3.7 KiB
The door had sealed behind them like the closing of a tomb.
A deep, grinding sound echoed for what felt like minutes—stone against stone, slow and final. Then, silence. Not the absence of sound, but the crushing kind, dense and suffocating, as if even the air feared to stir. No wind. No echo. Just breath and heartbeat.
Ryn didn’t move at first.
Alisha stood beside her, pale in the faint glow of their torch. Her hand reached for Ryn’s, not out of affection, but instinct. “It’s too quiet,” she whispered.
The tunnel ahead stretched into shadow—hewn from black stone so smooth it barely reflected the torchlight. The walls were narrow and slightly curved, as though bored into the bones of the mountain by some ancient force. Icy rime clung to the corners, spreading in veins like pale fingers.
Ryn took a step forward. Her boots struck the stone without a sound. She looked back at Alisha.
“We go together,” she said.
They moved deeper.
The passage opened into a broad corridor, impossibly still. The walls here bore alcoves—each one housing a statue carved from the same seamless obsidian as the keep itself. Ancestors, perhaps. Figures in regal robes, hands resting on hilts or scrolls or strange relics. Many were cracked, their faces blurred by age or shattered outright. A few had been decapitated entirely. Not by time, but intent.
Alisha stopped before one. “Someone tried to erase them.”
Ryn said nothing. But her hand hovered near the pommel of her dagger. It wasn’t fear. It was... memory. The air here smelled of stone, ash, and something older—like parchment burned in the middle of writing.
Far above them, faint rumbles echoed through the ceiling. Not thunder. Not wind. Just something shifting, slowly, deep within.
They reached an antechamber. The silence thickened there.
The floor was littered with blackened tiles, and the mural that stretched across the far wall was faded but unmistakable in outline. A crowned figure, tall and stern, stood above a kneeling crowd. In one hand she held a sword of flame—not fire, but something darker, curling like smoke across the blade’s edge. Spirits bowed in chains at her feet. Behind her, a great throne burned—not consumed, but alight with something otherworldly.
Alisha turned away. “This is... wrong.”
Ryn stepped closer. Her hand traced the edge of the mural’s worn surface. The crowned figure’s face was lost—scraped clean. But around the blade, the paint still clung, dark and oily in the firelight.
The sword called to her. It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t even thought. Just a pull in the chest, a thread drawn tighter. Longing.
The corridor beyond twisted again, winding downward. They descended without words, torchlight flickering off frozen steps. At the bottom, they passed through an archway broken at the top—scarred with ancient claw-marks that had gouged the stone deep.
And then they saw it. The throne room. Or what remained of it.
The great hall had collapsed long ago, stone buckled and fractured beneath some titanic force. The walls sloped inward, as if crushed from above, and the far end of the chamber had vanished into a sinkhole of frost and stone. But the throne endured.
It sat atop a jagged rise—carved not from wood or gold, but bone and basalt and strange metal. Its arms curved like antlers, its seat worn smooth by centuries. Chains lay shattered at its base. The air around it shimmered faintly, as though warped by unseen heat—or memory.
Ryn stopped at the threshold.
Her legs felt heavy. Her breath caught in her throat.
Something was watching them. Not from above. Not from the shadows.
From within the stone.
Alisha moved closer. “We shouldn’t be here.”
“I know,” Ryn said.
But she did not step back. She stepped forward instead.