Mod Superhero

Chapter 7.28 - Jareth

High in the Rockies, hidden from the world by wards and jurisdictional sleight of hand, the Vault squatted inside a mountain. From the outside, it was just another ridgeline. But pass through the concealed demiplane gate, and the world changed.

The mountain's belly opened into a sprawling complex of steel and stone, its passages lined with suppression glyphs and humming with power. Wards arced like constellations overhead, suppression rings nested one inside another like clockwork gears. Crystalline conduits pulsed with slow light, rivers of mana threading down into reservoirs hidden in the rock.

Most would only ever know this surface level—the prison twisted until it was part maze, part fortress.

But to its keepers, the Vault was an iceberg—most of its complexity and danger hidden far below the surface. It was a true labyrinth. One that had been expanded and folded into a tesseract.

Corridors looped back on themselves in impossible angles, wings stacked atop one another without weight, and containment levels were shunted sideways into pockets of space that shouldn't exist. To walk its halls was to move through a puzzle box the size of a city, every path mapped and remapped by wards that pulsed like veins through stone. It was a marvel of magical engineering—terrifying in its ingenuity and its hubris. Like a mountain balanced on the edge of an avalanche, the Vault existed because men dared to fold reality and believed it would hold.

Jareth Callun knew better.

Fortresses and icebergs were steady. The Vault was more like a mountain slope after too many storms. One wrong tremor sent the whole thing sliding into an avalanche.

It reminded him of Alcatraz. It had been one of the first places they stashed low-level villains. The petty firestarters, the men who could lift cars but not mountains, the women who could slip through walls but only if they were paper-thin. But the island fortress wasn't worth it. It cost more to maintain than it ever paid back. The Vault was the same problem, only magnified tenfold. Here the upkeep wasn't just iron bars and guard rotations, but kilometers of wards, suppression arrays, and alchemical coolant channels that needed constant attention.

Jareth had long since stopped calling the Vault a prison. Prison made it sound like justice. The Vault was a machine. One that ate money, mana, and men by the dozen just to keep running.

Jareth walked methodically through his rounds, boots echoing down the hall. His thin frame and gray-streaked hair gave him the look of someone older than his fifty-odd years, though his eyes still had the sharpness of a man who knew the system better than anyone.

Stability enchantments were his specialty—keeping suppressive fields steady, ensuring the bindings didn't fray. Not glorious work, not the kind of thing that ballads were written about, but without it, the whole Vault would unravel in days. He knew it the way Alcatraz's keepers once knew: The true cost wasn't in the stone walls but in the endless fight to keep water out of the cracks.

The hallway he walked now was one of the oldest sections of the complex, and in many ways, the most ordinary. It wasn't especially deep, nor was it reserved for the notorious prisoners. Just a stretch of standard containment—old stonework, old wards, and inmates whose names had long since been scrubbed from the record. The kind of place most guards stopped noticing after their first few rotations.

But Jareth noticed. The walls here still bore faint scorch marks where containment glyphs had buckled decades ago, patched over with new runes that glowed faintly in the dim light. Thin veins of crystal ran along the floor, channeling mana like arteries under skin, their pulse steady but tired. The air carried the heaviness of a system long past its prime, as if the mountain itself resented being hollowed out and threaded with enchantments. To anyone else it was just a corridor—cold, silent, endless—but Jareth knew every note of its rhythm: The way the sound carried oddly at the midpoint where space folded, the way the suppression hum dropped half a tone near the last junction. For him, this wasn't just stone and wards. It was the fragile pulse of a living system, one he was tasked with keeping alive.