Veradin, once a city of bell towers and white marble, now stank of incense and fear.
Its beauty had been famous throughout the west. Scholars once debated beneath open skies in marble amphitheaters, and poets wandered colonnades hung with ivy, reciting verses to gods long dead. But those days had faded like paint in the rain. Now, the ivy had withered, the amphitheaters stood silent, and the gods... the gods were not listening.
Now, its libraries had become sanctuaries for the deranged, its halls of law repurposed into temples to a god with no name. Where legal scrolls once ruled, now charred bones formed the spine of scripture. Where wisdom had once been sought, madness now answered. The cobblestones bled at dawn, and the statues cried at dusk—literal tears, saline and endless, streaming down granite cheeks. Day and night, the city wept. No one dared question why.
The cult had made it so.
And at the center of this unholy grief stood the Seven-Spired Cathedral, a towering fusion of old faith and new blasphemy. Beneath it pulsed the First Gate, like a wounded heart refusing to die. Above it, the highest spire loomed, once the seat of the city's philosophical councils. Now, it housed the Voice of the Herald—a figure cloaked in robes darker than moonless nights. It never spoke aloud, but those who stood in its presence found their dreams changed. Shadows grew teeth. Light became pain. And memory became something twisted, foreign, untrustworthy.
Caedren approached the city not as a warlord but as a whisper.
He wore no sigil, bore no banner. He dressed as a wandering noble, threadbare cloak wrapped against the wind. His sword—Ashreaver, kissed by three wars and a dozen dead kings—was hidden beneath merchant satchels. Lysa rode beside him, dressed as his scribe. Her limp slowed her, but not her will. Neither of them smiled. They passed through broken villages, burned-out keeps, ash-covered orchards. The cult had stripped the western lands of resistance, then salted the soil so no defiance could grow back.
Yet resistance still breathed.
In tunnels beneath the riverbank, hidden by silt and old iron grates, they found it. The Sons of Virelle.
A hidden cadre of exiled magistrates, surviving scholars, and faithless priests. Some had once sworn loyalty to the Crown. Others had fled the Crown long ago. But all bore the mark of rebellion now—not in speech, but in silence. Their leader was an old woman named Salien. Once a dean of theology, now commander of ghosts. Her hands were ink-stained still, though she had not held a quill in years.
"You're too late," she whispered when she saw Caedren. Her voice was rust and smoke. "The First Gate opens in three days. And it's no longer a gate. It's a mouth."
Caedren didn't blink. "What do they plan to summon?"
She looked at him, eyes tired. Eyes that had read too many prophecies and seen too many fail. "Nothing. That's what they worship. Not a god of creation or destruction. A god of absence. Of forgetting. A void where thought collapses. Where time stops. They don't want to rule. They want to end. Everything."
He walked the sewers that night. Just him, Lysa, and the distant sounds of water dripping like clock ticks. Each sound a countdown. Each echo a reminder that time still moved.
"It smells like death," Lysa murmured.
"It smells like camouflage," Caedren said.
They could move unnoticed—until they reached the cathedral's roots. There, stone turned to bone. Marrow-pocked walls curved like ribs. The First Gate had warped the rock around it. It was growing.
Its shape was uncertain. Sometimes a maw. Sometimes an eye. Once, it looked like a mirror—but what it reflected was not the present, nor the past. What it showed... should not exist.
Caedren stared too long.
Blood leaked from his nose. Lysa yanked him back.
"You saw it, didn't you?"
He nodded. Wiped his face.
"I saw myself."
"Did you win?"
He hesitated. "I don't think it was me."
The second day dawned with a crack in the sky.
Not thunder.
Silence.
The birds stopped flying.
The river stopped flowing.
The children stopped laughing.
The people stopped speaking.
They moved like sleepwalkers.
Eyes glazed.
Heads bowed toward the spire.
The Voice had summoned the congregation.
The Gate would open at dusk.
Caedren did not bring an army.
He brought fire.
Salien's rebels had smuggled casks of blackpowder beneath the cathedral over the years. Some of the tunnels were so old they predated the city's founding. Lysa had mapped the catacombs from forgotten scrolls and whispered tomb-lore. Caedren moved with blade in hand, slicing cultists in ceremonial trance before they could scream. The halls reeked of iron and honey.
But the Voice knew.
And it was not just a man.
The spire cracked open like an egg, and the Voice unfurled.
No bones.
No skin.
Just robes... filled with shadow and memory. A mouthless figure with hands made of regret. Eyes stolen from dreamers. It drifted toward the altar, toward the Gate, and its presence screamed without sound.
Lysa fell to her knees.
Blood at her ears.
Eyes wide with knowing.
Caedren stepped forward.
Ashreaver drawn.
Heart steady.
And for a heartbeat, the Voice looked at him.
The shadow recoiled.
"I know your blood," it hissed without tongue. "The failure of Ivan. The echo of Kael."
"Then you know what I came to do."
"You cannot kill what was never born."
"I don't have to kill you," Caedren said.
"Just bury you."
He raised Ashreaver—heirloom of the fallen north, breaker of pacts, singer of last rites—and drove it into the altar.
The explosion was instant.
Fire swallowed the Gate.
The Voice screamed, its shadowy limbs disintegrating in waves.
The cathedral collapsed inward, sucking stone and song and cultist alike into the abyss.
Caedren fell.
Lysa's voice was the last thing he heard: "Don't you dare die now."
When he awoke, he was beneath rubble.
Alive.
Barely.
The Gate was gone.
The First Mouth had been closed.
But as he staggered to his feet and looked at the sky, he saw no stars.
Only cracks in the world.
The Second Gate had begun to stir.
And somewhere, in a distant valley once sacred to the first kings, a heartbeat echoed.
Slow.
Inevitable.