Madeline rode out before sunrise, beneath a gray sky that never quite brightened. Her cloak was soaked before she reached the lower quarter. She didn’t care. The sigil burned into Amara’s throat haunted her, flaring behind her eyes every time she blinked. She had memorized its angles. The hollow points. The shape of the broken center.
It wasn’t just a symbol.
It was a mouth.
And something was trying to speak through it.
She steered her horse toward the old cisterns beneath Stonehold, the fortress ruins outside the city wall. Once a stronghold during the first unification wars, the place had long been abandoned — except by rats, smugglers, and the occasional mad priest. But Ithan’s records had noted something peculiar about it: strange mineral burn patterns in the lower chambers. An unnatural heat where there should’ve been only damp stone.
Madeline passed the crumbled gatehouse and tied her horse beneath an overhang. The main entrance had caved in decades ago, but she knew another way — a narrow tunnel between the old wine cellar and the quarry shaft. It was half-flooded, black as pitch, and smelled like mold and wet earth.
She lit her lantern.
And descended.
The air grew colder, drier, as she went. The walls changed, too — from quarried stone to something smoother. Shaped. The tunnel widened, revealing a circular room with seven alcoves carved into the walls, each containing a crumbled statue. Most were faceless. One still bore a half-broken helm and the hint of a crown.
The same symbol appeared again, this time etched beneath the statue — shallow, deliberate, waiting.
Madeline ran her hand over the grooves.
They were fresh.
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The stone here had been cut recently.
And then she heard it.
A scraping sound. Stone against stone. Slow. Deliberate.
She turned, lantern trembling in her hand. The air seemed to tighten.
From the far end of the chamber, where a tunnel sloped deeper into shadow, came a whisper:
“Unseal the mouth.Let the truth burn.Let the ash remember.”
Madeline backed toward the wall, heart pounding.
Then, a figure emerged from the dark.
Not a ghost. Not quite a man.
He was clad in robes of deep crimson, threadbare and stained with soot. His face was veiled, but his eyes glowed faintly — not with light, but with memory. His voice echoed strangely, not just from his mouth, but from the walls themselves.
“You are the scribe,” he said.
Madeline gripped her lantern tighter. “Who are you?”
He tilted his head. “I am the herald. The first to kneel. The last to speak.”
“Speak of what?”
He stepped forward. “The return. The binding. The mouth that remembers.”
“Saldrith,” she said. The name tasted like old ash.
The figure bowed his head.
Madeline raised her voice. “What is it? A god? A curse? A name from a song?”
He looked up.
And smiled.
“Saldrith is none of those,” he said. “Saldrith is what is left, when a god is burned and its bones are buried in lies.”
She shivered. “What happened at Hollowby?”
He raised a hand. His fingers were blackened, charred like wood struck by lightning.
“It was a whisper,” he said. “A test. And you — daughter of the Binder — you heard it. You carry the echo.”
Madeline stepped back. “My grandmother had no power.”
“Not hers,” the figure said. “Yours.”
The lantern dimmed.
The walls groaned.
And the rune beneath the statue began to glow, faintly — as if something beneath it had awakened.
“Madeline,” the figure said softly, almost kindly, “you are not the first to search for truth. But you may be the last to walk away from it.”
He vanished.
The light returned.
And Madeline was alone.
She stumbled back into the daylight hours later, drenched and shaking. The sky had darkened. Thunder still rolled far off, but now it felt closer — as though echoing from within the earth, not the heavens.
She mounted her horse.
And for the first time since she began this investigation, she felt something new.
Fear.
Not of death. Not of ghosts.
But of what might happen if she kept going.
And what might happen if she didn’t.