FOUR DROKHAR
FOUR
DROKHAR
The dead don’t deserve anything. The dead are dangerous. The dead need to stay silent.
That’s what I’ve told myself for twenty years.
“Stay here.” I draw my blade. The enchanted iron hums against my palm, eager for work, the magic in the metal responding to the magic saturating the air. “If I’m not out in ten minutes, seal the chamber and burn it.”
Varn nods. She doesn’t argue. She knows the protocols.
I step into the chamber.
The candles have all blown out. The shadows are too deep, too solid, pooling in corners like they’re hiding from the darkness at the room’s center. The grief-residue is thicker here, coating every surface, making the air feel heavy and wet against my skin.
And in the center of the chamber, a corpse sits upright.
Not a whole body. Fragments. Bone shards and scraps of cloth arranged into a rough approximation of human form, held upright by a force that has nothing to do with muscle or sinew. Its empty eye sockets are fixed on the entrance—on me—and its mouth works slowly, grinding bone against bone.
Behind it, a dark shape lies beneath a cloth. The woman. Ira Genn, according to the report. Forty years old. Came to the crypts to speak with her dead son.
She found her son. And her son killed her.
I approach with my blade raised. Standard procedure—destroy the animated corpse, burn the remains, seal the chamber until the residual magic dissipates. I’ve done this a hundred times. A thousand. The movements are automatic, ingrained so deep they don’t require thought.
The corpse turns its head.
Looks directly at me.
And speaks with perfect clarity.
“Drokhar Stoneveil.”
The voice is a boy’s—young, barely old enough to hold a sword. But it carries harmonics that suggest an older presence, a larger one, using this dead child’s remains as a vessel.
I stop. My blade hovers in the air between us, enchanted iron gleaming in the faint light that seeps through the chamber door.
“The dead remember what you did.” The corpse’s mouth moves out of sync with the words, the sound emerging from deeper than its throat. From the shadows themselves. From the grief coating the walls. “The dead remember every pyre you lit without letting them say goodbye.”
Move. Strike. End this.
I don’t move.
“The dead remember—” The corpse’s mouth unhinges, opening wider than bone should allow, and a new voice joins the boy’s. Then another. Then dozens, harmonizing into a chorus that makes my bones ache and my teeth vibrate. “—and the dead want you to listen.”
I hesitate.
I’ve never hesitated before.
I’ve burned children who rose screaming for their mothers.
Veterans who clawed their way out of mass graves, still clutching weapons they’d held in life.
Innocents who died before their time and couldn’t accept it, who reached for me with rotting hands and pleading groans.
I’ve never hesitated, because hesitation means death, and death means rising, and rising means more work for the pyres.
But this corpse knows my name.
This corpse says what every death warden fears to hear.
The dead remember.
The chorus fades. The boy’s voice returns, singular now but no less wrong.
“We were dumped in pits. Covered with lime. Our names were never recorded. Our families never found our bodies.” The corpse tilts its head, empty sockets tracking my movements with impossible precision. “You burned us, Ashwalker. You scattered our ashes before anyone could mourn.”
Ashwalker. A name I earned in the border wars, when I burned three mass graves in a single week to prevent the fallen from rising behind our lines. A name that followed me back to Blackreach, that became my identity, my purpose, my curse.
A name the dead apparently remember.
“What do you want?” The words scrape out of my throat before I can stop them. I shouldn’t be talking to it. Shouldn’t be treating it as anything but a threat to be eliminated.
But I need to know.
The corpse’s mouth grinds. The sound echoes off the stone walls, mixing with whispers that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. From the grief in the stones. From the silence between heartbeats.
“Find the witch.” The voice deepens, gains resonance, carries the echo of a thousand dead throats speaking as one. “She speaks for us now. She gave us voice when you gave us only flames.”
The mourning witch. The one who fled before the guards arrived. The one whose magic opened a door that shouldn’t have been opened.
“Find her, Ashwalker.” The corpse rises, bone fragments clicking and grinding as it pulls itself upright on legs that shouldn’t support any force. I raise my blade, but it doesn’t advance. It stands there, swaying, empty sockets fixed on my face. “And answer for what you’ve done.”
The chamber goes cold. Colder than the crypts. Colder than the mass graves I’ve burned in mountain passes where winter never ends.
Then the corpse collapses.
Whatever force held it upright releases all at once, and the bone fragments scatter across the floor, clattering against stone, rolling into shadows. The whispers fade. The presence withdraws, sliding back to wherever it came from, leaving nothing but silence and the smell of old grief.
I stand alone in the dark, my blade still raised, my heart pounding against my ribs.
What the fuck was that?
I breathe. Force my hands to steady. Lower my blade.
The chamber is quiet now. Ordinary quiet, not the expectant silence of a presence watching. I move to the scattered bone fragments and crouch, examining them with the practiced eye of a man who has seen thousands of corpses in various states of destruction.
Young male. Barely grown. The bone density suggests he was active, fit—probably a soldier. The marks on the fragments indicate violent death followed by crude burial. Mass grave burial, if I had to guess.
I straighten. My gaze moves to the covered shape behind where the corpse stood. Ira Genn. The woman who paid a blood-price to hear her dead son speak.
Her dead son spoke. And then her dead son killed her.
But it wasn’t really her son, was it? The voice I heard—the voices—they were older. Larger. Using the boy’s remains as a channel, the same way the mourning witch must have used them to let him speak.
The witch opened a door. And a presence came through that wasn’t invited.
I scan the chamber one more time, searching for any other signs of what happened here. The scorch marks on the walls. The grief-residue coating every surface. A small silver knife lying in the corner, its blade dark with dried blood.
And beneath it all, barely detectable beneath the overwhelming smell of death magic and old sorrow—
A floral trace. Light and subtle. A woman’s perfume, or maybe the natural scent of someone who spends time among flowers and growing things. Out of place in a crypt. Out of place in a chamber filled with death.
The witch. She was here, kneeling in this spot, close enough that her scent lingered even after hours of grief-magic saturating the air.
I file the scent away. I’ll know it again if I encounter it.
Varn appears in the doorway, her blade drawn, her posture ready for violence. “You’ve been in there fifteen minutes.”
“It’s done.” I sheathe my blade and move toward her. “The corpse collapsed. Whatever was animating it is gone.”
“Gone where?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have an answer.
Varn falls into step beside me as I walk back through the crypts. She doesn’t press. She knows when to give me space, when to let silence do the work of conversation. Ten years of working beside me has taught her the rhythms of my moods.
“The witch.” I keep my voice level. “Find her.”
“We have a description. Dark hair, pale skin, young. The Crypt-Keepers said she’s been working the crypts for months, maybe years. Discreet. Never caused trouble before.” Varn pauses. “They called her Aradya.”
Aradya.
A name to go with the floral scent. A name for the woman who opened a door that should have stayed closed.
“She’ll have gone to ground by now. The Undercroft, probably.
That’s where they hide when the Council comes calling.
” I keep my voice level, professional. The voice of a death warden doing his duty.
“Post guards at the known entrances. Don’t try to go in after her—the tunnels are a maze, and the witches know them better than we do. ”
“And you?”
“I’ll find her myself.”
Varn’s steps slow. I can feel her stare on the back of my neck, sharp and questioning.
“Drokhar.” Her voice drops. “What did it say to you? The corpse?”
I stop. Turn to face her. The candlelight catches the scars on her face, the silver threads in her dark hair, the years of service written in the lines around her mouth.
If the dead remember—if they’re capable of holding grudges, of coordinating, of using mourning magic as a channel—
Everything we’ve built is at risk.
“Find the witch.” I turn away, heading for the crypt entrance. “Before this gets worse.”
The streets are emptier now. The fog has thickened, rolling between buildings in gray waves that muffle sound and obscure vision. I move through it with the confidence of a man who knows these paths by heart, heading for the section of the city where the Undercroft entrances cluster.
Find the witch. She speaks for us now.
The corpse’s words echo in my skull. The dead want me to find her. They want me to answer for what I’ve done.
The fog swirls around me as I walk, and somewhere in the depths beneath the city, I can almost sense it. The presence that spoke through the corpse. The thing that knows my name, that carries the accumulated grievance of every body I’ve burned without letting them speak their final words.