Dravenhold's inner sanctum was quiet in the early hours, lit only by dying torchlight and the pale red gleam of dawn fighting through the cracks in the stone.
Kael stood alone, high in the overlook tower, where the mountains met the sky.
He'd been awake for two nights straight—maps spread before him, pulses of the Veil drifting through his bones like smoke. The deeper he reached into the power, the more he could feel the movements of the enemy.
And just beyond that… the presence. Always watching. Always whispering.
Then came the knock.
Darric entered, mud still clinging to his boots, holding a crimson-sealed scroll in one hand.
"It's from Lyra. One of her shadows made it back."
Kael took the scroll without a word. He broke the wax.
He read it slowly, once. Then again.
"Tunnel collapsed. Veilwalker slain. Minimal losses. Outpost crippled. Fear is spreading."
"They believe you walk among their dreams."
A small exhale escaped him.
"She did it," he whispered.
Darric stepped closer. "She's a knife in the dark, that one. But this cost her something. I saw it in the scout's eyes."
Kael nodded. "It always costs."
He rolled the scroll closed, then turned back toward the wind.
The Black Host was adapting. Malrik was escalating. But the resistance was no longer reactionary.
It was surgical. Coordinated.
And the legend of the Crimson Sovereign—Kael Rivenhart, born of fire and storm—was beginning to haunt enemy lines.
Kael stepped out to the open walkway, letting the cold wind bite at his skin.
He reached into his coat and pulled out the old medallion—his mother's, worn thin by years of war and memory.
He closed his hand around it.
"You'd have liked her," he whispered, eyes on the horizon.
"She doesn't follow me because of the bloodline. She follows because she sees what I refuse to."
He looked down at the Veil glyph burned faintly into his palm.
"That maybe I can still be human."
He returned to the war table and marked a new region—The Vale of Mourning.
A key route. Ruled by corrupted noble houses who had bowed to Malrik before the first swords even fell.
"They'll expect sabotage," he murmured. "Not fire."
Darric frowned. "What are you planning?"
Kael's crimson eyes gleamed.
"I'm done bleeding the edges."
"It's time we set the center ablaze."
The throne room of the Spire of Bones was never quiet—but tonight it shuddered.
The black-veined pillars groaned.
The air rippled with pressure.
The very Veil itself was trembling.
Malrik stood beneath the Crown of Chains, arms raised, chanting in a voice older than any human tongue. His eyes glowed with veiled crimson, twin suns of fury and rot.
The Circle of Hollow Priests knelt around him, their lips stitched shut, blood pouring from their ears as the ritual pulsed through the chamber.
A messenger had dared to bring news earlier. He no longer existed.
As the ritual crested, the Veil shuddered open.
A massive form shifted behind reality—a Veil-Titan, half-dream, half-memory, older than the stars above.
It did not bow.
It simply stared.
"Why do you tremble?" it asked in a voice that cracked marble.
Malrik stepped forward, voice shaking with power and strain.
"He moves through my lands like wildfire. Striking deep. Vanishing."
"They believe he cannot be killed."
"They believe he is more than a man."
The Veil-Titan tilted its impossible head.
"Perhaps he is."
From the void behind the titan, a new figure stepped forward.
Shrouded in gold-threaded rags. A face of cracked porcelain. Voice like wet silk.
One of the Broken Choir—lost children of the Veil, who whispered only to dying kings and mad gods.
"You fed on fear. But now fear feeds him."
"Your Black Host was bred for conquest, not devotion."
"You need worship, Malrik. You need believers."
Malrik snarled, lifting a hand wreathed in black fire.
"I need no gods."
The figure smiled.
"Then make yourself one."
As the Veil receded, Malrik stood alone, dripping sweat and shadow.
He turned to his generals—dark-robed, half-masked monsters of flesh and steel—and spoke with renewed, brutal certainty.
"They want a legend? I will give them one."
"Bring forth the relic coffins. Dig up the Thousand Martyrs."
"Let the skies see blood again. Let the Vale of Mourning weep."
"And summon the Voice-Eaters."
One general dared to speak. "They have not walked in centuries."
Malrik's smile was red and thin.
"Neither have I."
Beneath the Spire of Bones, far below even the Veilheart Crypt, there was a door without lock or handle—just a wall of melted stone inscribed with one word, etched in a language long forbidden:
SHUT.
No one alive remembered when the Vault of the Silenced was built.
Only that it was never to be opened.
Until now.
Seven figures approached in perfect silence.
The Black Choir, Malrik's high ritualists, carried no blades. Their weapons were songs—etched into their bones and souls, sung backward, devouring echoes.
Each bore a shard of the Crimson Key, carved from the spine of a dead god.
As they placed the pieces into the vault's seal, the wall cracked—not with sound, but with the absence of sound. A deafening void.
The seal dissolved.
The air went wrong.
Inside lay a circular pit filled with obsidian coffins, each ringed with chains etched in blood-runes and wrapped in the silk of Veil-spiders.
Each bore a name that no tongue could speak.
And within each…
…a Voice-Eater slept.
They were not born.
They were made—in screams, during the War of Sundering, when the world was still raw and gods walked like men.
Not of flesh, not entirely.
Their bodies were thin and long, without joints, with faces that flickered and changed—each a stolen voice, a stolen memory, worn like a mask.
The Black Choir began to chant in silence.
The first coffin cracked. Slowly.
Steam rose from within—steam that whispered.
Then a hand emerged.
White, elongated, too many fingers. Too many knuckles.
The creature crawled free like a shadow made flesh.
It stood, impossibly tall, with no eyes, no mouth. Only a smooth face that shimmered.
Then it spoke—but not with words.
Every torch in the room extinguished.
Every ritualist fell to their knees, bleeding from the ears.
One turned and began carving out his own tongue.
It did not scream.
It devoured scream.
Malrik descended into the chamber, his black robes trailing embers.
The Voice-Eater turned toward him and tilted its faceless head, sensing the Veil-wrought power in its king.
Malrik extended his hand.
"You remember me. I was the one who locked you away."
"Now I ask you: Do you hunger?"
The creature did not nod.
It simply began walking toward the surface.
More coffins cracked.
The Vault filled with rusted breathing.
With stolen voices returning to the surface.
With hunger.
Malrik stood at the gate, smiling like a man reborn in fire.
"Let Kael Rivenhart taste what the world tried to forget."
"Let the Vale scream—until it forgets how."
The village of Rellmoor slept beneath a grey sky.
A quiet place of farmers and old stone. It stood on the western fringe of the Vale of Mourning, just beyond the shadow of ruined keeps and half-burned woods.
They had heard the rumors. Of Kael. Of Malrik. Of war moving like smoke through the mountains.
But they were simple folk.
So they kept to the old rites. Kept their doors shut. Lit their protection runes at dusk.
None of it would matter.
It began as a stillness.
Not quiet. Stillness.
No wind. No night-birds. No rustling trees.
A baby stopped crying. A dog barked, then whimpered, then lay down and never moved again.
And from the far edge of the tree line came the shimmer.
A shape walking—not fast, not slow—across the fields with too-long limbs and no face.
Just a mirror of something that had once been human.
Every step it took stole the sound from the world around it.
The village bellringer was the first to see it. He opened his mouth to call the alarm.
No sound came.
His lips moved. His chest heaved.
But the noise was gone.
Then he collapsed. Blood pouring from ears, nose, mouth—his scream still trapped inside him, echoing uselessly through his skull.
By the time the first door opened, it was already too late.
The Voice-Eater reached the center of the village.
It paused beneath the old watchtree.
Then it spoke.
Not in words.
But in stolen voices.
Hundreds. Thousands.
A cacophony of dead men, grieving mothers, tortured wails, all crashing together in one unbearable tide.
People dropped where they stood.
Others clawed at their faces, at their own ears, trying to dig the voices out.
Some turned and ran into the fire.
A child knelt before the Voice-Eater and whispered, "Mama?"
The creature leaned down and whispered back in her mother's exact voice.
Then the child forgot her own name.
By dawn, the village was ash and echoes.
Nothing moved.
Nothing spoke.
Only one survivor crawled free: a broken-eyed priest, blind and burned, his tongue cut out—whether by his own hand or not, no one knew.
He would later be found by Kael's scouts. But even when healed, he never made a sound again.
Only scrawled one phrase, over and over on the walls of his cell:
"It spoke in her voice."