Emberholt Veiled
The wind that greeted Alaric and Mira on the outskirts of Emberholt was bitter and dry, a breath from old stone and older blood. The city was nestled within a split ridge, its walls dark with soot and its gates choked with silent travelers. Once a thriving trade citadel, Emberholt now simmered under something colder—something watching.
They left their mounts beneath a broken aqueduct and approached the city on foot, cloaks drawn and hoods deep. Mira walked with measured steps, her fingers brushing the iron glyph-threads stitched into her robe—silent wards that trembled faintly as they neared the threshold. Alaric walked beside her, calm and wolf-still, but his eyes scanned every rooftop, every alley, every shift in the scent of the air.
No sentries challenged them. No guards inspected their passage. The gates hung open—not in invitation, but abandonment.
Inside, the streets were half-empty, though eyes peered from behind drapes and lattice. The people who dared the roads moved fast, heads down, carrying bundles, not commerce. Emberholt was not conquered—but it feared something.
"Too quiet," Mira whispered.
"I can smell it," Alaric murmured. "Something else breathes here."
They reached the central quarter as bells tolled a strange pattern—not time, not ritual. A warning. From the stone steps of the high library, a preacher stood shouting fragmented verses. His eyes were white. Not blind—burned.
"They walk again!" he cried. "You buried them beneath our bones, and now they come to collect! Your screams will not unmake the chains! The first failed walk—and they remember!"
Guards did not silence him. None approached.
Alaric and Mira exchanged a glance.
"This is the front," Mira said. "Even if the city doesn't know it."
Alaric nodded. "We find whoever still leads this place. We need to know what's already broken loose."
They slipped into the underlayers of Emberholt—through forgotten storm tunnels, along smuggler paths once used to move forbidden lycanthropic bloodstones. The deeper they went, the thicker the magic in the air became: not fresh spellwork, but ancient bindings unraveling.
In a catacomb chamber deep beneath the city's forge district, they found it.
A rift.
It pulsed in the dark—a vertical gash in the air itself, where light bent and whispered. Chains lay melted at its base. The ward-circle once carved around it was scorched, as if something inside had burned its way out.
And beside it, two bodies—still smoldering.
Neither human.
Their bones were wrong. Their mouths stretched back into jagged maws. Inhuman, but not beast.
"Protoforms," Mira said, voice strained. "Failed vessels. Flesh the Council tried to shape before they understood soulbinding."
Alaric crouched, hand near one. The heat still radiated.
"Whatever came out of here... didn't stay."
They heard it then—a scraping, low and distant, like talons dragging across stone far too wide to be anything living. Mira reached for Alaric instinctively.
"We need to warn them," she said.
"Who?" he asked. "These people? They're already paralyzed."
"No," she said, and her eyes glowed with sudden intensity. "The rebellion. Caelen. The outposts. They have no idea what's about to step into their nightmares."
Alaric straightened. His voice was iron.
"Then we bring the war to the thing before it spreads its shadow. If this is the Council's first move, we strike before the second."
Together they turned and vanished into the tunnels, leaving the cracked rift behind them.
Above, the sky began to bleed red with sunset, though no clouds stirred.
And far to the west, something monstrous watched them with eyes that had not opened in a thousand years.