The room lay deep beneath stone and root, a belly of earth shaped long before anyone living could remember. Black slate walls ran with thin veins of pale quartz, catching torchlight and throwing it back in trembling threads. The air tasted of mineral and smoke, old dust and the faint tang of iron, as if the stone itself remembered blood. A round table anchored the center—polished to a dull sheen, its edge worn smooth by hands that were not kind.
On the far wall, hammered into rock, hung a sigil: a lion devouring a serpent. The lion's jaw clamped down, teeth buried in scaled flesh that coiled tight in frozen defiance. Flakes of gold leaf clung like old scabs where damp had gnawed the years. In the flicker of flame, the serpent's eye seemed to shift; the lion's hunger looked endless.
A man in black stood beneath that sign.
His cloak drank the light. Thin gloves fit like a second skin. His face was pale and fine-boned, expression filed down to nothing—until you met his eyes. Then came the sense of a cliff where there should be a path. A weight across the chest, as if the room itself had tightened. The air grew heavier around him; breath ran shallow for no reason you could name. A heart might miss a step simply from looking too long.
He spoke without raising his voice. The nearest flame snapped as if startled. "So," he said, faint amusement skimming his words, "the child of Daren and Mara is born."
The air held still to listen. Torches hissed. A thin draft nosed through a crack in the stone and died there, leaving a cool taste on the tongue like rain that never fell.
He set a gloved hand on the table and tapped once, twice—a habit of thought. "I have waited years for this," he murmured. "Now that the boy breathes, Daren and Mara will come again. What is rightfully his can be claimed."
He straightened, the motion clean as a blade lifting from water. "My planning will not be undone by a child."
He spoke a name then, soft and heavy. "Varn."
The temperature slipped. Cold unwound from nowhere, thin as thread and sharp as glass. A man stepped out of that cold as if it had chosen a shape.
Varn was tall and narrow, built like a spear. Black hair combed back from a high brow. Cheekbones that threw small shadows. A restrained mouth. Precision clung to him—boots clean, cuffs aligned, belt buckled to a ruthless tidy. He smelled faintly of oil and wet leather, the scent of work kept spotless.
His presence raised the skin—not sudden terror, but something slower, like footsteps you feel in your bones before the floorboards take them. His eyes were the worst: pale, not quite gray, steady as a level. When they met yours, you felt weighed and set aside.
"Master," Varn said, bowing just enough to count.
"You have always wanted this," the man in black said mildly, a dry smile ghosting his lips. "To test yourself against Daren. Against Mara. Consider this permission."
He did not move, but the torches leaned toward him anyway. "Two things," he added, placing the words like stones. The air drew tighter, a storm thinking itself into being.
"One: Daren and Mara must die. The child will die regardless—by your hand or by the curse that follows him." The syllables fell without heat; the room absorbed them like oil into cloth. Somewhere in the walls, a cooling stone ticked.
"Two: bring me the Resonate."
At that name the flames pinched inward, their edges running blue, smoke lifting straight and thin. The word changed the shape of the room, as if the walls took one slow breath and held it. A bitter taste crept under the tongue, like metal scraped with a knife.
"And remember," he said, voice softer, "names left behind still finish work. The mark is enough."
Silence thickened again.
Varn's mouth creased—smile or hunger. "As you wish." He stepped backward, not turning until the last moment, and then was gone. The cold he carried folded shut with him, leaving the room warmer by a small, guilty degree.
Silence dropped, clean and sudden. The lion and the serpent stared each other down in their endless struggle. Dust drifted, sweet with the smell of old chalk. The man in black did not glance at the door.
Another figure stood there as if he had always been part of the room, the way a sudden memory arrives whole. He held still for a heartbeat, listening to a music no one else could hear. Then he stepped forward, and the light found him easily. He was beautiful in a way that made the eye ache—features fine and balanced, skin clear, hair the color of wheat at dusk. Not delicate. Refined. Every seam sat right. He looked like certainty.
He laughed, a ripple without warmth. "So," he said, his voice wrapping the stone and drawing it close, "the prophecy has chosen its path. Our hindrance has come. I told you before—those two must die."
"They are already outside the circle," the man in black said. "They are not the hindrance. The child was born, and the curse passed with his first breath." He might as well have been discussing weather, but the room seemed to lean in to hear. The torches spat resin, a sweet, coppery scent catching at the back of the nose.
The newcomer tilted his head, gaze flicking to the lion and serpent, then back. He let the moment sit, then asked, careful as a hand on a wound, "What is this Resonate you want?"
The man in black lifted his gaze and met his eyes. For a heartbeat there was no one else in the world. The look was not hard; it was clear. It held the other the way a deep lake holds the sky—reflecting and drowning at once.
"Careful," he said softly. "There are questions that unmake the one who asks them."
The warning was gentle; its edge was not. Images seemed to pass through the air—cloth torn by an unseen hand, a candle going out where no light had any right to be. Stone carried a faint hum underfoot, as if the earth were thinking. "Some doors, once opened, do not let you back."
The newcomer's smile thinned. He wet his lips—smoke and salt—and looked again at the devouring lion. The gold leaf caught and lost the light like a dying ember. "I only need to know where to stand," he said. "And when."
Inside His thoughts raced, sharp and relentless. The Resonate—that was what mattered most. What kind of resonant was he after from those two? Whatever it was, I needed to find out. Or maybe he'd spoken that way to ensure someone would be sent after Varn. The scheme was the same as before. Watch the edges.
Whether the man in black heard that thought, he could not tell. Safer to assume he did.
All the torches guttered at once and then recovered, small flames throwing long shadows like the spokes of a turning wheel. The faint hum rose in the stone again, so soft that naming it might make it stop. The air tasted briefly of rain on hot iron.
--
Above them, far above, Lera slept and woke and worked, unaware. A child rolled in his quilt and reached for a wooden fox, the toy smooth with bite marks. A mother listened to the even draw of breath and smiled in the dark. A father counted the ways to stand between his family and whatever came, hand on the doorframe, feeling the grain like a pulse.
--
Below, the man in black looked up at the lion and the serpent and did not blink.
"Go," he said at last. The word barely disturbed the air. "The rest will come."
When the room was empty again, the earth seemed to settle, making more of itself around the silence. The man trailed his gloved fingers along the table's worn edge, lifting a thin line of dust no one else would have seen. He rubbed thumb and forefinger together, listening to the dry whisper, tasting grit like old ash.
He did not speak the name again.