The city was silent.
Not the silence of sleep, or of an early morning before the streets filled up. This was a different kind — the kind that settles in after everything that made noise has stopped. The roads were empty. The buildings stood undamaged, doors still on their hinges, windows intact, market stalls still carrying their goods. From a distance, it might have looked like any other city at rest.
But the bodies were everywhere.
They were small, pale things — white and soft, collapsed across doorsteps and cobblestones and the wide open squares between buildings. Some were slumped against walls. Others had fallen mid-step, as if whatever had happened to them had happened fast. They did not look like they had fought.
They did not look like they had run. They simply looked like they had stopped — all at once, all together — and never started again. The smell of blood hung thick in the air, dark and metallic, drifting through the streets with nowhere to go.
Nothing moved. Not a bird. Not a flag. Not even the wind.
— — —
At the center of the city stood a mountain.
It rose sharply above the surrounding buildings, too steep and too perfect to be entirely natural, its dark rock face cutting straight up into a sky the color of ash. Near its base, carved into the stone like a wound, was a hall — massive and open-mouthed, its entrance tall enough to swallow a building whole. The darkness inside it was not the ordinary darkness of an unlit room. It had weight to it. Depth. The kind that did not invite you in so much as make clear that going in was your own problem.
The bodies were thicker here. They lined the path leading up to the entrance, packed closer together the nearer they got to the mountain, as if whatever had drawn them here had pulled them all the way to the end.
Inside the hall, at the far end where the darkness was deepest, something moved.
— — —
It was hard to make out as a person at first. It stood still enough that it could have been part of the rock — a shadow among shadows, tall and unhurried, with an aura around it that did not flicker or pulse but simply pressed outward in all directions like heat from a fire that had been burning for a very long time. The air around it felt different. Heavier. The kind of air that made you want to take smaller breaths.
At its feet lay a body unlike the others.
This one was larger — not by much, but noticeably so. And where the others had been dressed in nothing remarkable, this one wore robes that had once been fine. Deep colors, now darkened with blood. Trim along the edges that caught what little light existed in the hall. The clothing of someone who had, not long ago, mattered a great deal.
The shadow crouched.
One hand reached down, slowly, without any particular urgency, and closed around the hilt of a sword that had been buried to the hilt in the body's chest. The blade was pitch black — not dark like iron or shadow, but black in the way that an absence is black, as if it did not reflect light so much as refuse it entirely. A faint aura clung to it, crawling along the edges of the blade in slow, quiet pulses, like something alive and patient.
The shadow pulled.
The sword came free with a sound that was almost nothing — a soft, clean pull, like a breath being let out. The shadow straightened up, holding the blade at its side, and stood there for a moment without moving.
Then it turned and walked back into the dark, and the hall was still again.
Outside, the city stayed silent. The pale bodies lay where they had fallen. The smell of blood drifted through empty streets.
Nothing answered it.
{ End of Prologue }