Sorrow's Pass earned its name from the wind. It was a ceaseless, mournful cry that swept through the valley, sharp enough to scour a person's cheeks raw. The land here was unforgiving, yielding only the toughest black rye and even tougher people. On the grand map of the Empire, it was a forgotten inkblot, the last ragged scar tissue between civilization and the wild.
But today, the sound hanging over the lord's manor was not the wind. It was a heavier, more viscous silence. A silence of the dead.
When Lilith arrived, this was the scene that greeted her. The manor's great iron gates stood agape, like the maw of a silent beast. The guards, usually stern and proud, huddled outside, their faces pale and their eyes darting away from the entrance as if it held a contagion of the soul. The air was a nauseating mix of rust and a cloying, unnatural sweetness.
The townmaster, a man aged prematurely by a lifetime of anxiety, scurried forward, wringing his hands. "The Artist. Thank the heavens, you've come." "Artist" was the honorific for her kind, a title laced with equal parts reverence and fear.
Lilith gave a slight nod, her only acknowledgment. She retrieved a long, leather-wrapped tool roll from the weathered carriage, her movements unhurried and deliberate. She wore a simple, dark grey traveling dress, practical for the road, her long hair tied back neatly. She seemed carved from river stone, smoothed by a thousand years of currents—serene, detached, and utterly out of place.
"Is the situation as the letter described?" Her voice was soft, like a feather on the wind, yet it cut through the nervous whispers with uncanny clarity.
"It is, my lady. No... it is worse," the townmaster stammered, a shudder wracking his frame. "Please, follow me. But forgive me, I cannot go inside. It is... unholy in there."
Without another word, Lilith took her tool roll and walked alone through the gaping maw of the gate.
She crossed the deserted courtyard and stepped into the main hall.
Seven bodies.
The lord and his family, all seven of them, were scattered about their daily lives in poses of grotesque tranquility. One was slumped at the dining table, as if about to raise a toast. Another lay on the bearskin rug before the hearth, seemingly in peaceful slumber. There were no signs of a struggle, no blood, not even a flicker of terror etched onto their faces.
But Lilith knew what horror lay beneath the calm.
Their skin had the cold, marbled quality of statuary. And beneath it, a network of ice-blue veins, like frost flowers, pulsed with a faint, chilling luminescence. The patterns seemed to shift, to crawl sluggishly within the flesh, radiating a cold that sank deeper than bone.
This was not a human death.
As a Grave-born Fae, Lilith's senses were attuned to mortality in ways humans could never comprehend. She could smell the texture of قيم, could touch the memories left in bone. The scent rising from these corpses stirred something in her, a feeling both intimately familiar and chillingly alien.
Familiar, because the source of this power was the same that belonged to the cabal that had stolen her Heart-Bone a century ago.
Alien, because this power was more refined, more... vile than she remembered.
This was her first real clue in a hundred years.
She suppressed the storm of rage and longing that threatened to rise within her, her face a mask of professional calm. She unrolled her kit, revealing a set of delicate silver tools and several small pots of mineral pigments.
She approached the body of the lord, her pale, slender fingers reaching for his cold skin.
CRASH!
The manor's gates were thrown open with a violent, unquestioning force.
The heavy, synchronized tread of armored boots echoed through the hall, a hammer striking at the heart of the silence. A squad of soldiers flooded the room, clad in black cloaks embroidered with the sigil of an obsidian stone. They were silent, lethal, moving like executioners summoned from the underworld.
The man who led them stopped in the center of the hall.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, his black commander's uniform tailored to him like a second skin, making him look every inch the blade he was. He wore no helmet, revealing a face of sharp, statuesque handsome-ness. But his eyes, deep-set and dark, held no warmth. They held only the pure, absolute cold of a northern glacier.
This was Kaelen, Lord Commander of the Obsidian Order.
His gaze swept the room, taking in every detail, before it landed, with unnerving precision, on Lilith. It was a hunter's gaze, sharp enough to peel away every facade.
"Secure the perimeter," he commanded, his tone devoid of emotion, yet carrying an authority that could not be defied.
"No one leaves."
His eyes never left Lilith as he took a step closer, his voice low and cold as he asked the first question.
"Who are you?"