Chapter 650

People tend to measure a successful life by two things: a happy family and a successful career.

By those standards, Kaecilius had once considered himself a very fortunate man.

He had a beloved wife, a partner for whom he would have given everything and who would have done the same for him. Professionally, he had been blessed with extraordinary talent. From childhood, he had been raised and personally trained by the Ancient One herself, earning a reputation throughout Kamar-Taj as her most promising successor.

Of course, even Kaecilius knew there was a small problem with that plan.

He probably wasn’t going to outlive his master.

Still, being recognized as the Ancient One’s heir had filled him with pride.

If life could be divided into four seasons, Kaecilius believed the first half of his had been nothing but spring.

Then, one day, his beloved wife and the child born from their love were taken from him forever.

There was no heroic tragedy. No spectacular disaster. No grand battle.

Just disease.

Kaecilius had exhausted everything he knew. Every spell. Every technique. Every scrap of magical knowledge he possessed.

It wasn’t enough.

He watched them die anyway.

Desperate, he had fallen to his knees before the Ancient One, the woman he had once believed capable of anything, and begged her to bring his wife and child back.

Her answer had been simple.

Death had its own laws.

That was the day Kaecilius’s life entered autumn.

Afterward, he changed.

He became stubborn, extreme, and increasingly unwilling to listen to anyone. He threw himself into the study of magic with an obsession that bordered on madness.

To everyone around him, it seemed obvious what had happened. Kaecilius had suffered a devastating loss and buried himself in magical study to escape his grief.

They were wrong.

Kaecilius never tried to escape his pain.

He carried it with him.

He remembered every moment of it and turned that pain into fuel. Somewhere within the endless mysteries of magic, he believed, there had to be a way to save his wife and child.

The Ancient One had told him there wasn’t.

Kaecilius refused to believe her.

She cared about the boundary between life and death.

He didn’t.

If breaking that boundary was what it took to bring his family back, he would pay any price.

But after mastering every spell the Ancient One was willing to teach him, Kaecilius still hadn’t found what he wanted.

So he turned elsewhere.

He began studying the forbidden arts.

Dark magic.

Necromancy.

Voodoo reanimation. Raising the dead. Spirit manipulation. Summoning the undead.

The logic seemed obvious to him. If magic could make corpses move again, if it could even preserve fragments of their memories, then surely true resurrection couldn’t be impossibly far away.

Maybe the difference was only one final step.

So Kaecilius kept studying.

Day after day.

Year after year.

To the outside world, he remained the Ancient One’s favored disciple.

Behind closed doors, he secretly pursued the very magic Kamar-Taj had declared forbidden.

Eight years passed before Kaecilius finally realized just how far he had traveled down that road.

And the gap he had once imagined as a single final step?

It was still an abyss.

No matter how much he learned, true resurrection remained beyond his reach.

Yet as his understanding of dark magic deepened, he began to notice something familiar about the Ancient One herself.

Something he had never been able to put his finger on before.

Eventually, he discovered Kamar-Taj’s greatest secret.

The Ancient One was using dark power too.

And Kaecilius’s growing mastery of forbidden magic allowed him to recognize the truth immediately.

Whatever the Ancient One was drawing upon was nothing like the crude dark spells he had been practicing.

It came from somewhere far greater.

A place whose very name spoke of darkness.

The power of the Dark Dimension.

The very force Kamar-Taj’s sorcerers had sworn to oppose.

That was when Kaecilius felt his life descend into winter.

Suddenly, so many questions had answers.

Why was the Ancient One so powerful?

Why was there still such an enormous gulf between her and even her most gifted disciple?

Because she had been keeping the real magic for herself.

Everything she had taught them was merely the surface.

Kaecilius’s admiration and reverence for the Ancient One collided with the guilt he already carried over his own use of dark magic.

The result was rage.

He had been deceived.

He had been made a fool.

If the Ancient One had simply refused to teach him the deepest secrets of magic, perhaps Kaecilius could have forgiven her.

She had raised him, after all. Even without the knowledge she had given him, there was still the debt of that upbringing. He could have told himself that perhaps he simply wasn’t talented enough to be entrusted with the truth.

But there was one thing he could never forgive.

When he had knelt before her, sobbing and begging her to save his wife and child, she had told him that death had its own laws.

You were already ancient when Kamar-Taj was founded.

You came from the age of Celtic mythology.

You had watched generation after generation of disciples grow old and die while you remained seemingly untouched, still possessing the body and vitality of a woman in her prime.

Wasn’t that longevity the result of the very forbidden power of the Dark Dimension?

If death truly had its own laws, if you were so determined to preserve the boundary between life and death, then why had you been allowed to survive for centuries?

If you could use the power of the Dark Dimension, why couldn’t he?

And so Kaecilius stopped caring about the Ancient One’s warnings.

He stopped caring about her opposition.

He pursued the power hidden in the abyss.

Eventually, he rose against his former master, broke away from Kamar-Taj, and took many followers with him.

After leaving, Kaecilius and his disciples wandered across the world.

They had abandoned Kamar-Taj out of anger, greed, or both.

But now that they were gone, where were they supposed to go?

What was their purpose?

What was the point of all that power if they had nowhere to direct it?

Lost and uncertain, Kaecilius finally heard the whisper that had been echoing at the edge of his thoughts.

They say Heaven is your kin, but Heaven is no kin at all.

The sun, the moon, and stars cross the sky, turning the young old and carrying countless lives toward their end.

Kaecilius drew a long breath.

Then everything became clear.

He understood the greatest enemy faced by himself and every living thing in the world.

Time.

Time itself was a curse.

His wife and child had been torn away from him because time moved forward.

Countless people suffered the same pain every day. Countless others were forced to drag their aging bodies toward an inevitable grave.

All because time existed.

At last, Kaecilius had found his purpose.

He would lead his followers and save the world from the curse of time.

But that required more power than he possessed.

Much more.

The Great One, Dormammu, had to descend upon this world.

Humanity had to be brought into his embrace.

And before that could happen, Kaecilius needed the key that would allow him to reach Dormammu.

The Book of Cagliostro.

Through it, he would contact the Great One, receive his limitless power, and clear away every obstacle standing in the way of his arrival.

Summer had come.

Once this final stretch was endured, spring would finally arrive.

The spring of his life.

The spring of the entire world.

There was only one problem.

Kaecilius had discovered that summer was really, really hard to get through.

For example, he had devised a clever plan.

First, he would launch a surprise attack on the New York Sanctum. Then, while the defenders were distracted, he would slip into the library and seize the Book of Cagliostro.

Simple.

Except his portals kept failing.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That part was understandable. Kaecilius had left Kamar-Taj years ago. Naturally, the defenses had been upgraded since then.

This had to be another test from the Great One.

If he couldn’t even break into a library, how could he hope to bring spring to the entire world?

So Kaecilius refused to give up.

He brought out everything he had.

Secret spells taught to him by the Ancient One.

Forbidden magic he had secretly mastered himself.

Every trick in his arsenal.

Eventually, he found a weakness in the Sanctum’s defenses and successfully opened a portal.

And then came the problem.

Why was there a bathroom on the other side?

Kaecilius and his followers poured through the portal and immediately became human canned food.

Bodies were crushed together from floor to ceiling. There was barely enough room to breathe, much less move a finger.

Fortunately, the bathroom door collapsed under the pressure.

Kaecilius fought his way free of the pile and looked around.

The place had a distinctly modern feel.

Had Kamar-Taj really changed this much?

Had the New York Sanctum been renovated?

The thought barely had time to form.

His excellent sense of direction told him immediately that this wasn’t the New York Sanctum.

It was nearby, though.

"How dare that hypocrite humiliate me like this!"

Kaecilius led his followers out at a sprint.

Being dumped into a bathroom had to be another trap set by the Ancient One.

Naturally.

It was the only explanation.

They didn’t stop until they reached somewhere they considered safe.

Then Kaecilius turned around and counted his followers.

He froze.

There were more than twenty missing.

And then he noticed one of the survivors.

"Hey, I know we were all packed in there pretty tightly, but you were literally upside down in the toilet. Could you please get that mushroom off your ear?"

The man stared blankly at him.

Kaecilius stared back.

"Seriously. That’s disgusting."

Their grand campaign had barely begun, and they had already suffered casualties without accomplishing a single thing.

This...

This had to be another test from the Great One.

Kaecilius nodded firmly to himself.

That explanation made perfect sense.

Then he took matters into his own hands.

This time, he didn’t bother with distractions.

He opened a portal directly toward the library.

He checked the destination again.

And again.

No traps.

No obvious abnormalities.

Finally, he stepped through.

He had made it.

At almost the exact same moment, inside the Kamar-Taj library, Clea closed the ancient tome spread open before her.

"I’ll be leaving, Master Styller."

The librarian had his arms folded across his chest. He gave her a small nod.

"Then return the book. You know where it goes."

"Of course."

Clea nodded and turned toward the shelves.

Styller watched her for a moment before asking, "Are you coming back tomorrow?"

"No."

The answer was casual.

Styller’s expression fell slightly.

After all, Clea was famous throughout Kamar-Taj for being beautiful. Before she’d found herself a partner, who hadn’t harbored at least a little interest in her?

And Styller spent most of his life buried in this library.

Even now that Clea was spoken for, it wasn’t illegal to keep a little hope alive.

Supposedly she’d chosen some outsider who couldn’t even afford a proper dowry.

If the two of them ever ran out of money and couldn’t make ends meet...

Well, Styller was available.

"It’s not like I’ve finished the whole book," Clea said from behind the shelves. "I’ve just finished everything I needed to read."

She placed the book back in its proper position.

Then she paused.

Something felt wrong.

The atmosphere had changed.

There were footsteps.

More than one set.

Clea quietly leaned toward a gap between the shelves and looked through.

At some point, another group had entered the library.

They had surrounded Styller.

Four of them suddenly raised their hands, conjuring blazing red magical chains that wrapped around the librarian’s arms and legs.

They pulled.

Styller’s body rose into the air.

The leader stepped forward and placed a bronze basin on the floor.

Then he made a swift motion with both hands.

Styller’s head dropped cleanly from his shoulders.

It landed perfectly inside the basin.

The leader picked it up and began murmuring an incantation.

Clea’s eyes narrowed.

Then the man suddenly stopped.

His gaze snapped toward the shelves where she was hiding.

"Who’s there?"

...