41 lines
No EOL
3.2 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
No EOL
3.2 KiB
Markdown
Halven moved deeper into the old halls. The door to the inner vault groaned on rusted hinges, exhaling a breath of stale incense and forgotten time. Halven lifted his lantern and stepped inside.
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The chamber was narrow, choked with collapsed shelving and frost-kissed statuary. Once a sanctum for pre-Shattering relics and forbidden scriptures, it had become a crypt of misremembered truths. His boots scuffed over scattered bone beads and shards of offering bowls. The stone walls were carved with glyphs older than any surviving script of Talpis.
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He moved carefully, reverently—his fingers gliding along broken seals, faded sigils, the wax-cracked bindings of ancestral warnings. A part of him, buried deep beneath discipline and duty, felt like a trespasser. But another part, the one that had walked the palace halls in silence for decades, whispered: _If not me, then who?_
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Near the back, hidden behind a fallen tapestry stiff with mildew, Halven found it—a scroll case wrapped in layers of oilcloth and thread, bound with a knot he recognized from royal funerary rites. He paused, heart tapping a slow rhythm beneath his ribs. Then he opened it.
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The parchment inside was brittle as moth wings, its ink faded to the hue of dried blood. But the script was unmistakable. A dialect older than the throne itself.
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He read aloud in a whisper:
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> “...beneath the mount where grief is carved in stone,
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> lies the throne that drinks no fire,
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> and a blade that knows no mercy.
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> Flame that burns without flame,
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> heat that is stolen, not kindled.”
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Halven frowned. The words blurred together like half-remembered prayers. No name was given—but the descriptions echoed what he’d seen in the old murals beneath Talpis, and again in the Hall of Kings: the woman with the black blade, her face chiseled from silence, erased from history by generations too afraid to remember.
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Another line struck him oddly:
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> “Let none unbind what the tyrant-queen sealed with her own blood.
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> For the hunger she sated sleeps only lightly.”
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His breath caught. “Hunger?” he repeated. “What kind of weapon was this?”
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He traced the next few lines with care. The text spoke of longing—strange longing—for the flame. Again and again, the phrase recurred:
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> _“They came seeking the cold flame.
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> They left as ash.”_
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Halven’s scholar’s mind wrestled with the phrasing. A flame that was cold. A throne that drank sorrow. Could it be a metaphor for sacrifice? A relic of lost nobility? He tried to fit the meaning into known myths—but something resisted.
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“Strange,” he murmured. “They wrote of the blade as if it were a lover... or a hunger.”
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A sound answered him—not a voice, not words, just the faintest breath of movement. He froze. The flame of his lantern sputtered, dimmed. In the periphery of vision, something shifted—soft, slow, like a woman turning her head. Halven whipped around. Nothing. Only dust motes. Stone. Silence.
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He shook his head, pressed his fingers to his brow. “The air is too thin,” he told himself. “Too many nights without sleep.”
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Still, as he rolled the scroll closed and tucked it inside his cloak, he could not stop the feeling that something had been listening. Not watching—_listening_. |