The abandoned inn was quiet—a strange sort of quiet that made the team realize just how chaotic the night had been. The wind outside rustled half-broken shutters, and every now and then, a distant rumble from the heart of Luthadel reminded them of the chaos they’d left behind. The building itself, once likely a humble lodging for traveling rchants, showed signs of disuse: a warped front door hanging on loose hinges, a handful of rickety tables scattered around a common room, and a staircase missing entire chunks of railing. Despite the sorry condition, it was enough. It was away from the imdiate danger, and for now, that was all they needed.
They filed inside and did a quick sweep, closing the crooked shutters as best they could. Candlelight flickered in the darkness, and soone managed to find a lantern in a closet under the stairs. When they lit it, the glow was soft and shaky, throwing their shadows against walls lined with peeling wallpaper. Exhaustion clung to every movent, making their limbs heavy and minds slow. For the first ti since the mayhem started, they let themselves breathe.
Mikhailis sank down onto the edge of a splintered wooden table. He could feel the weight of the mist pressing in on him even here, though no one else seed to sense it the way he did. His fingertips drumd absently against the table’s rough surface. It’s still clinging to , he thought, amazed and unsettled at the sa ti. He didn’t need to see it to know it was there—an intangible presence that pulsed faintly in tune with his heartbeat. It was like an echo in his mind, a half-forgotten lody that refused to stop playing.
Lira stood in front of him with her arms crossed, posture rigid despite the exhaustion etched into her features. She was everything the rumors said a royal maid could be: elegant, poised, beautiful, and fiercely loyal. But right now, there was a tension in her eyes that Mikhailis rarely saw. He recognized the worry concealed behind her mask of composure.
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"You felt sothing in there," Lira said, her tone more of a statent than a question. Candlelight reflected in her dark eyes, revealing just how intently she was watching him.
Mikhailis let out a slow breath. For a second, he considered deflecting with a joke—maybe sothing like Well, I feel a headache, does that count?—but he could see the seriousness in her gaze. Instead, he nodded. "The mist isn’t just wild energy," he began, searching for the right words. The mory of that otherworldly space still lingered, making his chest tighten. "It’s… alive. And it knows ."
Lira’s lips parted slightly, but she didn’t speak. She seed to be waiting for him to say more, to explain what exactly it ant that the mist was alive. Mikhailis wanted to explain, but he wasn’t sure how. The experience defied the neat categories he usually relied on to make sense of the world. He couldn’t sum it up with easy words like magic or essence. It was bigger than that, sohow.
They both looked up when the door to the inn opened again, letting in a brief draft of cold air. Cerys and Vyrelda slipped inside, shutting the door behind them. Their postures were tense, eyes sweeping over the room to check for threats. Satisfied there were no imdiate dangers, they moved closer to the table. Cerys’s red ponytail clung to her neck with sweat, and she had a bruise forming on her cheek, but her eyes were sharp as ever. Vyrelda, in contrast, looked a bit disheveled, hair coming loose from its usual neat style, and the lines of worry were carved into her face more deeply than usual.
"We found sothing," Vyrelda announced. Her voice was clipped, each word precise, like she was trying not to waste a single breath. She pulled a small data crystal from her belt pouch and tossed it onto the table.
Mikhailis picked it up. It was warm to the touch, pulsing with faint traces of arcane energy. Whatever information it held, it had probably been protected by all sorts of complex encryption. The fact that Vyrelda and Cerys had retrieved it spoke volus about the risks they’d taken inside the Technomancer Spire.
Lira stepped forward and swiftly retrieved the crystal from Mikhailis’s hand, her movents graceful despite her fatigue. She was used to handling magical items, though a data crystal was more of a Technomancer creation than the typical enchanted artifacts she usually dealt with. Holding it near the lantern, she pressed a small switch at the crystal’s base, letting out a soft beep. Then a subtle glow began to emanate from within, flickering like a hidden firefly.
Her expression changed as lines of coded text flashed across the crystal’s surface. She could read them in small, glowing incrents—like reading a tiny scroll. The rest of the group fell silent, waiting. Rhea crossed her arms, her foot tapping restlessly on the warped floorboards, while Cerys and Vyrelda watched from either side of the table. Mikhailis stayed seated, still feeling the odd sensation of the mist swirling around him.
After a mont, Lira’s brow knit together. "The Technomancers didn’t create the mist suppression network," she murmured, as if to herself. She looked up, eting everyone’s eyes. "They inherited it from a lost civilization."
Mikhailis frowned. "Inherited?" he repeated, not entirely sure he liked the sound of that. "aning… they found it? Or claid it after soone else abandoned it?"
"Sothing along those lines," Lira said, scanning more of the data. Her voice had a distant quality, like she was reading and talking at the sa ti. "The details are old, fragnted. But I can piece together references to a group that existed before the modern era of Luthadel. They apparently built this network for a reason that had nothing to do with controlling the populace."
Cerys shifted, leaning her back against a broken old bookshelf. "So the Technomancers simply ca across it and decided to repurpose it for their own ends," she concluded. "Typical."
Lira nodded. "Yes. And it seems there was a reason it existed in the first place—sothing about two keys." She tapped the crystal, face illuminated by the tiny glow. "They called it the Serewyn system, referencing a pair of essential components that must work together."
At that, Vyrelda cleared her throat. She stepped to the table, looking uneasy. "The file ntions the Serewyn system was designed with two keys," she said. "One is the Mistborn Guardian—the entity we saw unleashed on the city. The other is… the Sovereign Catalyst."
A cold flutter danced in Mikhailis’s stomach, and he noticed that everyone else stiffened too. So that monstrous thing is only half of what the old system was ant to be. That hardly made him feel better. He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to muster so sense of calm. "So the entity isn’t just attacking randomly?" he asked, voice quieter than he intended. "It’s looking for its missing counterpart."
Rhea let out a low whistle, shifting from foot to foot. "That’s… bad," she said simply. Her usual witty edge was gone, replaced by sothing closer to genuine dread. She might have joked about it before, but seeing the chaos in the streets had shown everyone how serious the situation was.
Lira closed her eyes, exhaling through her nose. "The Crownless House wasn’t trying to release power," she said softly. Her gaze flicked to Mikhailis, dark and solemn. "They were trying to force the Sovereign Catalyst to erge."
At those words, Mikhailis felt a terrible chill settle over him. Force it to erge… from where? From whom? He didn’t dare voice the question, yet the thought gnawed at him. He recalled the swirl of voices in the void, the intangible sense that sothing in him resonated with the mist. Am I…? He didn’t want to finish the thought, not here, not now.
A silence weighed on them, so thick you could almost taste it. Outside, the wind rattled the broken shutters, and the candle wavered in a draft. The inn felt smaller than it had monts ago, as though the truth pressing down on them had taken up space in the room.
"The Crownless House failed," Cerys said finally, her voice subdued. She rubbed at a faint bruise on her forearm, a souvenir from the Technomancer Spire. "They tried to bring out this Catalyst but got the Guardian instead. Now the city is paying the price."
"And that Guardian is raging," Vyrelda added. She set the data crystal down, stepping away from it like she couldn’t stand to hold it any longer. "It’s growing larger. We saw it from the Spire. It’s not just chaotic; it’s… searching."
Mikhailis leaned back in his rickety chair, feeling it wobble beneath him. His mind swirled with the possibilities. If the Crownless House had known about this from the beginning, then all their rebellious actions—the sabotage, the infiltration of the city’s old tunnels, even the attacks on the Technomancers—had been a desperate attempt to unearth the missing half of the system. But why bring out sothing this dangerous? he wondered. They had to know it’d cause widespread destruction. Or maybe they thought they could control it…
"So, what’s the plan?" he asked aloud, glancing at each of them in turn. He was no stranger to strategy—he might act frivolous, but he was still a prince consort used to the intricacies of royal politics. If they were to handle a threat like this, they needed a direction.
Vyrelda stepped forward, pulling out an aged parchnt from under her cloak. She spread it on the table, careful not to knock over the flickering candle. "We have one lead left," she said, tapping a portion of the map. "There’s a ntion of another Serewyn Key hidden beneath the city, likely in the catacombs that connect to the oldest parts of Luthadel."
Everyone drew closer. Rhea grimaced at the jagged lines that represented the labyrinth below. "Great. Underground ruins. Probably cursed. Definitely dangerous. Because tonight hasn’t been exciting enough, right?"
Mikhailis felt a wry grin tug at his lips. "I an, if I’m supposed to be a prophecy-born mist overlord," he said, trying to lighten the mood, "I might as well lean into it." He shot Lira a look, half expecting her to roll her eyes. She didn’t disappoint—she gave him that really, Your Highness? stare that had beco so familiar.
"You’re taking this too lightly," Lira said softly, though there was a small sigh that suggested she knew this was just his way of coping.
He shrugged, the grin lingering. "Hey, it’s my coping chanism," he replied, raising his hands in mock surrender. "You wouldn’t want to start crying, would you? That’d ruin my roguish charm."
Rhea almost snorted a laugh but managed to hold it in. Cerys shook her head with a faint smirk curling at the corner of her mouth. For a mont, the tension in the room eased, replaced by the faint glow of camaraderie. Sure, they were in danger, with a monstrous entity ripping up the city, but they were also in this together—and it was better to laugh than to be paralyzed by fear.
Lira watched him for a beat longer, then called him an idiot in a tone that was far from insulting. In fact, there was a hint of sothing else in her voice—affection, perhaps. She was worried about him, no doubt, but she also trusted him. That trust put a responsibility on Mikhailis’s shoulders he wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for.
He noticed that in the dim lantern light, her expression was tinged with relief. Maybe she needed to see he could still joke, that he wasn’t completely overwheld by the madness swirling around them. In monts like these, he realized that humor wasn’t just for himself—it was for everyone. A way to keep spirits alive when the world felt close to falling apart.
Mikhailis pushed himself off the table with a huff, crossing to stand beside her. He placed a hand on her shoulder, briefly letting the contact linger. "I know," he said, voice soft enough that only she could hear. "But if I don’t laugh, I’ll go crazy." Lira said nothing, but her gaze softened in a way that told him she understood.
Then he turned to the others, scanning their faces. Rhea looked ready for a fight, her eyes burning with determination. Vyrelda kept glancing back to the data crystal and the parchnt, her mind clearly dissecting every possibility. Cerys folded her arms, an air of unwavering resolve about her, the stance of a knight who would see her mission through. Each of them had risked their lives for this mont, for answers that might avert a full-scale disaster.
The candle sputtered, throwing shadows across the cracked walls. In the distance, faint echoes of the city’s turmoil drifted in—a reminder that their ti was running short. The Mistborn Entity would only grow more unstable if they didn’t act. And if the stories about a second key were true, then it might be their only hope to save Luthadel from utter collapse.
"All right," Mikhailis said, breathing in deeply to steady himself. The faint pulse of the mist brushed against his senses again, sending a shiver through him. Am I truly the Catalyst? The question flickered in his mind, but he pushed it aside. Doesn’t matter right now, he thought. We just need to find answers before everything falls apart.
He forced a grin, focusing on the map and the marked location of the catacombs beneath the city. Even the word catacombs sent a small thrill of dread down his spine—an underground maze of darkness, tombs, and who knew what else. But he’d faced enough danger tonight that a few crumbling tunnels weren’t going to scare him off.
"Yeah, yeah," he said, turning his grin up a notch as he caught Lira’s eye one last ti. "Let’s go find this key."
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