It should not have opened.
But now it stood wide.
Madeline stared at the broken seal as torchlight danced across the shattered stones. The scent of grave-dust and myrrh curled in the air. A cold breeze exhaled from the dark below, wrong in every sense — not chill, but empty, like something had taken the heat from the world and not returned it.
Behind her, the guards held their ground, spears trembling.
“You’re certain it wasn’t looters?” one asked. “The crown—”
“The crown is still there,” said Ithan, his voice tight with dread. “But the bones are gone.”
Madeline stepped forward into the tomb. Her breath misted. The floor was cracked in a spiderweb pattern. Stone worn smooth by time had been pulled apart from beneath — not shattered by tools, but lifted, like something had dug its way out.
She knelt by the sarcophagus, now split wide.
The velvet-lined interior was blackened. Charred. The scent of burned silk filled her nose. But there was no body.
No skull. No bones.
Only ash.
And buried in the center of that ash, a fragment of a jawbone — fused to something else.
Iron.
Madeline pried it loose with shaking fingers.
It was part of a crown.
She poured over Ithan’s records by firelight, her hands stained with soot and bone-dust. Her dreams still echoed with the vision of the thrones. Of her grandmother’s face, painted in pain and resolve. Of the whispering name that would not leave her:
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Saldrith.
And now the dead were walking.
Or something worse — the dead were remembering.
“They were sealed for a reason,” Ithan said, pouring himself wine. “The old kings, the ones who took part in the Binding. They were complicit. They didn’t kill the thing beneath Hollowby — they buried it. But it never died.”
He opened a book older than her lineage. One bound in dark hide.
“This is the Chronicle of the Bleeding Years. A banned text. Hidden for a reason.”
He turned to a page inked in what looked like rust.
There, drawn in brutal detail, was a figure made of armor and ash — its ribs made of charred bone, its mouth wide, filled with burning teeth. And upon its brow: a broken circlet.
The Bone King.
“I thought he was a myth,” she whispered.
“So did the kings who followed,” said Ithan grimly. “And now their bones lie uneasy in their tombs.”
Madeline closed the book.
And stood.
“If he’s returned — in body or in spirit — then he’s after the one thing they all feared.”
“The seal,” said Ithan.
“No,” Madeline said softly. “The Binder.”
Word spread like wildfire.
Whispers in the alleys. Panic in the courts.
The tombs are breaking.
People began lighting lanterns in their windows at night — not for light, but as a ward. Priests offered ash for the doorframes. The Sable Order patrolled the streets, but even they walked a little slower near the old cathedrals. Near the wells. Near the forgotten places.
Because something moved in the dark now.
Something with a crown of bone and a mouth full of ash.
It didn’t kill.
It remembered.
And those it remembered — changed.
Madeline watched from a rooftop as the funeral fires began.
Three men dead without wounds.
Eyes white. Mouths burned shut.
Each had dreamt of a crown with teeth before they died.
She knew because she had dreamt the same.
Back in the scriptorium, she carved a circle into the floor of her chamber and surrounded it with salt, bone-dust, and ink. Her grandmother had left no clear instructions, but the echoes of the Binding Song still lived in Madeline’s mind.
She spoke them aloud.
And the mark on her wrist flared.
“Seven thrones fell.Seven kings rose.One mouth remembers.One Binder remains.”
The room grew cold.
And then a voice — the same voice from the tomb — rasped through the flame.
“You cannot seal what is already awake.”
Madeline opened her eyes.
And saw a figure standing in the mirror.
Tall. Cloaked in bonefire.
Wearing the shattered crown of King Aedric.
Smiling.
And it spoke her name.
“Madeline.”