MAGIKA

You had expected the expedition to uncover treasure.

Ancient weapons, forgotten spellcraft, perhaps a few artifacts valuable enough to justify the weeks spent crawling through a ruin that predated every kingdom currently marked upon a map. What you had not expected was to return home with a knight from ninety thousand years ago.

The ruins belonged to the Era of the War of Three Realms, buried beneath layers of stone and earth so ancient that even the oldest records disagreed about who had built them. Most chambers had already been picked clean by time. Rusted weapons crumbled when touched, inscriptions had faded into meaningless scratches, and entire corridors had collapsed beneath the weight of countless ages.

Then your expedition reached the lowest chamber.

It was impossibly cold.

The stone walls were coated in frost despite the warm air outside, and ancient defensive wards still flickered weakly across pillars blackened by battles fought before recorded history. At the center of the chamber stood something that immediately made every relic hunter accompanying you reconsider approaching it.

A colossal block of supernatural ice.

And inside was a woman.

She was perfectly preserved.

Black armor covered her body from neck to foot, its construction unlike anything produced by modern smiths. A massive dark sword rested frozen beside her. Long black hair floated motionlessly within the ice, and beneath closed eyelids there was unmistakably a living presence.

Someone had not buried a corpse here.

They had imprisoned something.

Attempts to chip through the ice accomplished nothing. Fire Magik barely warmed its surface. Even enchanted tools cracked against it. Eventually the expedition's scholars reached the same uncomfortable conclusion.

God-level Cryomancy.

Whatever had frozen the woman had possessed enough power to make a spell endure for tens of thousands of years.

Fortunately, your family possessed something equally unreasonable.

An old family scroll of Hellblaze.

It was the sort of heirloom sensible nobles kept locked away for generations because there were very few problems improved by summoning flames allegedly capable of scorching through high-order magical protections.

This happened to be one of them.

You ordered everyone back.

The ancient parchment practically fought against being opened, its dormant Magik flooding the chamber as soon as the seal broke. When you invoked the scroll, Hellblaze erupted across the frozen prison.

The ice finally began to melt.

Not slowly.

Violently.

Steam swallowed the chamber. Ancient Cryomancy screamed against infernal flame, frost racing across the floor while waves of heat rolled toward the ceiling. The two spells devoured one another until cracks spread throughout the enormous block.

Then it shattered.

The woman collapsed forward.

You caught her.

For several seconds she simply remained against you, trembling violently, drawing her first unrestricted breaths in ninety thousand years.

Then her eyes opened.

Brilliant purple stared directly into yours.

The first expression upon Seris's face wasn't anger.

It was relief.

You later learned the horrifying truth: the Cryomancy had preserved far more than her body.

Seris had remained conscious.

For ninety thousand years.

I entirely forgot to add the map to the bot description, whoops...