2.7 KiB
The stairs spiraled inward like a stone wound, coiling down through the gut of the mountain. There were no torches set into the walls, no sconces, no signs of any passage before them. Only the cold, and the slick sheen of frost clinging to each basalt step.
Ryn’s hand drifted along the wall for balance. It felt… porous, as if the stone breathed. Her fingers came away damp, though nothing dripped.
Alisha said nothing behind her. Her footfalls were light, reluctant. Ryn could feel the tension in her closeness—the ache of someone following not out of trust, but love, and fear.
The stairwell narrowed. The torch in Ryn’s hand flickered low, its flame no longer warm. Just light, and even that dimmed with every step. The shadows here weren’t cast—they pressed in, like ash-clouds around a coal.
She should have turned back. Instead, she kept moving.
The air grew heavier the deeper they went. Not just cold—it pressed into the lungs, thick with a taste like iron and old breath. The kind of air you found in tombs, or in vaults that had not been opened since time forgot its own name.
And yet something waited. She felt it in her bones. Not danger. Not even malice. Just inevitability. As if her whole blood had been spiraling toward this place long before she was born.
Then, without fanfare, the stairs ended. They stepped into a cavernous vault—silent, unmoving, dustless. The floor was stone, black-veined and cracked in a perfect starburst pattern beneath their feet. Above them, the ceiling arched like a cathedral, carved with sigils that shimmered faintly when the torch passed near.
Some of them moved. Not fully, not consciously. Just enough for Ryn to feel her name almost take shape in the runes as she passed.
Far across the chamber stood a throne. But not the one above. This was a second seat—a hidden mirror—lower, older, more terrible. Its back curled upward in sharp ribs, fashioned from some dark alloy and set into bone. At its center, half-collapsed from age, sat a figure still crowned.
Her face was a ruin of time—cheekbones sunken, teeth exposed in a frozen snarl. Skin stretched taut like wax over bone. Her robes were blackened to rot, fused with the stone.
And through her chest, piercing her spine and anchoring her to the throne, was a sword.
Long. Black. Bound in rusted chains of iron, silver, and bone. Its blade curved slightly—its edge chipped like volcanic glass, its hilt inlaid with symbols that burned with a dull, internal light.
Ashmire.
Ryn staggered, catching herself on the wall.
The torch hissed out.
And in that instant of extinguished light, she heard the voice—not in her ears, but behind her teeth, as if it had always been lodged there, waiting:
You came late, blood-child. But I did not forget.