4.8 KiB
The torch burned low.
Their breath fogged and hung in the still air as they moved cautiously through the shattered throne room, boots crunching over powdered stone and brittle remnants of what may once have been bone. Fatigue pressed down on them, heavier than weariness alone. It was the kind of exhaustion that coiled behind the eyes and wrapped around the ribs, like hands that weren’t quite there.
Ryn paused at the base of the dais. The throne loomed above, silent and empty, its angles not built for comfort but dominance. Star-metal gleamed in its frame, catching the faint light in ways that defied simple reflection—glints like eyes that never blinked.
But the sword was not there.
No blade lay across the throne. No relic sealed in honor or fear. Only the hush of dust and memory.
“We’re missing something,” Ryn murmured. “This isn’t where it ends.”
Alisha knelt beside one of the collapsed pillars. Her fingers brushed across grooves in the stone—symbols like constellations, etched in an impossible script that flickered faintly in the torchlight and then died again.
“This place was buried on purpose,” she said. “Cursed, maybe. There are... presences. I can feel them watching.”
They both could.
Shadows crept along the walls in unnatural rhythms. The flicker of torchlight elongated them into limbs and teeth, shapes that reached too far for too long. Sometimes, just at the edge of hearing, they caught whispers in a tongue too old for memory—sibilant, scraping voices like wind through hollow bone. And once, a sound like chains being drawn slowly across stone.
The spirits here weren’t guardians. They were jailers. Something—or someone—had bound them to deter trespass, to choke the air from lungs and courage from hearts.
They lit a second torch and pressed deeper into the side chambers. The architecture changed the further they went—less like a fortress, more like a sanctum. The Keep had been carved, not built. Every corridor curved with the contours of the mountain, every wall fitted with precision that had not crumbled even after a thousand years of ice and silence.
The rooms beyond the throne chamber were stranger still.
One chamber—hexagonal, with mirrored walls—contained the remains of a mechanism that once pulsed with luminous lines etched through crystal conduits. Some had burst, the glass fused with molten runes. Others remained eerily pristine, save for the absence of light. At its center stood a pedestal with a hollow where something circular might once have rested—perhaps a lens, perhaps a core.
Alisha stared at it. “Like a sun that never rose.”
“The Tul-Dar,” Ryn said, voice low. “They brought fire from the stars. But the Veil... it cut them off. Nothing shines here now.”
Another chamber held rusted racks of instruments—articulated arms of brass and obsidian, delicately jointed and long dormant. A few still twitched faintly when touched, powered by ghosts of charge. Between them stood a table of pale green stone, veins shot through it like frozen lightning. Alisha touched one of the metallic arms and pulled her hand back.
It had burned cold.
A library followed—its shelves collapsed, scrolls turned to brittle ash or torn parchment. But beneath one shelf, buried in the stone, Ryn unearthed a sliver of crystal the size of a dagger’s hilt. It hummed faintly in her grip—warmer than it had any right to be. She tucked it into her cloak without a word.
Room by room, the picture grew clearer. This place had been more than a keep.
It had been a temple. A throne not just of rule, but of rite.
Eventually, they returned to the throne room, hollow-eyed and dust-covered. They could go no further that night. Every breath was effort. Sleep pulled at their limbs like drowning hands.
They laid their cloaks out beside the dais. The stone beneath them was hard, but dry. Alisha leaned against Ryn’s side, shivering not from cold, but from something deeper.
“This place hates the living,” she whispered.
Ryn did not reply. Her eyes were on the throne, its seat vacant, yet charged with presence. Somewhere beneath it—beneath this place—was the answer. She felt it, pulsing in her marrow.
The blade had been taken—or hidden.
And only the dead remembered how to find it.
That night, she dreamed of a stairwell spiraling down and down into the black, lit by torches that never burned and walls that bled ash. She heard her name spoken not in sound, but in intention. Saw the throne again—this time occupied. A woman with her face and not-her-face sat upon it, eyes closed, a blade across her lap, drinking in shadow.
When Ryn woke, her hand throbbed with pain. She looked down to see a fresh cut on her palm. Blood welled and trickled across her fingers.
She hadn’t touched anything in her sleep. The wound had made itself.