The heavy silence of the ruins felt a lot more crowded now.
Cassian kept the machete raised, his knuckles white against the wooden hilt. His muscles were ready to spring, but the figure crouching in the brush didn't move like a soldier.
There was no iron armor glinting beneath the leaves, no crest of the temple stamped onto a polished chestplate. Just a scrawny, tangled mess of a human staring up at him through wild, bloodshot eyes.
The man shifted, his knees popping like dry twigs as he slowly crawled out of the foliage. He was clad in strips of faded canvas, animal hide, and frayed cloth—scraps tied together with rough vines. A thick, matted beard covered the lower half of his face, caked with dirt and specks of dried moss.
He didn't look at the blade hovering inches from his chest. Instead, his hollow, sunken gaze drifted straight to Cassian's chest, and then to his eyes
"You don't work for the Archon?," the old man rasped. His voice sounded like two dry stones grinding together, raw and scraping from decades of disuse. "You're too feeble looking for that."
Cassian's eye twitched. He took a half-step back, maintaining his stance, though his wrists throbbed from holding the heavy iron. "Who are you? Step out where I can see your hands."
The old man chuckled—a wet, rattling sound that devolved into a harsh, coughing fit. He spat a dark blob into the dirt and pushed himself up, revealing a stooped frame that barely came up to Cassian's shoulder. He held up two palms, caked in black soil, completely empty.
"I am nobody, boy. A ghost watching a graveyard," the man muttered, squinting through the gloom. "Though I suppose I have more right to stand on this dirt than you do. My name is Manes. The Keepers of the Ashes have watched this valley for four hundred years, and I am the last wretched soul left to keep the count."
Four hundred years.
Cassian froze. The word echoed in his head, cold and heavy. He didn't lower the machete. "Four hundred years? What are you talking about?"
"The purge, boy" Manes barked a bitter, breathless laugh.
"The Great Cleansing. You think this moss swallowed Oakhaven yesterday? Four centuries ago, a city stood here. Stone towers, grand archways, three thousand souls. And in a single fortnight, the Archon's inquisitors turned it all to dust."
Cassian opened his mouth, but before he could squeeze a word out, Materdea's presence flickered sharply at the edge of his mind.
"Four... hundred?"
The absolute shock in her voice sent a shiver straight down Cassian's spine. For the first time since he'd opened his eyes at the bottom of that waterfall, the sarcasm was gone from her tone. The icy, arrogant certainty was entirely shattered.
"No," she whispered, a sudden, frantic edge bleeding into her thoughts. "No, that's impossible. It hasn't been four centuries. It couldn't be..."
"Why?" Cassian muttered aloud, his eyes still locked on the old hermit. "What happened here four hundred years ago?"
Manes blinked, his wild eyes darting around the empty clearing before settling back on Cassian's face. "Talking to the devil on your skin, are you? Careful, boy. That stain is how they lured our ancestors to the slaughter."
Manes walked right past the tip of Cassian's machete, completely unbothered by the iron, and shuffled toward a massive, moss-covered slab of stone.
He sat down heavily, his ancient joints cracking, and rested his dirt-caked elbows on his knees.
"The old texts call it the Seduction," Manes said, staring out into the choked, overgrown forest. "Four hundred years ago, the cult of the Great Corruptor—the Devil, Materdea—took root in Oakhaven. They preached her dark whispers, making promises of false power and heretical miracles. They turned their backs on Korvus, the true God who breathes life into the world."
Cassian's heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the mark on the back of his hand pulse—a sharp, stinging heat radiating through his skin.
"Liar!" Materdea's voice shrieked inside his head, so loud and violent it made Cassian's vision swim with dark spots. "Seduction? Corruption? I created this valley! I gave them the rain! I built their foundation while Korvus did nothing. I was more of a god to them than Korvus ever was"
Cassian squeezed his eyes shut, pressing two fingers to his temple as the headache spiked to an agonizing roar. "Shut up!" he screamed back at her in his mind.
"Let him speak"
"Korvus showed mercy for a time," Manes continued, entirely oblivious to the war inside Cassian's skull. "He sent his priests to guide them back to the light. But the devil's grip was too deep. The people chose the dark over god. So... the Archon fulfilled the Lord's divine wrath. He sent the Iron Legion. They didn't just kill the cultists, boy. They salted the earth. They broke every stone so no one would ever worship the Corruptor here again."
Manes spat into the grass, his expression turning solemn.
"A few survivors escaped into the mountains—my ancestors among them," Manes rasped softly. "They realized the terrible mistake Oakhaven had made. They swore an oath, passing it down from generation to generation, to guard these ruins. To make sure no fool ever came back here trying to wake the Devil from her grave."
Manes looked up, his bloodshot eyes narrowing as he pinned Cassian with a sharp, lethal glare.
"And yet... here you stand. Bearing her black mark."
Cassian stood paralyzed. The heavy iron machete felt like a useless lead weight in his hand. He looked around the clearing again, but the scattered stones didn't look like an abandoned town anymore. They looked like an ancient execution site.
Four hundred years.
Four hundred years ago, if Manes was telling the truth, three thousand people had died because they believed in her. And now, she lived in his head.
"Four hundred years," Cassian thought, his voice trembling as he addressed the darkness in his mind.
"You were trapped for four centuries?"
Silence met his thought. Deep, suffocating silence.
When Materdea finally spoke, her voice wasn't loud or angry anymore. It was dangerously quiet, cold enough to freeze the blood in his veins.
"They call me a devil..." she breathed, the words laced with an ancient, terrifying poison. "They slaughtered a city, and blamed me for it, and then they had the gall to write me into their holy books as a monster."
A faint, dark tremor rattled through Cassian's chest, his mark reacting to her rage.
"Then let us give them the monster they prayed for, Cassian."
Cassian swallowed hard, his throat bone-dry. He turned his attention back to Manes, who was watching him like a hawk waiting for a rat to move.
"If your family guards this place to keep people from waking her," Cassian said, his voice steadying despite the terror gnawing at his stomach, "then why haven't you tried to kill me yet?"
Manes let out a dry, rattling breath and patted his sunken, fragile chest. "Look at me, boy. I'm seventy-six years old. I haven't held a sword in thirty years, and my breath leaves me when I climb a hill. I couldn't kill a sick dog, let alone a boy bound to the corruptor"
"Then what are you doing here?"
"Fulfilling the last duty of the Keepers," Manes said, pointing a gnarled, dirty finger toward the center of the ruins, where a massive mound of collapsed, ancient stone was completely swallowed by thick, twisting tree roots. "Beneath the high altar lies a vault.
My grandfather told me the Inquisitors couldn't break the ancient seal before the roof caved in. It's where the old cult kept their texts. Their forbidden knowledge."
Materdea's presence flared up, suddenly sharp and attentive. "The vault... the seal held."
"Why tell me this?" Cassian asked suspiciously. "If it's full of 'devil worship'?"
Manes leaned forward, a bitter, tragic smile stretching across his cracked lips.
"Because I've watched the Archon's men burn down three more villages in my lifetime, boy," the old man whispered, his eyes gleaming with a strange, dark despair. "They call Korvus God, but all I see is blood and iron. If the Devil has truly descended and sent you to march on the Archon, then maybe it's time this world got what it deserves."
Manes stood up slowly, groaning as his old bones protested, and pointed toward the root-choked mound of stone.
"The entrance is buried under four hundred years of earth," Manes said softly. "If you want the knowledge to control that stain on your hand before the Inquisitors find you then you'd better start digging."