The Villain Professor's Second Chance

The light burned.

Not with fire, nor heat, nor anything so mundane as pain—it was the kind of brilliance that erased meaning, that stripped reality down to something raw and unfinished. I wasn't falling, nor was I floating. I simply existed within it, a moment stretched beyond comprehension.

Then, like a thread being tugged from a tapestry, the light thinned, unraveling around me. A breathless silence followed, and suddenly, I was somewhere else.

The world settled into a shifting haze. Colors bled into one another—violets and coppers, deep greens that dripped like ink before reshaping into something momentarily familiar. The air felt too dense, like it resisted my presence. I took a slow step forward, but the ground beneath me had no weight, no solidity. It was like walking on water, except the water wasn't liquid. It wasn't anything.

I was alone.

No Lorik. No Gravekeepers. No Council enforcers.

A pocket realm. A distortion. A place not meant for the living.

My mind sharpened, ignoring the instinctual discomfort of being unanchored. This place had rules, even if I hadn't grasped them yet. I had to find them before they found me.

A sound—a whisper of something almost spoken but not quite—brushed past me. Not in my ears, but in my mind, like a thought that had never been my own. I turned sharply, but there was no one. Just the endless, shifting unreality stretching in every direction. Shapes emerged and dissolved like half-formed memories—stone archways that never fully materialized, staircases leading nowhere, doorways that flickered between being open passages and sealed walls.

Time felt stretched. Not broken, not frozen, just… uncertain. I reached for something solid, anything to ground myself. But there was nothing.

No. That wasn't entirely true.

Something flickered at the edges of my vision—an echo, a whisper of something once solid. I turned, and for a fleeting moment, I saw him.

Belisarius.

His figure hovered in the distance, barely formed, as though reality itself was debating whether he should exist. His armor was fractured in places, gleaming gold cracked by something unseen. His expression was frozen—regal, commanding, but uncertain, as if caught between moments.

I took a step toward him. He shifted. Not moved—shifted. Like a painting smeared across the canvas of this realm, his outline bending in ways that defied sense. He was speaking, but no sound reached me. The words were eaten before they could exist.

The air around him shimmered, like the heat distortions that ripple over summer stone, but here, it was colder. Wrong. The kind of wrong that pressed into the bones, like the world itself refused to acknowledge what I was seeing. His lips moved again. Still no sound. His hands, once gripping the hilt of a sword, were empty now—open, reaching.

Reaching for me.

No.

Not for me.

For something beyond me.

I turned, my movements precise despite the strange weightlessness of this place. And then I saw it.

A force. A shadow. A presence watching from beyond the edges of this fragmented world. It had no shape, not one I could comprehend, but I could feel it—like a pulse running beneath the skin of reality. Something old. Something vast. Something that did not belong here. Or perhaps, something that had always been here, watching from the unseen corners of existence.

I reached out with my arcane sense, threading through the fabric of this space. The energy here didn't behave like magic in the real world. It responded to thought more than action, to intent more than incantation.

Then I understood.

This was not just some errant distortion, some side effect of the Gravekeepers or the Council's meddling. This was the Tapestry itself—alive, shifting, reacting. And I had been pulled into it.

Or perhaps, I had forced my way in.

Either way, it recognized me now.

I focused, forcing the instability to bend to my will, to give me something tangible. A structure. A foothold.

The world trembled, and for an instant, things sharpened. The shifting haze snapped into something resembling a grand corridor, its walls lined with portraits that bled into one another. Some were from my past. Some were from my future. Some had never been real at all.

One image flickered between three different versions of itself:

A younger me, standing at the Tower's library, pouring over ancient tomes by candlelight, fingers ink-stained, eyes cold with focus.

Another version, older, clad in darkened robes, standing over a battlefield, the corpses of mages and warriors alike strewn before me.

And the third, a version of me that had never existed, seated upon a throne of silver and obsidian, the crown of the Magisterium resting against my brow.

The Tapestry was trying to make sense of me, just as I was trying to make sense of it.

But there—behind the shifting echoes, something loomed. A presence. Watching. Directing.

Not the Gravekeepers. Not the Council.

Something older.

The weight of its awareness pressed against me, as though reality itself was leaning in to observe me, to measure my worth, to decide if I was meant to be here.

I did not flinch.

I had spent my life mastering forces others feared. I had bent magic to my will, broken men with my words alone, torn through battlefields and courtrooms alike. I did not kneel before unseen forces.

If it sought to measure me, it would find me sharp. If it sought to break me, it would fail.
Discover hidden tales at My Virtual Library Empire

The corridor shuddered, the illusion of stability fracturing again. The portraits warped, distorting into grotesque mockeries of themselves. My younger self's eyes melted into black voids. The battlefield version of me twisted into something monstrous, shadows coiling where flesh should be. The crowned version crumbled into dust, the throne collapsing into the abyss beneath it.

A test.

Or a warning.

I clenched my teeth, pushing back against the unraveling force. If I was to survive here, I needed control. I needed an anchor.

The portraits reassembled. The walls steadied. The ground beneath me solidified.

I forced my presence into this realm, digging my will into it like claws into flesh. The air resisted, but I was not one to be denied. The corridor became more defined, its chaos locked in place by the sheer certainty of my existence.

And then, for just a moment, the presence wavered. As though I had done something I wasn't supposed to. As though it hadn't expected me to fight back.

I didn't intend to stop.

_____

The world outside House Valemore had been drowned in silence.

Then, with a sharp crack, reality reasserted itself.

The courtyard was a ruin. Magic still burned in the air, residual energy flickering in dying embers. The stench of scorched earth and singed flesh clung to every breath of wind, and the jagged remains of once-proud columns lay scattered around like the bones of some ancient, slaughtered beast. The bodies of the fallen—Council enforcers and Gravekeepers alike—were strewn across the shattered stones, some utterly still, some writhing in agony, their groans an unsettling chorus under the tense hush. Broken weapons and twisted fragments of armor caught the moonlight, glinting like predatory eyes in the darkness.

Near the battered archway where the final surge had emanated, a faint haze of violet arcs still lingered in the air, as though bits of the rupture refused to fully vanish. Anyone sensitive to magic would feel the pressure in their skulls, a dull ache that signaled the Tapestry had been torn. That the world had, for just a moment, forgotten itself.

Those from the retrieval team who remained on their feet exchanged uneasy glances, their formations sloppy, more a reflex of survival than strategy. They hadn't expected a magical onslaught of this magnitude—and certainly not one that would fling Draven into some unknown realm. The Gravekeepers, for their part, stood in smaller clusters, fewer in number but still exuding a lethal calm. Their dark cloaks were tattered, and many clutched at wounds staining their clothes, but their eyes burned with an unwavering purpose.

In the center of it all, Lorik lay slumped near the now-stable (or perhaps only partially sealed) rift. The ground there was blasted into uneven craters, the stone beneath charred. The swirling energies of the breach had subsided into a tenuous shimmer that might have been beautiful in different circumstances—like a faint aurora weaving across the courtyard. Yet, to anyone who understood the severity of what had happened, it was a warning: the Tapestry was far from healed, and the boundary between worlds remained tenuous.

Lorik's breathing was shallow. Dirt and ash smudged his face, and the faint smell of ozone clung to his robes. The token in his grasp had dimmed, its once-potent glow now reduced to the occasional flicker, and each pulse was weaker than the last, as though it, too, had been drained by the cataclysmic energies unleashed just moments ago. He wasn't dead, but he was close enough to breaking that he might as well have been.

A Gravekeeper stepped forward, her blade still unsheathed. Her robe, dark as midnight, clung to her lean frame, and she moved with predatory confidence despite her injuries. Two more Gravekeepers limped behind her, their expressions grim under their hoods. One clutched his forearm, where the cloth was soaked with blood, while the other's breathing hissed with each step. None of them looked ready to abandon the fight.

"We take him," the woman said, voice cutting through the silence like a razor. "The artifact is ours. The Site is compromised."