The door did not simply open. It surrendered, in a shrieking symphony of tearing wood and protesting nails that filled the small, frigid hut with a cloud of splinters and the smell of violence.
Three figures stepped through the ruin, their entrance methodical and unhurried. They were tall, dressed in long, heavy cloaks of a wool so black it seemed to swallow the weak moonlight from the doorway. The cloaks moved with a sharp, snapping rhythm, not from any wind, but from the sheer force of their presence. Their faces were not their own; each wore a mask of bone-white porcelain, sculpted into a silent, eternal scream of agony or warning—it was impossible to tell which. But it was their throats that marked them for what they were. At each man's neck, a disc of silver scales was pinned, a delicate, deadly instrument. A soul-weigher. I'd only heard tales; they were said to press cold against the skin and, with the right pressure, compel the truth from a man's lips by the sheer threat of what they could measure.
Rhen shifted immediately, a solid wall of muscle and worn leather sliding in front of me, his broad back blocking my view. I planted a hand between his shoulder blades and pushed, hard, coming to stand beside him. I would not be hidden. The frost on the rough floorboards bit through the thin soles of my boots.
"Wren of the Crown," the central Inquisitor said. His voice was flat, distorted by the mask, a sound from the bottom of a well. "Step aside. The Circle claims the Ash Wolf."
I worked the coppery taste of old blood in my mouth and spat, a dark stain spreading on the frozen wood between us. "Come take him."
There was no signal, no glance exchanged. The Inquisitor on the left simply flicked his wrist. From within the voluminous sleeve of his cloak, a coil of dark metal snaked out, falling with a series of dull, heavy clicks. It was not a lifeless thing; it seemed to quiver, to taste the air with a faint, hungry hiss. Then it shot forward, not toward me, but toward Rhen—a viper of forged iron.
Rhen was already moving. The broken, notched sword he favored was in his hand, and he met the chain not with a block, but with a savage, grinding parry. Steel shrieked against whatever unholy alloy the chain was made of, and a cascade of white-hot sparks erupted, illuminating the hut's poor interior for a blinding instant: the packed-earth floor, the empty hearth, the shadowed corners that held our meager possessions.
I used that flash of light. I lunged past the sparking conflict, toward the Inquisitor on the right. My dagger was a simple, brutal piece of steel. I aimed for the gap beneath his ribs, where cloak and armor might part. The point punched through wool, grated sickeningly on a layer of fine mail, slipped, and then caught. Flesh gave way. A spray of hot blood, shocking in its intimacy, coated my knuckles.
He did not cry out. He pivoted, the movement terrifyingly efficient for a man just wounded, and his gloved fist caught me across the side of my face. The world dissolved into a supernova of white and red behind my eyes, my head ringing as I stumbled back.
A roar, raw and guttural, tore from Rhen's throat. The living chain had wrapped around his left forearm, biting deep into the leather vambrace. Instead of pulling away, he pulled back, using the Inquisitor's own weapon as a tether to yank him off balance. In the same motion, Rhen drove the point of his broken sword straight into the screaming eye-slit of the porcelain mask. There was a sharp, brittle crack, a sound like ice breaking over a river, followed by a wet, choking gurgle. The chain went slack.
The central Inquisitor, the speaker, raised both hands, palms facing us. The air in the hut changed. It wasn't magic, not in the way bards sing of—it was pressure. A terrible, soul-deep pressure, as if the room had been plunged to the bottom of a dark ocean. It weighed on my shoulders, pressed on my skull, sought to drive me to my knees. My legs trembled, and with a gasp, I buckled. To my side, Rhen crashed down onto one knee, the wood groaning beneath him, his teeth bared in a snarl of pure defiance.
"Soul resonance," the Inquisitor intoned, his voice now amplified, vibrating in my bones. "Resist and shatter."
And then I felt it. The thread. Not a physical thing, but a resonance, a taut, singing line of shared pain and will that ran between Rhen and me, anchored in the mirroring scars we bore. Under the Inquisitor's pressure, that thread screamed. A high, psychic whine that felt like it was tearing the seams of my mind. Agony, sharp and bright, lanced from the old wound on my side, through my core, and I knew it was doing the same to him. The taste of iron flooded my mouth, thick and real.
Rhen turned his head, just an inch. His eyes, pale and fierce in the gloom, found mine. Blood trickled from his temple. His lips moved, forming soundless words. On three. Break the circle.
I forced my chin down in the smallest, most difficult nod I had ever given.
His chest rose and fell in a ragged rhythm. I watched the focus gather in his gaze, a storm condensing. One. A sharp inhalation. Two—
We moved as one broken body.
I did not throw my remaining dagger with finesse; I hurled it with every ounce of defiance and failing strength I had left, aiming for the exposed column of the speaking Inquisitor's throat. It was a distraction, a piece of violence to shatter his concentration.
It was enough. Rhen, with a brutal twist that must have torn the skin from his ensnared arm, ripped free of the dead chain. He dropped his shoulder and rolled forward, a blur of tattered cloak and driven muscle, and swept the Inquisitor's legs out from under him with a bone-jarring kick.
The suffocating pressure vanished. The sudden release was as dizzying as the weight had been.
I was already scrambling, half-blind, driven by adrenaline and rage. The remaining Inquisitor, the one I'd wounded, was turning, his hands coming up. I didn't give him the chance. I threw myself at him, my shoulder driving into his midsection. We crashed backward, into the cold stone hearth. A cloud of old ash and dormant embers erupted around us in a grey bloom. His head struck the mantel with a dreadful crack. I landed on top of him, pinning him with my weight, and slammed my forearm across his throat, leaning into it with all the desperate strength I had left. He struggled, his masked face turning, his hands clawing at my arms, but the fight was leaking out of him. His movements grew weaker, slower, until finally they ceased, and only the ragged sound of my own breathing filled my ears.
I looked up, ash and sweat stinging my eyes.
Rhen stood over the leader. The man was on his back, one hand feebly clutching at the hilt of Rhen's sword, which was buried to the cross-guard in his chest. Rhen's boot was on the man's other wrist, pinning it. For a long, silent moment, they were a frozen tableau. Then the Inquisitor's hand fell away, limp. Dark blood, black as ink in the moonlight now streaming through the shattered door, welled around the blade and pooled on the floorboards.
Silence descended, absolute and profound, broken only by the twin bellows of our breathing.
With a wet, sucking sound, Rhen pulled his blade free. He did not look at me, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond the doorway. "They'll send more."
I pushed myself up, my body protesting every movement. "Stronger ones," I finished, my voice hoarse.
He bent, wiping the length of his stained sword clean on the dead leader's black cloak with methodical strokes. "We need distance. And answers."
I moved to the bodies, my movements clinical despite the shaking in my hands. The ritual of survival. I checked pouches, patted down coats. From inside the leader's vestment, my fingers closed on a crisp, folded parchment, sealed with a disk of dark wax. I lifted it to the light. Stamped into the wax was a single, unblinking eye—the sigil of the Circle. I broke the seal, my numb fingers fumbling.
Inside were not orders, but a location. Coordinates scrawled in precise, dark ink. A date and time: three nights from now. And beneath it, a single line of text that turned the air in my lungs to ice:
The eighth pair must complete the merge beneath the Riftspire or the tear widens forever.
A shadow fell over the page. Rhen had come to stand behind me, reading over my shoulder. I felt the subtle shift in him, the hardening of his presence. His jaw clenched, a muscle ticking in his cheek.
"Three nights," he said, the words low and gravelly. "That's how long we have before the world starts bleeding."
I refolded the letter, its parchment suddenly heavy with dreadful implication, and tucked it securely inside my jerkin, against my rapidly beating heart. I met his eyes, seeing my own grim resolve reflected there.
"Then we steal three nights," I said.
Without another word, we turned from the ruin of the hut, from the scattered, motionless forms in their screaming masks. We slipped out the back, into the waiting forest, and the night, which had begun to snow. The flakes fell now, thick and silent as ash, already beginning to veil the evidence of our survival, and our crime.