Location: Ruins of St. Michael's Cathedral, Outer Shanghai 2:16 AM
The church had burned long ago, its skeleton picked clean by time and something hungrier. Charred pews lay like broken ribs beneath a sky bleeding starlight through the gaping, ruined ceiling. The air reeked of wet ash, ozone, and old blood.
At the altar, where a crucifix had once hung, a blackened handprint still smoldered faintly its fingers curled, clawed, as if trying to escape the stone.
The Plague Doctor stood motionless in the nave, his beaked mask tilted toward the shadows. Around him, the Hollow Veil gathered six figures cloaked in threadbare robes, their faces obscured by masks of porcelain, iron, and woven reeds.
"You shouldn't have used the Lightbane in Shanghai," whispered the Porcelain Mask, her voice dry as wind over grave dust. "The river still burns. The dead do not sleep."
The Iron Mask chuckled, a sound like a rusted gate groaning open. "Let them remember. Let them writhe in the memory of fire."
The Plague Doctor's gloved hand tightened around the hilt of his weapon Oblivion's Edge, a blade forged from the frozen breath of a dying star. Its surface shimmered with trapped constellations. A new fracture pulsed faintly along the blade, glowing like a wound.
"Thechildren?" he rasped.
The Reed Mask stepped forward. "Alive," they said. "But their dreams are drowned. They speak of a city beneath the sea... and towers of bone."
A beat. Then.
"We found something else."
From within their tattered robe, they produced a human rib, etched with spiraling sigils that glowed the color of drowned sunlight.
"Pulled from the riverbed," the Reed Mask continued. "The language is Vorthic the tongue of the Forgotten Ones. But the message is for you."
The Plague Doctor's voice dropped. "Play it."
The Reed Mask pressed a thumb to the bone. The runes ignited.
and the rib screamed.
"Kur-Bai'el," it wailed, its voice wet and broken. "The Drowned King comes! He bears the Tide That Hungers! The Archons have given him the Key of "
The Plague Doctor crushed the rib in his hand. Bone shards crumbled like sand.
Silence.
"That name is dead," he murmured. "Bury it deeper."
The Ultimatum
The Porcelain Mask hesitated. "We intercepted a transmission from the Deep. It's worse than we feared. The Archons are no longer testing the Veil... they're building a bridge." She swallowed. "And they're using "
"Using what?" the Plague Doctor growled.
"Echo-Steel," said the Iron Mask grimly. "Pure. Untouched. Like the core inside your brother's armor."
A murmur slithered through the circle. The Plague Doctor turned eastward, toward the bleeding edge of dawn.
"Atlas," he whispered.
Reed Mask's voice came low. "There is a ritual. A way to sever the bridge. But it demands a sacrifice... someone bound to the Archons by blood."
The Plague Doctor didn't flinch.
"You mean me."
No one denied it.
The Porcelain Mask stepped forward. "There may be another way. The Bone Orchard "
"A myth," snapped the Iron Mask.
"No," said the Plague Doctor. "It's real. And it's beneath us."
From his robe, he drew a key a shard of obsidian laced with veins of liquid starlight.
"Under this church. In the catacombs. The Orchard is where the Archons buried their first mistakes." His voice turned to a whisper. "And where they hid the tools to unmake them."
Descent.
The stairs behind the altar opened like a mouth and swallowed them. With every step, the air thickened. The walls dripped with a black ichor that hissed as it met the stone floor.
Then they reached the Orchard.
A cavernous expanse stretched before them, its ceiling lost to darkness. Bone-white trees grew in twisted rows, their limbs fused with shattered armor, rusted blades, and fragments of long-forgotten weapons.
At the center of the grove stood a throne not of stone, nor bone, but of compacted silence, absorbing sound and swallowing light.
The Plague Doctor approached. Oblivion's Edge quivered in his grasp, the hairline fracture glowing brighter shedding tiny, dying stars.
"What is this place?" whispered the Reed Mask.
"A graveyard," the Plague Doctor replied. "For things that should never have been born."
He reached for the throne.
and the first Archon's voice shattered the silence.
"Kur-Bai'el," it boomed. "You were always too curious for your own good."
The Plague Doctor spun, blade raised
as the throne opened its eyes.
To Be Continued…