3.4 KiB
The torch had guttered in its sconce, casting the throne room in an amber dimness when they woke.
Ryn rose slowly, stiff-limbed and chilled through despite her cloak. Her body ached in places she didn’t remember straining—an old fatigue, heavy in the bones. It was morning, technically, though the sky beyond the narrow stone slits had changed little: still gray, still mute.
Alisha sat against the far wall, knees to her chest, staring into nothing. Her eyes were rimmed red, the shadow of tears clinging beneath them. She looked hollowed out.
“They wouldn’t stop,” she whispered as Ryn approached. “Not words, not visions. Just… emotions. Fear. Rage. Regret. All tangled together.”
Ryn knelt beside her, but said nothing. There was no comfort to offer that wouldn’t feel like a lie. Whatever lived in this place—spirit, memory, curse—it wanted them to remember, or to despair. Maybe both.
“I saw my mother,” Alisha said, voice thinner now. “But not her, not really. Just... pieces. Twisting. Blaming. As if I’d failed her by coming here.”
Ryn reached out and took her hand. The touch grounded them both for a moment. Then she stood.
“We’re close,” she said, more to herself than anyone. “It’s here, I can feel it.”
She turned to the throne again. It loomed as ever—cold, silent, unyielding. But something in the night’s vision still echoed behind her eyes. The throne was not the ending. It was the lid.
They searched methodically, trying not to be too hopeful. The room was massive—twin staircases curved to mezzanines above, and multiple pillars created alcoves where other doors might have once led. Most were blocked by collapsed stone or fused shut.
But something beneath the throne drew Ryn’s attention.
It was Alisha who noticed the faint break in the dais—a seam, almost too fine to detect, circling the stone like a shallow moat. And behind the throne, half-hidden in shadow, was a strange, socketed arch—an ancient mechanism fused to the stone, blackened with age, but once finely wrought in a fashion that mirrored the other broken wonders of the Keep.
It looked like it had been built to receive power. Not from stars, as the Tul-Dar once drew, but from something more intimate.
Blood.
They stared at it, uncertain.
Ryn drew the crystal sliver she’d taken from the library chamber, thinking it might match—but it didn’t fit. She tried touching the arch itself. Nothing.
Then she turned her hand.
The cut was still there—fresher now, as if reopened in her sleep. She extended her palm over the mechanism. One drop. Then another.
The moment her blood struck the socket, the Keep answered.
A grinding sound echoed up through the stone floor. Dust spilled from between seams that hadn’t moved in a thousand years. The dais vibrated underfoot—softly at first, then with a groaning intensity as ancient gears shuddered awake. The circle of stone split down the middle and slowly slid apart, revealing a spiral descent carved of black steps, sloping down into the mountain’s heart.
A rush of cold air spilled upward—not just chill, but wrong, like breath held too long in the lungs of a corpse.
Ryn looked back once at Alisha, whose face had gone pale again, then descended the first step.
The others would not see her again for hours.
And below, something waited. Chained. Watching. Hungry. They could feel it preying on them.