Night had chosen her as its daughter, not with tenderness but with claim, and she answered without hesitation.
She pulled back her hood slowly, like unveiling something sacred and long-buried. Her face emerged pale and still, carved from silence. Torchlight hammered to the mine's entrance brushed her skin like a cold hand, flickering over features that refused to flinch.
Her black hair fell over her shoulders, smooth, heavy, as if weighed down by the dark itself.
She stood for a moment, gazing into the gaping black ahead. Not an entrance. A throat. A hunger.
"So this is where he vanished — The Scarlet Maw."
Behind her, Charon exhaled sharply. His hooves scraped at the earth, an uneasy rhythm.
"Easy, Charon," she murmured, resting her hand on his neck. A slow, warm golden glow bloomed beneath her palm, like breath beneath skin. The beast stilled. She whispered nothing more and turned from him without looking back.
The stone door loomed. Immense. Blind. No handle. No lock. Only a sigil carved deep into the rock: a broken circle pierced by a blade.
The mark of the Ashen Light.
Her eyes narrowed.
Mana crawled up her spine like frost climbing a shaft. Her vision cracked and shifted.
Runes revealed themselves, dozens of them, carved in a language the world had buried, pale scars around the seal, pulsing faintly — a cage disguised as faith.
"Lighthouse keepers, yet they hide the rot in the basement."
She spoke two words older than the mine, older than memory.
The runes faded. The light died. Silence thickened.
She braced herself against the stone.
"Move."
The door protested, groaning as it gave way. Dust spiraled upward. Darkness yawned open, thick, almost sentient, not absence of light but something waiting.
She stepped through.
The air tasted of iron. Old blood. Rust and memory.
She barely breathed.
"Smells like slaughter and secrets no one ever buried deep enough," she said.
Her eyes glowed gold. She lifted her hand. Light bled from her fingers in soft pulses, enough to cut paths through the dark without banishing it. The stone floor gleamed beneath her boots, uneven, slick with moisture and history.
The stone has gone quiet. Something else is speaking now.
The walls changed. Less worked, more wounded. Scarred not by tools or time, but by something worse.
Then the tunnel opened again.
A vast chamber greeted her, its skeleton of wooden beams blackened and bowed, creaking as though each one feared collapse. Every trace of ore had been carved out. The walls were hollowed like an old wound.
She stood still.
In the distance, a light flared. Small. Red.
A candle burned in a shack pressed against the far wall, its flame too steady, too deliberate.
She walked toward it.
The air inside was brittle — dry wood, old sweat, ink gone sour on paper. The red flame pulsed once as shadows stretched like claws.
She stopped.
"Nice stage. Shame the audience rotted in their seats."
On the desk lay a letter, pinned by a knife. Plain blade. No ornament. Made for cutting, not ceremony.
She leaned in and read.
"If you're reading this, the mine hasn't swallowed you yet. This place isn't empty. It isn't merely corrupted. Something is here. And it watches."
"Of course it does."
"The creatures wandering these shafts seemed like cursed husks at first. I was wrong. They move too human."
Her gaze swept the room, slow and methodical.
"The worst always do."
"Their movements are sluggish, hesitant, as though something still drives the body after the mind has gone."
"They still walk, but no one's home."
"They don't know what they're doing. That makes them unpredictable."
"I've seen corpses dance, but never with rhythm."
"The mine twists your instincts. Your reflexes start lying."
"Good. I like a challenge."
"Stay away from anything bearing black chains. They aren't restraints. They are warnings."
"Or signatures."
"I opened one. The insides were human. Without question."
"Not a ghoul."
"It still moved. It fought."
"Something was wearing the skin."
"Only complete containment has any effect. Salt must be pure, pressed tight, no gaps.— Reinhard of Noireval, Ensangré of the Scarlet Chamber."
She stilled. Her eyes narrowed.
"Reinhard."
She let the name settle on her tongue like poison she already knew the taste of.
"So you did crawl here in the end."
Her gaze scanned the darkness. Silence stretched, like a breath held too long.
Then her mouth curved, slow and sharp.
"Either you're a ghost too stubborn to stay dead…"
She stepped forward, the echo of her boots swallowed by stone.
"Or someone survived what should never have spared anything."
She straightened, unblinking.
"Either way… I'm not leaving until I see your face."
She folded the letter, slowly, almost with respect, slid it into her satchel, and sealed the leather with a single movement. Then she continued her descent.
The scent of blood thickened until it was no longer a trace but a presence, seeping into the very walls, staining the air itself.
The world around her no longer resembled a mine carved by human hands. It was a living chasm, breathing with slow, foreign energy, heavy as a thought no one can push away.
Her golden eyes flared, detecting patterns others would have missed.
A red mist crawled along the stone, thin, nervous, flowing like blood that had forgotten to remain liquid. Filaments seeped from cracks and spiraled downward, guiding her deeper.
She followed, step by patient step.
The tunnel opened and narrowed, as if stone itself breathed, and below, galleries stretched into deeper darkness: wood rotten where it stood, beams sagged under unseen weight, rails twisted like broken limbs, shattered crates lay abandoned like bones.
The air pulsed. Every footfall groaned like a wound opening.
Then she stopped.
Something stepped from the shadow.
Not an attack. Not a threat.
Presence.
A human shape formed, slow as though pulled from the stone itself — incomplete, unstable, draped in what had once been priestly robes, now filthy and torn, soaked in a brown-black that was no longer quite blood. The emblem of the Order clung to his chest, tarnished and eroded, barely legible.
He did not look at her.
He was weeping.
His face was twisted by silent sobs too vast for a body no longer whole, dark streaks marking where tears might once have fallen, as though even his grief bled.
"I… I didn't want it," he whispered, voice brittle and broken. "I thought… it was necessary. They told us it was purification. That the earth was sick. That some had to be removed so the rest could survive…"
His hands trembled, reaching toward something that was already gone.
"I still hear them… every night… every scream… every stare… they ask why… and I have no answer…"
She took another step closer, unflinching.
"Because you never had an answer when you chose to obey."
Finally, he lifted his eyes. No longer red with zeal — red with exhaustion, with the weight of too many dead.
"I helped send them down… families… children who barely knew a spell from a whisper… mages too weak to defend themselves… half-bloods who never chose what they were born as… and I told them to pray…"
He shook, voice ragged.
"I told them the Light was watching…"
The chamber seemed to shrink around them.
"You killed them," she said, her voice calm but piercing. "Not out of fear. Not for survival. But for comfort — because a world without them was simpler to imagine."
He trembled, as if that truth was heavier than his own bones.
"I thought… I thought death would be the end…"
"Not for you."
His breath hitched.
"Then tell me it meant something. Tell me regret matters…"
She met his eyes without wavering.
"Regret is what remains when all other comfort has fled."
He gasped, a sound torn from deeper than lungs.
"I would give anything to undo it…"
"You already did," she said, her voice quiet, final.
Her hand rose, not in mercy, but in reckoning.
"You gave their lives."
He closed his eyes, as though at last the truth settled upon him.
"I don't deserve peace… do I…"
"No," she replied.
The red mist curled tighter around him, drawn like iron to blood, absorbing the weight of his guilt.
"But you deserve to remember."
He did not speak again.
And then, as if the shadows themselves answered her decree, he dissolved — a slow unraveling into the scarlet mist, his presence washing away to whispers and wind.
She lingered a heartbeat in the lingering hush.
Then continued her descent.
The mist curled around her feet, guiding, not with sight but with sensation — iron, blood, memory.
Galleries stretched deeper and quieter. Wood sagged. Stone leaned inward.
She passed two more levels.
Yet still there were no bones.
"The mist must have absorbed them," she murmured.
A station appeared ahead.
A red torch flared into life with a breath.
On the table lay a letter.
Beside it, a sealed wooden box.
"You're guiding me," she said.
She picked up the letter, yellowed and brittle, the ink holding fast as though the writer fought with every breath to remain legible.
She read.
"To whoever finds this:I am exhibiting symptoms."
She stood motionless.
"I use that word deliberately — it is vague, but it spares me from worse terms. Persistent fever. Chills like ice crawling beneath skin. Memory slipping like sand through fingers. Lost hours… entire segments gone."
"You're still counting. Still watching."
"I know what this implies. In theory… this shouldn't be possible. An Ensangré does not fall ill."
"No. He does not."
"I wish I could believe it's just weakness. Something personal. A flaw. But that explanation is too small. The other explanation… is more consistent. And far more dangerous."
"You understood. Too late."
"If the worst occurs, I have taken precautions. There are notes in other galleries still accessible. I am testing a potion — a variant of Erol's Draught. I have no alchemilla left. I may find some near the Fosse. If not… I will improvise."
"In this place…"
"If the potion works, this note will be meaningless. If it fails — improbable as that seems — I have stored the formula and ingredients for you in the box beside this letter."
A pause.
Then the final line.
"I have not lost control.Not entirely."
She folded the letter with care and set it on the table.
"A lie. Or hope," she murmured.
Her eyes slid to the box.
"Let's see what you left behind."
She reached out her hand.