“It found us.” My voice comes out strangled. “The presence—it’s here. It followed me, or it was already here, waiting?—”
The Ashwalker draws his blade. Enchanted iron gleams in the dim light, humming with power I can feel against my skin. He positions himself between me and the doorway, his body blocking my only escape route.
Protecting me. Or keeping me from running.
I don’t have time to figure out which.
The floor splits.
Not a small fissure—a fault line tearing through the packed earth, running from wall to wall, widening with every heartbeat. The whispers crescendo into a roar, hundreds of voices harmonizing into a single demand that I feel in my bones.
LISTEN.
Hands burst through the floor.
Skeletal fingers claw at the stone, dragging bodies upward from depths that shouldn’t exist beneath a safe house. One corpse. Two. A dozen. More, emerging in a wave of rotting flesh and rusted armor, their empty sockets fixed on the living who have intruded on their domain.
The Ashwalker moves.
His blade sings through the first corpse before it fully emerges, severing the thread that binds it to animation. The body crumbles to dust. He pivots, strikes again, takes down a second, a third. His movements are precise, economical, the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this thousands of times.
But more keep coming. Crawling up from the earth, filling the small chamber, pressing toward us with mindless hunger.
I have no weapon. No strength to run. My magic is drained, my body exhausted, my mind reeling from the impossibility of what I’m seeing.
But I’m still a mourning witch. And the dead are still speaking.
I reach for the whispers. Not to channel them—I don’t have the strength for that—but to hear them. To understand what they’re saying.
We were forgotten. We were burned without rites. We want to be HEARD.
The dead aren’t attacking randomly. They’re trying to communicate. Desperately, violently, but their intent isn’t destruction—it’s expression.
“Stop!” My voice comes out hoarse, barely audible over the cacophony. I push harder, forcing power I don’t have into my throat. “STOP! I’m listening! I HEAR you!”
The corpses pause.
Not for long. A heartbeat, maybe two. But long enough for the Ashwalker to cut down three more, long enough for the wave of rising dead to hesitate before surging forward again.
He glances back at me, sweat beading on his brow, his blade dripping with ichor. “What did you do?”
“I listened.” I move toward him without thinking, putting myself at his back, facing the corpses still emerging from the broken floor. “They want to be heard. They’re not attacking—they’re screaming.”
“They can scream while I burn them.” He cuts down another corpse, kicks the remains aside. “We need to move. This room is compromised.”
He grabs my arm. His grip is iron, his palm calloused against my skin. The contact sends a jolt through me—unexpected, electric, a spark of heat in the midst of the freezing chaos.
I don’t have time to examine it.
He drags me toward the doorway, blade flashing in his other hand, clearing a path through the bodies still clawing their way up from the earth. I stumble after him, my exhausted legs barely cooperating, my free hand pressed against my nose as blood starts flowing again from the strain of touching even a fraction of my power.
The corridor outside is no better. The walls have buckled, the floor heaved, and the witch-lights have gone out—replaced by an eerie luminescence that seems to rise from the earth itself. Thewhispers are louder here, echoing from every surface, filling the air with the desperate cries of the forgotten dead.
“Which way?” The Ashwalker’s voice cuts through the noise.
I point. Left. Toward the passage that leads up, toward the city, toward fresh air and open sky and the pyres that never stop burning.
We run.