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 dead. 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, but 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 lengthened like reaching fingers, and the sky dulled to slate. 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, cold, ancient. He gathered fallen limbs, brittle with age, and sparked them alight with a whispered word and a flicker of warmth from his palm. The fire rose low and sharp, casting restless shadows that danced across roots and bark as though something unseen moved within them.
He sat with his 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 secrets or unfurl in tongues of ink and fire.
They didn't.
The pages remained still. Too still. The kind of stillness that waits just before it chooses to speak. Only the final line remained, carved deep in rust-colored ink that had soaked 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—some convergence still taking shape, hovering just beyond the edge of sense? A pattern not yet seen, but there. Waiting.
A colder wind slithered through the hollow, dry as bone, carrying a sound like a breath drawn through stone. The fire recoiled, shrinking low. Distant trees rustled with a slowness that felt deliberate. Calculated.
He shut the book with a snap and leaned back, gazing up through a narrow gap in the canopy. Stars had emerged—silver knives scattered across a velvet sky. Cold. Watching.
They did not blink.
They did not speak.
But for the first time in weeks, Dorian felt something beneath them. Something beyond their glow. A presence—not divine, not malevolent. Just… aware.
He was no longer moving through a world that slept.
The world had noticed him.
Sleep came like a slow tide, quiet but unkind. His dreams brought no visions—only echoes. The cloaked figure beneath the crumbling arch. The staff twisted like roots and bone. The blank, faceless stare.
And behind it all, something deeper. A voice, just out of reach, whispering a name he did not yet know how to carry.
When morning came, it came in white.
Mist rolled across the land like breath from a slumbering titan. Every edge softened, every sound hushed to a dull murmur. Footsteps vanished before they could echo. Trees blurred into ghosts.
Dorian moved through the fog in silence, 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 swallowed beneath the slow 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 fleeing, never stopping. Once, a howl echoed from the hills—deep, inhuman. It reverberated in his bones. He did not search for its source.
The terrain changed slowly. Trees thinned, their trunks pale and twisted, bark like blistered skin. The ground turned to red clay, dry and brittle, streaked with veins of black-glinting ore that shimmered faintly beneath moonlight. The air shifted—sharper, harsher. Metallic, like scorched copper scraped across steel.
Shrines began to appear beside the road—crumbling, overgrown, eyeless statues with hands frozen in prayer or shattered mid-supplication. Most bore no names. Others had been carved out, burned, or defaced until only silence remained.
On the fourth night, he found the corpse.
Half-buried in ash, the figure lay in melted remnants of armor, fused to bone. The death was recent—a week, perhaps less. One hand still clutched a talisman, its once-sacred runes blackened and twisted like veins under poisoned skin. Ash clung to the body's edges like something still feeding. Tracks led away—deep, clawed impressions carved into the clay, 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 pulsed with steady fury. Lava threaded through canals and conduits in glowing veins like the circulatory system of a slumbering god. Black smoke smeared the sky. Spires crowned the skyline—brass and basalt, some jagged like fangs, others carved with runes that pulsed faintly in the dark.
Bridges arched across fire-lit chasms. And above it all, the forges roared.
Not with sound—but with presence. With purpose.
It was terrible.
And beautiful.
And utterly indifferent.
He waited until twilight swallowed the last of the light and approached along the merchant road. Cloaked in dusk and ash, he moved quietly along the well-worn paths watched by flameward torches—torches that flickered not from wind, but from sensing something not quite alive. The walls shimmered faintly with enchantments buried in their basalt bones. But they let him pass.
Perhaps they didn't know what he was.
Perhaps they did.
The city accepted him in silence.
Ashkar's lower rings were a labyrinth of soot and stone—tight alleys, sulfur-streaked corners, and fountains that hissed like dying serpents. People moved quickly, heads low, eyes haunted. Time here did not pass. It hunted.
Traders whispered of ash wards and iron charms. Priests murmured forgotten verses behind locked temple doors. Soldiers in armor lined with faint flame patrolled with impassive faces and blades that steamed in the cold.
He said nothing.
But he listened.
And what he heard disturbed him more than silence.
Villages razed without warning. Dreams shared by strangers. People vanishing mid-sentence, their words still on their tongues. Stories unraveling into ash. And beneath it all, one name, always whispered, never spoken aloud beneath the sun:
Night Maw.
Not a beast.
Not a man.
A hunger.
He found lodging on the city's forgotten edge, where buildings leaned like drunks and moss crept through stone as though it remembered when it had once been forest. The keeper was gaunt, with hollow eyes and two fingers missing. 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 small scratched inside the walls, he laid the book before him again.
This time, it changed.
A map unfurled across its pages—not of land or sea, but of something deeper. A web of living lines, pulsing like veins or threads of magic, tangled and vast. Symbols swam within them, fluid and alien, except one.
A bisected circle.
And at its heart, a word took form.
Nareth.
He whispered it.
The air in the room drew taut, as if the walls had inhaled.
The amulet at his chest pulsed once—sharp and cold—and stilled.
The fire dimmed to a whisper.
And somewhere in the city, a bell began to toll.
Once.
Twice.
Three slow chimes.
Then silence.
He rose and crossed to the window.
Far below, near the lowest furnaces, smoke was rising—not the red breath of the forges, but something thicker. Blacker. Heavier.
A sickly green glow followed, blooming like rot in water.
He stared.
It spread like veins.
Like infection.
Clutching the book, dagger humming faintly 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.