"When all you love turns to ashes, only rage can keep you standing."
The mist smothered Briholm like diseased skin. The houses seemed to float, stone phantoms glowing faintly in the sickly light. Between the alleys, elongated shadows drifted without footsteps, their tattered robes drinking up what little glow remained. At their head walked a hooded figure; from its hand swung a bell, cursed with an otherworldly gleam. Every movement of its wrist sent another chime shuddering across the village. Chime. Chime. The world shrank with each note.
- "Grandfather! Grandmother!" Rook's voice broke, sharp with panic. "Wake up!"
The floorboards groaned as he dashed down the corridor. The house smelled of resin and stale smoke; the embers in the hearth had long gone out. When he burst into the main room, a chill clamped around his ankles like iron.
Adalfus was already rising from his bed, one hand pressed to his aching hip, the other groping for the edge of the table.- "What in the blazes is that sound?" he growled, caught between pain and irritation.
- "The mist… there are people outside… but they're not people, grandfather. They're not." Rook trembled despite himself. "They're coming this way!"
The grandmother appeared behind him, hair white and tousled, her eyes swollen from sleep, wrapped in her wool shawl.- "Merciful heavens…" she whispered, stepping toward the window. "Rook, bar the door."
Amalis was small and slight, her frame delicate, with cropped gray hair framing a face etched by time. Her eyes, still a piercing blue, must have been dazzling in her youth, though now they bore only the weight of exhaustion. Life had been harsher on her than on Adalfus; though younger than her husband, she seemed older, as if the years had chosen to settle their burden on her fragile body.
The next Chime rang from the doorway. No footsteps. No knock. Only the blast of cold when two figures drifted through the wood as though it were smoke. Rook staggered back instinctively. Their robes were stitched of shadow and frost; beneath them he glimpsed ribs like dry branches, skeletal hands that never touched the ground.
- "Stay behind me, boy," Adalfus said, his voice calm—the calm of a man who had lived with fear his whole life yet never once set down his tools.
Rook seized the fireplace poker. Adalfus clenched a carpenter's mallet, its head scarred and hardened by decades of use. Amalis shrank back, clutching her shawl tight.
The first specter lunged with a hiss. Adalfus swung, his mallet striking with the practiced force of a craftsman, more precision than fury. The blow didn't strike flesh—it tore through vapor. But the vapor broke. The creature reeled, unraveling like scraps torn by the wind, reforming clumsily, as if something in its essence had fractured.
- "Rook! The eyes!" Adalfus roared.
Only then did Rook see: the hood had fallen back, and within the void of a face, two faint blue flames flickered like drowned embers. He drove the poker straight into that hollow. The clang split the silence; the specter wavered, then dissolved with a shriek not born of any living throat.
Before they could breathe, the second one was upon Amalis. Adalfus bellowed—a sound Rook had never heard from him—and struck again, and again, pounding the very air as though hammering stakes into stone. The shadow cracked and disintegrated, scattering in wisps that clung to the walls like smoke.
- "Get to the door!" Adalfus commanded. "We have to get out!"
Rook turned, but the hallway itself writhed, alive, as if it inhaled. The bell chimed again, closer this time. Chime. Amalis, a step behind her husband, gasped. Rook spun just in time to see a new shadow bloom from nothingness behind her. A hand of bone pierced through her back as though she were only cloth. Her mouth opened, trying to shape Adalfus's name, but only a white breath escaped. Her eyes dimmed before she fell.
- "No!" Rook's chest cracked under the scream. "Grandmother!"
The specter Rook had struck down was already reforming at the door, condensing like a puddle drawing itself together.
- "Run!" Adalfus planted himself between Rook and the exit. "Go!"
"I'm not leaving you!" Rook's voice shattered.
- "Now!" Adalfus slammed his shoulder into him, shoving the boy toward the door. For an instant, Rook saw his grandfather not as an old man crippled by pain, but as the giant of his childhood—unyielding, indomitable.
Rook obeyed. Or rather, his legs betrayed him, carrying him out while his heart broke. Tears blurred his vision, hot against the bite of the mist. Behind him, the mallet crashed down. Something screamed that was not human.
The door burst open and the mist devoured him. Outside, Briholm lay in ruin: torches guttering out, doors torn from hinges, shadows dragging limp bodies that left no trace in the mud.
He sprinted for Sett's house. Mud clung to his boots; his chest burned with every step. To his right, he glimpsed the blacksmith, knees buckling, hands still stained with soot, a shadow engulfing him and turning his eyes to glass beneath his helm. A woman clawed at a door that led nowhere, trapped in a maze spun of fear.
- "Don't look," Rook told himself. "Don't look. Don't—"
But he looked. He saw too much: a child's hair plastered to a windowpane, chickens exploding into black feathers, Toru's dog floating lifeless in midair before collapsing like a broken doll. Chime. Always that damned bell, cutting lives short with every note.
Sett's house appeared, a dark block in the chaos. A sliver of light glowed through the window. Rook arrived just as something exploded outward. A body smashed through the frame in a shower of splinters and hit the mud with a sickening thud.
- "Sett!" Rook skidded to his side.
Sett coughed, spitting glass from his mouth. Blood streaked his brow and split his lip. His green eyes, wide with terror, locked instantly on Rook, as though he had been waiting for him all along.
- "Mother…" he rasped. "Rook, we have to help them…"
From inside came a scream, then a scrape like steel against stone. Rook leaned through the shattered frame. He saw Sett's mother, small and frail, arms reaching for her son. Behind her, darkness folded in on itself—and then nothing. The mist swallowed her whole as though a curtain had fallen.
- "No!" Sett lurched forward, but Rook pinned him by the shoulders.
A shadow emerged in the broken frame, two blue flames sparking open like eyes in the void. The bell rang to their left. Chime.
- "To the woods!" Rook barked. "Now!"
They ran. The tall grass at the village's edge soaked their legs, cold and wet. Two specters slid after them, unhurried, as though time itself had been conquered. Sett panted raggedly, blood trailing down his cheek.
- "Keep going," Rook gasped. "Don't look back."
They looked back anyway. Fear demanded it. The first specter had halted, waiting for command. The second glided closer, snapping at their heels. They vaulted a fence; the stakes bruised their shins, mud sucking at their boots. The treeline loomed ahead—black columns, roots clawing up through the earth.
The strike came without warning. From the left, a claw ripped through the mist. Rook screamed as ice tore into his leg just below the knee. The world went white.
- "Rook!" Sett skidded to help him, but a shadow coiled around his torso, squeezing like iron bands. Sett bellowed, kicking uselessly, his fingers grazing the mud as the thing lifted him off his feet.
- "Bastard!" Rook tried to rise; pain seared through his leg like molten iron.
Another specter stepped in front of him. Its hand lifted, the air around its fingers shimmering like water. It meant to take him too.
Rook searched frantically. No stones. No stick. Only one thing: the weight at his belt. His grandfather's wooden knife.
- "It won't work," he whispered hoarsely. "It can't…"
But when he drew it, the world listened. The carved blade, smoothed by patient hands, glowed faintly, wrapped in an aura like dying embers refusing to fade. It wasn't light to banish darkness—it was defiance, pure and stubborn.
The specter lunged. Rook raised the knife. Wood clashed with shadow—and won. A sharp crack split the mist. The void screamed, if voids could scream, and dark ichor splashed across the grass. Rook pushed forward, stabbing where a skull might be. The knife quivered, not like steel, but like a name spoken with absolute certainty. The specter exploded in tatters, rising and then falling as ash in the rain.
- "What…?" Rook had no time for the thought.
- "Sett!" he cried, staggering to his feet. His leg buckled. "Let him go!"
He hurled himself forward, the knife burning in his grip. The specter hauling Sett gave a vicious jerk, dragging him into a wall of thick fog. Sett's arm flailed once, then vanished. Rook crashed into nothingness. Only the fading blue lights marked where his brother had been before they blinked out—like a door slamming shut to another world.
He was alone. Gasping. Broken.
The bell tolled again, and with it came the surrender of the village.
Briholm burned. Not like a single house fire. The whole ground seemed to smolder, flames tearing through the windows like tongues licking the low sky. Smoke stank of resin, straw, and flesh.
Rook gripped the knife until his knuckles ached. Then he limped on, leaving a crooked trail of blood in the mud. Each step a question: Why us? Why tonight? Why, why, why? The only answer: fire.
He stumbled past the smithy, where the anvil glowed red like a severed heart. His boot struck something soft—he knew it was a body before he looked. He looked anyway, because he owed them that. He shut his eyes, opened them again, and moved on.
The door to his house sagged inward. The workshop, once rich with the smell of wood and varnish, reeked of smoke and endings. Beams sagged overhead, dripping resin like molten tears.
- "Grandfather…" His voice vanished into the roar.
He saw them. Amalis lay on her side, her shawl in tatters, her body so small, still. Beside her, Adalfus lay flat, one hand still clenched around his mallet, as if even in death he meant to shield her. There was no blood; the smoke had stolen even that.
Rook fell to his knees. The pain in his leg vanished beneath a grief far heavier. He pressed his forehead to the floorboards, letting the ashes of the only home he'd ever known stain his skin.
- "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I should have—" The words broke apart.
He tried to lift them, to pull their bodies free. A groan stopped him. Another beam leaned dangerously, dripping flame. The heat struck him like a giant's hand. He pushed, teeth clenched, but the house bellowed back, refusing to release its dead.
Coughing, eyes streaming, he staggered backward. Sparks bit into his arms. The truth struck with brutal clarity: nothing could be done. Nothing. The realization split him in two.
- "Forgive me," he said, and knew the word would stay lodged in his chest for the rest of his life.
He stumbled out, blinded by smoke, and let the night's cold slap his face. The knife still pulsed faintly in his hand, as if someone unseen held it with him.
He forced himself toward Sett's house. If his parents… if perhaps…
No. Sett's house was an inferno. Flames leapt from the roof like hounds unleashed. The door caved inward, vomiting a black breath. There was nothing left but fire in the shape of a home.
- "I'm sorry," he repeated, this time voiceless.
The world narrowed to a dark corridor with only one path forward. Rook limped to the village edge.
The forest received him without questions. Blood seeped hot through his torn trouser leg. He lifted his gaze toward the direction where the Pale Host had vanished, a wedge of shadow threading through the trees—a path that should not exist, yet was the only one. He tried to speak Sett's name, but a sob came instead.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a black smear across his brow. He tightened his grip on the knife, and the aura—low and insistent—throbbed like a heartbeat in his palm.
- "I'll find you," he swore, the forest listening in silence. "By my blood, by my dead, by every house reduced to ash—I'll find you. And if I cannot bring back what you've taken… then I'll make you pay. Every last one of you."
No echo answered. Only the faint rustle of leaves, accepting the vow.
Behind him, Briholm burned. Before him, the night opened wide, ready to consume him. Rook did not look away. He had chosen.