Time began to rot.
Every tick of the clock was a hammer in Shanane's skull, a whisper in her ear, a thread unraveling from the fabric of her sanity.
The promise she had made in the dark beneath the cottage weighed heavier than any iron chain. And yet, she could not regret it. She had made the pact to save the ones she loved. But now, each morning, she woke with her soul curled inwards like a dying flame.
Eoghan remained at her side, silent and watchful. He no longer offered comfort. There was nothing to say. Hope had become a brittle thing, shattered too many times to be repaired. What remained was work...always the work. Research became survival.
They began in the logical places: books older than any library's catalog, symbols burned into bone and bark. Eoghan unearthed tomes from vaults sealed by time, parchments hidden behind false walls in the cottage cellar, notebooks from the dead that still bled at the edges.
But nothing pointed to salvation.
The names they needed had been scraped from history. The rituals were broken, severed by madness or silenced by death. When Atheramond's name appeared, it was always accompanied by violence: pages torn out, ink slashed into oblivion, or a single word followed by smears of blood.
Still, they searched.
Shanane began to dream again, but they weren't dreams. They were absences, hollow spaces where part of her soul was gnawed away each night.
On the fourth day, the sigil appeared, drawn in wet ash at their doorstep. It hadn't been left by man or animal. It was a mark, a whisper from the abyss. The demon lord was watching, counting.
Their travels grew more desperate. Silent towns and twisted forests became the backdrop of a pilgrimage without faith. They knocked on doors that opened too late or not at all. They chased rumors: an old healer in Berwind who summoned lightning with her breath, a man near Istren's marshes who claimed he heard the cries of unborn ghosts.
Every trail ended in failure. Either the stories were lies or the power pitiful, ticks and shivers masquerading as magic. Some offered nonsense: sage smoke and crystal charms, videos of chants pulled from the internet. One woman tried to cure Shanane with "positive thoughts."
By the end of the first week, the world had begun to shift. The moon turned a deeper red, not yet crimson, but dark enough to stain the sky with warning. The wind carried a strange scent, neither death nor decay, but something older. A wound in the air.
The barrier between realms was thinning. The demon lord was not waiting. He was preparing.
Shanane's dreams grew worse. She wandered through forests that breathed. Mirrors bled. Staircases spiraled into bone. Her grandmother stood blind, mouth sewn shut. Aurora floated in black water, her limbs twitching like a puppet's. And Ren was gone. Not even the dreams could find her.
Reality cracked.
Birds flew in spirals overhead until they collapsed midair. Water ran upstream. Dogs barked at empty corners and then fled, tails between their legs, as if something cold had moved through them.
Eoghan began to keep a blade on him at all times. Not because he believed it would protect them, but because holding something solid made him feel sane. Every time he saw Shanane staring too long into the fire or at nothing, he'd call her back with her name, gently, urgently.
They keep pursuing every whisper, every desperate lead passed in hushed tones by the few who still believed in the dark.
A man near Dolmere called himself "Sorren the Ash-Binder". With soot-stained fingers and bones rattling from his neck, he claimed he'd seen Atheramond and lived. He offered to purge the pact with a potion brewed from crow's blood, grave mold, and "boiled dreams." He danced in circles, muttering lies dressed as ritual.
The next was worse. In a crumbling manor lit by eternal candles, "Seraphina of the Twelve Moons" wrapped herself in silk and riddles. She demanded one of Shanane's eyes, the left one, claiming it tethered the pact. But when asked if she truly knew the demon's name, she faltered, turned pale, and refused to speak it aloud. Her fear was genuine. Her power, nonexistent.
A warlock who boasted of breaking pacts was exposed as a killer who had left villages salted and dead. A coven in Trestel promised aid, but the moment Atheramond's name was whispered, they fled in panic.
And then came the worst: the ones who knew the truth.
They wore no robes. They spoke no chants. Their power clung to them like old wounds. One lived in a collapsed chapel, a blind woman who knew Shanane's face before she stepped through the door. She served them bitter tea and stared into the void.
She told them that Atheramond was not a demon to banish. He was older than language, heavier than the world itself, a force that pulled souls into silence like gravity. She would not help. Not out of malice, but out of terror. Because she knew: death was not what he brought.
They left her in silence.
Again and again, the pattern repeated. Those who spoke Atheramond's name refused to speak it twice. Those who had true power chose fear instead of defiance. He was not a prince of hell. Not a conjuration. He was a constant.
Some whispered he was the first pact, the one that birthed all others. That every demon's deal was merely a droplet from the flood of his dominion. He was hunger. He was dread. He was the silence that followed the scream.
By the start of the second week, everything that could be searched had been scoured. They followed every path scratched in the margins of forgotten texts, every thread carried by trembling voices in the dark. But none led to deliverance.
And then the signs began.
The moon, once only tinted, deepened its hue to an almost arterial red. The wind spoke in murmurs through the trees, and shadows stretched unnaturally, slinking along surfaces where light once held dominion.
The veil between worlds now felt thin as paper. Birds stopped singing. Even the air had grown dense, like breath inside a tomb.
One morning, on the sixteenth day, Shanane woke with something burned into the skin of her palm. No pain had come with it. No flame. Just the sigil: black, intricate, veined with a darkness that shimmered beneath the skin. She recognized it. It was the final seal, the mark that meant the pact was nearing its fulfillment.
The cottage around them had already begun to shift. The fire no longer gave warmth. The ground beneath their feet had grown soft, like breathing flesh.
When they returned to the house, everything they had written, every word of hope, every plan was gone. Not burned, but blackened. The ink had spread across the pages like rot, devouring the words as if language itself could no longer defy what was coming. Even the ancient journals and books were now blank. Only the worn covers remained, mute in the silence.
And then the whisperers begun. They came at night, curling like smoke beneath her feet. She didn't flinch anymore. She didn't blink when the moon wept a single droplet of blood. She only watched. She was helpless.
Even demons whispered Atheramond's name with reverence and fear.
In the deepest circles of hell, in caverns where light had never touched, in the places where language was a broken scream, he was still remembered. He was "The Flame Beyond the Veil." "The Silent Root." "The First Pact." He was the one who signed before time. The architect of the hunger that fed on promises.