In its heyday, Vexohatar’s dungeon was a place of unwholesome vitality — something of a paradox for a necromancer’s lair.

  Colorless fire lit every corridor and chamber, save for those deliberately left in shadow for atmospheric effect or to conceal lethal traps.

  Macabre but beautiful gardens of saprotrophic fungi thrived in the main atriums of each floor, nourished by flesh-eating waters that trickled from the stone-tiled walls.

  Vast hordes of undead and other abominations patrolled ceaselessly, with a singular purpose: to annihilate any intruder at the faintest provocation.

  Which is why it was so strange when a young magus of the Republic —that grand alliance of all nations, sworn to destroy the Hollow King— simply waltzed in, alone and unafraid.

  She descended level after level without triggering a single ward or trap, eluding undead sentinels completely; her presence passed through every defense layer as if she had always belonged.

  No spell, not even from the most exalted branches of Republican sorcery, could have veiled her from Vexohatar's ethereal gaze through the planes. And yet, she continued, undeterred.

  Only when the Haunted Cloak heard her footsteps — echoing far too close to the master’s sanctum — was she intercepted.

  Her name was Calvenna Aliendris, and the reason for her unchallenged passage was disarmingly simple: she had not come to fight, but to join.

  She was received by Vexohatar himself, and after three hours of polite menace, thinly veiled threats, and arcane tests of loyalty, the Pale Monarch accepted her as his first and only apprentice.

  ***

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  Calvenna was granted her own office, where she arranged the contraband tomes she had brought with her and hung a banner bearing the sigil of the order she hailed from —a magic circle she vowed to reclaim and rule beneath her new allegiance.

  The Cloak often passed by on its groundskeeping circuits, humming a funerary tune or muttering to itself in proud, tattered verse.

  Occasionally she would respond with a grunt, but, more often than not, she said nothing at all, eyes fixed on pages bound in human skin, mind lost in diagrams of worlds that either no longer or not yet existed.

  The sorceress received frequent private audiences with Vexohatar. Behind closed doors, she was exposed to the most forbidden knowledge —not just Spells, but laws of nature. She learned of the gods, and their unholy counterparts, and how the most fragile metaphysical balance sustained reality as it was.

  Months passed.

  Then one day —without announcement, ritual, or farewell, taking advantage of a prolonged absence of Vexohatar in the astral realm— Calvenna simply packed her belongings and prepared to leave.

  The Cloak, equal parts bewildered and insulted, followed her to the very exit. “Thou leavest? For what? Was our inverted tower too damp? Our ghosts too loud? Speak, lady of the scrolls!”

  Calvenna did not look back. Her steps were swift. Her voice was calm.

  “Our… Or rather, your lord is no sovereign. Vexohatar is but a humble librarian in service of something older —something vaster. I came for power, not servitude.”

  The cape specter, floating in silence, could find no retort.

  “I’ll find that entity,” she said. “Forge a better pact. Don’t be cross, Cloak. We may yet be allies again on some darker battlefield, under stranger stars.”

  And with that, she stepped through the main gates and vanished into the ashen steppe beyond. She was the last guest the Pale Monarch would ever welcome willingly.

  The Cloak lingered in stillness for a long while, before returning to its chores.

  In Calvenna’s abandoned office, her banner remained, forgotten: a black field upon which a copper owl grasped a scroll in one talon, a sword in the other.

  When the age of modern heraldry arrived, that ancient design would inspire the coat of arms of House Valiendre —direct descendants of the defector Aliendris.