The wind howled low, like a dying hymn sung by ghosts.
Borreal.
Once a kingdom of silverwork and knowledge.
Now a monument of charred stone, split towers, and the scent of long-dead glory.
Sora and Kaelith stood at the archway of its shattered gate.
The runes etched along its frame were broken some vandalized, others simply eroded by time and blood.
Kaelith pulled her cloak tighter, scanning the skyline.
"So, this is it. Borreal. Last breath of the North."
Sora said nothing. But something in his posture shifted.
He could feel the weight of the place — the same pressure that had haunted the memory tower.
Only now, it has teeth.
They passed through empty courtyards where statues had been reduced to armless saints, their faces eaten away.
The ground beneath them crunched with ash and bone.
Then—
A whisper.
It's not wind.
It was movement.
Kaelith froze.
Bow already in hand.
Sora turned his head toward a crumbled hallway the sound came again
dragging, skittering, and it likes, limbs too long for their bodies scraping stone.
“We're not alone.”
Sora unsheathed his blade.
From the shadows of a cathedral's ruin, they came.
The Varnished, once-man, now hollowed things, skin like peeled bark, eyes glowing with wrong light.
Joints bent backwards mouths sewn shut with iron wire.
Five? No, it’s seven.
Kaelith loosed an arrow.
One creature's head snapped back, gurgling.
But two more leapt the walls like insects, landing in silence behind her.
Sora moved.
Blade met flesh with a sound like breaking glass.
One Varnished split open down the chest its insides were smoke and rot, not organs.
Kaelith dropped, rolled beneath another, stabbing upward with her hunting knife.
More came.
From windows.
From graves.
And from the fog.
One latched onto Sora's back, clawing at his throat. He slammed it into a wall with raw force, crushed it under his heel.
But he was bleeding.
Kaelith screamed more from rage than fear her bow broken in two now, fighting with just her hunter knife and her fists.
“They keep coming!”
Sora turned, eyes scanning.
There a collapsed library, its doors intact.
He grabbed her wrist. Pulled her toward it.
Kaelith didn't resist.
They sprinted through the ruins, shoving shelves, bodies, and stones behind them.
Sora kicked the door shut. Jammed it with a broken spear.
Darkness.
Just their breath.
Heavy.
And shaking.
Kaelith slid down a pillar, hands bloodied, hair loose.
“…What the hell were those things?”
Sora knelt. He pulled a shard from his side not a bone, a needle, engraved with whispering glyphs.
“Someone made them,” she said.
"Someone still controls them."
The fire in her voice burned lower now.
They were in Borreal's heart, and it was still beating.
Outside the doors, silence returned.
But they both knew:
This kingdom was not forgotten.
It remembers every trespasser.
And Sora silent, still bleeding gripped the hilt of his blade tighter.
This was just the beginning.
Dust filtered through the cracks in the ceiling, shimmering like ash caught in dying sunlight.
The two sat in silence.
Sora's blood had dried along his side, crusted against the fabric and skin. He'd bound it with what little cloth he had, torn from his own cloak. The pain lay quietly beneath the surface, but he did not flinch.
Kaelith sat across from him, leaning against the stone wall. Her eyes were dim now more tired than afraid. Her bow, once an extension of her will, lay snapped in the corner of the room like the broken wing of a bird.
“Useless,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
She opened her satchel. Inside, only two knives remain. A water flask. A lock of red cloth she never explained. No food. No medicine.
Her hands trembled as she ran them over the broken bow.
"That was my last gift," she whispered, as if the stone would carry the words away.
Sora reached into his pack. Pulled a worn strip of jerky. Not much barely enough for one. But he placed it beside her, then stepped away.
Kaelith looked up. Frowned.
"You haven't eaten in three days. And bled more than a wolf in a hunter's den. And you gave me the last piece?"
He said nothing. Only stood near the threshold, blade in hand, as if to say:
You'll need your strength more than I.
Kaelith looked down again. Then took it.
“Stubborn bastard,” she said softly.
Hours passed.
When they left the safety of the ruined library, the sky was iron gray and no sun. Only the outline of jagged spires looming overhead, like the teeth of something ancient waiting to close its mouth.
Kaelith had tied the fragments of her bow into a makeshift club crude, but better than nothing. Her gait was careful, one eye always searching for the shadows. She didn't speak unless she had to.
Sora limps slightly now. The wound slowed him, but not enough to stop. Every step was a word unspoken, a will unbroken.
They passed through what had once been Borreal's marketplace.
Stalls long devoured by fire and rot.
Mannequins stood draped in decayed finery, their heads replaced by bird skulls and rusted metal signs of worship or warning, it wasn't clear.
Then—
A sound.
Not claws this time.
Footsteps.
Real ones.
Slow.
Bare.
Deliberate.
Kaelith stopped. Readied her makeshift weapon.
From the alley emerged a figure. Cloaked in bandages and bones, face hidden behind a cracked porcelain mask.
It didn't speak.
But it extended a hand not in peace but more like invitation.
Then it turned, walking back into the fog.
“A trap,” Kaelith hissed.
Sora remained still. Watching.
Then he took a step forward.
“You're kidding.”
He took another.
Kaelith cursed under her breath, then followed.
“If we die, I'm haunting your silent ass.”
The alley swallowed them whole.
What they would find beyond would not be sanctuary, nor ambush.
But a relic of Borreal's last breath a chamber buried beneath the city, hidden from time, where the last remnants of a forgotten rebellion still whispered secrets in the dark.
And where is the cost of continuing forward… would begin to show its first real price.
The air thickened as they followed the masked figure into the shadows. What light remained seemed to bend inward, as if reluctant to follow.
Sora's boots scraped against cobblestone slick with centuries of decay. Kaelith's breath was steady, but her grip was tight around the makeshift club. She walked half a step behind him, not from fear but trust.
The alley narrowed until it gave way to a spiral stairwell of black stone, leading downward into a hollow beneath the city.
The masked figure never looked back.
They descended for what felt like hours.
When they reached the bottom, the chamber opened before them vast, circular, and alive with a low humming that seemed to pulse with breath.
Pillars of ancient obsidian held the ceiling aloft, etched with sigils that were written gently under unseen energy. Statues line the walls faceless, crowned, broken. Between them, braziers lit themselves, revealing murals painted in blood and gold.
Kaelith whispered, wide-eyed:
“This… this was the throne beneath the throne.”
At the center stands a pedestal.
Upon it: a bow.
Not wood, nor metal. But of sinew and starlight forged from something forgotten.
The masked figure stepped aside, gesturing silently to Kaelith.
She hesitated.
“You expect me to just… take it?”
No answer. Only the humming, and Sora's quiet presence beside her.
She stepped forward.
Reached.
The bow pulsed faintly as her fingers touched it and memories not her own surged into her vision.
A woman draped in silver fire, loosing arrows that turned beasts into dust.
A last stand atop Borreal's highest wall.
And a promise “This will find the hands it was meant for.”
Kaelith gasped.
Dropped to one knee.
“What… what was this place?”
The masked figure finally spoke its voice like wind across a graveyard.
"The Highblood sealed the truth. The kingdom above fell not from war... but from within. They drank from a well that did not belong to mortals. They broke what was meant to sleep."
“Borreal’s fall…was penance.”
Kaelith rose slowly, bow in hand, changed.
She explored at Sora, whose eyes had not left the figure.
"And why bring us here?"
The figure turned to Sora.
"Because he was the last one untouched by the lie. He was born without the words they use to shape truth into chains."
Sora stepped closer. His hand hovered over the pedestal, not for the bow but something beneath it.
A hidden sigil glowed faintly.
As he touched it, the room shifted walls revealing a vast map, burned into the stone, showing realms long lost… and a mark pulsing deep beneath the earth, where Borreal's sin was still slumbered.
The masked figure whispered:
“You are not meant to save the world.
But you can choose who gets to rebuild it.”
And with that, the figure stepped back into the dark and vanished.
Kaelith looked to Sora.
“So… no pressure then.”
He gave the faintest smirk. Almost impossible. But it was there.
Then, without a word, they turned.
The path forward now clearer…
But the burden is heavier.
The ruined kingdom had given them a weapon and a whisper of truth.
What lay beyond, deeper into the dying lands, was no longer just survival.
It was reckoning.
It was a calculation they had to think about before moving forward.
The chamber had grown still again.
Kaelith sat on the broken lip of a marble fountain, her new bow resting across her lap. Its faint glow had dimmed, now sleeping until called. The only sound was the slow, echoing drip of water from cracks above, and Sora's quiet footsteps as he paced the edge of the room.
The silence between them was not empty.
She watched him, this silent stranger who had walked through horror and memory without uttering a word. Not once had he flinched, Not once had he begged and Not once had he questioned why.
"You've seen more than most speak of in dreams," she said finally.
No answer. Just the soft flicker of his eyes meeting hers.
Kaelith reached into a pouch and pulled a small strip of dried meat. She tossed it toward him, he caught it effortlessly.
"Eat, mute hero. I'm not dragging your corpse if you fall again."
He gave a slight nod.
Ate.
She sighed, looking upwards.
"This world... it used to mean something. Borreal wasn't just a kingdom. It was a beacon. A home."
"Then something changed. Something beneath the stone and soil. And suddenly we were no longer people we were hosts."
Her voice cracked slightly. She stood, clutching the bow tighter.
"You don't know what it's like to scream and have no one hear you. To watch everything rot, and be told to smile through it."
She turned to him.
“But I think… maybe you do.”
Sora said nothing. Just stepped closer. And gently, deliberately, he placed a hand over his heart then reached toward hers.
A gesture.
A promise.
No words but understanding.
She looked down at the gesture, then up to his face. For the first time, something in her eyes softened.
“We went east at first light,” she said, voice steadier now.
"To the Ashfold Wastes. That's where the old cathedral lies. And maybe..."
She trailed off.
They both knew it wouldn't be a possibility.