The corpse twitched once more. A final nerve spasm, meaningless but noted.
Kier Luthan crouched over the body, his fingers already wet with blood. He studied the man's face—the vacant eyes, the slack jaw. There was no fear left. No understanding. Just stillness.
"You shouldn't have remembered that name," he whispered.
Vaelen—a name Kier had buried, along with anyone foolish enough to unearth it.
From a pocket within his robe, Kier drew a shard of obsidian etched with faint runes. He pressed it to the corpse's sternum. A dull hum vibrated in the stone as it began drawing in the residual soul-echo. Weak, diluted. But still worth collecting.
The man had died for nothing more than a word. But a word, spoken aloud, could ripple across threads unseen. Kier did not leave loose ends.
He stood, slipping the shard back into his robe and brushing blood from his fingers. Fog clung to the forest around him. No wind. No sound. Even the animals stayed away.
The quiet did not unsettle him.
Kier had long made silence his companion.
He moved east, his path marked by memory, not maps. Beyond the woods lay the ruins of Morsilith—once a bastion of the Dominion Cult, now a place feared even by scavengers and madmen. They called it cursed. Dead.
Kier knew better.
It had simply been waiting.
He crested a low ridge, and there it was. The fog pooled like milk across shattered stone. Ruined columns jutted out of the earth like broken fangs. Vines twisted unnaturally along cracked stairways.
Most would see decay. Kier saw design.
Morsilith had been built atop a soul convergence point—a place where memory, energy, and silence tangled. He could feel the pull of it even now, like a breath caught in the earth.
His ring—an unassuming band of blackened bone—tightened faintly around his finger. A subtle pulse.
Confirmation.
Kier stepped into the ruins without hesitation. Stone walls loomed on either side, covered in glyphs too faded to decipher, but still dangerous. He passed beneath a half-collapsed archway into what had once been a ritual hall.
He paused before a dais at its center—a spiral-shaped platform carved from obsidian. Faint lines traced its surface, glowing ever so slightly red.
He stepped forward and knelt, placing his ringed hand on the stone.
"Let silence shape you," he murmured.
The ring cooled. The air thickened. Threads of forgotten memory seeped into his mind—not visions, but impressions. A scream cut short. Ash in water. Twelve truths spoken at once and swallowed.
Kier absorbed them all.
Not with awe. But with understanding.
This place had not forgotten him.
And now, it would serve.