Ariadne finally stopped, her heart pounding hard with excitement. She might find a way to become a boy again. In front of her, on the polished oak table, rested the volume she had been waiting for weeks: Compilation on the Dungeon; The Maidens' Traps, a tome bound in black leather with intricately wrought silver clasps that still carried a faint smell of fresh ink and beeswax.

  Her fingers trembled slightly as she opened it. The pages were arranged with a precision that reminded her of her former life, when she had to produce these tomes whenever a member of the royal family demanded a topic: diagrams drawn with ruler and crimson ink, marginal notes in tiny handwriting from at least five different scribes, cross-references to forbidden scrolls from the Lower Library, and even excerpts from the journals of explorers who never returned. All gathered into a single volume.

  It was, without question, the work of the scholars of the Great Royal Library—she remembered spending her adolescence and youth there.

  When Prince Cyrus requested information—whether an arcane subject, a fragmented prophecy, or, as in this case, the deadly secrets of a legendary dungeon—the sages didn’t simply send him disordered piles of books. No. They distilled knowledge. They scoured every shelf, every forbidden bookcase, every chained codex in the lower crypts; they compared contradictions, eliminated tavern fables, and fused the useful knowledge into a single new tome, written expressly for the requester. A born-book, created in mere days by an invisible machinery of brilliant, obsessive minds.

  Ariadne flipped through the pages at a feverish pace, her eyes devouring entire paragraphs while her mind already sketched plans for when she became a boy again. As soon as she recovered her penis—and with it, the body that truly belonged to her—she would head straight to one of the great brothels in the Bazaar of a Thousand Lights, in the heart of the imperial capital. She would spend everything she had, down to the last gold daric, on a dozen of the empire’s finest dancers and lovers.

  She had heard wonders for years, stories that circulated among merchants, soldiers, and drunken scholars in the taverns along the royal roads. The oral mistresses of Kemet (the land the Greeks called Egypt) were legendary: they said their tongues could trace invisible hieroglyphs across the skin, that they knew secret pressures at the base of the member that made pleasure rise like the flooding of the Nile—slow but unstoppable—until it burst into ecstasy that lasted entire minutes. They used oils perfumed with lotus and myrrh that slightly numbed the skin to intensify every touch, and their trained throats swallowed effortlessly, as if the act were a form of prayer to Hathor, goddess of love and intoxication.

  Then there were the former bandit women of Gedrosia, turned courtesans after being captured and “civilized” in the coastal satraps’ harems. They rode with a ferocity that recalled their desert days: hips that spun like sandstorms, muscles that clenched and released in unpredictable rhythms, capable of bringing a man to the edge again and again without letting him cross until they decided. It was said that some still carried small daggers hidden in their hair, and that more than one noble had woken with a cold blade against his throat only to discover it was part of the game—a reminder that pleasure and danger went hand in hand with the women of Makran and the Gedrosian desert.

  She couldn’t forget a pair of dancers from Aria, from the mountainous satrapy to the east, famous for their veil dances that imitated the flight of falcons over snow-capped peaks. Their flexible bodies contorted into impossible angles; they could arch their backs until their breasts brushed the lover’s thighs while riding him upside down, or spin on themselves without losing rhythm, creating the illusion of multiple women moving in unison. Their hips carried silver bells that marked every internal contraction, turning the act into an audible symphony.

  And of course, she wouldn’t overlook the perfume and pressure specialists from Bactria, who blended Kandahar rose essences with mild hashish to relax muscles and sharpen senses. They knew how to massage the perineum with slow thumb circles that sent waves of heat up the spine, or use mouth and hands simultaneously in combinations that made men forget their own names for hours.

  Ariadne slammed the book shut with a sharp sound that echoed in the empty room. Prince Cyrus could keep his dungeons and deadly secrets. She had her own enigmas to solve—and the first one began the moment she recovered what had been stolen from her. She smiled in the dim light, already imagining the scent of incense, sweat, and jasmine that would fill that night of resurrection.

  But her wild fantasies dissolved in a minute, like fine sand slipping through fingers.

  Ariadne went back a page, her eyes fixed on a paragraph she had overlooked in her reading fever. It was written in smaller script, almost like a footnote, but it came from testimonies collected from the few adventuresses who had survived the dungeon—or at least returned intact enough to speak.

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  “The Dungeon of the Maidens admits no males of any kind, age, or condition. Only women, and only after fifteen full cycles of the greater moon. Any attempt to enter by a child under that age activates the sleeping guardians: living marble statues that rise from the ground and drag the intruder back to the entrance without allowing entry, but marking them.”

  Ariadne was nine years old. Six full cycles remained. Six years of waiting, of training while dressed in feminine clothes—she felt chills—she couldn’t imagine walking around in panties and bra, enduring the humiliation of this body that was only missing its penis… besides, she looked masculine, not very feminine at all. She couldn’t picture herself moving like her sisters with erotic bodies; that could never happen to her. Six years before she could even step across the dungeon’s threshold without the guardians pulling her out—and that was without even knowing where the dungeon was located.

  “Damn it…” she whispered through clenched teeth, her fist striking the table with a dull thud that echoed in the room. The echo returned her own childish, high-pitched, helpless voice.

  She slammed the book shut again, but didn’t let it go. Instead, she clutched it to her chest as if it were a weapon. Six years were nothing on the scale of time—it was the time needed to prevent the Dark King’s apocalypse. She could use that time. She could learn to improve her swordsmanship, her martial techniques, and ensure the prince built a strong base to repel the undead hordes.

  And when the day came—the day she turned fifteen, when her body became right again and the dungeon could no longer reject her—she would enter not as a desperate girl, but as a man.

  …

  In the misty Western Lands of the Great Frankish Empire—that vast domain stretching from the Atlantic coasts to the Rhine borders, self-proclaimed beacon of civilization against the “German barbarians” of the east—stood the Citadel of the éveillés, on the outskirts of Eternal Paris. The Franks called it that with pride: an empire of Gothic cathedrals scraping the clouds, armies of semi-dragons (in reality wyverns, with only wings and legs and lacking the immense power of true dragons) clad in armor, and a court at Versailles that schemed in halls of gold and velvet.

  Deep within the Tower of Echoes—a black stone obelisk that vibrated with the constant hum of mana generators—a handful of mad scientists, the Alchimistes éveillés, worked without rest. Their philosophy, while resembling that of Persian scholars or those of China in their insatiable hunger for absolute knowledge, was fascinating in its poetic brutality. While the Persians distilled knowledge like fine perfume, the Franks flayed it alive: “The universe is not understood,” they proclaimed in salons filled with bubbling tubes and parchments stained with ichor, “it is vivisected, its heart torn out, and forced to confess.”

  The object of their obsession lay on a marble slab veined with silver filaments, immobilized by anti-mana shackles that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He was an invoked being: an entity ripped from the abyssal planes through a failed ritual—though in truth, what was failed when the other eleven were formidable?—four moons ago. His form was almost human but distorted.

  In his chest, where a heart should have been, beat the Noyau Aetherique: a crystalline organ the size of a skull, gleaming like a captured star. It housed an immense quantity of pure magic, an ocean of mana that made the air around it crackle with blue and orange sparks and caused the alchemists’ instruments to overload just by approaching. It was “the engine of the invoked’s magic,” capable of summoning storms that razed entire armies or healing wounds that Frankish medicine declared incurable. And in the brain, swollen and translucent like a glass balloon, resided the Cortex Resonateur: a bulbous lobe that did not think, but resonated. And shaped the magic that emerged from his core—apparently that was where the noblest differences lay.

  His bones were harder than the adamantine from Frankish mines, forged in a natural alloy that defied known physics: a density that made them immune to hammer blows and enchanted swords, yet with subtle flexibility that allowed the invoked to twist into impossible angles without breaking. Under the éveillés’ probes, mana rays revealed veins of ethereal crystal embedded in the marrow, which not only regenerated fractures in minutes but absorbed magical impacts and converted them into energy pulses that fed the Noyau Aetherique.

  His nerves were three times faster, a labyrinth of silver filaments that snaked through the body like living lightning. They were not mere transmission cables; each synapse generated ether sparks that accelerated signals to supersonic speeds, enabling reactions the scientists measured in fractions of a second: a flicker of pain in the Cortex Resonateur translated into a spasm that could knock down three alchimistes before they could react. “It’s as if time folds for him,” murmured the Ma?tresse éveillée, noting how a skin prick sent a wave racing through the entire nervous system in less than a heartbeat, activating automatic defenses such as mana discharges that burned the flesh of anyone who dared touch him.

  And they kept him alive. Not out of mercy, but because of the implacable precision of Haute Niveau Magic. A perpetual spell of Eternal Sustentation, woven with threads of mana stolen from the Black Mountains mines and blessed by the arcano-cardinals of the Frankish Cult, held his body in a limbo of un-death: the secondary heart pumped, the blood—a luminous, viscous fluid—circulated, and the organs continued secreting their inexhaustible power. But the most sadistic thing, what truly defined these madmen, was that they kept him awake. Always. The invoked’s golden eyes, large and glassy like eclipsed moons, blinked with torturous slowness, fixed on the vaulted ceiling where bronze gears and vials of poison turned. They sedated him only just enough to prevent complete madness—a brew of ethereal opium and mandrake essence—but enough for him to feel every incision, every crystal probe, every injection of reagents that burned like fire.