The fire burned low, throwing long, shivering shadows across the stone field.
Varik slept in fits, his sword across his chest, one eye half-open even in dreams. Caelen did not sleep at all.
He sat by the guttering embers, hunched over a scrap of parchment. In the dim, flickering light, he traced unseen lines between the stones with his mind, a broken map forming in the dark behind his eyes.
Lines of power. Lines of forgetting.
When the last ember hissed out, Caelen rose.
The mist had thickened into a heavy, deadening shroud. The stars were gone, swallowed by a ceiling of slow-moving black. Even the moon, a sickle-scar in the sky, seemed distant and false.
Carefully, Caelen picked his way between the black stones.
Each step brought a deeper cold, a silence so dense it buzzed against the edges of his mind. The ground dipped, barely noticeable at first, then steeper, drawing him down into a hollow between the stones.
And there, half-sunken, half-choked with ivy and ash, he found it. A faint pressure tugged at the back of his mind, like a half-forgotten name whispered in a dream. The air turned metallic, the scent of old blood mingling with the tang of stone. His heart beat slower, not from fear, but reverence, as though something in the ruin had been waiting for him.
An arch of crumbling stone, buried in the earth. A mouth without teeth. A threshold forgotten by the world.
The glyphs above the arch were almost worn away, but one remained clear. A crown, broken into three jagged pieces. Below it, a single word in a dead tongue: Kharûl.
Caelen felt the name echo through him like a cold hand pressing on his ribs. He had seen the word once before in the margins of a forbidden manuscript kept beneath the dust vaults of the Scriptorium, where the oldest histories were hidden. Kharûl: a word from a forbidden tongue, a remnant of the old speech whispered in rites of unmaking. A language never meant to be remembered.
“That’s not the kind of name you whisper, Caelen,” Varik said, his voice rough with unease. He stepped closer, squinting at the glyph. “What does it mean?”
Caelen didn’t answer immediately. He reached out, brushing ash from the stone. “A name struck from the world,” he said. “Unspoken. Unwritten.”
“Wonderful,” Varik muttered. “Why is it always the places with names like that where you decide we need to crawl inside?”
“You found something, didn’t you?”
Varik’s voice broke the stillness like a knife.
Caelen turned. Varik was awake, had been watching, maybe longer than he cared to admit. His sword was already in his hand, resting lightly against his shoulder.
“I did,” Caelen said.
“And of course,” Varik drawled, stepping closer, “you’re going to tell me what it is?”
Caelen smiled thinly. “No.”
Varik snorted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Figures.”
He peered into the archway, grimacing. “You planning to drag me down into another one of your cursed holes? Because last time, you promised ‘minimal banshee interference.'”
“No ghosts this time,” Caelen said. “I think.”
“You think,” Varik muttered. “That’s what you said before the ghost bitch nearly clawed my soul out through my ears.”
Caelen adjusted the satchel on his shoulder. “You survived.”
“Only because she was too busy screaming bloody murder at you to notice me gutting her.”
A gust of cold air blew from the archway, dry and reeking of old stone and older things.
Varik sighed heavily.
“I better be getting a bloody bonus for this.”
“You will.”
“You said that last time.”
“And you’re still breathing.”
“Which feels more like your curse than my fortune,” Varik grumbled.
They lit no torches. Caelen insisted that flame would disturb the patterns, whatever that meant, so they descended into the dark with only a dim, rune-glow Caelen coaxed from a stone he pulled from his satchel. It cast a cold blue light, making the walls sweat with sickly shadows.
The descent was steep.
The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for them to walk single-file. The stone walls pressed close, slick with condensation, and the stale air clung to their throats. Every footstep echoed like a whisper too loud, swallowed and returned by the dark. A distant drip counted out time they no longer trusted. The stone was old, cracked by pressure and time, and here and there ancient carvings flaked away like scabs.
Paintings lined the walls, faded to skeletal outlines. Once, they must have been vibrant. Now they were simply of a past steeped in forgotten victories. One fresco depicted a solemn court kneeling before a veiled figure seated on a throne made of bone. Between the frescoes, scenes of ritual and confinement played out: priests in half-masks drawing sigils of silence, scholars lowering chained tomes into a sunken vault. This had not been a place of worship. It was a vault.
Varik muttered under his breath. “Cheerful decorators, these ancient folk.”
“Warnings,” Caelen said softly. “Stories they didn’t want forgotten.”
“Fat lot of good it did them.”
Caelen said nothing.
He understood. Better than he cared to admit.
The tunnel widened into a chamber. Circular. Domed. Massive cracks spider-webbed across the ceiling.
In the center stood a pedestal, a squat block of stone, black and veined with red. Upon it, something wrapped in ancient cloth.
The air here was colder. Heavy. Thicker than it should have been.
Varik held back.
“You planning to touch it?” he said. “Because I feel like the last idiot who touched ancient things probably has his bones scattered somewhere around here.”
Caelen approached the pedestal slowly, reverently.
Up close, the cloth shimmered oddly. Not silk. Not linen. Something finer and wrong, like spider-thread soaked in oil. Faint runes crawled along its surface, pulsing dimly.
He reached out.
The moment his fingers brushed the wrappings, the ground trembled.
Dust spilled from the cracks above. A deep, low hum shivered through the stone.
And from the far side of the chamber, something moved.
A dragging sound. Wet. Slow. Scraping.
Varik drew his sword with a sharp whisper of steel. “Of course. Of bloody course.”
Emerging from the darkness was a figure, or what had once been one. Caelen’s breath caught. “A Bound One,” he whispered, more to himself than to Varik. “A guardian of Kharûl.”
A man-shaped thing, bent backward at impossible angles, wrapped in the same black cloth, its face hidden beneath strips of rune-marked fabric.
Its arms ended in jagged, broken fingers. Its chest was caved in, a hollow cage of cracked bone.
It moved like a marionette with half its strings cut.
And it was coming for them.
Fast.
The creature lunged.
Varik barely had time to bring up his sword. The thing slammed into him with a sickening crunch, sending him staggering back against the crumbling wall.
Its touch burned, not fire, but cold so deep it gnawed straight into the bone.
“Move!” Caelen shouted, his voice slicing through the heavy dark.
Varik snarled and rolled aside just as the creature’s broken claw gouged a trench into the stone where he’d stood.
“Tell me you have some magic trick up your sleeve!” Varik barked, swinging his sword in a wide arc to force the thing back.
Caelen, clutching the wrapped artifact to his chest, grimaced. Something about the way it pulsed against his skin unsettled him. It felt aware, like it remembered its own making — or worse, what it had been used for. “Not one that will stop that.”
The creature shuddered, joints cracking, ribs groaning, and lurched forward again. It was fast, unnaturally fast, moving in short bursts that defied the limp, twisted shape of its body.
Varik cursed and slashed low, aiming to hamstring it, but his blade only scraped across the cloth, sparks flying, as if the thing’s skin was harder than steel.
The creature barely reacted. Its hollow head tilted, and a terrible, low croon escaped it, not a scream, not a growl, but a sound of endless hunger.
From the pedestal, the rune-stones pulsed, echoing the thing’s cry.
The chamber itself seemed to pulse with it, a heartbeat in the stone, ancient and wrong.
Varik gritted his teeth, but the mask of bravado slipped for a heartbeat. His eyes flicked toward the exit, and a tremor ran through his jaw, as if he were weighing whether they would ever see the sky again.
“We can’t kill it!” he shouted.
Caelen, backing toward the tunnel entrance, nodded grimly. “We’re not supposed to.”
“Oh good. Another brilliant plan.”
The creature lunged again, this time both arms outstretched, and Varik barely ducked beneath the swiping claws. His sword flashed once, twice, scoring across the creature’s side, but it barely staggered.
Instead, it shifted focus.
Its blind head turned toward Caelen, toward the artifact.
And it sprinted.
“Run!” Caelen barked.
No arguments.
They turned and bolted for the narrow tunnel, boots slamming against the stone.
The creature howled behind them, a shuddering, metallic noise that made the walls vibrate and the loose stones above crack further.
Chunks of ceiling fell around them.
A piece the size of a man’s head smashed into the ground where Caelen had been a heartbeat earlier.
The passage narrowed, and that, blessedly, slowed the creature.
Its twisted frame scraped and buckled against the walls, shrieking as it tried to force itself through.
Varik grabbed Caelen’s arm and yanked him forward. “Move your limp faster, scribe.”
They burst from the tunnel mouth into the dead field of stones.
The cold mist clawed at them, thick and suffocating. They ran blind, only the memory of their path guiding them.
Behind them, the creature screamed again, louder this time, shaking the very roots of the stones. But it did not follow.
Something in the old ruin held it prisoner.
For now.
They didn’t stop running until they reached the ruined waystone, the one Caelen had touched before, tracing its glyphs like a blind man searching for a door.
Caelen bent over, gasping, the artifact still clutched tight in his arms.
Varik leaned against the broken stone, face grim and pale in the rising mist. For the first time in days, his hand trembled slightly as it wiped at his brow. He didn’t say it aloud, but the look in his eyes, distant and wary, betrayed the thought: maybe this wasn’t just another ruin. Maybe they were in over their heads.
“That…” he panted, “was not in the contract.”
Caelen let out a sharp, ragged laugh, more relief than humor.
“No,” he said, straightening. “It wasn’t.”
Varik wiped blood from a split lip, scowling. “You get us into another mess like that, you better start paying in kingdoms.”
Caelen only smiled faintly, the look of a man who had seen too much and still knew too little. But beneath the calm, doubt gnawed at him. He had no idea what the artifact truly was, or if they had just unshackled something better left buried.
He knelt by the waystone again, brushing aside dirt and moss.
There, barely visible in the fading rune-light, was something new.
A second glyph. A symbol: a broken sword crossed over a weeping eye. Caelen traced it with a fingertip, frowning.
“A seal of mourning… or judgment,” he murmured. “The sword broken means betrayal. The weeping eye, remembrance, perhaps.” He glanced at Varik. “Someone sealed this place, not just to hide it, but to warn what was left behind.”
And beneath it, three carved letters: VAT.
“Vatru,” Caelen breathed.
Varik frowned. “What’s that?”
Caelen stood, cradling the artifact under one arm, and pulled his cloak tight against the mist.
“A place,” he said. “A place where we might find the next piece.”
Varik spat into the dirt. “Wonderful. Another hole in the ground full of angry dead things.”
Caelen’s mouth twitched.
“Maybe,” he said. “But this time… we’ll need more hands.”
He adjusted the strap of his satchel and set off into the mist.
Varik hesitated, then fell into step beside him.
“Where are we going, then?” the mercenary asked.
Caelen’s voice floated back through the mist:
“North. There’s a place called the Wailing Hound. If we’re to survive what’s coming, we’ll need others. And coin buys more than just blades at the Wailing Hound.”
Varik grunted. “Coin buys trouble too.”
Caelen smiled grimly.
“In this world,” he said, “there’s no difference.”
Far behind them, in the dead stones, something howled, and the broken crown glyph shivered in the dark.
Previous Next