The wind changed as he stepped beyond the threshold of the ruins.
It carried a weight he hadn't felt before—cooler, yes, but older too, like the last breath of something vast and long-buried finally reaching the surface. It was a wind that remembered, threading through the trees without stirring a single leaf, whispering through the branches in languages long lost. Above him, the limbs swayed in silence. No birds sang. The forest had gone still in that thin, aching hush that precedes not a storm of sky, but of fate itself.
He didn't look back.
The book was still tucked beneath his arm, bound in black leather that retained its unnatural chill. The amulet rested heavily against his chest, and at his side, the dagger lay quiet, its violet sheen dulled, yet never quite asleep. The trail ahead—a narrow game path weaving through moss-heavy trees and briar-thorn underbrush—offered no certainty, only direction. But that was enough.
By nightfall, the forest had thickened, shadows lengthening like reaching fingers. Beneath a sloped outcropping of rock, nestled in a shallow hollow, Dorian found shelter. Ivy spilled down like a veil, and the stone beneath was dry and cold. He gathered fallen limbs, brittle with age, and sparked them alight with a whispered word and a flicker of heat from his palm. The fire rose, flickering low and sharp, casting restless shadows that danced across roots and bark as if something unseen moved within them.
He sat, spine pressed to the stone, and waited for the silence to speak.
When it didn't, he opened the book again, half-expecting the pages to ripple with new secrets or split into tongues of ink and fire. But they didn't. The pages remained still, too still, the kind of stillness that waits before revealing its truth. Only the last line remained, the same line, etched deep in rust-colored ink that had sunk into the vellum like dried blood:
"The vessel awakens in pieces. Mind. Blood. Name."
He touched the line with one gloved finger, slow and thoughtful.
Vessel. Was it him? The dagger? The amulet? Or something greater, something still taking form? Some intersection of all three—a pattern waiting to be seen?
A colder wind slithered through the hollow, carrying a sound like a hollow breath drawn through stone. The fire recoiled, shrinking low. Leaves on distant trees rustled with deliberate slowness.
He shut the book with a sharp snap and leaned his head back, gazing up through a narrow gap in the canopy. Stars had emerged—silver knives scattered across the velvet dark, cold and watching. They did not blink. They did not speak. But for the first time in weeks, Dorian felt something beneath them: smallness. Insignificance. And awareness.
The world had noticed him.
Where before it had been a place he moved through, now it felt... alive. Not sentient, but attentive. No longer a stage. A witness.
Sleep found him like a slow tide, quiet but unkind. His dreams brought no visions—only echoes. The cloaked figure beneath the crumbling arch. The twisted staff. The blank, faceless stare.
When morning came, it came in white.
Mist rolled across the land like breath from some slumbering titan. Every edge softened, every sound hushed to a dull murmur. Footsteps vanished before they could echo. Trees blurred into ghosts. Dorian moved silently through the fog, a shadow among shadows, until the forest began to fall away behind him—and the old imperial road greeted him like the scar of a forgotten war.
He followed it westward. Toward life. Toward knowledge.
Toward Ashkar.
The journey stretched across days.
The road barely held its shape—cracked stone lost beneath the crawl of roots and weed. Birds returned to the skies, but they flew in strange, whirling flocks. The small creatures of the underbrush scurried in jittery bursts, always moving, always fleeing. Once, a howl echoed from the distant hills—deep, inhuman. He did not stop to search for its source.
The terrain changed slowly. Trees thinned, their trunks twisted and gray. The ground turned to red clay, dry and brittle, streaked with veins of black-glinting ore. The air changed with it—sharper, harsher, metallic like scorched copper scraped across steel. Shrines appeared beside the road, their statues crumbled and eyeless, hands raised in frozen prayer or shattered mid-supplication. Most bore no name. The rest had been burned or defaced.
On the fourth night, he found the corpse.
Half-buried in ash, the figure lay in melted remnants of armor, fused to charred bone. The death was recent. A week at most. One hand clutched a shattered talisman, its once-sacred runes blackened and twisted beyond recognition. Ash clung to the corpse's edges like something still feeding. Tracks led away from it—deep, clawed impressions vanishing into a ravine.
They did not return.
Dorian said nothing. But he did not forget.
By the sixth day, the land broke open before him.
Ashkar rose from the caldera like something born of the world's last breath. A city of flame and iron and stone, it coiled above molten rivers that glowed with steady fury. Lava threaded through canals and conduits in glowing paths like the veins of a living giant. Spires crowned the skyline—black and brass and terrible—piercing a sky stained crimson by smoke. Bridges arched across fire-lit chasms. And above it all, the forges roared, their breath curling into the heavens like prayer.
It was terrible. And beautiful. And utterly indifferent.
He waited until dusk deepened into twilight, and took the merchant road toward the outer gate. Cloaked in shadow, he moved quietly along worn paths watched by warded torches—torches that flickered not from wind, but as if sensing him. The walls shimmered with enchantment, magic buried deep within their basalt bones. But they let him pass.
Perhaps they didn't know what he was.
The city accepted him in silence.
Ashkar's lower rings were a labyrinth of stone and soot—tight alleys, sulfur-streaked corners, and fountains that hissed like dying serpents. People kept their heads low and moved quickly, as though time itself hunted them. Traders whispered of ash wards and iron charms. Priests murmured forgotten verses behind locked temple doors. Soldiers in flame-lined armor patrolled with impassive faces and blades warm to the touch.
He said nothing.
But he listened.
And what he heard disturbed him more than silence.
Villages, razed with no warning. Shared dreams. People vanishing mid-sentence, mouths still open. Stories unraveling into silence. And beneath it all, always the same cursed name:
Night Maw.
No one said it aloud in daylight. It passed in murmurs, behind closed shutters. Not a creature. Not a man.
A hunger.
He found lodging on the city's forgotten edge, where buildings leaned like drunks and moss crept through stone. The keeper was gaunt, his eyes hollow, two fingers gone. He offered a key without a word. Dorian took it.
He needed no warmth. Only a place to open the book.
That night, as wind whispered between broken tiles and something scratched inside the walls, he laid the book before him again.
This time, it changed.
A map took shape—not of land or sea, but of something deeper. A web of living lines, like veins or threads. Symbols swam within them, fluid and alien, except one.
A bisected circle.
And at its heart, a word formed.
Nareth.
He whispered it.
The air in the room pulled tight.
The amulet at his chest pulsed once, sharply, and stilled.
The fire dimmed.
Somewhere in the city, a bell began to toll.
Once.
Twice.
Three slow chimes.
Then silence.
He crossed to the window.
Far below, near the lowest furnaces, smoke was rising—not the red breath of forge fires, but something thicker. Blacker.
Wrong.
A green glow followed, blooming like rot in water.
He stared.
It spread like veins.
Clutching the book, dagger humming at his side, Dorian stepped back into shadow. He would not sleep. Not now.
Something had awoken.
And far beneath Ashkar—past flame, past stone, past the reach of gods—something older was waiting.
Watching.
Listening.