The ruined towers of Aridhol rose against the evening sky like broken teeth.
Spencer had known they were coming — four days of hard travel from Baerlon, watching the landscape shift from rolling hills to desolate flatland, counting down the miles to the dead city he'd read about a dozen times. But knowing and seeing were different things. The towers were massive, built by hands that had been dust for two thousand years, and even in ruin they spoke of power that modern cities couldn't match.
Shadar Logoth. Where the Shadow waits.
"You've gone quiet," Mat observed from beside him. "Usually you at least make rude comments about my riding."
"Just thinking."
"About?"
Spencer hesitated. The city loomed ahead, and every instinct screamed at him to warn the others. Don't go in there. Don't touch anything. Don't let Mat out of your sight.
But warnings required explanations, and explanations led to questions he couldn't answer.
"I've heard stories about this place," he said finally. "About what happened to Aridhol."
Moiraine's head turned. Her silver-blue thread pulsed with sudden, sharp attention.
"Stories?" Her voice was mild, but Spencer had learned to hear the blade underneath Aes Sedai mildness. "What stories would a Two Rivers carpenter have heard about a city that fell two thousand years ago?"
Careful. Don't oversell it.
"A trader told me once. Passing through Emond's Field." Spencer kept his voice casual, the voice of a man sharing idle gossip. "He said the city was cursed. That the people turned so hard against the Shadow, they became something just as bad."
The silence stretched. Moiraine's eyes didn't leave Spencer's face.
"That is... a remarkably accurate summary," she said slowly. "For a story from a passing trader."
"He seemed to know a lot about old things."
"What was this trader's name?"
I don't have a name. I made him up thirty seconds ago.
"I don't remember. It was years ago."
"And yet you remember the story itself in such detail."
Spencer said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.
Moiraine studied him for a long moment, then turned back to the road. But her thread had changed — the silver-blue was still controlled, still purposeful, but now it carried a new note. Calculation. Assessment. The look of a woman adding another entry to a ledger of suspicious behaviors.
The Aridhol slip cost me, Spencer realized. She doesn't forget a bad lie.
---
The Trollocs found them three miles from the city walls.
Spencer felt them first — red construct-threads moving through the trees on the ridge above, converging on a position that would give them a clear line of sight to the road. Three of them. Scouts, not a raiding party.
Lan's hand came up in a signal Spencer had learned to recognize: Stop. Silent. Wait.
The group froze. Spencer dropped low, moving without thinking to a flanking position that gave Lan a clear approach to the ridge while keeping himself out of the Warder's way. Thread Sight tracked the Trollocs' movements — they were focused on the road below, not on the shadow climbing toward them from the rocks.
This is what Lan taught me. Positioning. Don't fight — create space for the fighters.
Lan moved like smoke. One moment he was beside Moiraine; the next he was gone, dissolved into the terrain. Spencer watched his gray-green thread slide up the ridge, silent and purposeful, and then the Trollocs' threads flickered and went still.
Three kills. No sound. Thirty seconds.
Lan descended from the ridge with his sword already clean. His gaze swept the group, found Spencer in his flanking position, and the Warder gave the smallest nod.
Approval. Or at least not disapproval.
"We move," Moiraine said quietly. "The city is the safest place for tonight. The Trollocs won't follow us inside."
No. They won't. Because they're more afraid of what's in there than they are of you.
---
That night, they camped inside Shadar Logoth's walls.
The city was worse than Spencer had imagined. The books had described it as dead, empty, frozen in the moment of its fall — but the books couldn't capture the wrongness of the place. The air tasted of dust and something underneath the dust, something that had been rotting for two millennia and still hadn't finished.
Thread Sight made it worse. The city's threads were curdled green-gold, like bile preserved in amber. Every stone radiated faint corruption. The Pattern here had been twisted so badly that even time couldn't heal it.
Mashadar. The evil that destroyed the city and then consumed itself. It's sleeping in these walls, waiting for something living to touch.
Moiraine set wards around their camp — silver threads of the One Power that Spencer could barely perceive. Then she gathered the group and spoke in the flat, serious voice she used when lies could kill.
"Do not touch anything. Do not take anything. Do not explore. Stay within the wards until dawn."
The boys nodded, their faces pale in the firelight. Mat's thread flickered with the restless energy that always meant trouble.
He's going to wander. In the books, he wandered and found Mordeth and took the dagger.
I have to stop that.
---
Thom played music as the night deepened.
The gleeman's fingers moved across his harp strings, pulling out a melody that Spencer didn't recognize — something old, something sad, something about a city that fell to its own hatred. The notes hung in the corrupted air like prayers no one would answer.
Spencer listened with his back against a wall, watching the fire and thinking about everything he'd lost.
I used to read about this world. Late nights, audiobooks during commutes, forum arguments about whether Moiraine was right to manipulate everyone.
Now I'm here. In the story. And the music is real, and the fire is real, and somewhere in this dead city there's a monster that wants to eat my friend's soul.
The melody shifted, becoming something almost hopeful. A song about morning, maybe. About light returning after darkness.
Spencer closed his eyes and let himself feel it.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to remember that not everything was strategy and survival and fear.
---
Mat slipped away two hours after midnight.
Spencer had been watching for it — the restless shifting in Mat's bedroll, the careful glances toward the sleeping forms of Rand and Perrin, the moment when Mat finally convinced himself that a quick look wouldn't hurt anyone.
Curiosity and bad decisions. That's Mat Cauthon in two words.
Spencer followed. Not closely — Mat would notice that — but at enough distance to track his golden thread through the dark streets. The Warder Positioning Lan had taught him made the movement almost silent, though Spencer's heart hammered loud enough to wake the dead.
Don't let him reach Mordeth. Don't let him touch the dagger.
Mat's thread led through narrow streets and past buildings that still showed signs of the lives lived here before the fall. A cobbler's shop with leather tools still on the workbench. A tavern with chairs arranged around tables no one would ever sit at again.
And then a grand hall, doors hanging open, something waiting inside.
Spencer's Thread Sight screamed warning.
---
Mordeth was worse than the city around him.
The thing in the hall wasn't human anymore — if it had ever been. Its thread was concentrated Shadar Logoth corruption, the same curdled green-gold as the stones but denser, more aware. It had a human shape, but the shape kept sliding, reforming, as if it couldn't quite remember what people looked like.
Mat was reaching for the door.
"Mat." Spencer's voice came out harsh, too loud. "Stop."
Mat spun, hand going to the knife at his belt. "Blood and ashes, Aldan! You nearly stopped my heart."
"I heard something. Deeper inside." Spencer pointed past the grand hall, toward a corridor that led into darkness. "We should go back."
"I just wanted to look—"
"Now, Mat."
Something in Spencer's tone must have registered. Mat's grin faded, replaced by the wary alertness of a gambler recognizing a bluff he couldn't call.
"Fine. But you're buying the next round of drinks."
They turned to leave.
And Mordeth's thread reached out.
---
The touch was like ice water poured into Spencer's skull.
Not an attack — Mordeth wasn't trying to corrupt him, not yet. Just... tasting. Examining. The thread-tendril brushed against the Codex's presence and recoiled slightly, then pressed closer with what Spencer could only describe as curiosity.
[WARNING: Alien entity contact. Non-Shadow corruption detected. Entity has registered Codex signature.]
It knows what I am. Or it knows I'm something different.
That's very, very bad.
Spencer kept walking. Kept his hand on Mat's shoulder. Kept his face neutral and his breathing steady.
Behind him, something ancient and patient watched him go.
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