I’ve never hesitated before.
I’ve burned children who rose screaming for their mothers. Veterans who clawed their way out of mass graves, still clutching weapons they’d held in life. Innocents who died before their time and couldn’t accept it, who reached for me with rotting hands and pleading groans. I’ve never hesitated, because hesitation means death, and death means rising, and rising means more work for the pyres.
But this corpse knows my name.
This corpse says what every death warden fears to hear.
The dead remember.
The chorus fades. The boy’s voice returns, singular now but no less wrong.
“We were dumped in pits. Covered with lime. Our names were never recorded. Our families never found our bodies.” The corpse tilts its head, empty sockets tracking my movements with impossible precision. “You burned us, Ashwalker. You scattered our ashes before anyone could mourn.”
Ashwalker. A name I earned in the border wars, when I burned three mass graves in a single week to prevent the fallen from rising behind our lines. A name that followed me back to Blackreach, that became my identity, my purpose, my curse.
A name the dead apparently remember.
“What do you want?” The words scrape out of my throat before I can stop them. I shouldn’t be talking to it. Shouldn’t be treating it as anything but a threat to be eliminated.
But I need to know.
The corpse’s mouth grinds. The sound echoes off the stone walls, mixing with whispers that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. From the grief in the stones. From the silence between heartbeats.
“Find the witch.” The voice deepens, gains resonance, carries the echo of a thousand dead throats speaking as one. “Shespeaks for us now. She gave us voice when you gave us only flames.”
The mourning witch. The one who fled before the guards arrived. The one whose magic opened a door that shouldn’t have been opened.
“Find her, Ashwalker.” The corpse rises, bone fragments clicking and grinding as it pulls itself upright on legs that shouldn’t support any force. I raise my blade, but it doesn’t advance. It stands there, swaying, empty sockets fixed on my face. “And answer for what you’ve done.”
The chamber goes cold. Colder than the crypts. Colder than the mass graves I’ve burned in mountain passes where winter never ends.
Then the corpse collapses.
Whatever force held it upright releases all at once, and the bone fragments scatter across the floor, clattering against stone, rolling into shadows. The whispers fade. The presence withdraws, sliding back to wherever it came from, leaving nothing but silence and the smell of old grief.
I stand alone in the dark, my blade still raised, my heart pounding against my ribs.
What the fuck was that?
I breathe. Force my hands to steady. Lower my blade.
The chamber is quiet now. Ordinary quiet, not the expectant silence of a presence watching. I move to the scattered bone fragments and crouch, examining them with the practiced eye of a man who has seen thousands of corpses in various states of destruction.
Young male. Barely grown. The bone density suggests he was active, fit—probably a soldier. The marks on the fragments indicate violent death followed by crude burial. Mass grave burial, if I had to guess.
I straighten. My gaze moves to the covered shape behind where the corpse stood. Ira Genn. The woman who paid a blood-price to hear her dead son speak.
Her dead son spoke. And then her dead son killed her.
But it wasn’t really her son, was it? The voice I heard—the voices—they were older. Larger. Using the boy’s remains as a channel, the same way the mourning witch must have used them to let him speak.
The witch opened a door. And a presence came through that wasn’t invited.
I scan the chamber one more time, searching for any other signs of what happened here. The scorch marks on the walls. The grief-residue coating every surface. A small silver knife lying in the corner, its blade dark with dried blood.
And beneath it all, barely detectable beneath the overwhelming smell of death magic and old sorrow?—
A floral trace. Light and subtle. A woman’s perfume, or maybe the natural scent of someone who spends time among flowers and growing things. Out of place in a crypt. Out of place in a chamber filled with death.