CHAPTER 10: WHAT BLEEDS IN THE DARK
They reached Cragmere Fort again on the seventh night, moving quiet, moving angry.
The place looked worse in moonlight than it had in torchlight. Snow had drifted through the broken gate and piled against the circle of frozen corpses like a grave marker. The bodies were still there guild never sent a cleanup crew. Eleven statues of black ice, mouths open, eyes long gone.
Torven stopped at the threshold and crossed himself with the old mountain sign. Lysa spat. Dren just walked past like the dead were furniture.
Kael stepped into the courtyard and felt it immediately: the pressure behind the eyes, the name brushing the inside of his skull like a cat asking to be let in.
It was weaker than before, hungry, wounded, but still alive.
Good.
He wanted it alive.
They made camp in the old barracks, doors barred, windows shuttered, fire built small and smokeless. Torven took first watch despite the hole in his shoulder. Kael didn't argue; some men need to bleed a little to remember they're still on the right side of the dirt.
At third watch Kael woke to silence so complete it rang.
The fire had gone out without a hiss.
He rose, sword already in hand, and stepped into the corridor.
The name was waiting.
Not the tall thing from before; something smaller, thinner, wearing the shape of a child. Skin like wet parchment, mouth sideways, eyes just dark stitches. It crouched on the ceiling like a spider and whispered with Selene's stolen voice.
"Kael," it sang, soft as lullabies. "Come outside. It's cold."
He felt the hook try to set behind his eyes.
This time he didn't bite his tongue. He smiled.
"I was hoping you'd use her voice," he said. "Makes this personal."
He lunged.
The thing skittered backward along the ceiling, faster than anything that size should move, and vanished through a crack no wider than a fist.
Kael followed.
He kicked the barracks door off its hinges and stepped into the courtyard.
The fort had changed.
The walls were taller, blacker, leaning inward like teeth. The sky above was gone, replaced by a lid of writhing shadow. Snow fell upward. Every corpse in the circle had turned its head to watch him.
In the center stood the original thing, or what was left of it.
It was bigger now, swollen with stolen voices. Joints popped and re-set as it grew new arms from its ribs. The sideways mouth had split into three. Black fluid dripped upward and hung in the air like oil droplets.
It opened all three mouths and spoke with eleven voices at once.
"You came back."
Kael rolled his shoulder, felt the old sword wound from the ambush, already nothing but memory and walked forward.
"You started it," he said. "I finish things."
The fight was not a fight.
It was a conversation in breaking bones and tearing flesh.
The name-eater threw shadows that cut like glass. Kael walked through them, let them bite, learned the exact weight and angle of each slice. By the tenth cut the shadows slid off his skin like rain.
It spoke Selene's name again, trying to freeze him with guilt.
Kael answered by driving his fist through its chest and ripping out something that pulsed like a heart made of frozen screams.
It grew new limbs, wrapped them around his throat, poured winter into his lungs.
He breathed it in, let it burn, let it settle. Thirty seconds later the cold was just another flavor of air.
The thing shrieked with every voice it had stolen and tried to crawl inside his mouth.
Kael opened his jaws wide and bit down.
Teeth met something that tasted like grief and copper. He chewed, swallowed, felt the name try to root in his stomach and fail. His body had already learned how to digest nightmares.
The creature tore itself apart trying to escape him.
When it was done there was only a stain on the snow and a pile of black bones that crumbled when the wind touched them.
The courtyard snapped back to normal. The walls shrank. The sky returned. Snow fell the right way again.
Kael stood in the sudden quiet, chest heaving, covered in things that weren't blood and weren't shadow.
Torven, Lysa, and Dren stood in the doorway, weapons forgotten.
Torven found his voice first. "Did you just… eat it?"
"Parts of it," Kael said. His voice sounded rough, like he'd gargled gravel. "It won't be needing them anymore."
Lysa looked like she wanted to vomit or laugh and hadn't decided which.
Dren just nodded, slow, respectful.
Kael walked to the circle of corpses, knelt, and closed the nearest pair of frozen eyelids.
"I'm sorry we were late," he told them.
Then he stood and looked at the others.
"We're done here."
They left at dawn.
Three weeks later they walked back into Branch 17 with a sack full of black bones, a signed witness log from a village priest who'd watched them burn the remains, and eight hundred silver in mixed coin they'd taken off the dead inquisitor squad on the way down.
Captain Rhen met them at the gate herself.
No guards. No Veyra. No crossbows.
She looked at the sack, at the blood still under Kael's fingernails, at the new quiet in his eyes that hadn't been there before.
"Contract's closed," she said. "Inquisitor Sol has been… reassigned. Far east. Very far."
Torven raised an eyebrow. "Reassigned or disappeared?"
Rhen's smile was thin and sharp. "Paperwork says reassigned."
She handed Kael a new armband, deep blue with two white stripes.
"D-rank solid," she said. "Guild's not stupid. We'd rather have you walking in the door than kicking it down."
Kael took the band but didn't put it on yet.
"I don't take orders I don't like," he said.
"Didn't ask you to," Rhen replied. "Just asking you to keep killing the things that need killing. We'll call it a partnership."
She glanced at the others. "Your crew's ranked up with you. Try not to get them killed before they spend their share."
Torven whooped loud enough to rattle windows.
Kael finally tied the new band around his arm.
Partnership.
He could live with that.
That night the common room threw the kind of party that ended with broken tables and hung-over legends. Someone started calling him Cragmere's End. Someone else shortened it to just End.
Kael drank enough to feel it, which took more than it used to and watched the room from a corner table.
Torven was arm-wrestling three men at once and winning. Lysa had a new scar and a new admirer on each knee. Dren was quietly counting coins into four equal piles and smiling like he'd never seen so much money in one place.
Kael felt the warmth of the room, the weight of the new band on his arm, the absence of anything trying to crawl into his skull and wear his skin.
For one night the mountain was quiet.
He raised his mug to the dark beyond the windows.
Tomorrow there would be new contracts, new horrors, new leashes disguised as offers.
Tonight he was just a man with friends who'd bled beside him and a body that refused to stay broken.
It was enough.