Arkyn no longer felt numb to his situation, he began blaming himself and with each new wave of self-loathing, he kicked harder.
Eventually his own mana went wild and the fifth kick erupted into the ground with a sharp wedge of white energy, it turned green on contact with the ground before splitting it open and ripping the array in half.
The siren started to lose volume as the air magic was starting to fade. It was a hollow solution for Arkyn, he just took the cloth off his eyes and let a tear fall down his face. There was no point in holding it back.
'It's all gone, everything I built with my family is gone. Odbrane is dead.' Arkyn began turning around in defeat.
The slim chance of the siren being someone or something from the castle that could help him understand what happened had been snuffed. He was alone in a place he didn't just call home, but also his entire purpose. It was where he was born, raised, taught, and worked. He knew nothing beyond else beyond those gates.
He was unsure of what to do now, and decided to start retreating into the inner layers of the castle until something in the corner of his vision made him look back.
Just outside the grand entryway, Arkyn spotted a flash of gray flap with wind. Too offset from the rest of the grayish mountain colors in the background, and too slow to be some kind of fluttering animal.
It could have been anything, but in that moment, it felt like a form of salvation.
Arkyn ran out the entrance and discovered it was a partially collapsed tent. It could have housed up to at least a dozen men when standing correctly, but it was currently toppled as if a giant had decided to sit on it.
The tent looked old, but it was significantly newer compared to the damage done to the castle. That was a good sign in Arkyn's mind, it meant there might be some clues to what exactly happened.
He wanted to pull back the flap and discover what might lie inside, but that same itch of concern that compelled him to leave the forge was blaring caution in his body.
What was this tent doing here? Who set it up? Are they hostile?
The Odbranian Capital Castle had been built deep in the mountains to hide from the enemy. The [Gate Network] could allow only carefully inspected citizens and nobles into the castle. Setting up a tent just outside the walls was simply unheard of.
'Whoever set this up could not have a simple reason for being here.' Arkyn thought. 'The fact that they didn't even camp inside the walls means they weren't familiar or comfortable enough to sleep in a partially sheltered space.'
Arkyn scanned the tent with [Mage Sight] and found there was nothing magical inside the tent. Anything enchanted or full of mana would shine through the thin fabric of the tent like the golden mana of the [Heart of the Castle] or even his own mana.
'A spell would radiate mana through the holes like a haze of smoke and a mage's natural mana circuit would easily be visible.' Arkyn thought as he stared down at his own hand.
Flowing beneath his skin, white webs of mana circulated throughout his flesh and bone, making up what was known as a 'Mana Circuit.'
Not wanting to wait and wonder about what was inside the magicless tent, Arkyn deactivated his magic eyes and pulled the cloth entrance aside and was taken aback by what he saw.
He wasn't sure what to expect, but it certainly was not a pile of sun bleached bones picked clean of any flesh. All of them were wearing ratty, blue and white tunics. It was a color scheme not native to Odbrane or their enemy.
Arkyn took a step back but there was no reluctance to stay outside the tent after the shock passed. He climbed inside for a closer look and noticed several things almost immediately.
There were crates and barrels of old supplies and extensive damage to the corpses inside.
All eight of the bodies seemed to be crushed and fractured in some manner, but no two were the same. One was crumpled into two different directions from a shattered spine, another had both arms grounded into a dozen shards, and even the bodies closest to the collapsed side of the tent were missing entire limbs.
Arkyn picked up a cluster of bones still holding together in the shape of a foot and tried to make sense of the damage. He had already seen his fair share of death and injuries. A forge was already a dangerous place, but adding enchantments and volatile crystal structures to the royal workshop meant magically amplified disasters in the forge.
'If not for the [Golden Array Matrix], I would have looked like these people hundreds of times over. Let's see if they have anything to explain why they are here.' Arkyn referred his thoughts back to the arrays that kept him awake and his stamina unaffected deep in recesses of the castle.
Arkyn put the foot back down, he carefully moved the bodies with a bit of earth magic and his own two hands until they were all neatly lined up in the direct sunlight. It was still too bright for him, but Arkyn could still get a sense of the situation without shading his eyes now.
'Judging from how most of the bodies are so much bigger than the other two, it must've been some sort of excavation group. Physical laborers and a pair of researchers? Nah, probably a security detail. Perhaps the little ones were scholars or maybe scavengers. Regardless of their profession, they probably wanted to breach the armory or steal kingdom secrets while everyone was . . . gone.'
Arkyn pushed the dread aside and focused on the mystery in front of him.
Before looking at the supplies gathered inside, he checked for any sort of pockets or emblems along the bodies. He found nothing of interest, just dead bugs that had eaten away at the group and put holes in the fabric of the clothing.
'If they were here to treasure to ruined castle, the irony is their busted tent is probably worth the same as everything inside the castle surface.' Arkyn glanced back at the castle on the mountain side.
He now had a full view from the open area, the tallest of towers seemed to be the first pillars to fall and the sadness of it made him go back to the containers inside the tent. He didn't want to picture how everything just crumpled while he was deaf to it all this time.
Arkyn noticed inside a barrel was some fishing gear they must have intended to use at the coastline nearby. The woven lines were busted and most of the poles were cracked beyond use now. He ignored the supplies for gathering food and opened up the remaining three crates.
'Sure enough, all for mining. I see some crude pickaxes, sieves for minerals, shovels, and-oh?"
Arkyn had found the most promising item was actually wedged between two of the crates. He had found the torn off arms from one the bodies clutching what appeared to be a leather satchel.
He could only assume that the arms were torn off and not cut off because the shoulder joints were still intact, but the forearms had been fractured from the yanking force of something sudden and strong.
After removing the skeletal hands still firmly grasping the bag, he could clearly see a series of long gashes along the side. Four long, sharp claws had run cleanly through the tough material of the bag.
'Well I didn't suspect the whole lot of them to have killed each other, but this might prove the cause of death as wild creature related.'
Arkyn started pulling out the items one at a time. It contained supplies for writing, a cheap looking bracelet with a glass bead in the center, and a rectangular parcel wrapped in cloth. It felt rather dense to Arkyn.
The ink and splintered quills meant for writing made him guess the dense parcel was a journal wrapped for protection. His assumption was right, and he found a leather bound book. The paper along the edges was so yellow that it seemed to have aged for quite a while.
When feeling the old texture of paper and its smell invading his nose, Arkyn started to realize that nothing around him had happened recently. The bodies were old and everything looked aged beyond belief, especially the castle. He had no clue how much time had passed in the forge, as he lost all sense of time, but he still couldn't stop himself from wondering just how long he had been under the castle alone?
Arkyn flipped the book over to the cover before his mind would start dwelling on the passage of time. He discovered an emblem sewed into the leather. Something that finally gave him an indication of who these people were.
It was made entirely with a blue thread stitching, frayed along the edges from constant use, but it was still clearly depicting an owl with its wings extended. In its talons were a scroll and pen, making Arkyn more certain this group came for scholarly purposes instead of scavenging.
"It's an excavation team, but they're not Odbranian."
Arkyn mumbled to himself as he opened the first couple pages. He had to treat it delicately as some were stuck together and already falling out.
The original owner had penned their name into the front, but it was so blotchy, Arkyn could barely make out the letters. He skipped a few pages in and ran into the same problem.
The ink had faded and the writing was too scrambled from rainfall making it bleed, he could've been reading a different language and not be able to tell the difference.
"Damn, it's useless." Arkyn dropped the book back into the pile of belongings and immediately regretted it.
The journal would've fallen apart in the wind, and tossing it a few steps away resulted in an explosion of its pages.
Arkyn felt he was losing the energy to keep searching, the tent was a failure and he had no idea what to do next. He fell back onto his knees and watched the papers start flying out of the tent with the wind. The scene made him feel like it was the gods forsaking his life with one more twist of a blade to his back.
The feeling lasted until he spotted an abnormality among the falling pieces. A thicker sheet fell from the pile. Something about the lack of yellowing and how quickly it fell made Arkyn spot it. He picked it up and noticed it was actually a letter.
'It must've been stuck between some of the more recent journal pages.' Arkyn at a glance, was glad to see it was still legible and the higher quality paper didn't smudge the ink after getting wet with repeated rainfall. He could see it was even written in a language he knew.
The entire Continent was filled with enough towns and cities that everyone communicated in the same language and almost always wrote in the same languages too.
There was no name of the commonly used language, but Arkyn knew it was legible when he first saw the words; 'To the Mage of Discovery,' written at the top.
Arkyn wanted to start reading the contents in order, but something in the middle was underlined to emphasize the statement.
When Arkyn read over the sentence, he regretted skipping ahead and felt his heart skip a beat.
It read; 'The second-round surveyors have communicated recently and verified your findings to be true. There were no remnants that provide absolute dating sadly. We do, however, suspect with the aging of the stonewall inspected so far, the castle dates back to AT LEAST 400 YEARS AGO.'
Arkyn had been underground for over four centuries.
Suddenly Arkyn felt sick, and not just from all the emotional turmoil from the date, it was a much stronger sensation. It was like every action of his body was suddenly becoming more difficult to perform.
His breathing took every bit of effort to not pass out while still collapsing onto his knees in the dirt.
'What is happening? . . . I'm- Shit! I'm outside the boundaries of the castle arrays.' Arkyn's realization for the cause of the sudden sickness was his last clear thought before even his brain felt murky.
The [Golden Array Matrix] was capable of keeping mages within the Odbrane Castle infused with magical energy and fend off a lot of different ailments.
So long as the mage was within the boundaries of the Arrays at all times.
If Arkyn had in fact, spent over four-hundred years buried beneath the castle with no food or sleep, that was now being translated to his body. The Heart was no longer supplying his body with the energy it needed in substitution for food and water.
It took all his willpower to crawl back through the threshold, every moment effort to drag a limb forward was met with greater resistance each time. He could taste the crumbling dust as he kicked it up. Luckily, it was easy to ignore as even his sense of taste was too muddled to comprehend the dirt on his tongue.
Once he was inside the main gate, Arkyn collapsed face down, releasing a plume of more dust into the air. He passed out for hours, and for the first time in over a century, Arkyn began dreaming.