He adjusted the strap across his chest, the borrowed robe tugging where it met the curve of his shoulder. The ember-colored thread stitched into the hem pulsed faintly every few seconds, as if it too sensed something just beneath the surface. His boots skidded across a vein of blackened glass scorched into the pavement—magic-blasted, recent. The war had passed through here like wildfire. Or worse, with wildfire.
A hissing wind curled down an alley, carrying the scent of ash and loam and something like citrus left too long in the sun.
Kyrbane lived. But it lived like something sick and defiant.
Pag made his way deeper into the outer ring of the city. The buildings here—rootstone towers with curving buttresses and domed roofs—were pockmarked by scorch marks, punctured by jagged holes, their organic growth warped as if caught mid-scream. Vines still bloomed here and there, stubbornly flowering through blood-stained latticework.
Pag froze.
Permanent consequences?
Before he could dwell on it, a noise—soft, rhythmic, human—drew his attention. He crept forward, hand at the ready near the odd dagger he'd looted from a fallen automaton hours earlier. The sound was song. Low, rasping. Sung in a lilting Draggori dialect he barely recognized but which tugged at some deep intuitive part of his mind.
Rounding the corner, he spotted the singer: an old man, sitting on a crooked step beneath a ruined arch, wrapped in layers of mismatched cloth and scaled hide. One eye was gone, the lid stitched shut with thread dyed a somber blue. The other, pale with cataract, fixed on Pag as he approached.
“‘Ware the echoes, boy,” the man rasped, lowering his voice to a hoarse mutter. “They don’t stay in the stone like they should. They drift. They watch.”
Pag raised his hands slowly, non-threatening. “I’m not here to steal anything. Just trying to get through. Why are you still here?”
The man laughed, a cough-riddled wheeze. “Why does moss cling to the fallen log? Same reason I stay. It’s mine. My home.”
Pag crouched, eyeing the man’s ragged satchel and a curved shepherd’s hook resting at his side. “You’re alone?”
“Nah.” The man jerked a thumb toward the broken building behind him. “Jani and her brother stay in the old bathhouse. Stubborn little shits. And old Reylen’s taken to sleeping on the cathedral roof. Thinks the gods’ll make him a crow if he waits long enough.”
Pag tilted his head. “Do you know where I can find the Oracle?”
The man’s face twisted. “Oracle’s gone. Taken when the northern wall fell. Ain’t no prophecy to cling to now, just waiting. Waiting for more war. Or worse, peace.”
Pag was about to ask what he meant when a hollow creak sounded above. He looked up—movement flickering in a shattered archway. Someone else watching.
“Don’t move,” a voice hissed. Feminine. Young. Sharp as obsidian. “You’re not Draggori. Why are you here?”
Pag slowly raised his arms again, a sigh edging his breath. “I’m a player. Just… exploring. Trying to survive.”
“You one of those testers?” the voice asked. Then, before he could answer, “Lower your hood. Slowly.”
He did.
There was a pause, and then she stepped out of the shadows. A girl—no more than seventeen—her dark hair shorn close, her tunic cinched with what looked like a belt made of copper wiring. She held a slingshot fashioned from bone and filament, loaded with a smooth green stone that glowed faintly. Her expression was wary, but not cruel.
The girl studied him, then relaxed the sling and nodded once. “You don’t look like one of his.”
“Whose?”
She jerked her chin toward the distant center of the city. “Captain Vaesk. Loyal to the king. Leads the emberborn that came through three nights ago. Wrecked half the city all over again.”
Pag frowned. “I thought the war moved east?”
“They left just enough behind to remind us it hasn’t.” She sighed and turned toward the alley. “You’d better come inside. If you’re not going to run, you’re going to attract attention.”
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Inside the ruin, a stairwell descended into what had once been a bathhouse—now a half-flooded chamber lit by glowmoss and hacked sconces. Two other figures huddled near a makeshift brazier. One, a wiry man with jagged tattoos and a splint on his leg. The other, a young child clutching a cracked music box.
“This is the one I saw near the gardens,” the girl said, gesturing at Pag. “He’s not with Vaesk.”
The man grunted. “Then he’s an idiot. Or suicidal.”
“Both,” Pag muttered, sitting down beside the fire. “I just want information. I’m trying to reach someone. An NPC called Lyra. Fennician. She may have passed through here.”
The girl stiffened. “I know her.”
Pag looked up sharply. “You do?”
“She helped us when the siege began. She and the fox caravan. She said they’d return once the pressure on the borders eased. But that was a fortnight ago.”
Pag’s chest tightened. “Did she leave anything behind? A message?”
The girl hesitated. Then dug into her pouch, producing a small, folded square of pressed bark. “Said to give this to someone who asked. Someone with gold-green eyes. Like fire on a wet stone.”
Pag took it with trembling fingers and unfolded the note.
“Little flame,
If you’ve found this, then you’re already in the thick of it. Kyrbane watches. The city remembers more than it lets on.
Seek the marrowwell beneath the Drowned Archive. That’s where the threads gather. I’ll meet you there. —L.”
He reread the note twice. “Drowned Archive?”
The man by the fire let out a low whistle. “You are suicidal.”
Pag pocketed the note, the weight of it pulling deeper than his inventory. He turned back toward the stairwell. “Then I’d better go before the city forgets I’m still breathing.”
Pag stood at the edge of a crumbling plaza, staring down a staircase swallowed by roots and moisture. The mouth of the Drowned Archive gaped like the broken jaw of some ancient beast—half-submerged in stagnant water, its carved stone lintels sagging under the weight of time and abandonment.
His breath fogged as he stepped closer, boots crunching over a mosaic of broken tiles—each depicting a different scene: stars falling into water, a figure reaching into flame, a spiral split by a blade. The images were chipped, their meanings half-lost, but the artistry was undeniable. Kyrbane hadn’t simply recorded history. It had sung it into its very bones.
Pag checked his HUD. No party members nearby. No active enemies. No helpful quest arrow—just the note in his inventory and the vague, sick feeling in his gut that this was going to be more than just another dungeon.
A thin red prompt flickered into his vision as he reached the base of the stairs:
Pag let out a slow breath, then muttered, “Great.”
He pressed forward anyway.
The air changed as soon as he crossed the threshold—cool and wet, like a cathedral left too long in rain. A musty sweetness clung to everything, the scent of old ink, rotting parchment, and polished stone. Lichen traced glowing runes along the walls, barely illuminating the interior. The ceiling arched overhead in layered ribs like the inside of a massive shell, vaulting into darkness. Water dripped steadily somewhere deeper in.
The stairs ended at a wide antechamber. Shelves lined every wall—some collapsed, others still intact but thick with mold and vines. Scrolls rested in bundles, and wax-sealed volumes lay like sleeping beasts on sagging pedestals. Pag carefully moved toward the nearest stack.
He skimmed the exposed page:
“The Marrowwells hold memory. Not data. Not ink. But the soulprint of experience. They do not store—they echo. To read from one is to become it. One must not take lightly the risks of entanglement…”
Pag’s skin prickled.
Something stirred behind the stacks. He froze.
A whisper—not words, but a brush of thought, dry and searching, slid across the edge of his mind. Cold and curious.
Then came a sound like cloth sloughing across stone.
Pag ducked, pressing himself into the shadow of a fallen pillar just as a figure glided into view.
It looked like a librarian, or what had once been one. Long, papery limbs trailed from beneath a heavy, waterlogged robe, the fabric fused to its form. Its head was canted at an unnatural angle, no face beneath the damp hood, just a drifting veil of whispering glyphs that hovered in place of features. Its fingers were quills. Ink dripped steadily from the tips, trailing glyphs into the water as it moved.
A wretched prompt flashed:
Pag didn’t breathe.
The Custodian slid past, pausing near a crumpled pile of bones draped in faded robes. A few moments passed. It knelt. One quill-finger dipped into the skull’s forehead, drawing a spiral there, and the glyph vanished.
“...It’s recording the dead,” Pag whispered.
He backed away carefully, ducking through an archway to a deeper corridor, keeping his footfalls feather-light despite the water sloshing faintly around his calves. The hallway sloped downward, widening as it curved. The air grew warmer here—humid and heavy with the scent of something alive.
Roots jutted from the ceiling like veins. Some pulsed faintly with amber light.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a domed chamber.
In its center, embedded in a basin of fossilized wood and obsidian, was a well—not of water, but of light. Pale threads of memory, luminous and curling like smoke, rose from its depths. They twined in the air above it, forming faint, half-familiar silhouettes: a girl laughing, a city burning, a circle of masked figures chanting beneath a black moon.
Pag’s feet carried him forward on instinct.
Floating above the well were dozens of threads, drifting gently like jellyfish tendrils in the air. He reached for one—thin, violet, humming like sorrow.
As his fingers brushed it, everything dropped away.
>>Memory Thread: ‘The Night the Flamewalkers Burned’<<
He was someone else.
Shorter. Female. Human? His—her—hands were covered in soot. Around her, the streets of Kyrbane blazed with unnatural flame. Screams filled the air. Children sobbed behind barred doors. Across the square, soldiers in red lacquered armor marched in lockstep, dragging chains and branding captives with marks that shone like magma.
The woman ran. Toward a tree with silver leaves set in the middle of a stone plaza. Beneath it, the Oracle—a blind woman with lunar tattoos across her skin—stood, arms outstretched, singing a spell that shook the sky.
Then—
A great hammer of golden light fell.
The world split.
The thread snapped.
Pag jerked back, chest heaving, knees buckling as he stumbled from the memory’s pull. His Hygieian Meter dipped sharply, then ticked up slightly again—steadying at neutral.
Pag pushed himself upright. His skin was clammy, but his eyes burned with new purpose. He wasn’t just here to find Lyra. He was here to understand what was going wrong in this world.
And something was wrong. Deeply. Systemically.
Behind him, the whispering Custodian reentered the corridor. Pag’s HUD blinked.
Pag looked toward the opposite exit—down a tight, vine-choked hallway leading away from the Marrowwell. Toward the Silverleaf Tree.
And he ran.