The Vale Opens
He arrived between heartbeats.
One moment, the wind screamed through a silent, sunless place in the void-between-realities—and the next, it screamed through the glacial teeth of a snowbound valley. A shimmer of violet-green light hung behind him for the briefest breath, then collapsed inward with a chime like shattering crystal, leaving nothing but swirling snow in its wake.
Skipps stumbled forward, his cloak of twilight snapping in the gale like a tattered banner. The snow was knee-deep on his short frame, clinging to the cuffs of his studded leathers and icing the silvery tips of his long, sensitive ears. A twitch of his nose confirmed it: he was in a realm unfamiliar, feral, and cold enough to bite through bone.
Hovering at his side, tethered by a chain of mithral and quiet misery, was Vathrix the Shard-Gatherer—now reduced to a floating skull wrapped in rune-bound silence. His eye sockets glowed faintly with azure motes, dimmed in boredom.
“Well,” Vathrix rasped, his voice a dry scrape above the wind, “another random leap into potential dismemberment. At least this one has ambiance.”
Skipps offered no reply—only a grin that flickered on his whiskered face like the memory of mischief. He turned in a slow circle, surveying the white emptiness.
Behind a scrim of falling snow, he saw it.
The Castle of Madness.
A monolithic ruin, carved from black ice and half-buried in the frost. Its spires reached for the ashen sky like broken claws, and the very air around it shimmered with unreality, as though the fortress itself remembered other shapes. A lesser soul might have turned away. But Skipps? He pointed randomly toward the monstrous silhouette and declared cheerfully, “Let’s go that way.”
“Of course,” Vathrix sighed, his skull tilting. “Because when faced with a legendary fortress of death and dread, it only makes sense to wander in without a plan.”
“I never have a plan,” Skipps said brightly, and he began walking.
The wind howled louder—as if to protest.
The Castle and the Cold
The wind struck him like a curse.
Skipps hunched deeper into his cloak, which writhed like mist caught in twilight. Snow spiraled in needle-point daggers, driving against his fur in sharp flurries that froze the edges of his long ears and numbed the pads of his paws. Even his enchanted leathers, reinforced with arcane threads, felt brittle with frost.
He clenched the mithral chain at his belt. It rattled faintly, and from it swung the demilich skull of Vathrix—eyes flickering with bored menace.
"Delightful," the skull muttered. "Truly. I always dreamt of freezing to death in some forgotten crag while leashed to a bunny with delusions of grandeur."
Skipps smirked and pressed forward through the gale. The mountain valley stretched wide and bleak before him, rimmed by jagged cliffs and powdered with white desolation. But ahead—just visible through the whirling snow—rose a shape darker than shadow, crueler than night.
A castle. Massive. Silent. Waiting.
The Castle of Madness.
"Looks cozy," Skipps said, teeth chattering. He held his quarterstaff like a walking stick and leaned into the wind.
“We’re here for the apple wine, right?”
"You're here for whatever chaos your latest gate decided to spit you into," Vathrix grumbled. "I’m here because you bound me to your side with runes and sentiment. Neither of us is here by choice.”
Skipps ignored the complaint. The castle loomed like a rotted tooth jammed into the mouth of the mountain. He felt the pull of the place in his chest—not magical, but emotional. Curious. Wrong. Like a dream remembered backward.
Then he saw it.
Off to the right—a cave mouth, wide and black as oblivion, yawned in the snowdrift. The blizzard hissed around it, but the darkness inside looked still. Old. Possible.
He stopped. Looked between cave and castle. Raised a paw, pointing vaguely at both.
“Door number one,” he said, nodding toward the castle, “probably full of curses.”
“And door number two,” Vathrix offered, voice dry, “smells of predator dung and bones.”
Skipps grinned. “Perfect.”
Teeth in the Dark
The moment Skipps stepped into the cave, the wind vanished behind him—as if a door had been shut on the blizzard itself.
Stillness clung to the passage, not peace. The kind of stillness that waits to be broken by teeth.
Skipps’s breath came in visible plumes. He reached into his satchel with practiced fingers, producing a flame-threaded stone, striking it to his pan flute. A shimmering mote of fire kindled and swirled into a hovering orb above his head, bathing the narrow stone corridor in warm orange light.
Flickering shadows danced along the jagged walls. Ice clung like scales to the ceiling, and the floor was slick and uneven. But deeper in—it was warmer. Not by much, but enough to make his limbs ache with returning sensation.
“Well,” Vathrix said, his glowing eye-flames dimmer in the cave’s firelight, “congratulations. We’ve escaped one lethal environment for another, slightly cozier one. With echoes.”
Skipps padded forward lightly, boots crunching through a thin crust of frost. The cave walls were veined with ancient mineral streaks, and carved patterns hinted—just faintly—at humanoid hands. Not recent.
The air carried a whine. Not wind. Something else. The faint, high-pitched keening of something lost. Or hunting.
“Someone’s been here recently,” Skipps muttered. He crouched to examine prints in the half-frozen mud—too
large for a man, too heavy for any animal that should live in this climate. And they went deeper into the tunnels.
“Well?” Vathrix asked.
Skipps stood. “Three paths ahead.”
Vathrix sighed. “Of course there are.”
The tunnel forked, the firelight falling short at each branching. One was broader, its floor heavily trodden and slick with disturbed snow-melt. Another wound upward and glistened with thicker ice, colder air leaking from its throat like dragon breath. The last bent sharply, the rock warm and dry underfoot, shadows deeper than they should be.
Skipps sniffed. “One smells like frostbite. One smells like wet beast. The other smells… old.”
He tapped his lip, eyes bright with that particular spark that made Vathrix groan aloud.
“Let’s see where the footprints lead.”
The Gnawing Sound
The tunnel narrowed as Skipps moved forward, though the footprints ahead grew wider—deeper, pressed into the half-frozen mud with the weight of something large. Something that walked on two legs but dragged its claws. Every fifth step or so, the drag marks would stop, as if the beast paused to sniff the air—or listen.
Skipps slowed, one paw on Heart Riven’s hilt, the other holding the dancing flame aloft. The flickering light trembled against the stone walls, catching on twisted icicles that sprouted like broken teeth from the ceiling.
Vathrix’s voice slithered out of the dark like smoke. “I hear it.”
“So do I,” Skipps whispered.
The noise up ahead was not breathing. Not speech. It was… consumption. A wet, rhythmic tearing sound, punctuated by cracking—bone, or worse—and a high-pitched squeal that abruptly stopped. Flesh parted from flesh, and the cave echoed the noise like it was proud of it.
“I don’t suppose we’re about to find a nice butcher carving up haunches of winter deer?” Skipps asked.
“No,” Vathrix replied. “Unless this deer begged for its life.”
They stood at a bend in the path. Around it, the noise grew louder—closer. Skipps’ fingers tightened on his blade.
His flame dimmed of its own accord, as if even the magic wanted no part in what lay ahead.
The air changed. It smelled of copper. Hair. Melted snow thick with old blood.
Skipps looked back once. The path behind had vanished into pitch.
Then he looked forward.
“Well,” he whispered, “we’ve come this far.”
The Pit of the Feaster
Skipps extinguished his flame with a breath and stepped into darkness.
Only a faint blue flicker—reflected in Vathrix’s eyes—remained to guide him, and even that offered no comfort.
The demilich’s soft glow cast pale ghosts of shadow on the tunnel walls, just enough for Skipps to find footing as he crept forward, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, cloak trailing behind like smoke.
The sounds grew louder with every step. Something wet shifted across the stone floor. A low, hungry panting echoed in counterpoint to the crunch of bone. He could hear the slow drag of a massive body repositioning itself… and the long, slick draw of something chewing.
A patch of the tunnel opened suddenly—a crude chamber of ice and stone, dimly lit by cracks in the ceiling that filtered winter light like a dying breath. He pressed himself against the edge, barely daring to peer around.
It was worse than he imagined.
A creature—hulking, humanoid in shape, but all wrong in proportion—crouched over a corpse. Its flesh was a mottled pallor of frostbitten blue and death-gray. Ice crystals clung to its beard of tangled gore, and steam rose from its jaws with every slow, luxurious bite. Long claws clicked over broken ribs like a musician testing strings.
Vathrix whispered, “That’s not hunger. That’s obsession.”
Skipps didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
Behind the beast, a narrow tunnel continued—small, almost hidden, but there. A way out. A path forward.
The monster grunted, tearing a thighbone free and gnawing it like a child with a candy stick. It hadn’t noticed him.
Not yet.
The floor was slick with melted fat and blood. The bones crunched like dry leaves under its claws.
Skipps tensed.
The Ice Fiend
Skipps grinned.
The sort of grin that only came before something truly reckless.
A flick of his fingers and his Bladesong began—soft footfalls on slick stone, breath like rhythm, heart like tempo.
The wind in the tunnel shifted around him, reacting to the fey-string pulse of his magic. His limbs lightened, his steps turned to spirals of motion, and the world narrowed to a predator's focus.
From his hip, Heart Riven leapt into his grasp—its curved blade humming with sorrow and purpose. In his other paw, he drew Jawfang, the curved bone-blade whispering in ancient lupine growls, hungering for blood under the faint glow of the demilich's watchful gaze.
A single step forward.
Then fire.
A pulse of arcane force surged down the dagger’s blade as he whispered the sigil of green-flame blade. The edge of
Heart Riven blazed with verdant light, ghostly fire dancing along its fuller like ivy laced with war.
The creature—the ice fiend—turned at the last second. Its corpse-meal dropped from its jaws with a wet thump.
Milky eyes locked onto Skipps as it roared, a sound like glaciers shattering.
Too late.
Skipps was already in the air.
He twisted mid-leap, cloak flaring around him like stormcloud wings, and struck—
Heart Riven bit deep into the creature’s collarbone. Green fire erupted from the wound, curling across the ice fiend’s chest and leaping like a living flame toward the pile of bones behind it. The fire hissed against frost, cutting through the air with a scream like memory being burned away.
The monster howled.
Skipps landed lightly, sliding across the blood-slick floor, already turning to face its counterstrike. His ears twitched, reading the wind. His heart sang.
Vathrix hovered nearby, expressionless but clearly watching.
"Oh,” the skull intoned with a hollow whisper, “this will be loud.”
The ice fiend lunged.
Its claws, long as butcher’s knives, slashed the air where Skipps had stood. He flowed like water, ducking low,
flicking a cut with Jawfang across the beast’s side. The dagger drank deep, and the wound left behind pulsed black and red, dripping with necrotic rot.
“You picked the fight,” Skipps hissed through a grin, his feet already dancing to the next movement of his blade song.
The creature reeled.
And the chamber, once a slaughterhouse, now rang with fury and flame.
Heart’s Flame and Fang’s Howl
The Ice Fiend roared.
Frost rippled out from its maw in waves, but Skipps was already moving—cloak flickering through hues of dusk and steel, legs a blur of sidesteps and darting lunges. The Bladesong wove through him like a second heartbeat, and magic bled from his every step.
The creature struck—a wide, sweeping claw aimed to bisect him.
But Skipps wasn’t there.
He blurred ten feet to the side, Planar Displacement flaring as reality tore like silk, depositing him behind the beast in a shimmer of blur and afterimage.
“I hate being predictable,” he quipped—and stabbed Heart Riven between the ribs with Green-Flame Blade.
It screamed, flailing—then froze in place, muscles locking.
Skipps backflipped away and landed low in a crouch, his left paw holding Jawfang low, reverse-grip. The dagger pulsed with anticipation.
“You don’t get to scream alone,” he whispered.
Jawfang carved into frost-hardened flesh. The howl that followed wasn’t pain—it was fear.
The fiend stumbled.
Vathrix hovered silently. “Well. This was unexpectedly… efficient.”
Skipps pivoted again—one final motion, one final beat in the dance.
Heart Riven hit. The blade sang as it struck true again.
The Ice Fiend’s chest opened like shattered stone.
Its heart, if such a thing still beat beneath the frozen ruin of its flesh, gave one last stuttering pulse. Skipps twisted
the blade, and Heart Riven drank its last breath.
The creature fell with a guttural moan, steam curling from its wounds as green fire still licked its bones. It hit the
ground hard and didn’t rise again.
Silence returned to the cave. And with it… a scent.
Skipps turned, nostrils twitching. Something old stirred nearby.
Behind the collapsed corpse lay a narrow corridor leading away from the chamber, its entrance half-hidden by
frost-warped bone. A way forward.
He flicked blood and ichor from his blades, then tapped the hilt of Heart Riven to his temple in a mock salute.
"Next?"
A Tunnel in Mourning
The passage stretched narrow and crooked, veering downward at first, then curling like a beckoning finger. Skipps walked in silence, save for the jingle of glass vials and the faint chain-clink of Vathrix’s tether.
No runes lined this path. No markings. Just stone, worn by time and claw.
Time passed. Minutes? Hours?
It didn’t matter. Time had no meaning in places shaped by madness.
Then—the way ended.
A slab of ice and packed snow had sealed the tunnel’s exit like a frozen grave. Only a faint golden light bled through a jagged crack. Outside, something warm waited.
Skipps exhaled slowly, then struck the wall with his staff.
Again.
And again.
It cracked, then buckled.
With a grunt, he braced his foot and slammed both fists into it, reinforced by a touch of arcane pressure. The snow burst outward with a shriek of air, and sunlight stabbed through like a sword.
He scrambled out into a courtyard of statues and ruin—stone warriors shattered, half-buried in drifts. The wind had died here, hushed as if in awe. The ice fiend’s dying howl no longer echoed. There was no pursuit.
He was alone again.
But ahead—two doors.
One smaller, sunken, clearly a servant’s entrance with broken timber and frost-stained lintels.
The other, heavier and fortified—once a guardhouse, by the look of the barred windows and half-shattered war
symbols carved into the stone above.
Skipps sheathed Heart Riven and let the silence settle.
His cloak shifted in the breeze, shadows pooling at his feet.
“I don’t suppose either door leads to cider and clarity?” he asked.
Vathrix snorted. “If they did, the Abyss would’ve frozen over—oh, wait.”
Skipps smiled faintly. “Let’s try the left.”
Whispers in Stone
Skipps stepped lightly among the broken statues, his ears twitching to catch every echo. The snow here was thin but layered—older than the recent storm, as though it never truly melted, just changed shape. It clung in wind-carved ridges against fallen marble arms and faceless busts. Something about the silence pressed against his mind.
“These aren’t decorations,” he murmured.
“No,” Vathrix agreed, bobbing behind him like a morbid lantern. “They were warnings. People once turned into monuments, or simply posed for eternity by something crueler than time.”
Skipps paused beside a shattered centurion. Only the torso and legs remained—muscle etched in stone, mid-turn, as if fleeing something unseen. His head lay several feet away, mouth open in a scream.
“Do you hear that?” Skipps asked.
“No,” Vathrix said. “And that’s exactly what’s wrong.”
He crouched low, brushing away snow from the statue’s chest. There—barely visible beneath ice-streaked lichen—was an emblem. A leaping stag in silver relief. Faint, but noble.
“What house was this?” he asked.
“Old,” Vathrix replied. “And extinct.”
Skipps narrowed his eyes and reached deeper into the snowdrift beside it. His fingers met something hard. He pulled.
A hand.
Frozen. Still gripping a mace.
He nearly dropped it, but forced himself to look closer.
The flesh was blackened and paper-thin—more mummified than frozen. A warrior’s death-grip had fused to the
weapon’s haft. The mace itself shimmered with a lacquer of sky-blue glass, etched with swirling runes that resisted
the snow’s bite.
“Useful,” he said flatly.
“Cursed,” Vathrix countered, “but very stylish.”
Skipps tugged the weapon free. The frozen fingers snapped away like porcelain. He gave the mace a test spin—
well-balanced. And angry.
“Alright,” he said softly. “Let’s not waste the gift.”
He slid it into the loop on his back, where it clinked against other relics of long-dead fools.
The statues watched in silence. Snow began to fall again—light, indifferent.
The two doors still waited ahead.
The Door That Shouldn’t Open
Skipps ducked beneath the warped wooden lintel of the servant’s entrance, ears brushing frost-crusted splinters.
The doorframe had collapsed inward, and the wood bowed like it was sighing in defeat. A single lantern hook still hung askew on the outside wall—long cold, but whispering of a time when warmth lived here.
Inside, the gloom swallowed him like a breath.
The light from behind dimmed into a pale glow on the floor. Vathrix floated just over his shoulder, casting long, broken shadows along the narrow stone hall.
The moment Skipps crossed the threshold, his whiskers twitched.
Blood.
Old. Thin. Dried into the stone. But there, in splatter-patterns across the servant’s corridor wall. He crouched,
brushing two fingers across the smear.
“Not a massacre,” he murmured. “A pursuit.”
“Yes,” Vathrix agreed, voice hollow and faintly amused, “and you’ve walked into the aftermath like a storybook fool.”
The floorboards were warped beneath his boots. One gave way with a hollow crack, revealing jagged footprints—massive. Weighty. Deep enough to fracture the planks like glass. Each track pulsed with old, frozen rot.
Skipps glanced down. One of the prints was partially filled with half-frozen berries. He wasn’t sure if that made it worse.
“What kind of thing leaves that kind of print?” he asked.
“Something not born, but sculpted,” Vathrix said. “Something hungry enough to come through the servants first.”
He stepped lightly around the deeper cracks and moved forward, hand drifting near Heart Riven’s hilt, though he left it sheathed—for now. His eyes scanned the gloom ahead.
There—nestled in the corner of the next chamber, half-hidden beneath a torn tapestry and the crumbled shards of a broom, lay a skeleton.
Not a warrior. Not a cultist.
Just a servant.
Tattered linen sleeves clung to bone wrists. The skull lolled sideways against a cracked flagstone, eye sockets
frozen in silent question.
Skipps knelt beside the bones. Something glinted beneath the ribs.
Glass Fang in the Ribs
Skipps crouched low beside the skeletal remains, the air sharp with dust and a lingering trace of copper long since dried. Vathrix hovered silently behind, casting fractured shadows as if not wanting to draw attention—either to the bones or to himself.
The Harengon reached out gently, brushing away the remnants of threadbare linen and clinging frost. The bones shifted slightly under his touch, brittle with time. The servant’s ribs had collapsed inward as if something had pierced the chest—not from above, but within.
“Trapped,” he murmured. “Or betrayed.”
“Dead,” Vathrix said with a dry rasp. “The distinction, in this place, is only temporary.”
Skipps’s paw brushed something rigid.
A glint.
Half-embedded in the rotten floorboards, glinting beneath a collapsed rib, was a dagger.
Not steel.
Not iron.
Glass.
No—not quite. It shimmered with a strange translucent gleam, like frost given shape and edge. The hilt was wrapped in frayed black silk, stained rust-red.
It called to him.
He reached for it—and instantly hissed.
A line of crimson bloomed across his thumb, thin and sharp. Even sheathed in old silk, the weapon bit like it
remembered how.
Skipps licked the wound and wrapped a strip of cloth around his palm.
Vathrix chuckled darkly. “Oh, it likes you.”
“Good,” Skipps muttered, already prying the blade free. “It can be friends with the others.”
He tugged hard. The dagger came loose with a wet crack. The ribcage collapsed around it. A gust of stale air, trapped for gods-know-how-long, wheezed into the room like a final breath.
Skipps turned the weapon over in his paw. It was finely made—too fine for a common servant. The blade gleamed faintly in his hand, as though catching light that wasn’t there. A rune—scratched, not etched—ran just beneath the crossguard. Sylvan for “silence”, though it stuttered as if written by a shaking hand.
He slipped the blade into his belt.
“Another ghost in the collection,” he said softly. “Let’s move on.”
The bones didn’t answer. But something in the corridor ahead seemed… quieter.
As if it was listening.
The Dead Walk Lightly
The corridor narrowed.
Skipps moved with care, placing each step as though the stones might judge him for their disturbance. The walls, once painted in warm tones—perhaps ochre and green—had faded into gray bruises of mildew and shadow. Cracks webbed outward like veins from floor to ceiling.
The castle was not just ruined.
It was wounded.
Somewhere behind him, a tapestry he’d brushed aside collapsed in a soft heap of rot. The sound echoed much farther than it should have.
"Deeper,” Vathrix muttered, “and colder. This place remembers death, but not mercy.”
“That's where I do my best work,” Skipps replied.
He passed through a rounded arch—what had once been a servant’s common space. The remnants were there: splintered benches, a rusted cauldron, plates frozen to the floor in pools of frost. Everything bore a dusting of snow that didn’t seem to come from outside. It had gathered without wind, without sky.
“Unnatural frost,” Vathrix said, his eye-flames pulsing faintly. “A curse. Or maybe something worse.”
In the corner, another skeleton slumped against the wall, dressed in once-fine livery, now torn and splotched with brown rot. A broken wine jug rested beside it, the contents frozen into a cracked spiral of crimson ice.
Skipps didn’t stop.
A sound—soft, delicate—fluttered through the air like a page turning in another room.
He turned sharply.
Another corridor.
More arches.
More stillness.
Then… stairs.
Leading downward.
Of course.
Skipps hesitated at the top. The steps were wide and stone, but they glistened. Not water. Ice. Just thin enough to
make every step a test of balance.
“Do try not to die slipping on a staircase,” Vathrix offered. “I’d never hear the end of it from the lich community.”
Skipps drew a slow breath, placed one foot forward.
Then another.
The descent was careful, deliberate. Measured. He leaned slightly forward, weight centered, cloak dragging behind like a cautious shadow. A misstep would mean bruises—maybe worse.
Halfway down, his foot skidded. He caught himself with a quick rabbit-hop, cursed under his breath, and kept going.
Finally, he reached the bottom.
The chamber that opened before him was… wrong.
Not empty.
Just wrong.
A vast space, half-lit by a ceiling fissure, ice-covered walls glowing with bioluminescent veins. Three hallways led away like the roots of a rotten tree.
Skipps paused.
The castle watched.
And somewhere, in the depths below, something shifted—as though bones were being rearranged for presentation.
The Hall of Hollow Names
Skipps stepped into the chamber like a whisper, paws silent on the slick stone floor. The cold here was different—still, yes, but... aware. Like breath held behind a door.
The light filtering from the crack above was weak, moon-colored, and flickering—yet there was no moon outside.
His breath fogged.
So did Vathrix’s.
Skipps halted. “You don’t breathe.”
“No,” the skull replied, voice suddenly hushed. “So why is there fog?”
The frost on the walls thickened the farther he stepped. It coiled in patterns—spirals, knots, circular runes not quite finished. He reached out and brushed one with the tip of his fingers.
It pulsed.
Skipps flinched back.
From the wall, a ripple spread. Like breath through old parchment, the frost shifted, melted, then coalesced. It formed a face. Or the suggestion of one. Blank eyes. An open mouth. A silent scream.
Then another face beside it.
And another.
The walls were filled with them.
Dozens—no, hundreds—of frozen echoes, all weeping, all trapped mid-cry, their features blurred as if melting
through time.
Names whispered themselves, without voice:
Bennith. Ilfarel. Crask of the Nine. Elira—
Skipps froze.
“Say that again,” he breathed.
But the wall was silent.
The frost retreated.
Only Vathrix stirred. “It said her name,” the skull murmured. “The girl. The one who named you.”
Skipps swallowed hard. “I know.”
He took a step back from the wall.
The chamber no longer felt still. It felt… watched.
And above them—barely perceptible—a dry scraping sound circled the ceiling like nails dragging across ancient
stone.
“Time to leave,” Vathrix said, uncharacteristically urgent.
Skipps nodded.
But not before touching the wall one more time, right where her name had almost been.
It was warm.
Let’s Go This Way
He stood at the convergence of three hallways, each one stretching like a scar deeper into the castle’s frozen underbelly.
One passage sloped down, its walls slick with frost so thick it formed strange glistening ribs along the stone. The second bent sharply to the left, warmer somehow—its air faintly metallic, as if rust or blood hung in it. The third was narrow, almost forgotten, half-choked with debris but laced with the scent of old paper and burnt candles.
Skipps didn’t hesitate.
He pointed directly at the narrow, choked corridor.
“This way,” he said cheerfully, “feels like bad decisions and unsolved riddles.”
“Ah yes,” Vathrix sighed, “your comfort zone.”
He stepped forward, ducking beneath a broken arch of collapsed masonry. As he passed beneath it, a curtain of dust stirred—swirling in faint patterns. Shapes.
Runes?
No… words.
I see you now.
And I remember your name.
Skipps slowed.
His paw twitched toward Heart Riven, but the whisper passed. He turned, and it was gone.
The hallway narrowed into a cracked gallery lined with damaged murals. Most were obscured by frost, but one
remained faintly visible: a queen, white-haired, holding aloft a runed axe before a kneeling knight.
Another showed a blue-eyed maiden in plate armor, one arm outstretched toward something just beyond frame.
Skipps tilted his head, ears lowering slightly.
“I’ve seen her,” he whispered. “Or dreamed her.”
Vathrix hovered closer. “This castle wears echoes. That means it can misuse memory. Be careful what you remember aloud.”
Skipps traced a single glyph in the mural’s lower border: a half-sun, half-moon motif. A name coiled beneath it.
He didn’t speak it.
Instead, he turned toward the final arch, where the air shimmered—no longer cold, but close. Claustrophobic.
“Time to see what’s waiting.”
The Chain That Shouldn't Sing
The hallway ended without warning.
One moment, the path coiled inward like a serpent’s spine—and the next, it spilled into a chamber that hadn’t been carved, but grown.
The walls here were not stone.
They were roots.
Twisting, petrified vines formed a vaulted dome, spiraling like the inside of a fossilized shell. Amber light glowed from between the knotted bark as if some forgotten sun had been buried here and left to decay.
Skipps stepped inside slowly, head tilted, nose twitching.
“It’s fey,” he whispered. “But broken.”
“No,” Vathrix said, hovering low. “It’s a memory of the Feywild. Dying. Trapped in this place. This isn’t natural.”
At the chamber’s center stood a pedestal—an altar of vine-wrapped obsidian etched with glyphs from no single
language. Sylvan, Abyssal, Draconic. One that pulsed faintly in Infernal script translated simply as:
This is your promise. This is the lock.
Upon the pedestal coiled a chain.
Not just any chain.
It was forged from starlight and iron, impossibly thin in places, impossibly dense in others. It looped in a perfect circle, but the center sagged with the weight of something invisible—something missing. And as Skipps approached, it stirred.
A note.
Soft.
A single tone sang from the metal, clear and sustained. It rang out not through the ears, but through the chest—vibrating against the heart like grief given voice.
“What is this?” Skipps asked, not to Vathrix, but the room itself.
Vathrix hovered back. “It’s bound to a name,” he said slowly. “But that name has been erased.”
Skipps stared. The chain shifted again. A second tone joined the first, this one harmonic—aching.
Come closer, the relic whispered. I remember you.
Skipps blinked.
And saw her.
Not Elira.
A reflection of her. A younger face. Pale hair. Laughing eyes.
Only... it wasn’t a memory.
It was a piece of something cut away.
The chain flared with light.
He stepped back.
“Don’t touch it,” Vathrix snapped. “That’s a Name Lock. A true relic. If you so much as breathe your name into it,
it might unbind you from yourself.”
Skipps hesitated.
Then smiled faintly. “But what if I don’t have a name to give it?”
The relic pulsed once.
Then dimmed.
The music ended.
A small glyph, etched beneath the pedestal, shimmered into view. A word—Sylvan script, shaped like a key.
Elira.
He traced it, then stepped back, ears flat.
The chamber pulsed once more. The chain unraveled, falling into a perfect spiral across the altar, revealing something beneath:
A black silk pouch.
Skipps reached for it—carefully—and opened it.
Inside: a single crimson lens, shaped like a teardrop. Glass, but warm. It didn’t reflect the room—it reflected memories. His memory. Hers.
A cursed relic, perhaps.
But also... a gift.
The Daisy Chain
Skipps held the Tear in one paw, its crimson surface gleaming like frozen blood.
He whispered her name—not aloud, not in any tongue shaped for echo, but into the space between his breaths.
Elira.
The Tear flared.
Not with heat.
With sound.
A distant hum—no louder than a lullaby, carried on the hush between wind and world.
Skipps staggered.
The chamber dissolved.
He stood in sunlight.
Real, warm sunlight.
Golden, like honey poured through branches in early spring. The field swayed gently around him, heavy with wildflowers and the smell of sweetgrass. In the distance, a cottage nestled between two bent trees. Smoke curled lazily from its chimney.
And there—sitting cross-legged in the grass—was Elira.
Thirteen. Alive. Laughing.
She hummed softly to herself, threading flowers together with nimble fingers. A daisy chain. The same one she’d
once placed around Skipps’ neck the day they met.
He couldn’t move.
Couldn’t speak.
He wasn’t there, not really.
Only watching.
Elira lifted the chain and held it up to the sun, letting the petals glow. Then she turned—and looked directly at him.
But not at the Skipps standing in memory.
She looked at someone else.
Another Skipps.
Younger. Less armed. Less weighed down.
“Do you think the chain will last?” she asked.
The younger Skipps tilted his head. “Flowers don’t last,” he said. “That’s what makes them good for promises.”
She smiled faintly. “Then I promise this: when you forget who you are, I’ll remind you.”
The scene wavered.
Static curled at the edges of the memory. Snow, unbidden, blew across the grass. The trees warped—branches twisting into clawed shapes. The sunlight bled away, draining into dusk.
Skipps reached out—No.
But it was too late.
The sky cracked.
The field folded inward like paper on fire.
Elira’s voice remained, hanging in the dark like starlight.
“Don’t forget your name… Skipps.”
The chamber returned.
The Tear dimmed.
His paws trembled.
Vathrix, for once, said nothing. Not even a sigh.
Skipps placed the Tear back in its pouch with reverent care.
He drew Heart Riven and whispered to the blade, “Let’s keep that one.”
The weapon pulsed softly. Agreeing.
The Lie That Wore Her Voice
"You gave me your name… and you left me behind."
The thing’s voice echoed Elira’s tone too perfectly.
Too knowingly.
Skipps didn’t hesitate.
With a whisper to no one but the blade, he drew Heart Riven in a single motion—its edge gleaming like moonlight
on stained glass. The weapon’s runes flared, pulsing with feyfire and grief. The chamber responded—roots in the ceiling shuddered, the window cracked, and the ice beneath his feet recoiled like a living thing.
“You’re not her,” he said.
And then he was moving.
Bladesong ignited through him like rhythm made flesh. His steps danced through frozen debris. With one paw, he slashed upward in a spiraling arc—Heart Riven catching the false-Elira across the chest.
Heart Riven with Green-Flame Blade, the blade sears through frost and illusion. Fire ignites. No regeneration.
The thing screamed—but not in her voice now.
Its face twisted, buckled inward, revealing jagged bone beneath thin glamour. Its lips split. Its eyes became holes lit
from within by blue flame.
It lashed out—but Skipps was gone, blurring sideways in a Planar Displacement shimmer, cloak streaming like smoke.
He reappeared to its left and drove the blade home a second time.
Jawfang struck deep, necrotic damage blackening the wound. Whispered howls erupted from the wound as Skipps
growled, “Speak her name again and I’ll cut your voice out.”
The creature hissed in a chorus of wrong voices—her laugh, her sob, a child’s scream.
It slashed at him with long claws, its limbs warping as it tried to take his form. He ducked. Spun. Pounced forward.
Heart Riven again. No flair. Just execution.
The blade plunged between false ribs—cutting through stolen memory, severing the core of a curse designed to
mock what he had lost.
The chamber howled.
The frost cracked.
The creature gurgled.
It tried to reach for him—not in anger, but pleading.
But he didn’t flinch.
With a twist of his wrist, he whispered:
“She gave me my name. You only tried to steal it.”
The blade pulsed.
And the creature unraveled—its form falling backward like unraveling silk, blowing away into frost-mist and ash.
The ice receded.
The glass window above shattered.
The altar split in two.
Silence returned.
Skipps stood alone again in the cold, steam rising from the blood still sizzling on Heart Riven’s edge. He didn’t wipe it away. The blade drank it.
Vathrix hovered at his shoulder.
“That wasn’t her,” the skull said.
Skipps didn’t answer.
Instead, he walked slowly to the shattered altar.
There, half-buried in broken frost, was a petal.
A single, preserved daisy.
Untouched.
He picked it up and tucked it beneath his collar.
The Pit Beneath the Frozen Eye
The last echo of the mockery’s scream faded into the frost-rimed stone.
Skipps stood over the crumbled altar, breathing hard. Heart Riven still pulsed in his grip, whispering the last note of its vengeance. Beside him, the broken chapel dimmed—candles extinguished, frost receding like breath drawn inward.
Behind him, the shattered window let in nothing but cold.
He took one last look at the daisy tucked near his collar, then turned without a word and moved toward the corridor at the back of the chamber.
It sloped downward.
Much farther.
The castle no longer felt like a ruin—it felt like a living body now, and he was being swallowed.
The hallway narrowed into a steep spiral stair of frozen stone, worn by time, cracked by pressure. Skipps
descended quickly, staff in hand, cloak billowing like dusk.
Then the stair ended.
Abruptly.
A gaping hole in the floor opened before him, its rim splintered with frost-bitten tiles and collapsed stone. Cold
wind rushed up from below—sharp, dry, ancient. The smell of rusted metal and old rot slithered upward to meet him.
He knelt at the edge and peered down.
A drop—ten, maybe twelve feet—into darkness.
But even from here, Skipps could make out the sharp glint of warped wood. A door. Partially buried under debris.
Marked with… slashes.
Not symbols. Not language.
Just fury.
Behind him, Vathrix hovered, the demilich’s eye-flames pulsing low.
"You’re going in there,” the skull muttered. “Obviously.”
Skipps didn’t answer. He gave a slight grin and dropped without hesitation.
He landed in a three-point crouch, cloak settling around him like falling dust. No pain. No stumble.
He easily clears the descent—graceful as ever.
He rose, flame igniting along Heart Riven with a soft crackle of green-blue fire. The chamber smelled of secrets
gone stale and dreams buried in cold stone.
Ahead stood the door.
It was barely intact, but clearly resisting collapse out of spite. Vines of frozen blood laced the frame. The slashes in
its surface seemed to twitch slightly in the blade’s light.
Skipps tilted his head, watching the way the runes didn’t catch the glow. As though they weren’t carved into the door, but carved out of the world behind it.
The silence pressed in.
“I don’t like it,” Vathrix whispered.
Skipps stepped closer anyway.
The Breach
Skipps raised a paw and pressed it flat against the warped door.
It was warm.
Not comforting.
Alive.
With no further ceremony, he shoved hard.
The door groaned and buckled inward on half-frozen hinges, shrieking like a dying beast. The chamber beyond did
not welcome him. It tensed, as if reality held its breath.
Blackness greeted him—not just darkness, but the absence of shape. Of meaning. Only the dim outline of broken furniture and jagged shadow hinted at structure.
Skipps stepped in.
His eyes adjusted fast—trained, enchanted. The room was larger than expected, deeper than it had any right to be.
Stone shelves lined the walls, most collapsed. Ice glazed the floor. Broken glass crunched underfoot.
Then—sound.
A hiss.
High and wet, like steam escaping flesh.
Skipps spun, lifting his flame-wreathed Heart Riven just as movement tore from the shadows.
A shape.
Wrong.
Fast.
Teeth and trailing limbs, a body like stitched frost and eel-slick sinew, slithering across the floor in spasms.
Its eyes flared—two pinpricks of burning violet.
It laughed.
A bubbling, echoing laugh that clawed into the bones.
Skipps flicked his hand sideways, a cantrip surge of magical fire dancing between his fingers.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said flatly. “You’re just late to the funeral.”
The thing darted forward.
Initiative triggers.
But before combat begins, Skipps must react—it's too dark to see clearly.
He reaches for a torch—
Skipps struck his flint across the pommel of his blade—igniting the torch in one swift motion. Green and amber fire roared to life.
The chamber lit up—
And the creature screamed.
It hated light.
Now Skipps saw it clearly:
A twisted mass of limbs, stitched together like melted marionettes. Its head split vertically, revealing rows of ice-
coated fangs and a tongue too long to belong to anything natural. It reeked of salt and dead prayers.
Vathrix drifted into the doorway.
“Well,” the skull rasped, “you’ve done it again. You found the one thing uglier than your last decision.”
“Good,” Skipps whispered. He rolled his neck. “That means we’re getting somewhere.”
The Light That Monsters Fear
The creature shrieked—its jaw unhinging far too wide—and surged toward Skipps in a blur of frost and sinew. Its many limbs slapped across the stone like butchered eels, dragging a warped torso with a chain of ribs exposed like prayer beads.
Skipps didn't flinch.
He moved forward.
Fast.
Bladesong surged—his body became music, each motion a syllable in an ancient poem only the dead could read.
He dashed low, cloak trailing smoke, and Heart Riven lashed upward in a flash of ghostlight and pain.
Heart Riven with Green-Flame Blade, fire ignites across the wound.
The slash burned a glowing arc through the monster’s shoulder, searing open its flesh. Fire erupted from the gash,
leaping to its trailing limb and curling it into cinders. The creature howled.
It lunged.
Claws flashed—Skipps blurred away.
Planar Displacement shimmered, dragging reality sideways. The beast missed, striking only a mirage of dust and memory.
He reappeared behind it and drove Jawfang into its spine.
With his off hand, Jawfang, Moonbite’s magic courses into the wound.
The dagger sank into the base of the creature’s malformed neck. Necrotic energy poured in like venom, and the
monster convulsed. One of its arms exploded into brittle shards of bone and blackened sinew.
It turned—screaming in seven voices.
Not Elira’s this time.
Just fear.
Skipps let it charge.
At the last moment, he leapt into the air, using his staff to vault up and over the beast. He flipped midair, spun
Heart Riven like a silver spiral, and—
Final Strike critical with Heart Riven, fire surges from blade—no chance to recover.
He plunged the blade down as he landed, impaling the monster through the base of its skull.
For a heartbeat, the room fell still.
Then—
BOOM.
The creature’s body convulsed. A shockwave of frost burst outward. Skipps rolled back, shielding his eyes as the
ice burst into steam.
When the mist cleared—
There was nothing left but a slick smear of melted snow and a single glimmering tooth, frozen mid-melt, still twitching.
Skipps lowered his blade.
Vathrix hovered into view. “Would you like to declare this room sanctified now, or wait until something worse
crawls out of the walls?”
Skipps didn’t answer.
He was staring at the far end of the room—where the shadows had thinned just enough to reveal a new stairway, leading deeper still.
And in the wall beside it—a fresco. Faded, burned.
A Harengon figure painted in silhouette, bearing two blades.
Eyes glowing.
Cloak swirling.
He stepped toward it, ears twitching.
“Vathrix,” he said quietly, “I think we’re close.”
The Wall Remembers
The monster’s corpse had vanished, the frost was melting, and all that remained was a stillness too complete for comfort. But Skipps wasn’t watching the floor. His gaze was fixed on the far wall.
The fresco.
It was old—centuries, maybe longer. Painted directly onto the stone in deep ochre and coal ink, most of it now
chipped and weathered. And yet… the figure in its center remained startlingly intact.
A small warrior.
Not tall. Not broad. But quick. Cloak rippling like night fog. Two blades drawn—one a dagger, curved and white as bone. The other, long and luminous, etched with fey runes.
A Harengon.
Not just a Harengon.
Him.
Or rather—someone who knew him.
“That's…” he whispered.
Vathrix hovered near, silent for once.
The painted figure’s stance mirrored his own in battle. Knees bent. Off-hand low, dominant blade forward. Ears drawn slightly back in readiness.
Skipps raised Heart Riven. The blade's runes pulsed in soft echo to the ones carved into the figure’s weapon.
He stepped closer.
More of the fresco came into view.
Behind the Harengon stood a twisting wall of darkness—outlined not in paint, but scorch marks. Something had
tried to burn this section out. The soot was layered, intentional. Deliberate.
Someone had tried to erase the background… but not the figure.
Skipps touched the soot.
It flaked under his fingers.
Beneath it—barely visible—a shape: a second figure. A smaller one, half-cloaked in ivy. Hair like silver.
“Elira,” he said aloud.
Not a question.
A memory.
Her form stood behind the Harengon—watching. Singing.
And bound by vines.
The image was faint, more suggestion than portrait. But it was enough.
Skipps stepped back, heartbeat suddenly louder than the silence.
“What is this place?” he asked softly.
Vathrix answered with rare stillness. “It’s not a place. It’s a promise.”
Skipps looked again.
And beneath the fresco, he saw the words—faintly etched, just above the next stair:
“The nameless are not forgotten.
They are remembered by those who carry the chain.”
Skipps reached for the Tear of the Forgotten Name.
It pulsed.
Not brightly.
Just enough to remember.
He breathed in. Held it. Exhaled.
Then descended.
The Hall of Forgotten Feasts
The stairwell spiraled down like a throat swallowing light. Skipps moved quietly, blades at rest, Vathrix trailing behind in a slow orbit of dim blue flame.
As he descended, the air thickened—not colder, but older. Dust and silence held hands here. Nothing stirred. No wind. No echoes. Just the quiet patience of a castle that remembered everything it ever consumed.
The stairs ended in a low archway, fractured but still upright.
Skipps stepped through.
And froze.
The chamber beyond was once magnificent. A banquet hall, perhaps. Wide and solemn, with a vaulted ceiling
cracked by time. The remains of a grand table—shattered into splinters—lay across the stone like a broken altar.
Fragments of plates and cups glittered in the frost-dim light, each one frozen mid-meal, as if the feast had never truly ended.
Along the walls, six faded tapestries hung in heavy folds. Most were moth-bitten and drooping. But one—just one—still clung to shape: a torn swath of deep indigo, depicting a white-haired queen lifting a runed axe above her head, while others knelt in shadow.
And below it—
A hole.
No ordinary breach. This was a sinkhole, as if the castle had tried to devour its own heart. Black and wide, its
edges swallowed the last few feet of the tapestry. Cold wind drifted up from it—not ice, but air from a place without windows or walls.
Vathrix hovered at the edge and tilted slightly. “I don’t like this room,” he said, unprompted.
Skipps approached the tapestry.
“Neither do I,” he murmured. “But I think she was here.”
The runed axe mirrored the one in the mural above—though distorted. Its haft was twisted. The kneeling figures bled into shadow.
He pulled the tapestry aside.
The hole gaped, inviting.
Woven Warnings
Skipps moved slowly between the sagging tapestries, paw trailing gently across the brittle threads. Most of the fabric crumbled at his touch—fibers worn down by centuries of frost and silence. But two survived, more intact than the rest, as though shielded by some lingering enchantment or sheer force of memory.
He stopped before the first.
A maiden. Blue-eyed. Pale. Clad in ornate armor chased with silver filigree. She stood beneath a flowering tree, one hand extended toward a circle of flame that hovered just out of reach. Her expression was... unreadable.
Not fear. Not joy.
Anticipation.
The stitching shimmered faintly when his fingers hovered over it. Skipps narrowed his eyes. “That’s not just art.”
“No,” Vathrix agreed, “that’s a memory woven into thread. This entire place is stitched with recollection.”
The next tapestry made his breath catch.
A table—ornate, golden. Upon it, resting with sacred reverence, was a runed axe. Not a weapon of war, but of
legacy. Hands—not reaching to wield it, but to offer it—stretched out from robed figures. And above them all, seated in silhouette, was a queen with hair like a winter storm.
The axe glowed faintly in the weave.
Skipps traced a single rune embroidered into its haft.
It pulsed under his touch.
Then—
A flicker.
The chamber trembled slightly, just for a moment. The wind through the sinkhole hissed louder. A voice, faint and
frayed with age, curled through the air:
“The blade is not given to the strong…
It is offered to the named.”
Skipps stiffened.
He turned to Vathrix. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard only the echo of a throne that no longer remembers who sat in it.”
Skipps looked back to the tapestry. The axe still glowed. A rune at its base shimmered like a heartbeat.
It looked strangely like the sigil once burned into the spine of his own spellbook.
Or the gift etched into Heart Riven’s blade.
The axe and the blade may be one.
He stepped back.
Then turned toward the sinkhole again, mind racing with threads of fate, identity, and forgotten legacy.
The Feast That Never Ended
The wind sighed through the cracked dome overhead, but Skipps barely heard it.
He had knelt near the shattered banquet table, running one paw across the long-dead grain of the wood. Crumbs still clung to it—frozen, preserved, untouched by time. Not food, though. Not bread or bone.
Wax.
Candle drippings.
And beneath them, runes.
He scraped the wax gently aside, revealing a small ring of script carved into the table’s center. Old Sylvan. The dialect was archaic, frayed by formality. Skipps whispered it under his breath:
“To those who remember: the third toast is the true one.”
Vathrix hovered low beside him. “A ritual phrase.”
Skipps nodded, then rose.
He moved through the wreckage of chairs and goblets, lifting broken candlesticks, brushing frost from untouched
pewter. The plates were set for twenty—each one frozen mid-meal. The meat had long since dissolved, but the stains remained: crimson, oily, something darker. Not wine.
And then he found it.
A gap behind the far wall—just behind the head of the table.
He tilted his head and blinked slowly. The air shimmered there. Not illusion. Misdirection. The stones had been
carved slightly differently, the mortar thinner. A door—but not one meant for guests.
Servants. Or escape.
Or secrets.
He pressed gently.
The wall clicked.
A seam appeared—then slid aside with the groan of bone rubbed smooth by ritual.
Behind it: a chamber. Small. Circular. Empty.
Except—
A single item rested atop a stone pedestal: a goblet of dull silver, carved with scenes of war, surrender, and renewal.
Around its rim: three rings, each etched with a name.
The first two were faded.
But the third...
Skipps felt the name in his chest before he read it.
His name
Not the name Elira gave him.
A version from before.
From elsewhere.
He reached for the goblet—and the fire in Heart Riven flickered wildly, as if trying to warn him.
But he touched it anyway.
The goblet pulsed.
A memory surged into him—not his own.
He saw a hall like this one, filled with courtiers who had no faces. Voices whispering in unison. A blade held aloft
in one hand, a cup in the other.
A pact.
Not for power.
For remembrance.
“Drink, and you are named. Refuse, and you are scattered.”
He came back to himself.
Breathless.
The goblet still shimmered faintly in his grasp.
Vathrix hovered behind him, unmoving.
"You shouldn't keep that."
Skipps turned the cup in his paw. “I already did.”
He tucked it away.
And walked back toward the sinkhole.
The Corridor That Waited
Skipps gave the goblet one last glance before tucking it into his belt pouch. Its silver rim still pulsed faintly, the name etched into it burning behind his eyes.
He turned from the banquet hall without a word.
Not toward the hole this time. Not down.
But deeper.
He followed a narrow hallway branching from behind the throne-shaped chair at the head of the shattered table.
The stone beneath his feet shifted—less frost-ridden now, more solid. The walls here had held themselves together, untouched by the same decay that plagued the upper halls.
This corridor remembered being a castle.
The air thickened, but not with rot. It was silence now—a heavy, watchful thing, as if something far below waited to see if he would be brave or foolish enough to continue.
Vathrix hovered lower, his flame-eyes dim. “The stones here are clean,” he noted. “No blood. No ash. Just purpose.”
“That’s worse,” Skipps replied, ears twitching. “Means something still uses them.”
At the corridor’s end, a stairwell curved downward. No frost. No ice. Just stone worn smooth by time and ritual.
Skipps descended.
The Vault of the Third Name
The stairwell ended in silence.
A seamless silver arch formed the doorway—no hinges, no keyhole. Only a curve of metal etched with a winding script. Names carved in a dozen languages, many half-erased. The top of the arch bore no symbol. Only a jagged gouge where something had been ripped away.
Skipps placed one paw against the metal.
It parted like breath on glass.
The Room That Remembered
Inside: stillness.
The chamber was small. Circular. Its walls smooth and silver-veined, pulsing faintly beneath the surface with what
looked like rootlight—thin glowing tendrils tracing the memory of trees, spiraling deep through metal and meaning.
In the center of the room stood a pedestal of twisted wood, grown rather than carved. Its bark shimmered with impossible age—like it had never belonged to any one world, but had grown between them all.
And resting atop it:
His old spellbook.
The one Elira helped him write.
He stepped forward slowly, heart racing. No traps triggered. No ghosts stirred. The chamber did not threaten. It welcomed.
He opened the book.
The first page was blank.
Then—
A shimmer.
Words inked themselves in as if remembered:
"If you forget who you are… this will help you remember."
Her handwriting.
He turned the page.
A sketch followed—a crude spiral of rooms and glyphs, a map drawn in fey-memory. Not geography. Emotion. At
its center, a circle of daisies wrapped around a name:
Skipps.
His name.
The one he earned, not the one he lost.
He closed the book, pressing it to his chest.
Vathrix hovered nearby, silent.
Then—
A sound.
Wood shifting.
From beneath the pedestal, the floor rippled—not collapsing, but unfolding. Roots spiraled outward, not into air, but into layered space. Walls peeled back like the rings of a tree, each revealing more bark, more tunnels, more inside.
Not a door.
A return.
The Verdant Hollow had reached out.
A corridor stretched before him now—familiar. The scent of moss. The texture of gnarled vine. The faint humming of spells woven into memory. There were no stars, no wind, no sky.
Just green.
Dark.
Safe.
Alive.
Epilogue
Skipps stood on the edge of that root-path.
He looked behind him once.
The chamber remained, quiet and closed, the spellbook still in hand.
No monster followed.
No echo chased him.
The Castle of Madness was done.
And the Hollow—his Hollow—had opened within.
He stepped forward.
With every footfall, the light of the castle dimmed behind him. Rootwalls enclosed once more, sealing off the vault.
The spellbook hummed against his chest. The Tear warmed gently in his pouch.
And at last, the silence of the Verdant Hollow closed around him like an old friend’s embrace.
His name was still his.
The chain still held.
And the Hollow still remembered.
