Chương 150: Ch142- Footpath

Another Crawler darted into the array, sliced too fast to track. It hit Cassian's corner and bounced, claws screaming against the barrier. Perenelle's wand lashed upward.

"Pin them!" Nicolas frowned, eyes on the flickering line of wards.

"They're draining the magic. We don't have long." Cassian swiped sweat off his brow with the back of his sleeve.

"Patronus. Use them." The others didn't argue. No time for it. Bathsheda's wand snapped forward. A kestrel burst from the tip, wings sharp and fast as it took the air, skimming just above the lines. The flare of it brightened the failing array, dragging the light back in a hard snap. Nicolas followed, his Patronus coiling from his wand like liquid silver, long neck, winged, curling through the air with a hiss of feathers. Occamy. Already annoyed.

A Zouwu burst out from Madame Edevane's wand, long-bodied and shimmering, curling through the air. Eyes flicking toward the Crawlers like it was deciding which one to eat first. Perenelle's was quieter. A Thestral unfolded, lean and watchful, eyes blank and glowing. It paced the inner circle, head low, ready to hunt. Ayda's Graphorn exploded into shape with a stomp and a bellow, charging straight for the edge of the array. The Crawlers flinched.

The barrier shrieked again as another Crawler slammed into it, silver claws sparking against failing wards. The Patronuses flared, but the line was dimming. Cassian glanced around at the faces ringed in blue-white light. Old hands, tired eyes, the weight of decades pressed onto their shoulders. All of them ready to burn out one more time. He sighed and took a single step forward. Into the line.

"Cassian!" Perenelle's voice snapped like a whip, wand raised as if she could drag him back by will alone.

"Don't. You two are still young. We've lived long enough." He didn't stop. Ayda moved to follow, staring in fury as he warded off another crawler.

"We're not letting some boy throw himself to death in vain." Nicolas gave a smile, though his eyes stayed fixed on the crawling shadows.

"You probably can't even hold them, lad." Madame Edevane's Patronus coiled overhead, claws flashing. She gave a nod.

"Step aside. Let us bear it." Cassian turned back to throw them a look.

"You lot are bloody sentimental today. I'm flattered."

"Don't be clever," Perenelle hissed, stepping toward him. Her thestral prowled the circle behind her.

"No need to worry." Cassian flicked his wand, light humming up around him.

"I love living far too much to sacrifice myself." He didn't explain any further than that. Devouring his memory? That was impossible. Light cracked from his wand in threads. The others went still. Those threads moved fast, splitting and curling over the ruined basin. They swept past the half-finished sigils on the ground and caught the Crawlers mid‑stride. The creatures hissed when the light touched them, shadows boiling off their limbs like steam.

The tendrils wrapped tighter, dragging at the Crawlers' shapes, burning holes straight through the dark they wore. More light rolled from him, flaring brighter as it went, the pattern of the array reshaping itself around him as though it had been waiting for this moment. He stepped between them all as the sigils coalesced, one by one, peeling off the ground, off the fractured lines and broken arcs, and slid toward him like iron filings pulled to a magnet.

They pulled together into a centre that didn't exist ten seconds ago. That centre was him. Ngaralu's array didn't need pillars. It needed anchors. People. Her time had stone. Souls bound to rock, built into the bones of the world. Because the stone didn't forget. It didn't age, didn't warp under pressure, didn't break unless someone made it. Stone held memory. Old spells, ancient blood, ruined cities, if you carved something into rock, it stayed. That was the point. Flesh? Flesh was a mess.

Bones snapped, nerves frayed, breath stuttered. Even the strongest minds went foggy with time. But he was different. He'd known it for a while now, his memory was immutable. He didn't forget. Couldn't. Even when he tried. The moment the last thread of light snapped into place, the array responded like it had been waiting on him alone. Magic twisted. Pulled. Threads of it clung to his skin. The Crawlers shrieked. He stepped forward, one, then another, the light tightening around him.

The largest Crawler stood at the centre, still grinning. He walked straight up to it. Behind him, someone swore. Another shouted, too far to make out, but no one moved. He raised his hand. The Crawler charged. Heat drained from the air. His coat went heavy, like it'd soaked through. Magic tugged away from him, pulled straight out of the bones. The circle buckled. Light stuttered at the edges. Patronuses dimmed to faint outlines, silver reduced to a memory. The wind turned sour, rotten citrus and scorched bone.

The Crawlers fed on the cracks, pushing against the sigils like dogs testing a fence. But the tendrils held. Lines of light curled tighter round the Crawlers, latching on like fishhooks. Where they touched, the creatures flinched. A few tried backing up. One went still entirely, limbs locking like something had jolted its spine. Cassian watched them. Lips curled slightly. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The largest Crawler lunged again.

This time, it went low. Straight for him. He didn't dodge. He met it head-on. The light followed him, folding in like a closing jaw. He met the creature head-on, raised his free hand, and slapped it flat against the thing's skull. The moment they touched, the void buckled. His vision shifted. Dark skies. Lands that never had a sun. Crawlers born in silence. Built for hunger. Not survival, just... to devour. Fed on light, warmth, magic. They slipped in where magic ran wild and memory failed.

Took root in places forgotten. Ruins. Old spells. Names no one said aloud. Created to rot, devour, erase... Cassian reeled. The creature's thoughts were wrong. No, not thoughts, really. More like, pulls. Drives. But buried underneath the crawl of instinct, something else pressed up. Something old.

"Crown!" Cassian pulled. The creatures around him melted away like snow beneath sunlight. Bodies vanishing, souls sucked into glyphs. The Crawlers had never been bodies to break, they were amortal constructs. Memoryless hunger driven monsters, much like Dementors, but meaner, stranger. Amortality was not immortality. The immortal persisted within life whereas the amortal had never been alive, so it could not die, it could only be unmade, unbound, or unremembered.

Poltergeists, Dementors, all those damned things sat on that edge, you did not slay them, you starved, scattered, or sealed them. That was why Ngaralu and others had carved the arrays into stone. The Patronus worked against such creatures because, in a sense, it was their antithesis. It nullified their very being, but if left alone belief, ruin, and old places would let them knit themselves back together from the darkness.

And that was why Cassian had to seal them once more, this time using his own memory as the anchor. Not as a living sacrifice to be consumed, but through the immutability of his strange mind. Where others' thoughts might blur or fray under the Crawlers' erosion, his held firm, unyielding, unbending, a fixed point the spell could latch onto without devouring him. The biggest creature fell at last, snapping backward like a thread yanked tight, and the vision fractured, cracked like ice underfoot.

Cassian stumbled, breath catching sharp in his throat. The dark loosened. Air came rushing back, cold and foul, but real. It wasn't him. The Crawlers had escaped long before he'd ever lit that cursed spell in the Chamber. Years before he'd ever stepped foot in this world. He hadn't broken the seal. He hadn't called them. He sighed hard. New script flickered behind his eyes. Tenebrae Aboleo. Darkness that nulls. They'd all gotten it wrong.

He, Ngaralu, the ancients, Nicolas with his vaults of forbidden theories and half-remembered ritual diagrams. Everyone thought the Crawlers fed. They didn't. They erased. Magic, heat, memory, light, gone. That's what Lumos Noctis had done, wasn't it? It hadn't dimmed the room. It made light disappear. Even he couldn't see it. And now... now his spell could do the same. Tenebrae Aboleo wasn't a weapon. It was an equaliser. Light against lightless.

"Cass," Bathsheda called, already jogging toward him. The others were close behind. He didn't move. Just turned to face them, hair sticking to his temple, coat clinging damp at the collar.

"They're gone," he said, giving a big smile.

"Don't faint. I'm still in one piece." No one looked relieved. Nicolas frowned first.

"How?" They'd seen Ngaralu's vision. The Crawlers, the way they ate through light and thought like fire through parchment. You didn't walk out of that and stay intact. Cassian let out a short breath and chuckled.

"This is something we figured out a while back." He jerked his thumb between himself and Bathsheda.

"My memory doesn't go. At all. Not even with help." Nicolas shifted, but didn't speak. Cassian tilted his head toward him.

"Remember how you said you've seen us somewhere before but couldn't place it?" He gave a thin smile.

"I can. That day, when you wiped everyone's memory? Yours, Perenelle's, even theirs," he nodded toward Ayda and Edevane, "didn't work on me." He raised his hand.

"No worries. Seems like the same reason I keep those memories is why they don't do the whole nightmare-trigger thing when you hold them." They sighed in relief hearing that. Bathsheda still looked a bit lost, eyes flicking between them like she'd missed a line in the script. The others didn't need it explained. If something had made them, Nicolas bloody Flamel, of all people, scrub their own memories, it wasn't a footnote. It was something tectonic. Edevane folded her arms, brow tight.

"Isolated mind?" Ayda scratched his jaw.

"Could be. Maybe not part of the... causal thread?" He glanced at Cassian.

"Like a bypass."

"Still part of it. At least partially," Nicolas muttered.

"But not entangled." Perenelle shook her head once.

"Or something subtler. Something in the way his memory works. Not stronger than the spell. Just... immune." Nicolas hummed, low and distracted, eyes still on Cassian.

"Perhaps." Bathsheda looked between them, eyes narrowing.

"Right. What the hell is going on?"

"There are things," Nicolas said slowly, like he was choosing the least dangerous words, "that get stronger when remembered." Bathsheda frowned.

"Meaning?"

"Remember what Ngaralu said? Her kin is no more. People forgot her name, and thus she was erased. With her passing from memory, the monolith lost its power, and that was how the Night Crawlers escaped. Memory, faith, will... these are the pillars that bind ancient wards. Without memory, there is no anchor. Without faith, no strength to sustain them. Without will, no force to drive them. Strip away even one, and what was once eternal begins to crumble." Perenelle explained with a sigh.

"Names," Nicolas said.

"Faces. Events. Doesn't matter if they're true. If enough people believe them, feel something about them, love, anger, fear, even reverence, they gain weight. Memory becomes form. Emotion becomes anchor." Cassian tilted his head.

"Like a Patronus, but worse." Nicolas nodded.

"That's the idea. Patronus pulls on joy. Personal memory. But this... this is older magic. Collective memory. Wide belief. It can make monsters real. Or keep them alive long after they should've crumbled." Bathsheda's brow furrowed.

"So that's why wiping memory works?"

"If it stops a name from spreading, then yes," Nicolas said simply.

"If we'd remembered it, written it, taught it, it might've become something else. Something rooted. You spread a name far enough, with enough weight behind it... and you give it form. Removing our memories is not ideal. But better than letting it grow. The fewer who remember, the harder it is for that memory to take root." Edevane's eyes stayed on Cassian.

"He somehow evaded that. Since he isn't stronger than Nicolas, not even close," she added with a short snort like the idea was funny. Rude, "and yet nothing happens. His mind must be different. Isolated." A low hum of agreement rolled through the group. It was the only explanation that fit. Nicolas tilted his head, eyes still on the horizon.

"I felt a mark at Greece. It was about that then. We failed to remove the threat and only sealed it temporarily, barely, it seems." He rubbed at the side of his neck, almost absently.

"How troublesome." Cassian's brows went up. With barely a handful of details Nicolas had almost sketched the whole picture. He was sure the man could have gone further, spilled every last bit of what he suspected, but he could feel Nicolas holding himself back, as if one wrong word might knock the edge off something better left alone. That, more than anything, was impressive.

With that out of the way, they gave themselves a single day to breathe. They set up camp by the last ridge. The Crawlers were gone. For now. Nicolas and Perenelle decided to stay behind. Someone had to restore the monoliths, now that Ngaralu had dumped half the ancient script into their heads, they could actually do it properly. No more guessing with half-broken glyphs and hope.

"Without the Crawlers around, they won't need living anchors anymore," Perenelle said, handing out cookies.

"Nothing left to feed on memory." Nicolas unfolded a large scroll onto a flat rock.

"We'll reinforce the stones. Not just the old bindings. They need attention." Bathsheda frowned.

"To restore their power?"

"Yes," Nicolas said.

"Magic's old. Primitive in some ways. They draw power from faith, memory, repetition." Cassian squinted at him.

"You're going to start a cult."

"No," Nicolas said mildly.

"I'm going to build a footpath. Touristic route. Plaques. Suggested offerings." Cassian choked.

"You're serious." Perenelle smiled without looking up.

"Flowers. Candles. Simple traditions. Something people will do without question.""'Honour the Forgotten Stones,'" Ayda said, mock reading off an invisible pamphlet.

"Bet we'll have them printed by spring."

"They won't even know what they're doing," Nicolas said.

"But the belief will stick. Enough people lay flowers on a stone, that memory holds. Anchors bind tighter."

"Better than us bleeding into them," Perenelle said simply. No one argued. They'd all seen what the Crawlers could do. Better to keep the stones humming with accidental magic than leave them hollow. If that meant tricking tourists into stopping for a photo and dropping a daisy, so be it. Cassian tilted back, arms folded behind his head, gaze on the clouds.

"Right. World's saved by wildflowers and bad signage. Honestly, fits." The whole thing reminded him of the Norwegian nuclear facility. The Norwegians had feared that, once it was buried, people centuries later might stumble across it and dig it out again. They placed warnings in dozens of languages, even experimented with colors meant to repel, in case knowledge was lost with time. But humans were curious by nature.

It was much like the old Greek temples, stumble upon one, and the first instinct was to poke at the stones. And that could be dangerous. By creating a footpath, however, Nicolas was ensuring that people would not pry, but rather leave flowers and prayers, acts of reverence that would strengthen the stones instead of awakening what lay beneath. He had learned this from a fiction book back on Earth called Andres 919. It had been a fascinating read.