Shadow Weaver: Sole Heir Of The Night-Chapter 183: Under Dark

"So that’s how it is."

The words settled heavily between them, sinking into the cold stone and refusing to fade.

They sat around a jagged slab of rock that jutted from the frozen ground like a crude table carved by nature itself. The cavern stretched endlessly beyond the weak glow of their light, its walls veined with pale frost that shimmered faintly whenever someone shifted.

No one spoke for a while.

Raven had finished.

Not just the fragments they already knew. Not just Galafray and the chaos that swallowed it whole. She had unraveled everything. Her childhood beneath gilded ceilings. The suffocating expectations. The quiet rivalries dressed up as courtly smiles. The way her name was never spoken without calculation.

And Eliza.

"Eliza..." Enzo’s voice was softer now, stripped of its usual edge.

He reached beneath his coat and pulled out the necklace. The chain glinted faintly in the dim light, silver dulled by time and frost. Even now it carried a chill, as if it had absorbed the grief etched into it.

He held it out toward Raven.

She did not take it immediately.

They were sisters.

Eliza had been chosen. Groomed. Prepared to ascend as the next representative for the Hier position. The jewel of the royal lineage. The one meant to stand at the forefront while Raven remained in the shadow, free in ways only the forgotten could be.

But fate had twisted.

Eliza had died saving him.

And with that single act, the weight of a kingdom had shifted onto Raven’s shoulders.

The royal families closed in like wolves scenting blood. The Freedom Party watched from the darkness, waiting to either use her or erase her. Every faction that once ignored her suddenly remembered her existence.

She had not been ready.

No one ever is.

Her aunt understood that.

The woman who led the Liberation Front had known what would follow. Known that Raven would be crushed between duty and politics. So she burned everything instead. Her faction. Her influence. Her own life.

All to sever Raven from that world.

All to throw her into exile.

Into Earth.

"Thank you, Enzo."

Raven finally reached forward and took the necklace. Her fingers brushed his for the briefest moment. Cold met cold.

She studied the pendant as though expecting Eliza’s voice to echo from it.

A faint smile curved her lips, fragile and almost disbelieving.

"I never thought I would survive any of it," she admitted quietly.

The cavern seemed to breathe with her words.

Across from them, Leon shifted, his boots scraping lightly against the frost coated ground.

"How do we get out of here?" he asked.

There was no cruelty in his tone, only urgency.

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, eyes sharp and calculating even in this place of myth.

"I remember the stories of the Under Dark. They said it doesn’t have an entrance or an exit. I know that sounds ridiculous, but..."

His voice trailed off.

The Under Dark.

A name whispered to frighten children of the Ice Kingdom into obedience.

A place beneath the world.

A place that did not belong to time.

They said creatures long erased from history still crawled here. That extinction had simply refused to claim them. That corruption pooled in the air like invisible mist, seeping into bone and marrow until you forgot what you once were.

They said anyone who entered at night never returned.

Some became monsters.

Others became meals.

The silence that followed his words was thick.

Ice cracked faintly somewhere deeper in the cavern, the sound echoing like distant laughter.

"I don’t know," Raven answered at last.

Her smile turned bitter, the earlier softness gone.

"If I knew, I would have left a long time ago."

She looked at Leon directly now.

He was not bound to them by blood or history. He had no sister buried under royal expectation. No aunt who died to cut his chains. To him this was a problem to solve. An environment to escape.

To him, it was another prison.

Enzo watched her carefully.

For all her composure, he could see it. The exhaustion hidden beneath her calm. The way her shoulders tensed whenever the cavern shifted. The way her gaze occasionally drifted into the dark as if expecting something to stare back.

"We can start by scouting the area, Zeke can fly so do a quick Arial assessment. Meanwhile I need to know what kind of creatures you’ve encountered..." Enzo nodded and too charge immediately.

He wasn’t new to being lost in the wild.

No one at this level was.

They had all survived hunts that stretched for days, nights where sleep meant death, terrains that swallowed the weak without apology. Experience was not rare among them. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Composure was.

Very few could think clearly when the world shifted beneath their feet. Fewer still could choose correctly when every option felt like a gamble.

"Okay."

Without hesitation, Zeke’s body ignited.

Flames burst outward in a controlled bloom, wrapping around him like a second skin. The ice beneath his boots hissed violently as droplets of meltwater scattered into steam. In the next instant he shot upward, fire carving a bright streak through the dim cavern ceiling.

He hovered high above, turning slowly, surveying the endless stretch of frozen wasteland that extended in every direction. From above, the Under Dark looked deceptively calm. Jagged ridges of ice. Smooth plains like frozen oceans. Occasional cracks that split the land like ancient scars.

Nothing obvious.

That was what made it worse.

Below, Enzo had already begun moving.

With a dull thud, the coffin at his back opened just enough for him to draw out a compact bag of materials. Stakes, reinforced fabric, thermal lining, small metallic anchors designed to bite into rock and ice alike.

Leon watched him from the side, eyes narrowing slightly.

Clearly these guys weren’t incompetent.

They moved with purpose. No wasted gestures. No frantic scrambling. Even in a place like this, they defaulted to preparation.

"You guys do you," Leon muttered after a moment.

He rolled his shoulders as if shaking off an invisible weight.

"I’ll go over there."

There was something in the air that made his instincts itch. A faint pressure that suggested he was standing too close to something unseen. So he picked a direction at random and walked away, boots crunching softly over frost.

Distance meant clarity.

Or at least that was what he told himself.

Meanwhile, in the shelter of a protruding ice wall, Raven sat with her back resting against the frozen surface.

"Most of the creatures I’ve encountered are tyrants without exception," she said calmly.

Her voice was steady, but her eyes were distant, replaying memories she clearly did not enjoy revisiting.

"The weaker monsters are typically harmless. They serve as prey."

Enzo listened without interrupting, hands working as he began erecting the tent structure against the rock face.

"A lot of them can move inside the ice as if it were a world of their own," Raven continued. "Not like burrowing. More like swimming."

Her fingers tightened slightly against her sleeve.

"They don’t see it as solid. To them it’s fluid."

Enzo paused for half a heartbeat at that.

Swimming through ice.

That meant the ground beneath them was never truly stable.

"I think I saw a divine beast under the ice once," Raven added quietly.

Her composure faltered just a fraction.

"It scared me unconscious. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen one."

The admission lingered in the cold air.

For someone like Raven to faint from fear, the creature must have been beyond ordinary classification. Not just powerful. Ancient.

Wrong.

Enzo resumed tightening the rope lines, driving reinforced stakes deep into fissures within the rock. The tent fabric snapped lightly in the faint current of air that drifted unpredictably through the cavern.

"Oh, by the way," Raven said suddenly.

She tilted her head, watching him with faint amusement.

"That tent is useless. There are savage storms here at night. It’ll get blown away."

Enzo gave the rope one final pull, testing its tension.

"It’s fine," he replied with a thin smile. "We’ll find an alternative."

His tone was light, but his thoughts were not.

His first priority was simple. Establish a safe resting point. A place to recover energy. To think. To plan.

But the Under Dark did not feel like a place that allowed permanence.

The ice shifted in subtle patterns. The air currents changed direction without warning. Even the distant ridges seemed slightly different whenever he glanced up.

This wasn’t just hostile terrain.

It was unstable.

An ever changing chaos hole that refused to obey natural laws.

High above, Zeke descended slowly, flames dimming as he returned to the ground.

"There’s no clear boundary," he reported. "No visible exit. Just more of this."

More ice.

More silence.

More unseen things moving beneath their feet.

Enzo stood still for a moment, gaze drifting toward the vast frozen expanse ahead.

Then quietly, almost to himself, he muttered,

"Then we move carefully."

Because in a place like this, survival was not about strength.

It was about not making the wrong move.