Lyra's first breath tore up her throat like broken glass. Cold stone pressed against her spine, slick with the river's filth. Her body jerked once, then sagged. Limbs stiff. Skin cracked with cold. Every nerve screamed rebellion, dragging her back from the dark.
The air stank of mold and old blood. Heavy. Suffocating.
Above her, the ceiling wept. Thin streams trickled down the crumbling walls, pooling in the cracks between the stones. Braziers guttered weakly in recessed alcoves, their light struggling against the thick, rotting dark.
Shapes moved.
She blinked hard. Vision swam.
Skeletal figures rattled across the floor. One adjusted the leather straps at her wrists, working with clumsy, practiced motions. Another sorted instruments—curved blades, twisted hooks—on a rusted tray. A third dragged something heavier. A body.
Her stomach clenched. She followed its limp, dragging foot. Upward and froze.
The far wall was a butcher's gallery. Dozens of corpses slumped on rusted hooks. Some collapsed against the walls, others hung like puppets with their strings cut.
Maybe she knew them. Some hadn't been dead long—barely gray, their eyes still half-lidded as if stunned by death.
Maybe to a few she had spoken days ago. Names that hadn't yet faded from memory. Scavengers... Rivals...
Now just rot in the dark.
The scream clawing up her throat collapsed into a dry rasp. Her heart battered against the straps holding her down, frantic and useless.
Footsteps whispered out of the gloom.
Cerys stepped between the braziers with slow, deliberate ease, her robes brushing the stone in dry whispers. Ash clung to her hem like soot to a furnace wall. A cracked porcelain mask obscured her face, faintly stained where breath had once touched it. She moved without noise, but not without weight. People would leave before she even entered. They felt it, like pressure before a storm.
Behind her, Scriv stumbled into view. A stitched-together wreck. Bones wired with black twine, scraps of old skin clinging to a frame half-rotted. His broom scratched bone dust into ritual spirals with a grim, mechanical precision.
Lyra flinched, instinct more than thought. The air around Cerys seemed colder, the silence heavier. This wasn't just fear. It was recognition. Something in her gut—old thief's instinct—knew this woman had power she couldn't fake and would never lose.
Cerys stopped beside the slab. Her voice, when it came, was soft but carried the weight of command.
"Do you know what they are?"
A tilt of her hand toward the wall of bodies.
Lyra shook her head, breath snagging in her throat.
"Failed vessels," Cerys said. "Chosen. Broken. Discarded."
She bent, brushing her fingers across Lyra's bare collarbone. Even that light touch felt invasive—an assessment, not a gesture. Ownership assumed without hesitation.
"We tried to give them fire," she murmured. "The Wyrmheart rejected them. They lacked the will. The flame."
Lyra swallowed hard. Her tongue tasted like rust.
Cerys tilted her head. "You think there's something remarkable about you? There's not. No divine spark. No bloodline. You're here because we never tried with someone alive before. No one ever survived the descent, until you. That's it. You didn't earn this. You endured it."
She stepped back, voice steady. "You're not chosen. You're just the first who didn't die on the way down. We never had the chance to try this on someone still breathing."
Lyra's mouth opened, but nothing came. She wanted to speak, to curse, to spit but her breath hitched in her throat.
Her chest rose too fast, too shallow. She was shaking. Not from cold anymore, but from everything.
Her heart thudded fast and uneven, banging against her ribs like a trapped animal. She couldn't slow it. Couldn't stop shaking. Panic clawed up her throat, hot and tight, as if her own body was turning against her.
She turned her face away from Cerys, from Scriv, from the bodies on the wall.
She didn't say anything. She couldn't.
Scriv's broom scraped slow, uneven arcs through the bone dust. The patterns he shaped barely held their form, breaking and smearing as he worked. He muttered under his breath, half to himself, half to the empty sockets of the skeletal assistants that slumped around the circle.
"Steady now, steady... can't have another slip," he whispered. He nudged a loose rib into place with the broom handle, frowning. "You lot used to be quicker."
None of the other skeletons moved. Only Scriv shuffled on, talking like it mattered, like they could still hear him.
"Don't smudge the tail, idiot," he muttered to no one. Or maybe to the skeleton slumped beside him, its jaw hanging open. "We only get one circle, and I'm not cleaning it twice."
He adjusted a tiny femur, gave it a nod of satisfaction.
He worked like he'd always worked. Like the dead still had jobs to do, and he was the only one still paying attention.
Cerys knelt, the folds of her robe pooling black around her, and began to speak.
"Once, dragons darkened the sky, vast as mountains and old as the bones beneath the earth. Their wings crushed storms. Their hunger shifted rivers. Cities burned where their shadows fell. They did not rule by treaty or conquest, they ruled because no one could stop them."
Cerys's voice shifted, almost conversational.
"Do you even know who stands before you, child?" She paused, head tilting, studying Lyra like a curiosity. "Does the name High Priest Cerys mean anything to you?"
Lyra stayed silent, fear burning up her throat.
Cerys's chuckle was dry, stripped of warmth. "No. Of course not. Time buries everything. The old world forgets its brightest."
She stood. "It has been..." she glanced around the broken chamber, "...longer than I cared to count."
Her voice wove around Lyra, thick and low.
"They didn't march. They didn't negotiate. They moved, and everything else got out of the way. People followed because they were afraid not to. That's how dragons ruled. Not with titles. Not with crowns. Just power... obvious and absolute."
Cerys's fingers traced one of the runes, and the dust sparked faintly under her touch.
"But we rebelled, or so the stories claim. Paid in blood and ash, they say. That dragons fell. That their souls, the Wyrmhearts, were buried deep by those who feared them. Vaelrix was one of them. The last to fall. You've heard that name, haven't you? A monster in children's rhymes. But I was there, child. I saw the sky break."
Cerys rose, dust hissing from her robes. She raised one hand and shaped her fingers into a seal, sharp, deliberate. The air changed. Not colder, not louder, just heavier. The space around Lyra grew dense, like the world was pressing inward, grinding itself into her skin.
Something primal in Lyra broke loose.
"No..." she gasped. Her chest seized, breath too shallow. "Please. Please don't."