The corpses nearest her freeze mid-reach.
I pause, blade raised, a soldier’s exposed spine inches from my edge. The dead man stands motionless, his rusted armor hanging loose on bones stripped of flesh for centuries. His jaw works. Not attacking. Not screaming.
Trying to speak.
“We were thrown into pits.” The voice rasps from a throat that hasn’t drawn breath in generations. “No markers. No mourning. No one came to light candles or speak our names.”
Another corpse—the woman in civilian clothes, skull half-caved from whatever killed her—lifts a skeletal hand. Points at me with accusation that carries force beyond the physical.
“He scattered our ashes.”
The words hit like a blade to the gut.
“He burned us while we still had things to say.”
More voices join. Dozens. Hundreds. Speaking in unison now, a chorus of the forgotten dead harmonizing into a single grievance that vibrates through the stone itself.
“We want?—”
The pause stretches. A hundred mouths working. A hundred tongues that have been silent for longer than most memories can reach.
“We want to be remembered.”
The words hang in the air.
I stand in the center of them—the dead who have paused and the dead still pressing forward behind them, held back only by the bodies in front. And for the first time in two decades of tending pyres and sealing graves, I actually see them.
Not threats.
Not revenants to be eliminated.
People. The remnants of people who died with words still caught in their throats. With goodbyes that were never spoken. With confessions and apologies and declarations of love that rotted in their mouths while their bodies rotted in the earth.
Aradya gasps behind me. Pain. Exhaustion. The sound of a body pushed past its limits. The magic holding the dead at bay wavers, flickers, dies.
The corpses surge forward with renewed fury.
I intercept them.
My blade sings through dead flesh, buying her time. Three corpses fall in as many heartbeats—precise strikes to spines and skulls, the weak points in any animated dead. I pivot. Cut. Block. Destroy anything that gets within arm’s reach.
But I’m not fighting blindly anymore.
And when the death wardens came to seal the graves?—
When I came to seal the graves?—
I lit them on fire before anyone could say goodbye.
“Too many.”
Aradya’s voice pulls me back. She’s risen behind me, swaying on her feet. Blood streams from her nose and drips from the corner of her mouth, dark against skin gone pale as candle wax. Her eyes are glassy, unfocused, but she’s still standing. Still conscious.
Still fighting in her own way.
“We need to get out. Find?—”
“The pits.” I snarl the words as I take the head off another revenant. Kick the body back into the press of dead flesh. “The Ash Pits. If there’s a burial site stirring beneath the city, it’ll be linked to what we burn above ground. We seal it there. Cut off the flow.”