Chapter 1 : Splinters in the Vein
The wind was not merely cold that night—it bit like a blade fresh from the forge, searing the skin even as it froze the marrow. From the ramparts of Mournhaven, the land stretched away in a wasteland of fractured stone and ash dunes. The torches along the wall hissed in the gale, their flames bending and guttering, as though bowing to something unseen approaching from the horizon.
Captain Veylen pulled his cloak tighter, though the fabric felt like paper against the bite of the wind. Beside him, Kaelen's eyes never left the darkness beyond the outer fields. The younger man's hand rested on the pommel of his sword—not out of bravado, but in the silent knowledge that steel might soon be the only answer to what lay ahead.
"Three scouts missing," Kaelen murmured, his voice almost lost to the wind. "No signs. No tracks."
"Nothing leaves no tracks unless it isn't meant to be seen," Veylen replied. His tone was low, but there was iron in it. "Or unless it's something the land itself hides."
They both turned as the sound came again—faint, deep, a grinding like stone on stone. At first it seemed to come from the plains, but as they strained to listen, it sank into them that it was coming from beneath.
Beneath Mournhaven.
The sound carried a rhythm, irregular but deliberate. A knock. A drag. A pause. A knock again. Not the sound of picks or hammers, but of something far older, prying at the bones of the world.
Torches flickered harder as a tremor ran underfoot. Not an earthquake—too precise, too measured.
"Get the lower gates barred," Veylen ordered, eyes narrowing. "And send word to the Seers. If the veins are stirring…"
Kaelen hesitated. "You think it's that wound?"
Veylen's gaze remained fixed on the horizon. "I think something's found it."
The clouds overhead began to churn, iron-grey against the night. Far below, deep in the earth, the knocking continued—slow, patient, like the tolling of a bell only the cursed could hear.The stairwell into Mournhaven's belly was narrow enough that two armored men could barely pass each other. The stone steps had been worn concave by centuries of boots—soldiers, servants, prisoners, and things that were none of those. The air grew heavier with each descent, the wind's roar from above giving way to a thick, almost tangible silence.
Veylen's lantern cast an amber pool ahead of them, swallowing the darkness in fragments. It was not the clean, still black of a sealed chamber; this darkness moved, as if it breathed, coiling along the tunnel like something alive.
The lower keep smelled of damp stone and rust. Water dripped from somewhere far ahead, each drop echoing like a slow heartbeat. The deeper they went, the more the echoes of the knocking bled into the walls—not loud now, but closer, as if whatever caused it was only a few layers of rock away.
Kaelen ran his fingers over a seam in the wall—one of the great iron veins that spiderwebbed beneath Mournhaven. "It's warm," he muttered.
Veylen stopped and touched it himself. The iron was indeed warm—pulse-warm, as though blood ran beneath its surface. He drew his hand back sharply.
"Keep your gloves on," Veylen warned. "The Seers say the veins carry memory. If you linger too long, they show you things you don't want to see."
Kaelen didn't ask what those visions were. The tremor underfoot answered for him, sharper this time, rattling grit from the ceiling. A hairline fracture split the seam, and for a moment, light—dull, molten, almost red—glimmered from within before vanishing again.
Two more soldiers joined them at the base of the stair: Bren, whose armor bore more dents than smooth surface, and Orlen, the youngest in the watch, whose hands trembled not from cold but from something unspoken.
"The Seers have gone to the Chapel of Glass," Bren reported. "They're calling it a pulse."
Veylen's jaw tightened. "A pulse means something is feeding it."
The four moved deeper into the under-chambers, passing old storage vaults that hadn't been opened in decades. Faded banners hung limp, the crests long since obscured by dust. They came at last to the Vein Gate—a massive slab of black iron inset with rivulets of copper that caught the lamplight.
The knocking was loudest here.
It was not random anymore. It was answering.
Kaelen leaned close, almost against his will, and for a fleeting instant, thought he heard a voice between the knocks—distant, heavy, and speaking no tongue he knew.
Bren stepped forward, hand on the gate's surface. "Feels like it wants to—"
The rest of his words were swallowed by a deep, booming thud. The gate shuddered. A web of cracks spidered outward from its center, copper lines flaring with that molten light.The first crack rang like a struck bell, reverberating through every rib of the keep. Dust billowed from the seams, sifting through the lamplight like falling ash. Kaelen stumbled back, dragging Orlen with him as the Gate groaned under a force that didn't belong in the world above.
Veylen barked orders—short, sharp, forged for chaos. "Lanterns to the ground! Keep your hands free!" Bren obeyed instantly, but Orlen hesitated, clutching the light like a lifeline until Kaelen wrenched it from him and shoved it down.
The copper veins along the gate brightened again—no flicker this time, but a steady, searing glow that painted the vault in molten hues. Something moved on the other side. Not the shuffle of feet or the scrape of tools—a shifting of weight, as though a giant coiled against the barrier, searching for the weak place.
The knocking became hammer-blows. Each strike made the air vibrate in their lungs, rattled teeth in their skulls. Veylen's mind flitted to the stories—things buried when the First Cities fell, entities sealed in the bones of the earth, their prisons lined with iron so they could never hear the call of the surface again.
And yet… something had called.
The final blow came with a scream—not from any of them, but from the iron itself, a drawn-out metallic wail as the slab tore inward. The gap was jagged, edges curling like petals of some monstrous flower. Heat rushed out in a choking wave, carrying with it the scent of scorched metal and something fouler, older.
Bren stepped forward before anyone could stop him, peering into the breach. "Light of the—"
A hand shot through.
If it could be called a hand. It was wrought of something darker than obsidian, its surface rippling faintly, as if the material were alive and shifting. Long, jointless fingers hooked into the torn gate, and the heat spiked until Kaelen's vision wavered. Another hand followed, then the suggestion of a head—horned, but not in the way of any beast or carving he'd seen, the points curved inward like claws ready to dig.
Orlen retched against the wall, and Kaelen understood why—when the thing's eyes opened, they were not merely red, but layered with shifting rings, each spinning in an opposite direction, each holding a depth that drew the mind down like a drowning weight.
The entity paused, testing the tear in the gate. Then it spoke—not in sound, but in a vibration that shook the marrow.
"You bleed above. We bleed below. The Wound is open."
The walls groaned. The veins in the stone around them began to glow as the voice crawled outward, riding the network of iron like blood rushing to a heart.
Veylen drew his blade—not out of belief it would matter, but because men who turned away in fear were already dead. "Seal it!" he roared, though they all knew the breach was past sealing.
The creature's shoulders forced into the opening, tearing more iron from its moorings. Sparks cascaded like fire-rain.
And from somewhere deeper, beyond the thing that had come through… something else moved. Something larger.
Chapter 2 : Ash Beneath The Skin
They had run until the air cut their throats raw.
Down spiral stairs slick with condensation, through vaults where the stone sweated like flesh under fever. The shouts had faded behind them, replaced by the ringing memory of metal tearing, and the heavy, slow scrape of something that didn't need to hurry to catch them.
The passage spat them out into a storage hall—a long cavern whose shelves sagged with centuries of abandoned war stock. Rusted pikes. Bales of cloth eaten by time. Barrels that stank of vinegar and rot. The only light came from Bren's shaking hands as he fumbled to relight a lantern.
Veylen stood in the center, still holding his sword, but his gaze was distant. Not from fear alone—something in him had shifted since the breach. His knuckles had gone pale where he gripped the hilt, and when the light hit his face, Kaelen saw thin red lines branching from the corners of his eyes, like veins of copper beneath the skin.
"Sit," Veylen ordered finally, voice flat. They obeyed, though none leaned their backs to the walls—too many shadows clung there.
Kaelen swallowed hard. "What… was that?"
No one answered immediately. Orlen hugged himself, shivering despite the heat still clinging to their clothes. Bren muttered something under his breath—prayer or curse, Kaelen couldn't tell.
Veylen finally spoke. "Not a demon. Not a beast. A wound."
Orlen blinked at him. "A what?"
He knelt, running a gloved hand over the floor, tracing the old inlays of iron that spidered beneath the stone. "Every fortress in the low valleys is built on the scars of the first war. There are rents in the world that never healed—torn in the days before maps and kings. The old order buried them, sealed them with whatever they had left. And they prayed it would hold."
Kaelen's stomach twisted. "And this one didn't."
"It did," Veylen said, his voice heavy, "for longer than it had any right to. But something stirred beneath. And something else… called to it from above."
Silence swallowed the room. The smell of scorched metal clung to them all, impossible to shake. In the quiet, Kaelen realized his own pulse sounded different—slower, heavier, as if it were keeping time with something else.
From somewhere deeper in the keep, the sound came again. A single, resonant knock—far away, but not fading.The knock came again—three beats this time. Not loud, but deep enough to tremble the barrels stacked along the far wall.
No one moved.
Then Kaelen noticed it. The smell.
Not just iron and smoke anymore, but something acrid—like nails scorched in a forge, or blood boiled dry. It was coming from Veylen.
"Your hands…" Bren whispered.
Veylen looked down. The skin beneath the leather of his gloves was glowing faintly, as if veins of molten ore had been threaded into him. Each faint pulse of that inner light was in time with the distant knock.
"I told you," Veylen said, voice low. "A wound. And wounds… spread."
Orlen's chair scraped back. "We burn it out now. Before—"
"Before what?" Veylen's head snapped up, and for a moment Kaelen swore the whites of his eyes had been replaced by hammered steel. "Before I become what was inside there?" He shook his head. "It's not that simple. The Iron Wound doesn't infect—it binds. You can cut off a limb to kill a fever. But how do you cut off what's under your skin and in your shadow?"
The lantern hissed as Bren's hands trembled. "Then we leave this place. We put stone between us and whatever is knocking."
"No." Veylen's voice was final. "If we leave it unchecked, it will follow. Not because it wants us—but because it wants out. And now…" His gaze turned inward, as if listening to something they couldn't hear. "…now it knows the taste of air again."
Kaelen leaned forward, her voice tight. "Then what's the plan?"
Veylen finally looked at her. "We go deeper. We find the heart of the wound. And we kill it before it kills the keep."
The words dropped into the room like lead. None of them wanted to ask what the 'heart' of such a thing would look like.
From somewhere under their feet, the knock came again. Louder. Closer.
And for the first time it was answered—from behind the far wall.The answering knock wasn't like the first.
It was softer, slower—almost hesitant—like fingers brushing along the inside of a coffin lid.
The four of them stood frozen, eyes fixed on the stone wall at the far end of the chamber. It had always been there, solid and cold, the oldest part of the keep's foundations. Now… it seemed to ripple.
Bren stepped forward despite himself, lantern held high. The light pooled against the wall's rough surface, and Kaelen saw it—the faintest motion. Not the flicker of flame, but the expansion and contraction of something alive.
"That's not stone," she whispered.
The wall shivered, a ripple moving across it as though it had taken a slow breath.
Orlen swore and reached for his axe. "Tell me that's some trick of the light."
Veylen didn't answer. His gloved hand was pressed to his chest, right over the place where the faint glow beneath his skin was strongest. His breathing matched the rhythm of the wall.
Kaelen grabbed his arm. "It's answering you. Whatever's in there—whatever's behind there—it's tied to the wound."
"I know." His voice was hoarse, the kind a man uses when he's admitting something he's been denying to himself for too long. "And it's waking up."
The wall's surface bulged outward suddenly, just for a heartbeat, like something had pressed against it from the other side. When it receded, the mortar between the stones was wet.
Bren stumbled back. "We're leaving. Right now."
"No," Veylen said again, though his face was pale. "If we turn away now, it will keep breathing… and sooner or later, it will have lungs enough to scream. When that happens, this keep will be nothing but dust and rust."
From deep within the wall, something scraped—a slow, dragging sound, like chains across stone.
Kaelen felt her pulse sync with it. She realized, with sudden clarity, that this was no longer just Veylen's wound.
The Iron Wound had touched them all