Sleep, when it finally took them, came in fitful scraps—patches of half-dreams and flickering awareness, never quite letting go. Del stirred often, the cold creeping through the stone at his back, curling into joints and bruises like unwelcome fingers. His breath misted faintly in the stale air, and the scent of smoke still lingered—bitter and old, caught in the back of his throat.

  He blinked into the dim. The cold had crept into his bones, and now his spine twinged as he shifted against the wall, every muscle stiff with protest. Not rest. Just a pause between pain and more of it.

  At the tunnel’s edge, Misty sat statue-still, her silhouette no more than a shape in the gloom—save for the soft gleam of one slitted eye catching what little light there was. She hadn’t moved in hours. Hadn’t slept, either. Or if she had, she’d done it with her eyes open and her claws still ready.

  Beside him, Elara stirred with a quiet groan. She pushed upright slowly, brushing grit from her palms and flexing her shoulders until something popped in protest. Her breath caught, but she said nothing.

  For a time, they simply sat in silence. Not awkward. Not tense. Just… spent. The kind of quiet that felt earned.

  Then Elara lifted one hand, fingers curling in a practiced motion. A soft pulse shimmered into being above her shoulder—a pale orb of magic, steady and subdued, casting a silvery glow across the tunnel wall. It slid over damp stone like moonlight across still water.

  She reached for Del without a word, her fingers brushing the back of his hand. Another light bloomed there, faint and warm, illuminating the ground around his boots in a soft haze.

  “Won’t last forever,” she murmured, voice still rough from sleep. “But it’ll get us there.”

  Del nodded, flexing his hand beneath the glow. “It’s enough.”

  They moved toward the tunnel mouth, Misty already ahead, the pads of her feet soundless on stone. She paused only briefly, tail flicking once in irritation.

  Elara gestured down the narrow way ahead. “This leads back to the fork,” she said, voice hushed. “The other path…”

  “Decay,” Del finished, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “And if the smell back there was any indication, it’s not going to be pleasant.”

  Misty’s ears twitched. Her voice slipped into his mind like a blade behind the ribs. ‘If you two are done napping, we should move. Something’s shifting down there. The air tastes wrong.’

  Del exhaled slowly, adjusting the weight of his pack across sore shoulders. ‘Alright. We’re moving. Try not to get too far ahead.’

  ‘No promises.’

  The tunnel constricted as they descended, narrowing into a throat of stone that forced them into single file. Del ducked instinctively, shoulders brushing the damp walls. Cold sweat slicked the stone, and root tendrils hung from the low ceiling like brittle limbs, brushing his hair and neck with every step.

  He kept one hand on the wall, the other gripping his dagger, light from the spell on his hand casting warped shadows that swam across the rock like living things. The deeper they moved, the more the air thickened—not just with moisture, but with pressure. Like the tunnel didn’t want them there.

  ‘Stay alert,’ he told her. ‘If anything so much as breathes wrong…’

  ‘You’ll hear me screaming before it gets the chance to eat you,’ Misty replied dryly.

  Del didn’t quite smile, but his lips twitched. He raised his voice just enough to carry forward. “Misty says she’ll let us know if something plans to eat us.”

  “Comforting,” Elara murmured. Her voice was flat, but the faint lift of her brow showed she appreciated the joke. The soft blue light still floated above her shoulder, but she had shrunk its scope, so it flickered, like a candle fighting wind.

  The stink of rot grew with every pace. It seeped through the cracks in the walls, leeching from the stone, a reek both ancient and fresh. Sweet and rancid. It coated the back of Del’s throat with something metallic and sour, clinging like ash.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  He fought not to gag. Every footfall sounded too loud, a wet scrape against stone and bone. It felt like walking into a place that had long since been hidden from sunlight. A place meant to stay forgotten.

  The walls pressed tighter. His shoulders couldn’t avoid them now, and the touch of roots across his face made his skin crawl. They brushed like fingers, like they might twitch if he looked away.

  Elara tapped Del on the shoulder.

  “We’re close,” she whispered. “I can feel something, like a relic of something bad.”

  Ahead, Misty froze mid-step. Her fur rose slightly, ears flattening back. She didn’t speak right away.

  Then her voice slipped into Del’s thoughts, taut and low. ‘The fork’s just ahead. The left side—stinks like death. But there’s something else. Close.’

  Del stopped beside her, dagger angled low. ‘Something worse?’

  A long pause.

  ‘No. Just... different.’

  He moved up beside her, watching the path split in two. One side led into darkness thick with rot—wet, cloying, alive with the scent of decay. The other was unnaturally still. No scent, no sound, just a blank hush that felt… wrong in its own way.

  Elara caught up; her expression unreadable as her gaze flicked between the tunnels. “We should proceed carefully,” she murmured.

  Del nodded once; jaw tight. His heart had begun to hammer again. The ache in his ribs throbbed in warning, but he ignored it. Rest hadn’t healed them—it had only dulled the pain enough to forget how much worse it could get.

  He stared down the left-hand passage. The dark there didn’t feel passive. It pulsed. Thick and waiting, like breath held behind stone.

  “We came this far,” he muttered. “No turning back now.”

  He glanced to Elara, then Misty, and took the first step into the deeper dark.

  The tunnel widened without warning, like a throat opening into a scream.

  They stepped into a chamber so vast it devoured sound and erased sight. The ceiling vanished into shadow overhead, untouched by even Elara’s lifted light. She slowed, brow furrowing as she raised one hand, and with a quiet breath, released a second spell. A soft orb floated upward, drifting until it hung just beneath the unseen stone above. Its glow spread no more than a dozen paces, the shadows beyond shifting but never retreating, leaping like ghosts across the uneven floor.

  It wasn’t a chamber. It was a grave.

  The smell hit Del almost instantly. A dusty must of old death, like a mausoleum left untouched for aeons. His memory flitted back to a trip to the Paris catacombs, this was eerily similar.

  “By the gods…” Elara whispered.

  The blue light finally caught the floor.

  Bone.

  Drifts of it. Thousands of shattered remains strewn across the stone like discarded kindling, heaped in loose mounds and winding trails. Skeps—twisted ribs, long jaws lined with serrated teeth, skulls canted at odd angles as if still shrieking. But it didn’t end there.

  Scattered among them were human bones—some broken, others burned. Smaller skeletons lay half-submerged beneath the piles. And then worse: things Del couldn’t name. Skulls with tusks. Hollow sockets too numerous for one head. Long, jointless limbs, curled horns, jaws that hinged the wrong way. An entire taxonomy of lost and ruined life.

  And in the centre—darker patches. Black smears still slick against the stone. Not all of this was ancient.

  Something had been here recently.

  Misty crept forward, her steps measured and silent even across the litter of bones. She paused, nose twitching, tail low and stiff.

  ‘This is old,’ she sent into Del’s thoughts, her tone flat with unease. ‘Very old. But not all of it. Something’s been using this place. Feeding, maybe. Watching. It didn’t stop.’

  Del’s gut tightened. He stepped further in, the crunch of bones beneath his boots barely audible over the oppressive hush pressing in around them. Dust and ash stirred at his passing, caught in the faint currents of their movement. The light above warped their shadows, stretching them impossibly long across the ground.

  Everything about the place felt wrong. Not just the death, not just the madness of scale—but the way the silence settled, heavy and unnatural. Like sound itself feared to linger here.

  He scanned the ground slowly, eyes sweeping over the half-shapes and broken outlines of what had once been people, creatures, something in between. None of it made sense. But the wrongness of it all—the cruelty, the deliberateness—was unmistakable.

  “What happened here…” he murmured under his breath, though the words felt hollow the moment they left his lips.

  As if in answer, his boot caught on something buried beneath the detritus. He stumbled slightly, then crouched, brushing aside curls of desiccated leather, brittle cloth, and a layer of grey-black grime that clung like soot.

  Underneath, a shape resolved—dull metal, rust-bitten and half-lost to time. He cleared it further, revealing the remains of a sword. The blade was snapped mid-length, jagged and pitted with corrosion, but the hilt remained intact, its design delicate, unmistakably fine.

  “Elara,” he called, voice low but sharp.

  She was at his side in moments, already reaching out, fingers tracing the faded engravings along the grip. Her breath caught audibly as she took hold of it.

  “Elven,” she whispered. “This is… ancient.” She glanced up, her expression drawn tight. “It shouldn’t be here.”

  Del met her gaze, his brow furrowing. “You think your people fought here? Against skeps?”

  She didn’t answer at once. Her eyes drifted to the bones around them—the inhuman skulls, the twisted remnants of weapons and armour, the scorched black pits in the stone.

  She turned the hilt slightly, exposing a sigil near the pommel, nearly worn smooth by time. A faint glimmer of gold inlaid into the steel caught the magelight and gleamed.

  “No,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “Not just skeps… Look.”