A hundred ters below the surface, beneath layers of history, skulls, and millennial silence, stood the prison.
This prison had neither watchtower, nor courtyard, nor sky to contemplate. It had roots that plunged into the very mory of the earth.
Embedded in the forgotten catacombs, it had been sculpted directly into the listone by tools powered by ancient magic. Each cell, each corridor, each control room had been reinforced by gravitational stabilization and perception alteration spells. The walls, impregnated with technomagical alloys, blocked any attempt at communication or detection. No signal could filter to the outside. No natural light ca to remind of the sun’s existence. The air, perfectly regulated, was permanently recycled by invisible biosynthetic systems that produced not the slightest noise. The structure itself seed alive, breathing at the slow rhythm of the earth, absorbing each sound like a hungry predator.
Agents in reinforced armor patrolled the circular corridors, their opaque visors flashing at each security threshold crossing. They carried state-of-the-art mage-rifles, each calibrated to their biotric signature and connected directly to a technomagical beacon implanted along their spine. At the slightest sign of betrayal, at the smallest malfunction, their entire nervous system would instantly transform into a network of self-destructive offensive spells.
The architectural heart of the prison ford a vertiginous abyss around which the cells were organized, like alveoli suspended in the void. Each was isolated from the others by a multidinsional inhibition field, making communication between inmates impossible. The cell intended for Isaac was located at the deepest level, soberly designated "Level O⁰" the Core where the stone itself seed to whisper forgotten secrets.
He was lowered there aboard a spherical elevator wrapped in a translucent magical do with athyst reflections, escorted by six elite soldiers of A classification. Their armor, articulated with silent servomotors, reflected no light. Their faces, hidden behind neutral masks, betrayed no emotion.
When he reached his final destination, the transport capsule disintegrated into six perfectly synchronized chanical segnts, and articulated arms transferred him with surgical precision to his permanent detention cell: a circular space suspended above an unfathomable abyss, surrounded by six crystalline columns that pulsed with a greenish light. These pillars were not decorative; they contained ticulously cut absorption crystals to capture and neutralize the slightest particle of mana he might attempt to invoke.
Chains sprang from the walls, but they were not made of conventional tal. They were magical bonds made of solidified light, whose luminescence varied subtly according to the prisoner’s breathing. Complex glyphs, engraved in the air itself, animated with each of Isaac’s movents. If he attempted a movent too sudden, if his mind heated too intensely, the chains would react instantly, tightening like vigilant snakes.
A surveillance drone slowly descended from the ceiling, its hexagonal structure emitting a barely audible hum. It thodically scanned the prisoner’s vital signs, precisely adjusted the paraters of his inhibitor collar, then rose again and disappeared into a wall niche that closed without a sound.
And thus was sealed the fate of Isaac Draven, prisoner of the Rock Heart, erased from official registers, chained in the depths of the city he had once sworn to protect.
Yet, even suspended in this artificial nothingness, even dispossessed of his na, his voice, his freedom...
Isaac continued to look straight ahead.
His pupils, of a spectral orange that seed to defy the surrounding darkness, burned with an inner fla that no prison, no matter how deep, could ever extinguish.
The return was brutal.
As always.
Isaac’s consciousness was torn from his body suspended in the darkness of the Rock Heart the human prison and violently thrown into the older, more primitive darkness of his stone cell in the other world. He opened his eyes with a trembling sigh, short of breath, his neck sweaty, his muscles trembling from this transition torn from the fabric of reality.
Mordred.
He beca Mordred again.
The room was narrow, damp, dimly lit by the sickly light of a torch struggling to breathe in the air saturated with odors: stone, dried blood, corrupted magic.
His back was pressed against the cold wall, his chest covered with poorly healed scars, and yet his gaze reflected neither pain nor fatigue.
Only icy determination.
And growing urgency.
He knew his torturers would soon return. He could already hear, in the distance, chains dragged across the floor, the distant clicking of hooks and pliers, the hoarse breaths of those who ca to "toughen" what the draconic kingdom wanted to transform into an absolute weapon.
But this ti, he did not wait in silence. This ti, he did not let himself be overwheld.
He thought.
He forced his broken mind, fragnted by torture, to rebuild itself piece by piece. To organize itself. To formulate a plan. For one truth now imposed itself on him, clear, rciless: his Isaac body would never escape the human prison without outside help.
And for this help, there was only one place to look for it: here.
Mordred slowly straightened up, the chains on his wrists creaking against the iron rings fixed to the wall. His body cracked, his breath whistled, but his mind was already boiling. He no longer had the luxury of waiting. No longer the luxury of simply surviving each session of pain.
He had to act. He had to force events to rush forward.
Because he had no more ti.
The other world, Isaac’s world, had reduced him to the state of a beast, a public enemy, a shadow in a cage. They had chained him, humiliated him, erased him from the map of reality. And yet he felt that, even there, sothing was changing. Sothing was trembling. Perhaps in Elystria. Perhaps elsewhere. Cracks were opening.
But a shock was needed to break them completely.
And that shock... would be the invasion.
Not tomorrow. Now.
If he wanted his Isaac body to flee this human sarcophagus impossible to break from the inside, he would have to unleash chaos outside.
He would have to precipitate the war.
Create the necessary disorder.
The perfect opportunity.
His gaze slid toward the heavy iron door. The guards’ voices were approaching. This was no longer the ti for fear. He no longer feared them. Pain no longer ant anything to him. His mind was already elsewhere, above this cell, above this flesh.
He had understood.
I will give them what they want.
I will beco this weapon... their weapon.
And when the ti cos... I will point this weapon at them.
I will be the fire they thought they controlled.
I will be the catastrophe they themselves shaped.
His chains creaked again, tautened by the tension in his arms as he straightened completely. His bare feet hit the stone, solid. Standing. Exhausted, broken, but standing.
When the torturers entered, gleaming fangs and unsheathed claws, they found a Mordred with a straight, fixed gaze, cold as a blade.
He did not struggle.
He let them do it.
They still thought they were taming him.
But this ti, each blow they delivered, each spell they engraved in his skin, each poison they injected into his veins, was just another brick laid in the temple of his vengeance.
For war was coming.
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