The air stank of smoke and wet stone. A faint drizzle had begun at sunrise, not enough to clean the soot from the blackened bones of the village, but just enough to make the ash cling to everything. It turned the road into a slick grey smear and stuck to the hem of Madeline’s cloak like a curse.

  She dismounted her horse where the path ended — what had once been a bridge, now half-collapsed into the stream below. The other half lay in scorched ruin, charred beams jutting like the ribs of a corpse. She pulled her hood low and walked the rest of the way into Hollowby on foot.

  Or what remained of it.

  Twenty-three homes. One chapel. Two dozen dead. No survivors that could speak. Only the screams of crows circling overhead and the hollow-eyed silence of the stunned who remained. It wasn’t fire alone that had killed Hollowby. Fire was too clean.

  Madeline stepped over a broken doorway and into what had once been the baker’s cottage. The hearth was cold. The ceiling gone. The smell of burned flour and something... sweeter, more putrid, clung to the scorched rafters. A child’s doll lay face-down in the soot, one arm melted off, the other stretched toward a pile of bones.

  She closed her eyes. She had seen death before — war, plague, execution — but not like this. Not so quiet. There was something unnatural in the stillness, as though the village had tried to hold its breath at the last moment and was still waiting to exhale.

  A voice behind her broke the silence.

  “Madeline of the Archives?”

  She turned. A young soldier in rusted mail saluted her clumsily, helmet tucked beneath his arm. His face was pale, his lips dry and cracked. “You’re the king’s... ah... scholar?”

  “Scribe,” she corrected. “And yes.”

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  He swallowed. “The chapel is... different. You’ll want to see.”

  She followed him through the skeletal remains of Hollowby, her boots kicking up blackened dust. No birds sang. No dogs barked. Even the wind moved reluctantly.

  The chapel stood on a low rise at the village’s edge, half-collapsed. Its steeple had snapped cleanly at the base, and the bell lay split in two beside the path. The doors, once carved with the sunburst sigil of the Bright Court, now hung open like a gaping maw.

  Inside, the stone was black — not just from fire, but from something deeper. Char twisted into symbols had etched themselves into the altar, not written by hand or chisel but burned into the stone like scars. Madeline stepped forward slowly.

  The runes were ancient. She recognized the shapes — not letters, not quite — but echoes of a language the Court had long forbidden. She knelt, brushing ash from a central marking. Her breath caught in her throat.

  It was a crown. Hollow at its center. Seven spikes, each broken. Beneath it, the word:

  SALDRITH.

  She stood, heart pounding. She hadn’t heard that name since she was a child, in a forbidden lullaby her mother used to sing in whispers before falling silent forever.

  “Who found this?” she asked.

  The soldier shifted uneasily. “Priest Elric. He tried to cleanse the altar. Lit the incense, said the rites. Then he started laughing. Said it had teeth. Bit his tongue off before we could stop him.”

  Madeline stared at the altar again.

  Teeth.

  She took out her ledger and sketched the markings quickly. The ink ran in the damp air, as if resisting what she was doing.

  “The others,” she said. “The ones who survived.”

  “Won’t speak,” the soldier said. “Or can’t. Their eyes are... wrong.”

  Madeline left the chapel and found them sitting under the lean-to beside the granary — maybe a dozen people. Hollow-eyed. Dust-covered. Still. One woman rocked a bundle with nothing in it. A man was mumbling something, over and over. Madeline knelt beside him.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The man didn’t respond. His eyes were glassy. His lips moved soundlessly.

  She leaned closer.

  Now she could hear it — a single word, spoken again and again in a hoarse whisper:

  “Saldrith. Saldrith. Saldrith...”

  Madeline stood. Her hands were shaking.

  She turned back to the soldier. “Send word to the capital. This wasn’t bandits. This wasn’t fire.”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  She looked back at the chapel — at the broken bell, the twisted stone, the mark of the Hollow Crown.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “But it's old. And it’s not done.”