Sunless stone. Silent air. Cold.
Harsk Fenward stood perfectly motionless at the edge of the dark, subterranean cavern, his golden eyes scanning the vast, perfectly aligned rows of unmarked granite slabs. It was the deepest level of the Ghost School's central training facility. It did not exist on any municipal map. It did not appear in any Ministry of Whispers registry.
It was the graveyard.
Twenty-five generations, Harsk thought, his internal monologue stripped of all excess, functioning as a pure, predatory assessment of loss. Twenty-five generations buried in the dark.
He was the Second Hero of the Sovereign Imperium. The gnoll had lived for over eight hundred years, sustained by a direct aetheric tether to the Iron Sovereign's vast reserves of Faith Points. He was functionally immortal.
The men and women buried beneath the granite were not.
Harsk stepped away from the cavern wall and walked slowly down the central aisle.
