The mist swallowed him whole.
Each step Vaelen took felt both ancient and immediate, like he walked a path trodden by forgotten ancestors whose bones fed the roots beneath him. The Mourning Vale stretched ahead in listless undulations, a sea of pale grass that shimmered like glass in the half-light. No birds wheeled overhead. No insects hummed. The land held its breath, the way a hunted thing does before teeth close around its throat.
He relished the silence.
The world was quieter without the petty noises of desperate creatures clinging to borrowed life. Here, between the realm of waking and the Hollow Between, he belonged.
The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed faintly against his palm, its pages occasionally rippling with unseen wind. Symbols shimmered on its surface — some known, others alien — as if the book itself read the air, tasting the currents of fate like a hound scenting blood.
He reached a crumbling stone marker half-buried in moss. The faded glyphs spoke of a house long dead, a bloodline choked out by plague and blade. Vaelen ran a fingertip along the ruined sigils, feeling the old magic lingering like smoke. His lip curled.
"Forgotten. Unworthy."
The wind shifted.
And with it came a presence.
A flicker of intent. Watching. Not the choir's hunters — no, something older. He could feel the weight of it, a cold pressure behind his eyes, like a hand pressing his face into deep water.
Vaelen did not run.
He knelt by a shallow stream, its water thick and brackish, smelling of iron and old decay. In its reflection, he saw not a child, but something else. Eyes too pale. Skin too bloodless. A smirk that didn't belong on mortal flesh.
The voice came again — a low, distant resonance, threading through the marrow of his bones.
"Salt Hollow remembers, Vael'Zhaur's heir."
He spoke aloud for the first time in days. His voice cracked, rough from disuse but clear.
"Then let it remember well."
The water rippled.
A face formed in the current — eyeless, its mouth stitched with strands of shadow. It spoke without sound, and the words formed in his mind like old scars reopening.
"The price will be blood."
He rose without hesitation.
"It always is."
Westward, the land darkened. Salt Hollow awaited — a wasteland of skeletal trees and salt-bleached earth, where nothing living dared remain. Perfect. In its forgotten heart lay the Wretch-Barrow, an ancient tomb of those cursed for knowledge best left buried.
Vaelen would claim what they'd left behind.
He would devour the past to unmake the future.
Behind him, in the veil of mist, something moved. Heavy steps. Metal rasping against bone. Choir hounds. Close now.
Good.
His pale lips curled into a humorless smile.
"Come then."
He moved like a shadow stretched thin, slipping through dead underbrush and brittle grass. Every step deliberate, every heartbeat a measured thing. The book hummed against his skin, guiding him toward something vast and terrible slumbering beneath the earth.
A relic.
A weapon.
A fragment of the old world.
And when he claimed it, another thread in fate's tapestry would unravel.
The storm broke overhead, a single lance of white fire splitting the horizon. Thunder rolled in its wake, a sound like a god's dying breath.
Vaelen Morghast did not flinch.
For in this ruined, broken world of false gods and forgotten things, there would be one truth.
Him.
And he would be crueler than all of them.
The mist clung to Vaelen's skin like a shroud as he moved through the overgrown path, each step measured, deliberate. The damp earth gave way beneath his bare feet, cold and soft as a grave's embrace. The forest here had grown wild, unchecked, a tangle of limbs and shadows that swallowed sound and light alike. It suited him.
His gaze flicked along the path ahead, noting the faint impressions in the soil — men. Five, perhaps six. Heavy boots, poorly disciplined formation. The Choir's hounds, no doubt. Vaelen's lips twitched, not quite a smile. Predictable.
They think they hunt a frightened child.
Fools.
He knelt by a patch of disturbed earth, fingertips brushing the edge of a discarded binding cloth, its pale fabric marked with old sigils of warding. Still warm.
An hour ahead. No more.
Vaelen straightened, eyes narrowing at the faint shimmer in the distance. The Salt Hollow lay beyond, its wastelands blighted and desolate since the Pale Fever. No sane man ventured there. Which made it perfect.
His mind turned, wheels within wheels. The Choir's agents would expect him to run toward the borderlands — toward some forgotten ruin or sympathetic hermit. It's what the old tales dictated. And so they'd spread their net wide, casting men to the east and north.
But no one willingly entered the Hollow.
Which means fewer eyes.
A glimmer of old instinct tightened his chest, not fear — never that — but the cold recognition of risk. Power slept in cursed places. The kind that did not suffer thieves.
He relished it.
Vaelen moved, silent as fog, threading through root and bramble. The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed faintly against his side with each step, the book a constant presence. It was quiet now, but its silence spoke volumes. As if it too waited.
In time, the trees thinned, giving way to dead flats of grey salt-crusted earth. Cracked stone pillars jutted from the ground like broken teeth, remnants of some ancient outpost long since lost to memory. The wind carried no scent here. No birds. No life.
Perfect.
Vaelen crouched beside a sunken cairn, eyes scanning the horizon. The distant shapes of men moved where the treeline met the Hollow's edge. Six, as he'd guessed. Armed with ash-iron spears and warding charms.
They come.
A lesser creature would run. A wiser one might even plead. Vaelen did neither. His mind was already unfolding the pattern — the angles of pursuit, the predictable caution of men chasing shadows in cursed ground.
They'll hesitate at the edge. Superstition will buy me four minutes. The leader, likely a half-trained augur, will order a warded perimeter before entry.
Vaelen's gaze fixed on the weathered arch of a crumbled shrine. Faint sigils lingered in its stone, old protections long dormant.
But not dead.
He drew the rusted dagger from his belt, pressing its edge to his palm. Blood welled, dark as ink. A flick of his wrist, and the droplets spattered across the stone. The Threnody's pages rippled at his side.
The air tightened.
A whisper, ancient and sharp, brushed his ear.
"Name the offering."
Vaelen's voice was a low murmur. "The blood of Morghast. The last and the first."
The stone drank it. The sigils flared once — a sickly crimson — then vanished.
It would hold. Briefly.
The first of the Choir's hunters reached the perimeter moments later, halting as the salt crust cracked beneath their boots. Vaelen watched from the gloom, measuring faces, postures. Fear in the eyes of the youngest. Confidence in the leader. Complacency.
He thinks this is a boy's game. Good.
The leader raised a hand, signaling the others forward. Ward-charms clutched like talismans, they advanced in a loose line.
Vaelen's mind moved ahead.
Three minutes to breach the line. Another to recover formation. They'll expect resistance to fall back, not press forward.
He stepped from the cairn's shadow, cloakless, bloodied palm gleaming in the dying light.
"Looking for me?" his voice cut the stillness.
They startled. Two men flinched outright.
The leader snarled, lifting his spear. "In the name of the Choir, surrender yourself, boy."
Vaelen smiled then — a cold, joyless thing.
Fools.
The Threnody snapped open in his hand. Pages turned without touch, ancient symbols igniting like falling stars. Power hummed in the stones.
The leader took a step back. "Kill him! Now!"
Too late.
Vaelen spoke a single word.
"Draem'valkaar."
The earth split. Pale tendrils of mist and shadow coiled upward, wrapping around the hunters. Screams rose as weapons clattered to the ground.
Vaelen did not watch. He was already moving, steps silent as he passed the dying men. Their fates sealed the moment they'd entered his game.
A mind like his did not waste opportunity.
By nightfall, the Salt Hollow would be his.