The dark beneath Eldren's Reach is not empty.
It is listening.
Stone remembers every scream it ever swallowed.
Water remembers every drop of blood it carried.
And the Abyss remembers every promise ever broken.
CLINK… SCRRRAAAAAPE…
They woke to the sound of chains dragging across bone.
Veyra was up first, Wrathbinder already braced in her hands, thorns blooming across her collarbones like fresh red poppies, pulsing with battle-hunger.
Kael rose second, shadows peeling from the walls like torn silk to coil around his forearms.
Seraphine did not rise at all. She simply opened her eyes—
tink
— and the broken child-sword in her lap crystallized into black glass.
Something was coming down the seventh tunnel.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Wet.
A figure stepped into the faint pink glow cast by Veyra's blood.
White armor, once. Now cracked, sagging, and weeping golden ichor.
A golden circlet, once. Now melted into the flesh of the brow, skin fused to metal in a permanent, silent scream.
A dawnlight sword, once. Now a jagged bone-scorched thing, dripping molten scripture like pus.
ALCRIS VALEMONT walked like a man carrying his own corpse.
His eyes were gone—hollow sockets filled with writhing dawnfire.
His mouth moved constantly, whispering prayers that came out backwards, syllables folding in on themselves like dying wings.
When he saw them, the ruined thing smiled with too many teeth.
"Ka… el," it rasped—Alcris's voice layered over something older, vaster. "Found you. Always find you. …Promised."
Veyra's grip tightened. Wrathbinder's chains groaned like a strangled choir.
"Fuck me," she muttered. "They turned your boyfriend into a meat puppet."
Kael didn't answer. The shadows around him went perfectly still—
as if even the Hunger was afraid.
Alcris took another step.
CRACK—
The stone under his boot turned to stained glass and shattered.
"They gave me eyes that see sin," the thing wearing Alcris breathed. "I see yours. All three. So bright. So hungry."
Seraphine rose at last, her movement like a curtain of night lifting. Black-white flame licked across her fingertips.
"They fed him to the Relic," she murmured. "The Dawnheart. The Church's final weapon against me."
Her eyes dimmed, remembering.
"It devours the host and births a seraph. Most burn out in hours."
A pause.
"He lasted six."
CRK—
Alcris's head snapped toward her with a wet crack.
"Witch," he sang, his voice fracturing into a choir of dying children. "Burned a kingdom. Burned my kingdom. Burn you again. Burn everything."
Golden wings—molten scripture stretched across screaming faces—unfurled from his back with a furnace roar.
Kael finally spoke.
"Alcris," he said. "Look at me."
The hollow sockets fixed on him.
"I'm sorry," Kael whispered.
Then he let the Hunger out.
Veyra Thornblade — The Origin That Still Bleeds
(While Kael and the saint-thing circled each other, Veyra's memories slammed into her like a warhammer.
The Abyss enjoys reminding its toys where they came from.)
She remembers a village that doesn't exist anymore.
North of the empire. Beyond the frost wall. A place called Crimson Hollow.
They said the Thornblade bloodline was cursed. Every seventh daughter born with thorns under the skin instead of bones.
Veyra was the seventh of the seventh.
At age nine she killed her first man—her father—when her thorns awakened and burst through her arms to stop him from putting her baby sister in the cooking pot during famine.
At twelve, the village elders chained her in the square to burn the curse out.
The fire liked her.
Liked her too much.
She woke three days later in a crater of glass and bone.
Two hundred villagers gone.
Only their melted chains remained, fused to her flesh, growing longer every time she bled.
She wandered south. A walking calamity.
Every lord who tried to claim her ended the same way:
thorns through the heart, chains around the throne.
The Church caught her ten years ago outside Ironreach.
Seventeen Saints.
Same number that once hunted Seraphine.
They couldn't kill her. The thorns drank holy fire and grew. So they chained her beneath the cathedral. Fed her criminals, monsters, heretics. Let her absorb their strength the way her thorns absorbed their blood.
Every winter solstice they tightened the chains one more link.
They called it penance.
She called it foreplay.
And now the chains were breaking.
Because for the first time in ten years, something scared her more than dying.
The way Kael had looked at the name on the wall.
The way Seraphine looked at nothing at all.
She was starting to think living might hurt worse than fire.
Back in the Saint Graves
FWOOOOOM—!
Alcris—no, the thing wearing him—launched.
Wings of molten scripture blasted forward, turning the air to furnace wind. Scripture fragments rained like falling meteors.
Kael met him head-on.
Shadows versus dawn.
Hunger versus purity.
Brother versus brother.
The chamber erupted into a storm of black and gold.
Veyra roared and joined the fray, Wrathbinder screaming pink arcs that carved burning sigils into the air.
Seraphine simply watched, black-white flame coiling around her like mourning veils.
Every time Alcris's blade neared Kael, the golden wings faltered—just for a heartbeat.
As if something inside the saint still strained to keep an old promise.
Kael felt it.
And hated it.
He drove a shadow spear through the saint's chest.
SHRRRK—!
Golden blood sprayed. The wings shrieked.
Alcris smiled through a mouth no longer his own.
"Thank… you…" he gurgled.
Then the light in his sockets guttered out.
The body fell.
The wings dissolved into ash that curled a single word onto the floor:
SORRY
Kael stood over the corpse, chest trembling.
Veyra lowered Wrathbinder, thorns retracting beneath her skin with wet, slithering sounds.
Seraphine knelt beside the body, touched two fingers to the melted circlet.
"The Relic rejected him at the end," she whispered. "He fought it long enough for you to kill him cleanly."
Kael's voice cracked. "He was already dead."
"No," Seraphine said. "He was waiting. For you."
Silence fell—
heavy enough to bend the world.
Then from the deepest tunnel came a sound.
Not footsteps.
Not breathing.
A heartbeat.
Slow.
Ancient.
Hungry.
The walls began to bleed black.
Seraphine rose.
"It's time," she murmured.
Veyra grinned—
but without a shred of humor.
Kael looked one last time at the corpse of his brother, then turned away.
The Abyss had kept its promise after all.
It had let one of them jump.
And now it was coming to collect the other.