Before the skies split open and the seas drank the land, before the gods fell into silence and the winds forgot their names, there stood a kingdom born of stone and sorrow.
Its name is dust now, scattered on the bones of the earth.
But once it was a beacon — tall towers veined with gold, orchards so wide they blotted out the sun, rivers that ran with silver light. The people sang in tenfold choirs. The forges burned bright with endless flame. Even the stars bowed their light over its walls.
It was the age of promise.
But promises, like gold, tarnish in time.
The world grew old. The gods grew weary. And the kingdom found itself forgotten by the heavens it had once kissed.
The mountains cracked open, spewing smoke and ash.
The rivers shrank to cracked beds of dust.
The trees blackened and withered in their roots.
And the sun, once bright as a roaring forge, dimmed to a red coal in the sky.
No prayers availed. No sacrifices soothed. No walls held.
The world had begun its slow dying, and the kingdom, though mighty, was but another grain of sand slipping into the void.
He was the last of his line — a king crowned in shadow and clothed in oath.
It is said his name meant “Hope” in the Old Tongue, though none now remember what that name was.
He watched as famine hollowed his people.
He watched as his knights crumbled into desperate bandits, as his priests turned to whispered heresies, as his sons and daughters wept and wasted away.
And in the highest tower of his palace — where once astronomers read the future from the tilt of stars — he watched as the constellations blinked out, one by one.
Hope guttered.
Faith withered.
Only will remained.
And so the king did what no man should do.
He descended.
There are places in the world where the skin between worlds is thin, where the old laws are weaker, where the first things that ever were — and should never have been — still hunger in silence.
The king found such a place, deep beneath his own castle.
A cavern older than the stones that built the world.
A hollow wound where light had never been born.
It was not a temple.
It was not a tomb.
It was an absence.
There, something answered him.
Something that had been waiting since before breath.
No records tell of the words spoken between king and thing.
No songs recall the shape of what he faced.
All that is known is this: when he emerged from the earth, his shadow did not follow him.
And where his heart should have beat, there was only stillness.
The bells rang — soundless, brittle.
The court gathered — gaunt faces, hollow eyes, hunger gnawing at the walls.
The king ascended the stairs to the throne of old — a seat carved from the spine of the first dragon slain by his forebears.
His crown — once bright with diamonds — was gone.
In its place, he wore a circlet woven from silence.
And the people fell to their knees, for they could not meet his gaze.
He did not speak.
Words were no longer needed.
One by one, the lords and ladies and soldiers and smiths — every soul still breathing — felt the cold pass through them.
Their blood slowed.
Their breath dulled.
Their hearts beat… but without warmth.
Death was not defeated.
It was simply held at bay.
The kingdom would endure.
Unchanging.
Unliving.
And so it was.
The Pale Kingdom, they called it.
The City Without Seasons.
The Court of Hollow Eyes.
The Bloodless King ruled.
And beneath his empty gaze, the centuries crawled like wounded beasts.
The lands beyond the kingdom’s borders twisted and curdled.
The rivers that once welcomed traders now ran black with a creeping frost that did not thaw in summer.
The forests that once sang with birdsong now birthed trees of bone, leaves sharp as glass.
The skies above the city dimmed to a perpetual twilight, where no moon dared hang.
And those who dared the long roads into the heart of the Pale Kingdom never returned whole.
Some came back silent, their mouths sewn shut by invisible threads.
Some came back mad, raving of a throne that wept bloodless tears.
Some did not come back at all — only their shadows returning, walking the roads by moonless light.
And sometimes, when the mist rolls low and the earth shudders in its sleep, the bells of the Pale City can be heard once more — ringing without sound, mourning a king who forgot how to die.
Listen well, you who tread the broken paths of Saragossa.
Listen well, you who dream of crowns and thrones.
Do not seek the kingdom that endures beyond death.
Do not follow the rivers of frozen blood.
Do not answer when the bells toll thrice without sound.
For there is a throne that still waits.
A king that still watches.
A price that has not yet been fully paid.
The path was less a road than a scar.
Patches of cracked stone. Churned black mud. Thorn-choked gullies where rivers had once run fat with fish and silver dust. Now they ran with mist and memory.
Caelen Vey moved ahead, his limp slight but constant, the heavy satchel slapping against his side with every step. His cloak, patched and travel-stained, flapped against the cold breath of the southlands.
Behind him, Varik Solmere trudged through the ash-flecked undergrowth, muttering curses to himself. His sword clinked against his hip, and his boots left shallow impressions in the brittle earth. He told himself he was only here for the coin — that the scholar’s mad quest would burn out like all the rest. But some part of him, buried deep beneath the cynicism and scars, needed to see where this road led. Maybe to answers.
After a long silence, Varik said:
“You’re sure this is the right way?”
Caelen didn’t look back. “It’s the way the stars pointed.”
Varik snorted. “Stars. Bones. Bird shit. All the same when you’re lost.”
The mist pressed in — thick as wet wool, tasting faintly of salt and burnt copper. Trees loomed on either side of the path, skeletal and clawing, their roots bursting from the ground like the hands of drowned men.
Another stretch of silence.
Only their breath, the creak of leather, the crunch of dead things underfoot. Somewhere deeper in the mist, a sound too faint to name echoed once — like breath through hollow stone — and then was gone. The air felt stretched, expectant, as if the land itself was holding still.
They crossed the husk of a bridge — little more than a spine of splintered planks stretching over a black, stagnant creek. Something pale and eyeless floated in the water, face down.
Neither of them spoke.
A ruined waystone emerged from the mist — a lichen-choked pillar carved with symbols so old even Caelen squinted to make sense of them. He ran his fingers over the carvings, brow furrowed.
Varik leaned on his sword and said, “Last time you dragged us off chasing old rocks, we got screamed at by a ghost bitch.”
Caelen smiled faintly. “You mean the banshee.” His voice carried the kind of weariness that knew too many truths. “That scream was older than any of us. I needed to hear it—to be sure we were close.”
“I mean the ghost bitch.” Varik spat into the dirt. “You said she was just an echo. You said there’d be treasure.”
“There was treasure.”
“A cracked goblet and a book that tried to eat itself. Real fortune there, scholar.”
Caelen shrugged, brushing dust from his fingertips. “Knowledge is a kind of fortune.”
“You can’t eat knowledge. You can’t stab someone with it.” Varik flicked a pebble into the mist. “It won’t keep the things that walk at night from chewing your guts out.”
Another silence. Heavy. Settling like a second cloak over their shoulders.
The path split.
To the left: deeper woods. Blacker mist.
To the right: a crumbling trail of worn stones, sloping down toward something unseen.
Caelen paused — his head tilting slightly, as if listening to something Varik could not hear. The air around him felt denser, like pressure against his ears, and the faintest vibration skated along the edge of his awareness — a low hum, distant but familiar, like the memory of thunder that had never fully faded. He didn’t speak, didn’t blink — only listened, drawn toward something deep beneath the stone.
Varik’s hand drifted instinctively toward his blade.
“You’re doing that thing again,” he said. “The creepy listening thing.”
Caelen ignored him. Took the right-hand path.
Varik sighed and followed. “One day, I’m leaving you to the ghost bitches.”
“You won’t.”
“No?” Varik said. “Why not?”
“Because you’re curious.”
Varik grunted. He hated how often Caelen was right.
Later, as dusk bled out into a dark bruised sky, they came upon a field.
A field of stones — black, smooth, and sharp-edged, jutting from the earth like broken teeth. No grass. No birds. Just wind keening low across the flats.
Caelen stopped.
He knelt beside one of the stones, brushing dirt away. Under the soot, the faint outline of a broken crown was carved into its surface.
Varik stood behind him, arms folded, jaw tight.
“You going to tell me what we’re looking for this time?” he asked.
Caelen studied the glyph. His fingers trembled slightly, though whether from cold or something deeper, Varik couldn’t tell.
“We’re close,” Caelen said.
“Close to what?”
A pause.
“Something that should have stayed forgotten,” Caelen murmured.
Varik’s mouth twitched into a scowl. “Why does everything you touch sound like a bloody warning?”
“Because it is.”
They made camp on the edge of the stone field, a miserable fire struggling against the wind.
The night closed around them — thick, heavy, endless.
Somewhere, very far away, a bell rang once. Caelen’s breath caught. That sound — deep and toneless — echoed like something from his youth, from the halls beneath the Scriptorium where forbidden names had once been read aloud and then struck from memory. It was a bell used only in death rites, for those whose names were never to be spoken again. The kind of bell that didn’t ring unless something buried had begun to wake.
Then Again.
Then — silence.
Varik stared into the fire.
“I hate this place,” he said.
“So do I,” Caelen said softly.
He turned the broken crown glyph over in his mind, tracing lines only he could see.
In the cold beyond the firelight, something stirred — something old enough that the world had already forgotten how to fear it properly.
But fear it they would.
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