We waited for the evening watch to change.
The day didn't end all at once; it simply bled away. The light thinned by slow degrees across the valley, turning the service road and the vast, flat expanse of the staging ground from frost-white to a bleak iron-gray. Smoke from the cookfires flattened under the bitter wind, pressing low to the earth before breaking apart against the towering black stone walls.
Down in the yard, the exhaustion of a long day began to show its cracks. The men who had been hauling cargo since morning grew careless in the way tired men do — not enough to become harmless, but enough to leave small, sloppy gaps between one thought and the next. A handler forgot to latch a crate and had to be cursed back to it by a superior. One mule bit another hard enough to make both animals shriek, their cries echoing sharply off the rock. Two soldiers argued over whether the next bell had already rung, their voices carrying on the wind until a white-robed cleric stepped out of the shadows, threatening to send them down below if they didn't shut their mouths.
It was a messy, miserable end to the day for the laborers. Above them, however, the Church's military core changed its watch with absolute discipline.
The silver-marked knights operated in pairs, never as individuals. They patrolled in an unbroken system of sightlines, one man always scanning the yard the very second his partner turned his back. Beneath them, the handlers actively feigned ignorance, yet tracked the armor with the frantic, darting energy of prey trapped among wolves. Meanwhile, the clerics inspected cargo slates with a sour, meticulous patience, acting as if flawless bookkeeping could somehow render their cruelty sacred.
There were no blind spots to exploit in a machine wound this tightly. That was exactly why we hadn't descended to the runoff pipe yet. Rushing them while daylight still favored the Church — and while the mountain's interior was fully awake — wouldn't be a rescue; it would be suicide. I needed time to form a solid plan. The approaching night, and the upcoming change of the guard, would give me the perfect window to execute it. Waiting in our hollow cost us nothing, and observing them from the high ground gave me the chance to map their routines before we plunged back into the dark.
So, we held our ground.
The hatchling hated that delay even more than it had hated waiting before. By then, its fury had changed shape. It was no longer only the hot, immediate need to run toward the hidden gate and tear into the first thing that bled. It had cooled into something sharper, something far more dangerous. Something that watched. Its good eye tracked every priest in pristine white, every handler dragging chains, and every wagon that disappeared through the false stone. More than once, its claws flexed silently against the freezing earth beneath us, digging into the frost as if imagining the mountain's throat yielding under its weight.
Beside it, Renn had folded himself into the deepest part of the rock crevice, wrapped tightly in his cloak with only his ears and eyes showing. He had stopped trembling so visibly, but I knew that meant little. Some fear does not leave the body. It simply learns how to stand perfectly still.
When the sky finally bruised into a dark, heavy purple, and the guards began their rotation, I turned to them. "It's time," I whispered, my voice barely carrying over the wind. "We go back down to the pipe. Quietly."
Renn gave a single, tight nod. The hatchling pressed its belly low to the frost.
And so, leaving the hollow behind, we picked our way down the steep slope toward the drainage channel.
The pitch-black mouth of the culvert gaped twenty yards away. But as we closed the distance to ten, the hatchling suddenly froze.
Its entire body went rigid, head snapping downward. Not toward the gate. Not toward the voices above. Toward the dark runoff channel below us.
A heartbeat later, I understood why: the slow, deliberate grind of heavy boots on loose gravel, almost completely masked by the rush of black water.
My arm shot out before Renn could take another step. He froze against it, breath catching in his throat. I pressed my back harder against the icy stone and lowered myself behind the frozen scrub, looking down through the brittle branches toward the channel.
A cold knot tightened in my stomach the moment I saw what was there.
A single silver-marked soldier had descended into the ravine. He hadn't come to patrol. Seeking a moment away from the freezing winds of the staging yard, he had wandered down to the runoff stream to relieve himself. He stood with his back to us, his halberd leaning against a boulder, casually unbuckling his heavy leather belt at the edge of the foul water.
We were completely exposed on the slope. There was no cover, no rock large enough to hide a man, a boy, and a dragon.
My pulse hammered violently against my ribs, loud enough I feared he might hear it over the wind. I measured the distance between us, my mind desperately trying to force a solution. It was useless. He was too far away to silence. If I broke from the scrub, the loose gravel on the slope would instantly betray my first step. If he managed even a single shout, the staging ground above would swarm the ravine in seconds, burying us under silver armor and destroying everything we had risked to gain.
Time seemed to thicken, freezing into a single, suffocating breath.
Down by the water, the soldier let out a long, foggy sigh. The heavy leather of his armor creaked loudly in the quiet ravine as he adjusted his belt.
Then, painfully slow, he began to turn around.
We had milliseconds.
Panic, sharp and blinding, spiked in my chest. My mind thrashed for a solution, grasping blindly at the void. And in that fraction of a second, the desperate pressure tore something loose from the locked vault of my memories.
A word. A shadow. The terrifying sensation of falling out of the world.
I didn't think. I simply reacted. I lunged backward, grabbing Renn by the collar of his cloak and seizing the hatchling's scaled neck.
"Sriath," I hissed.
The word tore from my throat involuntarily, vibrating with a deep, unnatural frequency that felt heavier than air itself.
Instantly, the darkness beneath the scrub pine flared. It didn't just conceal us; it devoured us. The Shadow's Embrace pulled the three of us violently into the negative space of the world, bleeding our physical forms directly into the gloom just as the soldier turned his head.
He zipped his trousers and looked up the slope, staring directly at the spot where we were crouched. Through the strange, icy filter of the shadows, I watched his eyes narrow. He squinted into the gloom, his hand hovering uncertainly over the hilt of his short sword. He took half a step forward, the gravel crunching under his boot.
Renn squeezed his eyes shut. The hatchling didn't even breathe.
For three agonizing seconds, the soldier stared into the void that held us. Then, the bitter wind howled down the ravine, throwing freezing dust into his face. He grunted, blinking the dirt from his eyes, and shook his head.
"Seeing things," he muttered to himself, his voice raspy with cold and exhaustion. "Need sleep."
After that, he snatched up his halberd, turned his back on the dark, and began the slow trudge back up the embankment toward the warmth of the staging ground.
I waited until the sound of his boots completely faded up the slope before I let the magic drop.
The shadows didn't just fade; they expelled us with the jarring brutality of a physical blow.
I was already pressed flat against the freezing mud, but as reality crashed back in, the sheer weight of it pinned me there. My lungs seized. I gasped violently for air, my fingers digging uselessly into the frost as if I had just been pulled from the bottom of a frozen lake. A crushing wave of nausea hit me so hard my vision whited out at the edges, the world spinning sickeningly around me. I couldn't even push myself up to my elbows. Every muscle in my body screamed, hollowed out and drained of strength in a single, catastrophic instant. The ability had demanded an obscene amount of energy, and my vessel simply wasn't prepared to channel that scale of the void without fracturing itself in the process.
"Kyrion!" Renn whispered, dropping to his knees beside me, his hands hovering nervously over my shoulder. "What... what happened? Are you... alright?"
The hatchling shook itself violently, a low, confused whine rumbling in its chest as it stared at me.
"I'm..." I swallowed the copper taste of blood in my mouth, forcing my head up as the world spun sickeningly. "I'm fine."
I looked down at my trembling hand, flexing my numb fingers. The dark veins beneath my skin throbbed with a dull, vicious ache. What was that? The memory of the word was already slipping away, sinking back beneath the surface of my mind like a stone dropped in deep water. I had done it purely on instinct, but the toll it took was terrifying.
I couldn't afford to dwell on it. Not here.
Before I could force myself to stand, the first bell of dusk rang somewhere high above us. The iron note traveled down through the mountain, thin, hollow, and incredibly cold.
That was when the refuse cart came.
Guided by a single driver and escorted by a guard with a soiled cloth bound over his nose, it emerged from the hidden gate. Its load was covered in patched, filthy canvas, but the stench of rot was heavy enough to cut straight through the bitter wind. Instead of stopping with the supply wagons, it rattled toward the edge of the staging ground, heading for a break in the low stone wall where the runoff carved its path down the ravine.
It was coming directly for the slope right above us.
"This is our cover," I breathed.
Every muscle screamed in protest, but I forced my leaden arms to push me up just high enough to peer through the frozen scrub.
At the top of the embankment, the guard stopped. Disgusted by the smell, he leaned against the retaining wall and turned his back, watching the distant cookfires instead. But the driver kept going. He guided the nervous mule down the steep, narrow cut in the rocks, bringing the cart down to the edge of the chute right beside us.
With a string of muttered curses, the driver dragged the heavy canvas aside. He took up a long wooden pole and began shoving the tangled, gruesome contents of the cart down the slope.
Not all of it was refuse. Strips of blood-stained cloth, broken lengths of heavy leather, and splintered wood tumbled down the slope. A cracked metal collar rolled near us, its sunburst emblem eaten black by some failed alchemical reaction. When a tangled mass caught near the cart's wheel, the driver swore loudly and leaned far over the steep edge to pry it loose with his bare hands.
He delivered himself right to us.
I didn't need to stand, and I didn't need to walk. I only needed gravity and the brutal momentum of survival. As he leaned over the drop-off, I surged upward from the frozen scrub. My left hand clamped fiercely over his mouth, pulling him forward off his balance, while my right hand drove the knife deep into his throat.
He died faster than his surprise could bloom into panic.
I dragged his dead weight down into the hollow with us, my arms shaking violently from the effort. I held perfectly still for two long, agonizing breaths, listening past the rushing of my own blood.
No shout. No alarm. Only the mule stamping nervously up on the path.
Renn stared at the body, his face corpse-pale beneath his hood. The hatchling, however, stared at the cart. Its good eye fixed on the broken metal collar lying among the butchered refuse. A low, broken sound tightened in its throat — a sound of mourning mixed with a terrible, helpless rage. It knew exactly who those collars were meant for.
I stepped smoothly between the dragon and the pile, breaking its line of sight. "Not now," I said, my voice rough but steady.
It looked up at me. I did not soften my expression. "Not now."
For once, it did not argue. It only lowered its head, the simmering heat inside it compacting into something much colder.
Before moving on, I dragged the driver's body deep into the thickest tangle of frozen scrub, burying him under dead branches and loose earth.
I knew how the Church's watch operated. When the cart failed to return, someone would eventually come looking. If they merely found an abandoned mule, they would assume the driver was slacking. But the moment they found a slit throat, the alarm would ring, and the entire mountain would seal shut.
Hiding him well wouldn't prevent the search, but it would delay the inevitable. We needed every second of that borrowed time.
With the corpse concealed and the hatchling anchored, I turned my attention to the dark mouth of the drainage pipe. We didn't have to worry about breaking through the iron grate this time.
The stone frame was entirely empty, bearing only the jagged, blackened stumps of metal where I had consumed the bars with the void during our escape. It was a permanent, gaping wound in the mountain's defenses, waiting to swallow us again.
"Follow me," I whispered, turning my back on the freezing wind and stepping directly into the pitch-black maw of the pipe.
We quickly established our marching order for the cramped space. I took the vanguard, acting as the shield against whatever might be waiting inside. The hatchling took the middle, leaving Renn to bring up the rear where he was most protected.
Slipping back inside the culvert was worse than leaving it. Moving against the current, the freezing, foul-smelling sludge ran ankle-deep along the narrow channel, fighting our every step. The tunnel sloped upward, a tight, claustrophobic throat of ancient stone where the ceiling was so low my exhausted back screamed in protest.
After the first few steps, Renn stopped dead. His shoulders locked. The suffocating darkness, the memory of the iron bars, the smell of rot — I didn't need to read his memories to understand what returning to this tunnel was doing to his mind.
Sensing the boy freezing behind it, the hatchling turned its heavy head and bumped Renn squarely in the chest. Not gently, but not harshly either. It was a command disguised as contact.
Sucking in a thin, shaky breath, Renn placed one trembling hand on the dragon's warm scales, using it as an anchor as he stepped deeper into the black water.
There was no room for speed. The old channel twisted through the mountain in cramped, uneven turns. In that dark, every sound became massive: Renn's ragged breathing, the hatchling's claws slipping on wet rock, and the vicious pounding of the headache in my temples.
Directly above us, the Church lived its life unaware. Heavy boots crossed the iron grates over our heads, and voices filtered down through the stone, distorted but clear.
"Feed-room's short again," one of the handlers grumbled, his voice distorted by the echo of the grate.
"Then the lower pens get less tonight," a second man replied, his tone entirely indifferent to the starvation he was commanding. "Asterion ordered double resonance before dawn."
There was a brief pause, filled only by the scrape of a heavy crate shifting on the floorboards above.
"On the dragons?" the first handler asked.
"On whatever still answers."
I was leading the way through the narrow dark, keeping myself between them and whatever lay ahead. Close behind me, the hatchling stopped so violently that Renn nearly collided with its flanks. I immediately paused and reached back, closing my hand over the scruff of its neck. My fingers dug into the rigid muscle, physically anchoring it to the floor before it could try to tear through the ceiling.
"Move," I breathed.
It didn't. Its entire body vibrated with the urge to tear upward through the stone. Only when the heavy boots above finally walked away, taking their voices with them, did the hatchling's rigid muscles unspool. With a low, shuddering breath, it stepped forward again.
There was no maze to navigate, only the single, punishing path of the main drainage channel twisting upward through the dark. The old woman had told us the chute ran below the feed-room. I knew we had reached our destination when the rough, wet stone of the tunnel suddenly ended, blocked by the familiar shapes of heavy timber slats and stacked burlap sacks.
We were back at the hidden opening in the lower holding passage.
I pressed myself against the damp rock and peered through a narrow gap between the sacks. The corridor had changed since morning. The cages had been shifted. The older demi-human woman who had pointed the way was gone — whether moved to a hook-room or simply dead, I couldn't tell.
In her place, just outside the open door of the feed-room, a thin-backed clerk sat on an overturned wooden crate. He was using a flat barrel as a makeshift desk, scratching at a slate by the light of a single, sputtering torch. He muttered aloud to himself as he wrote, his voice a dry, indifferent drone.
"...mountain cat transferred... two demi-humans unfit for resonance... gray she-wolf prepped for harvest... dragon pair under Prelate seal..."
Beside me, Renn's hand closed around the back of my shirt. His grip was agonizingly tight.
The clerk dipped his stylus into ink. "Hatchling unaccounted for. Presumed dead or escaped. Prelate maintains auditory resonance effective through maternal response. Repeat calls scheduled before second dawn bell."
The hatchling made no sound, but its body went completely, unnaturally rigid.
I couldn't just stay hidden. Not after hearing that. Slipping silently through the narrow gap between the stacked sacks, I closed the distance in three long strides. My footfalls made no sound on the damp stone. The clerk never had a chance to turn.
My left hand clamped fiercely over his mouth; my right pressed the knife flush against his throat. His eyes bulged behind round glass lenses.
"Quiet," I whispered directly into his ear.
He trembled so violently the stylus clattered against the barrel. Renn slipped out from behind the sacks after me, followed closely by the hatchling.
I dragged the clerk off his crate and forced him to his knees. "...Speak low. Or die," I warned.
"The warded door at the end of the hall. How we open it?"
His eyes flicked nervously toward the hatchling. That was his first mistake. The dragon soundlessly bared its teeth, and the clerk paled.
"Y-You can't!" he whispered rapidly against my palm. "There is no mechanism! It's a blood-ward, sealed by the Church's high rites. Only Prelate Asterion can open it, and he keeps the catalyst on his person at all times!"
"Where is he?"
The clerk hesitated, his eyes darting back toward the upper ramp we had descended earlier. "The... the other wing. The left corridor from the main sorting chamber. He's tending to the... the project."
Hearing that, the massive, unnatural roar we had heard echoing from that archway earlier suddenly started making terrifying sense. "What project?" I pressed the blade just enough to draw a thin bead of blood. "What is down there?"
The clerk squeezed his eyes shut, reluctant to speak the Church's secrets even under the immediate threat of death. I twisted my grip and let a fraction of the void seep into the air around us. The temperature plummeted unnaturally, a deep, consuming pressure that bit into his skin and hollowed out his lungs. His resolve shattered instantly.
"A-A chimera!" he gasped, tears of panic spilling over his glasses. "A stitched horror... born of resonance and alchemy! The Prelate feeds it to force its growth!"
Then, Renn's voice cut through the dim corridor, small but incredibly sharp. "Gray she-wolf."
The clerk blinked at him, disoriented by the boy's sudden interjection. "...W-What ?... No," he stammered, shaking his head. "No, I don't know—"
Renn stepped closer. His face was entirely bloodless, but there was no trembling left in his frame. "Gray," he repeated, his voice dropping into a ragged, desperate growl. "She-wolf."
Terrified, the clerk's eyes instinctively darted toward a small stack of books resting on the damp stone floor. They landed on a heavy ledger bound in thick, gray hide.
I gave Renn a slight nod. The boy pulled the book from the stack, nearly dropping it under its sheer weight, and slammed it open across the flat barrel. Halfway down the page, one line had been heavily underlined in stark red ink.
Nerys of the Ashen Hollow. Adult gray she-wolf. Responsive under bloodline stress. Transferred to Research Room One. Status: Viable.
Renn stopped breathing. The hollow terror in his face vanished, replaced by a stillness that was entirely new. It was sharpened. Resolute.
"Mother," he whispered.
The hatchling looked from the boy to the page, and then up to me, sensing the shift in the air.
I looked back down at the clerk. "Where is Research Room One?"
He shook his head violently. "You're too late! She's the catalyst tonight! She was transferred to the left wing to be harvested. Asterion is going to use her blood to strengthen the beast!"
The word harvested hung in the damp air, heavy and suffocating. Beside me, Renn let out a ragged, broken exhale, stumbling back half a step as if he had been physically struck.
I stared down at the clerk. He was sobbing now, shrinking against the barrel in a pathetic, trembling plea. I still didn't possess all the broken pieces of my past, but looking down at him, I felt a cold, undeniable certainty: whoever I had been before the sea spat me out, that man wouldn't have hesitated to do this, either.
We were deep inside the mountain. The people we needed to save had only moments left, and leaving a witness at our backs who knew exactly where we were heading was a tactical failure I refused to make.
So I didn't ask anything else. Instead I just shifted my grip, clamped my hand firmly over his jaw, and gave a single, brutal twist.
He slumped against the barrel, dead before he could realize the interrogation was over.
After that I grabbed the heavy gray ledger from the barrel and shoved it tightly under my arm. It was cumbersome, but I wasn't about to leave it behind. It contained Asterion's internal shift schedules, the exact locations of the Church's captives, and detailed notes on the Prelate's experiments. In a fortress this massive, that kind of intelligence was just as vital as a sharp blade.
I turned to face my companions. Renn was staring at the dead man, his breathing shallow and frantic, while the hatchling's good eye burned with a volatile mix of grief and rage.
"Your mother first," I said quietly, locking eyes with Renn to pull him out of his shock. Then, I shifted my gaze down to the dragon. "Then we take Asterion's key, and we come back here for your parents."
The hatchling gave a short, tense exhale through its nostrils — a hard sound of reluctant agreement.
"We take the left path," I ordered. "But we stay quiet. From this point on, we assume every shadow hides a patrol. Move."
There was no blind rushing. We abandoned the drainage pipe, leaving the dead clerk in the shadows, and began the tense climb back up the steep ramp. We moved with punishing caution, testing every footfall against the damp stone to ensure absolute silence. At every bend, I held up a hand, forcing us to stop and listen past the steady drip of condensation for the heavy clatter of armored boots or the murmur of handlers. The mountain wasn't fully awake, but one misplaced step would bring the entire garrison down on us.
We retraced our steps through the gloom, slipping unseen past the main holding pens, until we finally reached the main sorting chamber where the path split.
The archway to the left gaped open like a wound in the rock, heavily branded with the Church's sunburst sigils.
The moment we crossed its threshold, the atmosphere changed entirely. The freezing, damp draft of the mountain vanished, replaced by an oppressive, suffocating heat. The stench hit us like a physical wall — a putrid, gagging mixture of stale copper, rotting meat, and harsh alchemical preservatives. Despite the bitter cold outside, fat, sluggish flies buzzed in the gloom, clinging to the wet walls and the ceiling.
This was the true heart of the Church's cruelty. The holding pens we had seen earlier were merely a waiting room for this hell.
We moved like ghosts through the macabre corridor, our eyes darting to every alcove, every rusted iron door. The shadows here hid things that defied sanity. Carts draped in heavy black canvas lined the walls, thick, dark blood pooling sluggishly beneath their wheels. Cramped cages were stacked haphazardly, holding the broken shapes of demi-humans and beasts too mutilated or sedated to even lift their heads. Skeletons picked clean by acid and surgical tools lay discarded in deep alcoves like common trash.
The hatchling's throat vibrated with a continuous, silent hum of absolute hatred. Renn kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, refusing to look into the cages, his hands balled into tight, trembling fists.
We pressed forward, sliding behind a stack of rusted iron grates to avoid a two-man patrol that crossed the far end of the hall. Once the scrape of their boots faded into the deeper tunnels, we crept closer to the flickering light ahead.
The passage opened up, revealing two main chambers.
The first was a wide, brightly lit room meant for harvesting and alchemical preparation. Beyond it, through a set of heavy, reinforced iron doors, lay a deeper, darker room. From that second chamber, the low, wet breathing of something massive and fundamentally wrong echoed into the corridor.
I signaled for Renn and the hatchling to hold their ground in the shadows. Pressing my back against the cold stone, I carefully peered through the wide iron lattice of the first room's doorway.
Inside, the nightmare was fully awake.
Four soldiers in dull silver mail stood along the walls, their hands resting lazily on their sword pommels. In the center of the room, strapped down by heavy leather belts to a massive, blood-stained stone table, was a large gray wolf. She was heavily sedated, her chest rising and falling in shallow, labored breaths.
I felt Renn step up silently behind me. He peered through the iron lattice, his breath catching in a agonizing, silent hitch. He didn't need to say a word. The gray she-wolf on that cold stone was Nerys.
Two clerics in pristine white robes stood over her, casually arranging silver blades, curved hooks, and glass vials on a side table. They were preparing to bleed her dry, treating her life as nothing more than raw material to feed whatever Asterion was tending to in the deeper room.
I felt Renn step up silently behind me. He looked through the bars. He didn't gasp, but the sheer force of his suppressed emotion felt like a physical pressure expanding in the air.
I took in the room with a single, sweeping glance. Six enemies in a bright, enclosed space. My vessel was already dangerously hollowed out from the Sriath spell, the ache behind my eyes pounding like a trapped heartbeat. But fighting them conventionally wasn't an option. Drawing steel meant chaos, and chaos meant risking a stray blade finding the sedated she-wolf — or the boy and the hatchling at my back.
I needed to let the void consume them. All of them. It would be a brutal, agonizing expenditure of energy that might tear my own muscles apart, but it was the only way to silence the room before the clerics made their first cut.
So I took a slow, deep breath, pulling the darkness from my blood, feeling it rise in my throat like freezing bile. I wrapped my hand tightly around the hilt of my knife, calculating the distance to the closest guard.
Three steps. Strike the throat. Unleash the shadows on the clerics. Parry the remaining three.
I tightened my grip, preparing to breach the door.
And then, the alarm bell began to ring.
It didn't come from inside the research hall. It came from the very top of the mountain. A massive, rhythmic iron note rolled down through the walls, waking the dungeon corridors one by one. It was the heavy, frantic tolling of a fortress that had just discovered a slit throat in the frost outside.
My blood ran cold. They found the cart driver.
Inside the room, the casual atmosphere shattered. The four soldiers immediately drew their swords, the scrape of steel echoing sharply against the stone. The clerics stopped their preparations, abandoning the silver blades and looking toward the corridor in sudden alarm.
Our stealth was gone. The element of surprise had just been violently ripped away.
We were standing in the heart of the enemy's stronghold, and the entire mountain was waking up to hunt us.