Invincible Blood Sorceror

Chapter 230: Bloodspear of the Progenitor

As Kaleth landed in what had once been a central plaza, Jorghan noticed something unexpected. Red lilies grew everywhere. Not just scattered blooms, but massive clusters that covered the ground in crimson carpets, climbed broken walls in cascading waterfalls of color, and filled empty windows with vibrant life.

The ruins were beautiful in ways he hadn’t anticipated, transformed by flowers that seemed to thrive in abandonment.

"Red lilies," Jorghan murmured, stepping down from the carriage and staring at the sea of flowers surrounding them.

"I’ve seen these before. In dreams. Since I was young. But I never knew why."

Nami descended beside him, her golden eyes taking in the floral display with recognition.

"Red lilies are said to be the flowers of the Sol’vur clan. Other clans talked about it as a sign of the clan. As far as I know from historical records, your ancestors used them as their banner. They represented blood and life intertwined—the idea that death could feed new growth, that sacrifice could create beauty. The clan crest featured a red lily blooming from a drop of blood."

She knelt and touched one of the flowers gently.

"They’re called Haemasthes in some texts. They supposedly only grow in places where great violence occurred, where enough blood was spilled to saturate the ground. But instead of corruption, they create beauty. Your ancestors saw that as a metaphor for their bloodline, power born from violence but capable of creating rather than just destroying."

Jorghan stared at the flowers covering his ancestral home, understanding clicking into place.

The dreams hadn’t been random. They’d been bloodline memory, an ancestral connection to a place that had shaped his family for generations.

In his past life and in this life, he was the same; what she described suited him perfectly.

"They’re beautiful," Sash observed, moving to join them.

"Tragic but beautiful. A reminder that this place was destroyed but not dead.

Life finds ways to continue even in ruins."

The two ladies began organizing their camp setup, but Jorghan barely noticed. He was transfixed by the sight of the Colloniel Ruins, this massive broken structure covered in red flowers, this place where his father had been happy before betrayal and violence destroyed everything.

He stood there for several minutes lost in thought.

And when they finished, Jorghan said that they should take a stroll around the ruined settlement.

They moved through the ruins systematically, Jorghan’s tactical mind cataloging damage and potential while his emotional self absorbed the weight of walking through his family’s history.

The outer residential sections were mostly intact, individual dwellings built into the structure’s lower levels, designed for clan members who weren’t leadership. They’d need cleaning and minor repairs, but they could be occupied relatively quickly.

The communal areas showed more damage. Great halls where clan gatherings had occurred were partially collapsed, their high ceilings fallen in places, their floors cracked and overgrown with vegetation. But the spaces were huge—easily capable of hosting hundreds for festivals and meetings once properly restored.

Sash provided running commentary based on her expertise.

"The foundation is solid. Whoever designed this understood load distribution and geological stability. The damage is mostly superficial, caused by time and weather rather than structural failure. With proper restoration work, this could be fully functional within a year."

As they explored deeper into the ruins, Nami shared stories she’d heard about Ser’gu Sol’vur from elves who’d known him before the betrayal.

"They said your father was most peaceful with his clan members. That he held huge feasts where everyone gathered together without hierarchy. He believed strongly in clan unity, in ensuring everyone felt valued regardless of their role or power."

She gestured at the great halls they were passing through.

"These spaces were designed for those gatherings. Your father wanted architecture that encouraged community rather than emphasized divisions between leadership and common clan members. It’s part of why the betrayal hurt him so deeply—he’d trusted so completely, loved so genuinely, that discovering the clans’ conspiracy shattered something fundamental in his worldview."

They continued through winding corridors, past training yards where warriors had honed their skills, through libraries where knowledge had been preserved, and into workshops where clan craftspeople had created everything from practical tools to artistic masterworks.

And finally, they emerged into a space that made all three of them stop and stare.

*

It was a massive open plaza, easily half a mile across, with a shallow lake in the center to the north of the ruins that reflected the sky above. But dominating the space were six colossal statues, or what remained of them.

Each statue depicted an elven warrior in a heroic pose, carved from stone so precisely that individual features were still visible despite centuries of weathering. They stood around the plaza’s perimeter, three on each side, each one at least two hundred feet tall.

But all six were broken. Toppled, shattered, reduced to fragments that littered the plaza like the bones of fallen giants. Their heads lay separated from their bodies, their arms broken into segments, and their legs cracked and fallen.

And in the center of the plaza, where the shallow lake reflected the broken sky, lay the ruins of what had clearly been the most important structure in all of the settlement.

A palace.

Not built on the ground but designed to float, a massive rhombus-shaped structure that the six statues had once held aloft through some combination of engineering and essence manipulation. It must have been magnificent when whole, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, visible from miles away as a testament to Sol’vur’s power and architectural ambition.

Now it lay shattered on the ground, its floating mechanism destroyed, its structure broken into sections that filled the lake and crushed the plaza beneath impossible weight.

Nami moved toward the wreckage slowly, her engineer’s eye assessing the destruction.

"This must have been the clan head’s palace. I’ve heard legends about it—the Palace of Masuerrozi, they called it. Held aloft by six Guardian Statues, visible day and night as a symbol of Sol’vur’s permanence. They said it could house several hundred people comfortably, that it had rooms for every purpose, and that its height made it seem like it was overlooking the realm beneath."

She touched one of the broken statue fragments, running her hand over the stone that had been carved with incredible skill.

"When the betrayal happened, when your father was exiled, someone destroyed this deliberately. Breaking the statues, bringing down the palace—that wasn’t an accident or decay. That was intentional demolition. A message that the Sol’vur were finished, that even their greatest works could be torn down and scattered."

Sash knelt beside the lake, looking at the palace fragments visible beneath the water.

"The engineering required to make this work must have been extraordinary. The weight distribution, the essence channeling to keep it aloft, and the stability systems to prevent catastrophic failure, building this in the first place would have taken decades. Destroying it probably took hours."

Jorghan stood at the plaza’s edge, staring at the ruins of his family’s greatest achievement, feeling the weight of what had been lost. This wasn’t just architecture. This was legacy, ambition, the physical manifestation of everything the Sol’vur had been before violence and betrayal tore it all down.

"We’ll rebuild it," he said quietly.

"Maybe not exactly as it was. But we’ll restore the palace, rebuild the statues, and make this place what it was meant to be. A symbol that the Sol’vur endures."

"This will take at least a couple of years," Nami cautioned.

"Possibly longer. The expertise required—"

"No matter the time," Jorghan interrupted.

"I’m not looking for quick solutions. I’m planning for centuries. Our children will see this restored. Their children will live in a fully functional Sol’vur settlement. We start now, and we work consistently, and eventually it gets done."

*

After standing in the plaza for several more minutes, Nami said that she saw something interesting.

They moved through the ruins, past collapsed sections and overgrown courtyards, moving steadily northeast. The terrain began changing, becoming more dramatic, the gentle slopes of the settlement giving way to steeper inclines.

Then the ground simply ended.

They stood at the edge of a cliff that dropped away into a massive valley—easily a mile across, two miles long, and hundreds of feet deep. It was a natural formation, natural rather than artificial, a scar in the landscape that had probably existed long before elves built a colony nearby.

But what filled the valley made Jorghan’s breath catch.

Bones.

Massive beyond comprehension, scattered across the valley floor in patterns that suggested they’d once formed a cohesive skeleton. The skull alone was larger than most buildings, with eye sockets that could have swallowed houses. The ribcage—partially collapsed but still recognizable—created cathedral-like arches that dwarfed the largest structures in the ruins.

And embedded in what had been the head, driven through the skull with such force that it had pierced completely through and anchored itself in the bedrock below, was a spear.

The spear was massive and longer.

Not a normal spear.