TWO ARADYA
TWO
ARADYA
The cloth-wrapped bundle in Ira’s lap begins to move.
She screams. Throws herself backward, scrambling away from the bundle—but it’s too late. The fabric tears. Bone fragments shift and click, rearranging themselves into patterns that shouldn’t be possible. And where there should be nothing but dead remains, two points of dull light flicker to life.
Eyes. Eyes that shouldn’t exist. Eyes that are looking directly at me.
“—they forgot to let us say goodbye.”
The voice pours through my throat with enough force to make me gag. I’m not channeling anymore. I’m being used—a vessel for a presence so vast and hungry that Kellan Venn’s spirit is nothing but a whisper beneath its roar.
I try to break the rite. Try to sever the thread I’ve pulled, to slam the door shut before anything else comes through. But my magic is slippery, weakened by blood loss, and the Veil refuses to close.
Let go. Let go. LET GO—
The corpse-bundle sits up.
Ira’s scream cuts off into a choking sob. She presses herself against the chamber wall, hands clawing at the stone behind her, fingernails scraping against rock. The thing that used to be her son turns its reconstructed head toward her with a grinding sound of bone against bone.
Run. Run, you stupid woman, RUN—
But Ira doesn’t run. She stares at the moving corpse with the paralyzed horror of prey facing predator, frozen by the impossible reality of what she’s seeing.
Her son. Her dead son, reaching for her with fingers made of reassembled fragments.
I lunge forward, trying to put myself between them, but my legs won’t cooperate. The blood loss is hitting me now—dizziness, nausea, the edges of my vision going gray. I crash to my hands and knees on the stone floor, gasping.
The candle goes out.
Darkness swallows the chamber. Complete. Absolute. The kind of darkness that has substance, that presses against skin and fills lungs and whispers with a thousand voices.
Those whispers rise now, pouring from the walls, from the ceiling, from the very stones of the crypt. They speak in languages I don’t recognize, words that predate human tongues, syllables that make my bones vibrate with frequencies that should not exist in the world of the living.
And beneath it all, cutting through the cacophony with terrible clarity, a single name.
Drokhar Stoneveil.
I don’t know that name. I’ve never heard it before. But the way the voices speak it—with hatred, with hunger, with the promise of reckoning—tells me everything I need to know.
Whoever Drokhar Stoneveil is, the dead want him. Badly.
“Find the Ashwalker.”
The words rip from my throat without my permission, my voice layered with harmonics that make the shadows themselves seem to flinch back.
“Tell him we have not forgotten.”
Ira screams again—a wet, gurgling sound that cuts off abruptly. I hear the snap of vertebrae. The rip of tendons. The soft, final sigh of a life ending.
Then silence.
The whispers fade. The presence retreats, sliding back through the Veil with the satisfaction of a predator that has made its point. My throat closes. My voice returns to my own.
I’m alone in the dark with a dead woman and the thing her grief awakened.
Move. Move, move, move—
I drag myself upright, swaying, one hand pressed against the wall for balance. My other hand finds the doorframe by memory—I’ve been in this chamber a hundred times, I know every stone, every crack, every shadow that pools in the corners.
I don’t look back. I can’t. If I look back, I’ll see what’s left of Ira Genn, and then I’ll start screaming and I won’t be able to stop.
The corridor outside is faintly lit by distant candles—other mourning chambers, other grieving families, other fools who think they can buy closure with blood. I stumble into the dim glow and run.
Not toward the exit. Not yet. The city guard will be coming—Ira’s screams were loud enough to wake the upper crypts, and the Crypt-Keepers won’t hesitate to call for help. I need to disappear before they find the body. Before they realize what kind of magic was used in that chamber.
Before they start hunting for the mourning witch who killed a client.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t—
The truth sits heavy in my gut. I didn’t kill Ira Genn. But I opened the door that let her killer through. I reached into the dark and pulled, and the thing that came back was not her son.
I take the service corridors, the ones the Crypt-Keepers use to move between chambers without disturbing mourners.
They’re narrow and unlit, the walls close enough to brush my shoulders on both sides.
Cobwebs catch in my hair. Dust coats my lungs with every breath.
The darkness is nearly complete, but I’ve walked these paths so many times that my feet know the way without my eyes.
They’re empty. That’s all that matters.
Behind me, I hear voices. Raised in alarm. The Crypt-Keepers have found the chamber. Found Ira. Found whatever’s left of the thing that wore her son’s bones.
Faster. Move faster.
I wind through the passages by touch, letting my fingers trace the stone, counting the turns.
Left, left, right, down three steps, left again.
The Undercroft entrance is hidden behind a false wall in the seventh service corridor—a bolt-hole that mourning witches have used for generations when the Council’s attention turned their way.
The wall swings open at my touch, and I slip through into darker darkness.
The Undercroft welcomes me with its familiar smell of damp earth and old magic, the pressure of secrets pressed into every stone.
Witch-lights float at irregular intervals ahead, pale and dim, providing the barest illumination to navigate the winding tunnels.
I’m safe. For now.
I collapse against the nearest wall, sliding down until I’m sitting on the packed-earth floor, my knees drawn up. The tremors start then—violent shudders that rattle my teeth and make my vision blur. Shock. Blood loss. The aftermath of channeling power I was never meant to touch.
Ira Genn is dead.
I killed her. Not with my hands, not with intent, but my magic opened the door. My whispers gave the darkness a voice. And when the dead spoke, they spoke in blood.
The tears come then, hot and silent, cutting tracks through the dried blood on my face. I press my fist against my mouth to muffle the sobs, bite down on my knuckles until I taste copper.
Stop. Stop crying. You don’t have time for this.
The city guard will find the body soon. They’ll seal the chamber, call for the Death Warden Guild, start asking questions about the witch who fled the scene.
Ira told people she was coming here tonight—she must have.
Clients always tell someone, even when I beg them to keep quiet.
A sister. A friend. A priest who thinks grief can be prayed away.
They’ll have a description. They’ll have my name, or close enough.
And when the death wardens come looking, they won’t care that I didn’t mean to kill her.
They won’t care that the thing that crawled through the Veil was older and hungrier than anything I’ve ever channeled before.
They’ll care that a mourning witch used forbidden magic and a woman died, and they’ll drag me to the Ash Pits and burn me before I can explain.
The Ash Pits. Where the death wardens burn the anonymous dead. Where pyres never stop smoking and the ground itself is black with accumulated ash. I’ve seen them from a distance—the columns of smoke rising day and night, the smell of char that drifts across the city when the wind blows wrong.
I’ve never gotten close. Never wanted to.
Find the Ashwalker. Tell him we have not forgotten.
The words echo in my skull, spoken in a voice that was mine and not mine. A message. A warning. A demand.
The Ashwalker. Drokhar Stoneveil.
I don’t know who he is. But the dead do. And whatever he’s done to earn their hatred, it’s big enough to wake the thing I encountered tonight—the vast presence that used Kellan Venn’s spirit as a doorway, that spoke through a thousand voices, that wanted me to carry its message to its enemy.
I press my palm against my sternum, the thud of my pulse rapid beneath my hand. The fabric of my dress is stiff with dried blood—mine, Ira’s, the blood-price that was supposed to buy a grieving mother one last goodbye.
Instead, it bought her death.
I should run. Leave Blackreach tonight, before the death wardens can organize a hunt.
I have contacts in other cities—Saltgrave to the west, where mourning witches operate more freely under the protection of merchant guilds who value discretion.
Thornwall to the north, where the dead are built into the walls and everyone is too busy preparing for siege to care about one more witch in the shadows.
I could disappear. Start over. Pretend tonight never happened.
But the thing that spoke through me isn’t finished. I sensed it pulling back through the Veil, satisfied but not sated. It found a crack in the barrier—a doorway it can use again. And if I run, if I leave without understanding what I unleashed...
More people will die.
I drag myself upright, bracing against the rough stone wall. My legs are unsteady, my head throbbing with the rhythmic ache of blood loss, but I’ve endured worse. I’ve survived worse.
The Undercroft stretches before me, a maze of tunnels and hidden chambers where mourning witches have sought refuge for centuries.
Safe houses marked with symbols only practitioners recognize.
Caches of supplies hidden in hollowed-out stones.
Old texts and whispered histories, passed down from teacher to student through generations of those who speak for the dead.
Answers hide in this darkness.
The Ashwalker. The dead have not forgotten.
I need to find out what that means. I need to understand what I’ve awakened.
And I need to do it before the thing beneath the city stops whispering and starts screaming.
Above me, through layers of stone and bone and ancient grief, I hear the first bells begin to toll. Not marking the hour—marking a death. The Crypt-Keepers have found Ira Genn.
The hunt has begun.
I wipe the blood from my face with the back of my hand, leaving dark smears across my pale skin, and move deeper into the dark.