Curse of the Astralis: Shadowbound

Intro

More than a year had passed since Malia vanished into the Obsidian Portal, and there was not a single day in which Felix did not try to find a way to reach her. The portal an ancient prison forged by the Nightshades, the Ironhearts, and the other great magical families remained sealed as tightly as the legends warned. Every attempt Felix made to breach it only deepened his desperation. Each time he focused his and the dark magic into the portal he blessed back into the wall nothing really worked. The wall stayed untouched.

His mind began to fracture under the weight of failure and guilt. The tattoos on his hands once faint marks of harmless experimentation—started to spread up his arms and toward his chest, twisting into thorn-like patterns. They were the price of practicing dark magic, a creeping curse that mirrored the corruption growing inside him. Yet with the spreading marks came power, unmistakable and intoxicating. Felix felt it humming under his skin, whispering to him in the quiet hours of the night.

He no longer spoke to anyone. His parents believed he was still grieving, as Malia had been his closest friend practically his other half and he had been protective of her. But grief alone could not explain the hollowness in his eyes or the way he withdrew from the world.

He moved into his late grandparents' estate, a lonely manor perched high in the mountains where the wind carried no voices and no neighbours. It was surrounded by thick forests and overlooked a river that fed into a dark, glassy lake. No one visited him anymore. And even if someone gathered the courage to climb up the winding path to his door, Felix never opened it.

In that solitude he became something like a king without a kingdom an heir to one of the oldest magical bloodlines, yet powerless to save the person who mattered most. The mission that had been placed upon him since childhood, the one he had vowed to fulfill, had slipped through his fingers the moment Malia crossed the threshold of the Obsidian prison.

Most days he wandered between his grandfather's study still filled with old spellbooks and forbidden research—and the wooden gazebo that overlooked the rushing water below. Winter crept early into the mountains; frost touched the windows, and snow dusted the stone paths outside. The fireplaces throughout the manor burned constantly, filling the estate with a warm orange glow that contrasted sharply with Felix's growing darkness.

He moved silently through the halls dressed in the traditional Nightshade nightshade robes: deep black fabric trimmed with crimson, the colours of his ancient family. The crest was embroidered over his heart, a reminder of the legacy he carried and the heavy expectation that he had failed.

Yet in the quiet, in the flickering firelight, Felix felt another truth settling over him:

He had not given up and he never would. Not while Malia remained trapped in the realm where the worst magicians in history were sealed away. He had hoped that she was still alive.