Chapter 36
That same night in a different part of the castle, Alaric crouched beside Cedric in the shadow-drenched corridor outside the chapel. They’d been there for half an hour. Watching. Listening.
Nothing.
No footsteps. No overzealous Silverwards making their rounds. Not even a rogue acolyte lingering for prayer.
Alaric glanced sideways. Cedric gave him the barest nod.
They slipped toward the chapel doors; boots muted against the stone. The space inside was colder than it had been earlier, the torches along the walls now little more than sullen orange smudges flickering in iron sconces. The air tasted like wax and disuse.
Cedric moved without hesitation, heading straight for the northern wall. He crouched beside the stone and ran his hands along its surface. Alaric kept watch by the door, one hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword.
With a soft click and the low, gravelly groan a portion of the wall shifted. It slid aside just enough to reveal a narrow opening—half the height of a grown man and twice as unfriendly.
Alaric stepped forward, peering into the dark maw of the tunnel. The smell of old stone drifted out—damp, iron-heavy, as if the earth itself had been holding its breath since the Sundering.
He exhaled once and gave Cedric a look.
“Well,” he said, “after you.”
Cedric rolled his eyes, crouching toward the narrow passage. “Of course. I live to be your canary in the crypt.”
Alaric offered him the torch. “You're too kind.”
While Cedric ducked into the tunnel, grumbling all the way, Alaric examined the stone frame from the outside. The last thing they needed was the door sealing shut behind them like some melodramatic tomb trap. He wedged a loose rock by the edge of the opening to keep their way back.
Cedric’s voice echoed softly from ahead, flattened by the stone. “I can’t see a thing down here. If that door closes, we’re trusting fate. Or dumb luck.”
Alaric followed a few steps behind, ducking to avoid a low arch. The passage was narrow, barely wide for their shoulders. In the walls, something wet wriggled. Worms, probably. Or worse.
“I'm not paid enough for this,” Cedric whined from the gloom. “This wasn’t in the job description. Why aren’t I back in the guest wing drinking brandy and seducing some half-bored noblewoman?”
“Because you're noble-adjacent and emotionally constipated.”
Cedric grumbled something that sounded like agreement but could’ve just been an insult.
Alaric reached out, his fingers brushed along the cold wall as they kept moving. “Stop whining. I’ve got a brain. You’ve got… something.”
“Rude.”
“Together we almost make one fully functioning person. We’ll manage.”
They kept walking, the corridor narrowing like it was trying to decide whether to let them through or crush them politely in the process. The torchlight flickered over uneven stone, casting jittery shadows that moved like something alive.
Cedric tripped over a rock and made a sound halfway between a gasp and a muffled sob.
“I want Vesena,” he groaned dramatically.
“Oh, I know.”
There was a beat of silence.
“What was that supposed to mean?” he asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” Alaric replied far too smoothly. “An observation. A prophecy. A universal truth.”
“I say it in a completely cognitive-friendly way,” Cedric huffed. “She’s more competent. Smarter. Prettier than you. If I’m going to die in a hole under a chapel, I’d rather do it with someone who doesn’t treat death as a conversation starter.”
“And I’m the hopeless one,” Alaric muttered, dragging his fingers over a particularly suspect seam in the wall.
“You know what? I’ve changed my mind. It’s a blessing she’s not here. At least if I die from your meddling and profound stupidity, I get to take you with me and balance the scales.”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“You’re the one who drags us into suicide missions just to win points with the ice princess.”
“Not just for that.”
Even in the gloom, he could feel the force of Cedric’s glare. A psychic beam of judgment cutting through torchlight and sarcasm.
“We’re doing our duty. Like the exemplary citizens we so clearly are.”
Cedric snorted, unimpressed. “Right. Exemplary citizen. You mean the one currently daydreaming about the princess’s neck or the one who wants to uncover centuries-long counterfeit?”
Alaric narrowed his eyes. “Okay. That’s enough. Sneaking should be done in silence.”
Cedric grinned, utterly unrepentant. “As you wish.”
Alaric exhaled through his nose and kept moving.
Why did all of his heroic efforts always come with a side of commentary?
They walked in silence for a while. The further they went, the more the air changed. Heavier, metallic, damp.
“I see something,” murmured Cedric and lifted the torch.
The tunnel widened gradually, until they stepped into something entirely different—hollowed out, vast, round.
A cavern. Not natural, not entirely. The shape was too symmetrical, the stone too clean in places and too deliberately scarred in others.
There were at least eight separate tunnel mouths ringing the chamber like the points of a compass.
Alaric blinked slowly. “Well, this isn’t ominous at all.”
Cedric was already moving, casting the light of his torch against the nearest wall. Alaric stepped further into the space. His gaze was drawn to the center—there, half-sunken in the floor, stood round slab that looked distinctly like a table. He approached it slowly. Reached out.
His gloved finger swiped across the surface and came away stained dark.
Dried blood.
Cedric’s torchlight swung behind him. “Alaric.”
He turned. Hi companion was standing at one of the walls—one of the few that didn’t host a tunnel. Just a flat, pale expanse of stone.
Painted on it, in dark, rusted streaks, was the symbol.
A circle. Three vertical lines inside it.
It can’t be a coincidence.
They looked at each other. A secret tunnel beneath the castle. A private chamber connected to the Chapel of Orvath. And this—the same sigil Evelyne saw. The same one everyone insisted meant nothing. The same he swore his grandfather mentioned once upon a time.
It was getting more and more significant.
To the side, half-shadowed by one of the supporting arches, stood a pedestal. Simple, unadorned stone with a wide, shallow tray carved into its top. Oil. Alaric recognized the scent before Cedric even reached for it. He placed the torch into the tray's metal grip, and the oil caught instantly.
Flames flared, and the entire space came alive.
It was somehow worse in full light.
The shadows danced wildly across the stone, wax, and bloodstained chains. Every edge flickered like it might move on its own if they turned their backs. The sigil on the wall looked wet again, though Alaric knew it wasn’t.
At the center of the tray, half-buried beneath old wax and soot, sat a single stone scroll. Rounded and etched, with rusted chains coiled around its base.
“What in the stars is this?” Alaric murmured.
The symbol was unfamiliar. Not Orvath’s. Maybe a heretical branch? A bloodier interpretation of discipline? The Doctrine had splinter groups, of course—anything that preached endurance tended to attract those who saw suffering as a shortcut to divinity.
But this… this was something else.
He turned back to the altar, breath fogging faintly in the cold, damp air. It was surrounded by candles melted into pools. Rusted knives, left carelessly. Chains—some still bolted into the floor. And blood. Dried, spattered, streaked. Everywhere.
The book lay there, thick and bound in worn leather, its surface smeared with something that had once been red. Alaric reached for it cautiously, half expecting the thing to hiss at him.
He cracked the cover.
It was not the Iron Verses, the sacred text of the Doctrine of Orvath. Not even close. The pages were handwritten, uneven, frantic in places.
Poems. Or parts of them.
He flipped through slowly, scanning ink that bled into the parchment in places. Line after line with no title, no source, just sentences that curled into the back of his mind like cold fingers:
“When twin moons fall as mirrored tears,
The firmament shall forget the shape of unity.
The sun shall depart in silence, barefoot upon dusk.”
“When the red remembers its grief,
The brightest thread, meant to bind what broken,
will shatter.”
Alaric frowned, the book heavy in his hands.
Page after page, line after line. Each more cryptic than the last. The verses bled into one another, untamed and uninterested in being understood. Some read like riddles. Others like threats. Some were just… wrong. Linguistically mangled, almost feral.
And then, near the end, he found it.
A page that looked newer—less yellowed, the ink still carrying a faint sheen in the flickering light.
“The heir of the stars shall walk unseen,
A flame once drowned, yet not extinguished.
The last tether, unaware it spins the loom.”
Alaric’s breath caught.
His eyes flicked back over the lines, re-reading them as if a second pass might remove the shape they’d taken in his mind.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
And yet…
It was the old Varantian rendering of the tale of the Drowned Flame—Esharion, God of Secrets, Knowledge, and Sacrifice.
He drowned in silence, and in his death, the world learned to speak.
When the Triad rebelled, it was Esharion who tried to mend the damage.
He had warned the others, reaching for balance while they tore it apart.
And when the Sundering began—when the world cracked beneath the weight of ambition—it was Esharion who stood alone against the unraveling.
The gods and their titans descended in those final moments, desperate to contain the rupture the Void Tear had left behind.
They held the magic, sealed it, shaped it into vessels and bindings.
And then they vanished.
All but Esharion.
It was he who remained, holding the threads together when the others could not. He anchored the remnants of what had once been divine. He swallowed the raw, fractured magic and with it, he was gone. The only god who gave his immortality so that humanity might begin again.
And yet there was no shrine to him. No statue, no festival day.
The old story said he would return when the time came—return not as a god, but in his Echo.
The Drowned Flame.
This was real. Real.
Not a rumor, not one of Cedric’s tavern tales or some scholar’s tattered notes from the Arqaetti.
He flipped the pages too fast, then backtracked, trying to catch his breath.
He needed time. He needed to read the entire book and then the walls if he had to.
His grandfather had been right—there were secrets here.
And Alaric had just stumbled face-first into one that smelled of gods and rust and truth. He would love it here.
He stared at the book for a moment, mouth dry.
Then—
Footsteps. Alaric’s head snapped toward one of the tunnels.
“Shit,” Cedric breathed.
There wasn’t time to extinguish the fire or make it look like they hadn’t been there. Voices echoed down one of the tunnels growing louder with each step.
Cedric didn’t wait. He grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard.
Alaric clutched his fingers helplessly in the still air, as they left the book behind, and ducked into a narrow side passage, flattening against the stone just beyond the arch. He could feel Cedric’s breath beside him, fast and uneven.
Then came the voices.
Two of them. A woman first.
“Well, Karel forgot to put the fires out again,” she muttered. “If you want to hide something, maybe don’t light a beacon over it.”
Alaric dared a glance.
She wore hardened leather, scuffed at the edges. Hood pulled forward, but not so deep that he couldn’t make out the silver hair brushing her shoulder, or the two blades strapped across her back.
The second voice followed, slurred with a northern drawl.
“He was probably in a rush to get back to the whores,” the man was broader, slower in step, hooded too, tattooed, with hands like shovels and the gait of someone who’d never walked silently in his life.
Alaric watched the pair by the altar with narrowed eyes, his fingers resting lightly near his belt. The woman stepped forward first, arms crossed. She glanced around the chamber as though appraising bad interior design.
“We’re too early,” she muttered.
“Do you have something better to do?”
“Not everyone defines their existence by clandestine meetings and mood lighting.”
“Look at that,” the man said, deadpan. “The one with the divine purpose speaks.”
“Shut up, Bryn.”
Another figure entered. The man’s frame was slender, but something about him cut through the space like a knife slicing through fabric.
At his side, another man. Thin, pale, staring in the distance.
The newcomer moved to the altar producing an envelope from his cloak and holding it out toward the pair.
“Take this to the Thandros,” he ordered.
The woman hesitated, eyeing the letter with a frown. “What is it?”
The man didn’t flinch. “None of your concern. Just deliver it.”
“I'd prefer to know what I’m sticking my neck out for.”
A long silence followed. Then the hooded man lifted his head slightly and fixed them both with a stare Alaric could feel, even from across the cave.
“I’m not paying you to ask questions.”
That was the end of it. The woman and Bryn exchanged a glance that said more than words. Alaric watched as they turned—not toward the tunnel he and Cedric had entered through, thank the gods—but another, one of the side exits. Their boots echoed briefly as they disappeared from sight.
The third man with his companion didn’t leave.
He stood there a moment longer, his head turning slightly as though tasting the air. Alaric felt his lungs tighten. The man shuffled to the altar, closed the book, and tucked it under his arm.
For fuck’s sake.
Then the man hummed.
It was short, like a vibration pressed through his throat, tight and controlled.
Alaric felt it more than heard it.
The flames died. All of them. The light vanished. Alaric’s vision was swallowed whole. Someone winced and groaned, but no response came. Just the sound of a pair of retreating footsteps.
A tremor rolled beneath their boots, faint at first. Alaric shifted his weight instinctively, bracing one hand against the stone wall.
Dust trickled from the ceiling. Small stones fell down from a ledge, scattering across the ground.
Cedric stilled, one foot sliding slightly on the grit.
The vibration deepened, drawing inward, as if something below the surface had stirred.
After a few heartbeats the earthquake had stopped, but the echo of it clung to the walls.
But whatever debt had just been drawn here—it was not yet paid.