What the Dead Remember
The blood on Aldric’s hands wasn’t warm anymore. It had cooled into a tacky crust across his lifelines, blackened by ash and ritual ink. His knees ached where bone met stone beneath him, pressed into the moss-slick floor of the ruined chapel. Overhead, shattered beams groaned with each gust of wind, the sky visible through jagged holes in the rafters. Sunlight didn’t reach this place. It was too full of rot. Too full of memory.
He’d carved the final glyph into the circle with the tip of a consecrated blade, his own blood the ink, a sliver of his own breath burned in the offering dish. The smell was copper, smoke, and burnt clove. The glyph pulsed once. The air thickened.
She lay before him on a broken bier, limbs arranged carefully, reverently; armor scorched, jaw slack, blonde hair matted to her temples with dried soot. Seris Vale. Paladin of the Ninth Host. And once, briefly, his enemy. She had killed his master and spared his life.
He didn’t whisper the spell. He let it drag itself from the meat of him.
The wind stopped.
Seris’s chest rose with a rattle, like lungs resisting air. Then she screamed - a hoarse, guttural sound - and bolted upright, metal scraping stone, arms flailing toward him.
He lunged forward instinctively, hands catching her shoulders before she could fall off the bier. Her eyes met his, pale silver blazing with recognition, and in that instant, the tether snapped into place.
Pain lanced down Aldric’s spine.
Her scream cut off as her body arched, then convulsed. Their breath caught, shared. One pulse. Then another. A second heartbeat thudded behind his own, discordant. Foreign. Her heart, in him.
She collapsed against his chest.
“Get off me,” she rasped.
He released her and stumbled back as if struck. The tether whipped tight. A jolt of invisible force dragged him to his knees with a sickening snap of magic. She clutched her ribs and gasped. He coughed blood.
“What did you do?” she hissed, voice gravel-rough.
“You were dead,” Aldric said, breath catching. “I brought you back.”
“You had no right.”
“You’re alive.”
She stood, legs trembling, boot heels scraping dried lichen from the stone. Her armor clinked dully, scorched and cracked where the divine sigils had burned out. She looked down at herself with open disgust.
Then she swung.
He barely raised a hand. Her fist crashed into his jaw. His head snapped sideways. The tether shrieked between them - pure sound, like metal tearing - and her body recoiled as if she’d punched a wall of flame. She staggered back, clutching her shoulder, lips curled in disbelief.
“What…” Her voice dropped. “You tethered me?”
He touched his jaw, fingers sticky with blood. “Soul-thread.”
“That’s forbidden.”
“I know.”
She didn’t move. Her chest heaved. Wind stirred through the broken rafters again, and something outside answered it—a sharp, shrieking noise that wasn’t human.
She took a slow step toward the chapel doors. He followed. Not by choice. The tether held.
She stopped. He stopped.
She turned.
“Cut it,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Then kill me.”
“I already did that once.”
She stared at him. And the look wasn’t rage, wasn’t even hate. It was betrayal. Deep. Ancient. Like something holy had cracked.
Outside, the shrieking grew louder. Wings. Not birds. Not anymore.
She walked to the door.
So did he.
Her breath hitched. His followed.
She turned her face just enough for him to see the color returning to her cheeks.
“You made me remember what dying felt like.”
Aldric said nothing. There was no apology strong enough to bind that wound.
The crows outside were no longer circling. They were landing. Hundreds of them. Their wings sounded like wet paper tearing. One hit the window. Then another.
Seris drew her sword from the melted scabbard slung over her back. The blade was blackened, chipped, holy once.
She glanced down at her trembling hand.
“Don’t mistake this for loyalty,” she said.
“I won’t.”
Another bird hit the wall; and then the door caved inward.
The door collapsed inward with a gust like a throat gasping its final breath. Feathers and soot hit Aldric’s face, hot and oily, and the stench of something long-dead riding fresh air turned his stomach. A dozen bone-winged crows poured through the breach. Not flying. Hunting. Their joints clicked like dislocated knuckles. Their eyes burned with glassy green light.
Seris moved without a word.
Her blade shrieked free of its scorched scabbard and cleaved through the first bird mid-flight. It burst open in a spray of sinew and dust. Another dove for her face. She pivoted, slammed it with the flat of her blade against the stone wall, bones cracking under the steel like a basket of sticks. Its scream echoed like a child drowning.
Aldric flinched.
A third came for his throat. He hissed a warding glyph, pain splitting through his ruined palm as blood surged into the air. The spell stuttered but caught—light flared red, and the bird slammed into the barrier, erupting in a splash of smoke and hair.
Seris didn’t turn. “You bleeding already?”
“Bleeding still.”
The tether yanked tight as she surged forward, and Aldric stumbled with her. His shoulder caught the edge of the altar, ribs compressing with a sickening pop. Seris spun, saw him stumble, and for half a breath her mouth opened, just a fraction. Not concern. Not pity. Something closer to rage that she felt anything at all.
Another bird hit her chest, claws screeching against the holy seal etched into her plate.
She grabbed it bare-handed.
It clawed her wrist, sliced open flesh.
She crushed it anyway.
The bones crackled like firewood, the tether between them buzzing high and sharp. Blood sprayed. It burned as it hit Aldric’s cheek and his skin hissed. Her pain, his punishment.
He gritted his teeth.
She wiped her hand on the edge of her cape. “Rot-bonded,” she muttered. “Tethered to something deeper.”
“I know.”
She turned on him. “You always fucking know.”
Another wraith launched from the rafters. Aldric threw a sigil, thai time too late.
She caught it midair on the edge of her sword. The blade cracked in her grip; split down its core. The bird fell in pieces. The sword did, too.
She stared at it for a second.
Then dropped the hilt.
“Now it’s your turn.”
Outside, the sky had soured, yellow-gray and buckling like bruised fruit. They stepped out of the chapel into a silence too heavy to be called peace. Wind stirred cinders in small spirals. The village hadn’t been burned. It had withered. Every structure sagged under the weight of abandonment. Doors hung by tendons of rust. Rot lived in the walls.
Seris walked fast. Aldric followed, each stride dragging him half a pace behind, the tether biting into his sternum.
“You should be weaker,” she said without looking.
“I am.”
“Then why the fuck am I not?”
He had no answer that wouldn’t break her.
The path narrowed between two husks of buildings—what had once been a blacksmith and a shrine. The air changed. Wet heat curled around them like breath on the back of the neck.
She slowed.
He did too.
Then she stopped entirely.
“Why me?”
“You were strong enough,” he said. “And once, you chose mercy.”
“Once.”
She turned.
“Say it plain. You wanted to fuck the paladin who spared your life.”
“No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I didn’t want to fuck you.”
Her eyebrow rose.
“I wanted to remember who I was when you looked at me.”
That stopped her.
The tether went slack for a moment. They stood with a yard between them, and it felt like more than that. The chapel behind them moaned as something inside it died more quietly than the rest.
Seris sheathed the ruined remains of her sword.
“Then you’re a fool. Because I was trained to see weakness and spare it only when it served the mission.”
He didn’t look away.
“I know.”
She turned again and kept walking.
The tether snapped taut. It would always snap taut.
She didn’t look back, but she spoke once more. “You think there’s a world left to save.”
He touched the blood still drying on his cheek. Her blood. “I don’t know if it wants saving.”
“Then why raise me?”
He didn’t answer.
She didn’t press.
But she slowed just enough for their steps to align.
The trees didn’t look dead. Not exactly. They looked carved from something that had never been alive in the first place; bone-pale trunks with bark like flaked skin, and leaves that clicked in the breeze like teeth. The air changed the deeper they went. Warmer, wetter. Sweet in the wrong way, like meat gone to syrup.
The path wasn’t a path. It was memory worn into the ground. Hoofprints long dried. Blood long soaked. Someone’s scream still hanging on the underside of the wind.
Seris didn’t ask where they were going.
Aldric didn’t say.
They walked in silence for nearly an hour. The tether between them didn’t tug, didn’t tighten. It pulsed; not like a rope, but like a heartbeat trying to find its way back into rhythm.
She was the one who broke it.
“This forest shouldn’t be here.”
“It wasn’t,” Aldric said. “Before the binding.”
She didn’t stop walking. “You mean the resurrection.”
“I mean the thread. The act of tying two souls like this. It bleeds into the world.”
“That’s why the birds were screaming.”
“Yes.”
She stepped over a pile of sun-bleached bones; deer, maybe, or something shaped like one. It collapsed under her boot with a dry snap.
“How far is the crossing?”
“Another mile.”
“Don’t lie.”
He didn’t.
She slowed near a place where the path curved and split, two trails snaking between trees that leaned in like eavesdropping drunks. One trail was narrow, overgrown, thorned. The other was clean. Almost manicured.
The tether burned hot as she turned toward the clean one.
She jerked her head toward the overgrown trail. “This one?”
“Yes.”
“Of course it is.”
She didn’t wait for him to catch up.
Thorns caught her armor, scraping the cracked sigils along her pauldrons. Vines slick with sap wrapped low across the trail like tendons pulled too tight. The air tasted sharp here—like citrus and copper. Her breath came shallow. His mirrored it.
A minute later, the tether jerked hard, and they both fell to one knee.
Aldric hissed. “Threshold.”
“No shit.”
She braced herself on one hand. Her fingers sank into moss and bone-dust. Her whole body shivered, heat crawling up her spine, cold pressing down her chest like a blade laid flat.
“I can’t move.”
“You’re crossing.”
“What am I crossing into?”
“Memory.”
Her head turned toward him slowly. Her pupils had gone wide. The silver had dimmed. “Yours or mine?”
“Both.”
The tether snapped like a whip. Not apart; deeper. It buried itself in the marrow. Her ribs contracted. His jaw locked.
They crawled forward. Together.
Branches snapped overhead, unseen things moving just out of focus. The smell changed again—burned hair, wet stone, the sharp-sweet tang of lightning before it strikes. Light shimmered in the air like oil on water. Time folded. Aldric’s nails cracked as he dug his hands into the earth to pull himself forward. Seris grunted with effort. Her shoulder caught on a low-hanging limb, tore open the seam where her armor had already split. Blood ran freely. She didn’t stop.
Then the pressure lifted.
The trees thinned.
The clearing was still.
Dead still.
A ring of stones stood in the center, blackened at the base, each carved with names too old to read. No birds. No breeze. Only that soundless vibration that lives behind your teeth when something bigger than you is watching.
Aldric stood.
Seris didn’t. Not yet.
He offered a hand.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then took it.
Her grip was strong. Hot. Bloody.
When she stood, they were face to face, tether between them pulsing with light neither of them had cast.
“Tell me what this place is,” she said.
His voice came quiet.
“This is where we find out what the world will take from us in exchange.”
Her hand let go of his, but she didn’t move away.
And when the light blinked once — red-gold, deep and old and final — neither of them closed their eyes.
The circle of stones was silent, but not still.
Each stone breathed. Not with motion, but memory. Names scarred deep into basalt exhaled fragments of moments that had once mattered—laughter, screams, the whisper of a lover’s name before dying. The air shimmered with them. Sometimes they clung to your skin, slick and warm like breath on the back of your neck. Sometimes they sank in deeper.
Seris stepped across the circle’s edge first.
No ceremony. No prayer.
Her boot hit the moss between two stones, and the tether spasmed in Aldric’s chest like a hand curling into a fist. He followed without speaking. The moment he crossed, the trees vanished.
Not physically.
They were still around them, but distant—muted, like background noise behind a locked door. The clearing was separate now. A wound sutured shut around them. A world inside a scar.
The stones rearranged when they weren’t looking. Only slightly. Just enough that the angles no longer made sense.
Seris turned her head sharply. “They’re watching.”
“They remember.”
“Who?”
He gestured toward the nearest stone. A faint outline shimmered above it. A man. Young. One hand reaching toward something unseen. His mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.
“He was one of us,” Aldric said. “Paladin. Tethered.”
“To a necromancer?”
Aldric nodded once.
She stared harder. “What happened to him?”
“The world broke.”
She didn’t ask again.
Instead, she walked to the center of the ring, where a basin sat atop a low altar, shallow and polished to a dull shine. It was empty.
She touched the edge. Her fingers recoiled as if burned.
“It’s warm.”
“It always is.”
“What does it want?”
Aldric stepped beside her. The tether pulled tight, then eased, as though the circle accepted the pairing now that they’d acknowledged it.
“It wants to see what we are.”
“I already know what I am.”
“You’re mistaken.”
She rounded on him. “You think this place is going to tell me something new?”
He didn’t answer.
She turned back to the basin. The surface remained blank.
Her voice dropped. “Show me, then.”
The basin filled.
No water. No reflection. Just motion, shadow becoming image.
A battlefield, soaked in rain. Her own hands, wrapped around the throat of a wounded man. A sigil half-burned into his chest. His lips moving in a language she wasn’t supposed to know.
Her blade entering his belly.
The image blinked. Shifted.
A girl’s face. Crying. Reaching for her.
Seris stepped back.
The basin emptied.
“I don’t know them,” she whispered.
“You killed them,” Aldric said.
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re here. The basin doesn’t lie.”
Her jaw clenched. “And what does it show you?”
He didn’t need to answer. The basin was already filling again.
A small fire. A field tent. A child’s body wrapped in cloth. Aldric standing over it, hands slick with blood, lips moving, crying, shaking. Behind him—Seris. Younger. Whole. Watching with the sword still in her hand.
The image flickered.
The cloth burst into flame.
Seris stepped away again.
“What was that?” she asked.
“My first resurrection.”
“You raised a child?”
“I tried.”
The basin cracked. A thin line split the stone. Light leaked through it—pale blue and steady.
Around them, the circle of stones pulsed once. Not violently. Not cruelly. But final.
Seris looked at him, something jagged in her voice.
“What does it want us to do?”
“Continue.”
“And if we don’t?”
“The world decides for us.”
Her hand brushed the edge of her scabbard, but the sword was gone. Left broken in the woods.
She looked at him, stripped of everything she knew. Armor scarred. Truth worse.
“You said the world broke last time.”
He nodded.
“And this time?”
He didn’t speak.
Because there was only one answer, and it lived behind every stone.
They followed the stones until the light changed.
It wasn’t gradual. It flicked—like a lantern being uncovered. One breath, they were walking through dead trees and memory. The next, they stood at the mouth of a ravine carved into black glass, the world beyond it lit by something that wasn’t sun. A sickle of light arced overhead, gold with a vein of blood through the center. Beneath it, a staircase spiraled down, melted smooth by heat that had never cooled.
Seris didn’t ask where it went.
She just looked at Aldric once. Long enough. Then started down.
The air grew hotter with each step, and thinner. Not hard to breathe—sharp to breathe. Like inhaling steam laced with iron. The tether twisted with the descent. Aldric felt it in his molars, in the arches of his feet. The magic didn’t want them here. Or it wanted too much.
At the base of the ravine stood a door.
No hinges. No frame. Just a slab of stone that pulsed in time with the tether. It wasn’t made to open. It was made to resist.
A voice rolled out from nowhere.
“One soul must be known. One must be claimed.”
Seris drew her arm back, ready to strike the stone with her bare fist.
Aldric stopped her.
“Wait.”
He stepped forward and laid his palm against the door. The surface rippled. Blood from his cuts soaked instantly into the rock.
It began to speak.
Not aloud. Not in sound. It spoke inside him.
The tether snapped taut.
Seris dropped to one knee, teeth bared.
“What. What the fuck is it doing?”
He fell beside her. Their hands touched the stone at the same moment.
The door vanished.
Behind it: a room of white ash and mirrors.
The floor cracked beneath their boots, fracturing in spirals that reached toward the walls. Dozens of mirrors stood on iron stems—each one six feet tall, black-framed, angled toward them.
None showed their reflection.
Instead, every mirror played something else.
In one: Seris killing Aldric. His throat split wide, her face unreadable.
In another: Aldric whispering her name as he lowers her lifeless body into a pit.
In a third: They kissed. It was soft, tender, and she cried. Not from love. From grief.
“What is this?” Seris asked, voice tight.
“Possibility,” Aldric answered.
One mirror showed Seris standing alone atop a ruined cathedral, the world burning behind her, wings of golden flame stretching wide from her back.
Another: Aldric, alone, kneeling at the center of a battlefield, hands coated in light, not shadow. Dozens of bodies laid out in neat rows around him. Every one of them wept blood.
Then the center mirror changed.
It showed both of them.
Old. Wounded. Alive.
Sitting beside one another, the tether still pulsing between them. The world outside the window was green again.
Seris looked at it.
Then turned away.
“No,” she said.
“It’s not a promise.”
“It’s a lie.”
The floor heaved. One of the mirrors shattered. The sound wasn’t glass. It was bone, sharp and sickening.
A glyph appeared on the ground beneath her feet. Pale gold. Flickering.
Under Aldric’s, a second glyph burned red-black.
The voice returned.
“One must give. One must take. Or neither leaves.”
Aldric stood. Blood leaked from his nose.
“I’ll take it.”
Seris grabbed his arm. “No.”
“Why?”
“You don’t get to carry this for both of us.”
“You already did.”
The glyph beneath him flared.
He screamed, full-bodied, sudden and uncontrolled.
She lunged for him. The moment her hands touched his chest, the glyph under her flared too.
A scream tore from her throat, joined his, and the tether between them went incandescent. For a second, they floated, hovering in pain, in memory, in the moment of the wound that made both of them what they were.
Then the mirrors shattered.
Every one of them.
The world went dark.
When the light returned, they were lying side by side on a bed of ash. Hands still pressed together. Breathing ragged.
Seris whispered first.
“What did we give?”
Aldric didn’t answer. He didn’t know yet what they’d lost.
———
They moved through a plain of scorched black earth, a landscape blistered by memory. No trees, no wind, no horizon—just shallow ridges like claw marks in the dirt, and every footprint they left smoked faintly behind them. The tether between them had stopped pulsing. It throbbed now. Not with magic, but with dread.
Seris walked ahead, slower than before. Her armor had cracked further during the trial. Her shoulder pauldron hung loose, attached by a single twisted strap. Blood—his or hers—soaked the edge of her collar.
“You didn’t answer,” she said finally.
He didn’t ask what she meant.
“I asked what we gave.”
He glanced back. The mirrors were gone. The glyphs. The pain still lived in his spine.
“Whatever the basin didn’t already take,” he said.
She scoffed. “You speak like a priest when you’re afraid.”
“I was a priest once.”
She stopped.
He did too.
“That supposed to matter to me?”
“No.”
She turned. Her face was drawn tighter now, angles sharper. Her skin looked thinner than before. Like she was being stretched into something she hadn’t agreed to become.
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“You should be.”
“No. You don’t understand. I’m not afraid anymore. That’s the problem.”
The tether pulsed hard between them, once, like a snapped nerve. She flinched. He staggered. It passed.
In the center of the plain stood a figure wrapped in silk bandages, hunched over a broken lectern carved from living bone. It didn’t speak. It raised a hand and crooked one finger toward them.
A Summoner. Old magic.
Seris drew in a breath and let it out through her teeth. “What’s it want?”
“Confession,” Aldric said.
“From who?”
“Whichever of us carries the lie.”
She laughed. It wasn’t kind. “That would be both of us.”
The Summoner’s eyes flickered beneath the bandages, glowing coals behind a veil. Its hand turned upward.
A book cracked open on the lectern. Pages writhed. Images formed. A war camp. A row of paladins bound in chains. Aldric, kneeling before them, fingers outstretched. Seris among them, unconscious, a sigil burned across her breastplate. The resurrection had started long before she died.
She stared at it.
He didn’t look.
“I don’t remember this.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
“You lied.”
“I didn’t tell the whole of it.”
“You knew I would die.”
“I didn’t know how.”
“But you chose me.”
He finally looked at her. His face was hollow. Not from lack of emotion; too much of it, burned down to the white coals.
“I chose you long before I earned the right to.”
The Summoner gestured once.
The page turned.
A battlefield again. Seris atop a hill, calling down a column of searing light. Aldric’s master beneath it, incinerated. Aldric himself weeping in the mud.
Her hand shook. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“You saw me.”
She shook her head.
“You saw me.”
“I didn’t—”
“You looked me in the eye and let me live.”
The page curled at the corners. The image bled away.
The Summoner gestured again.
This time, the page was blank.
The tether flared.
And Seris stepped forward.
Her voice was low. Flat.
“Write this down, then. I remember killing him. And I remember sparing you. And I remember wanting to forget both.”
The book drank the words.
The Summoner inclined its head. Turned to Aldric.
He stepped forward.
“I remember letting her die. Not in battle. Before. When I knew what it would cost and said nothing. I remember tying her to me out of guilt and calling it need.”
The book hissed.
One last image flickered into being.
The two of them.
Side by side.
Older. Burned. Alive.
Not touching. Not speaking.
Just enduring.
The Summoner closed the book.
The plain around them shifted.
Mountains emerged from the smoke and, behind them, something vast opened its eye.
The spirit had begun to wake. It smelled their bond.
Seris’s voice came as a whisper.
“What does it want?”
Aldric didn’t answer.
He knew the answer.
Because what it wanted was what they never should’ve had.
The mountain rose like a wound that never scabbed.
Jagged ridges jutted from the black earth, spined and slick with something too thick to be rain. The closer they came, the more the air slowed—slowed like time did in a held breath before a knife sank in. Aldric felt the magic pull deeper inside his teeth. Seris’s boots began to leave small red prints where they touched the stone.
The tether had stopped burning.
It had gone cold.
Aldric didn’t ask if she felt it.
She did.
They reached the base of the slope just as the light changed again. Not dimmed—shifted. The red vein in the sky deepened to purple, and something high above the clouds moved. Something so massive it could only be seen by what it blotted out.
Seris slowed.
At the foot of the path, a body waited.
Laid out on a slab of polished bone.
A paladin’s armor. Gold turned green with rot. One gauntlet missing. One eye open.
She stopped walking. The tether jerked.
Aldric stopped too.
She stared at the body for a long time.
Then stepped forward and knelt beside it.
“It’s him,” she said quietly. “Commander Hark.”
Aldric said nothing.
She brushed dirt from the man’s collar. His jaw had been shattered, his tongue removed.
“They made an example of him,” she said. “But we weren’t told why.”
Aldric walked slowly around to the opposite side of the slab. The body’s hands were broken. Nails missing. Wrists scarred from irons.
“He was tethered once,” Aldric said. “Before the war.”
Seris’s head snapped toward him.
“What?”
“He was the last to survive it.”
The corpse’s one eye turned. Just slightly. Not a twitch. A full pivot, locking onto Seris.
She stumbled back. Her hand went to the sword that wasn’t there.
Aldric didn’t move.
The mouth opened. No tongue. No sound.
Still, the voice came. It used the tether.
It borrowed Aldric’s throat. “You were made for obedience.”
Seris froze.
Aldric’s voice—not his words—spoke again. “You were forged to serve and discarded to preserve the illusion of control.”
Seris’s hand curled into a fist. “Who are you?”
The body moved. Sat up with slow, awful grace. Armor grinding like old teeth.
“Not who,” it said through Aldric’s gritted teeth. “What.”
Seris backed away. The tether pulled Aldric with her.
“It’s not him,” Aldric said. His voice was his own now. Barely. “It’s in him.”
The thing that had been her commander turned its head sideways, like a carrion bird trying to remember what meat was for.
“Your bond,” it said, “is a relic of a heresy that broke the spine of the world.”
Seris stood her ground. “Then why are you wearing the face of a man I respected?”
“To offer clarity. To speak the truth in a shape you might not yet burn.”
It rose from the slab.
Aldric pulled Seris back. She shook him off.
“You want to end us,” she said.
“I want to end the contradiction.”
“And what is that?”
The creature’s skull tilted. “That you could love the thing you were sent to destroy.”
Silence.
Even the tether didn’t move.
Then it stepped forward, and the world trembled with it.
“I can offer you a clean severing,” it said. “One of you dies. The other walks away untethered. Free.”
Seris laughed once, hard. “You think that’s mercy?”
“It is balance.”
Aldric stepped between them. Not bravely. Necessarily.
“You’re the spirit,” he said.
The creature inclined its head. “I am the function; the fail-safe. I am the shape that memory takes when the world cannot hold contradiction.”
Seris’s voice was low.
“Then why offer a choice?”
“Because you are the contradiction.”
The creature raised a hand.
“Decide.”
The ground cracked between them. A blade rose from the earth; silver, humming, neither holy nor profane. Balanced.
Seris looked at it. Looked at Aldric.
“No,” she said.
The spirit paused. “No?”
“I won’t choose. That’s your language. Not mine.”
She stepped forward, past the sword.
Toward the spirit.
It did not strike.
Because she didn’t draw.
Aldric followed.
The mountain opened behind the spirit, and they walked through.
Together.
———
The mountain swallowed them.
No walls. No door. Just sudden dark; dense, hot, thick with breathless pressure. The kind of dark that wasn’t absence but presence. A thing you wore. A thing that pressed into your skin, looking for ways in.
Aldric lit nothing. Seris asked for nothing.
The tether was enough.
Each step echoed longer than the last, the ground beneath them soft with ash, then wet, then something like cracked hide. Their boots left no prints. Their breathing grew louder. Louder than it should. Louder than footsteps. Louder than thought.
Then a hallway. Stone. Familiar.
Seris stopped.
Her voice didn’t echo. “This is the Hall of Swords.”
Aldric looked up. He saw it now—arched ceilings, cold iron brackets, banners torn to ribbons. He knew this place. Not by name. By pain.
“It’s not real,” he said.
“It was,” she answered. “When they made me burn my armor for failure.”
He stepped closer to one wall and touched a mark, a tally carved in rage. He’d scratched the same one into his cell at the monastery.
Seris turned. “Is this memory?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Judgment wearing memory’s skin.”
The corridor shifted again.
Now it was wood and firelight. The orphanage. A hundred beds in a row. Aldric could feel the whip still buried somewhere in his spine. Seris walked between bunks, untouched by them. A child sat at the far end—barely visible. Skin shadowed, hair matted, face down.
“Don’t look,” Aldric said.
She looked anyway.
The child raised its head.
It had her eyes.
Seris backed away.
“No,” she said. “This didn’t happen.”
“But it could have,” the child said. “If you had asked to be spared.”
She turned. “This is your world. Your fucking memories.”
The child’s voice followed her like smoke. “I’m what you gave up to kill cleanly.”
She ran.
Aldric ran too.
The corridor changed beneath their feet, rooms folding and unfolding; each a wound, each a truth. A field of burning monks. A tower filled with half-written apologies. A forest of gallows, all occupied.
Finally, a chamber.
Still. Warm. Familiar.
One bed. One window. A cup of water on the sill.
They knew it. At the same time.
This was the room they’d been offered in the mirror.
Seris stepped inside. The tether didn’t stop her. It hummed, welcoming.
Aldric stood at the threshold.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
Spoke without looking at him. “This would’ve been easy.”
“Yes.”
“We would’ve grown old. You’d forget your sins. I’d pretend I never had any.”
He stayed in the doorway.
“Would you have taken it?”
He shook his head. “Not anymore.”
She looked back at him. “Why?”
“Because if we take it now, it means we’ve already lost.”
She nodded once. Then rose and walked past him.
He followed.
The tether didn’t pull this time. It flowed.
They stepped into the next room. It was round. Empty. At its center, a pool of still black water.
The voice returned—not the spirit’s, not a summoner’s. Just the world. “Speak what you are.”
Seris stepped forward.
Paused.
Then said, “I am the blade they forged to strike first and burn last.”
The water stirred.
Aldric stepped beside her.
“I am the wound they buried so they could keep pretending they were clean.”
The water shimmered.
Began to boil.
“Now speak what you want.”
They did not look at each other.
Seris said, “To be unmade.”
Aldric said, “To be known.”
The tether ignited between them; pure light, white and blood-red, searing the floor beneath their feet.
The pool burst.
And a path rose up from it.
Bone and memory and breath.
They walked forward.
Together.
The path twisted like a spine.
Ribs arched overhead; some too large to be human, others unmistakably so. Each step they took struck bone that flexed just slightly underfoot, as if the world was exhaling beneath their weight. The tether between them was no longer a thread. It was a current, a river of heat running through the air itself, and the ground, and them.
Seris walked first. She didn’t hesitate. Her armor had burned off in places, melted along the seams where glyph-light had licked through. Her chestplate was gone. Her gauntlets hung by straps. Beneath the ruin, her skin glowed faintly—not gold, not divine. Something older.
Aldric followed, slower. Every part of him ached. He felt split—spirit pulled forward, body trying to stay behind. Like the tether wanted to walk without him.
Around them, the walls began to whisper.
Not voices.
Moments.
A boot slipping on wet stone. The weight of a body being carried down stairs. A laugh. A name. A prayer mumbled through cracked lips and swallowed before it could reach heaven. All the things that lived in a soul after the dying.
They passed a doorway.
Seris turned.
Inside: her father, younger than she remembered. Sitting in the barracks. Weeping into his hands, the letter of her acceptance to the Order unopened beside him.
She stopped.
Didn’t enter.
The tether trembled.
“I don’t remember this,” she said.
“You do,” Aldric said.
She took one step toward it.
The tether pulled taut.
He winced.
She did not move further.
They kept walking.
Aldric passed a door on his side. He didn’t look in. He didn’t need to. He knew what it would show.
His brother.
Rotting, not from death, but from years of silence. From the night Aldric let him die in the street for stealing food the priests called sacred. From the decision to do nothing.
He walked faster.
The hallway ended in a narrow stair that bent inward; down, then deeper, then in.
At the bottom: a chamber carved from memory. Not metaphor.
Memory.
The floor was made of names. Every name the tether had ever touched. Dead languages, holy marks, burn scars in stone. The ceiling above was a storm cloud caught mid-collapse, frozen in ash. And in the center, on a pedestal shaped like two palms pressed together in supplication, hovered a blade.
Simple.
Curved.
Familiar.
Seris didn’t approach.
Neither did Aldric.
The voice came; not the world’s this time.
Theirs. “Cut it,” it said. “Or carry it.”
Seris stared at the blade. “This is the end of the thread.”
Aldric nodded.
“Sever it,” she said, “and we survive as strangers.”
“Keep it,” he said, “and we survive as ruin.”
She stepped closer.
Not a single sound beneath her boots. Even the air was silent.
“What happens if we do nothing?” she asked.
Aldric looked up at the storm frozen above them. “It falls.”
The blade pulsed. Not with magic. With breath. Like a thing waiting to be born.
She turned to him.
“I should’ve let you die.”
“I should’ve let you stay dead.”
They stared at each other.
Then, without a word, Seris reached out and touched the blade.
Not to lift it.
Just to steady it.
Aldric laid his hand atop hers.
The tether flared.
It didn’t burn.
It opened.
Light exploded outward, but it wasn’t blinding. It was memory and regret and blood and breath, all pulled into the space between them. The thread they’d carried wasn’t a curse. Not only. It was a witness.
To every price they’d paid.
The blade dissolved. So did the pedestal. Only the storm remained.
And it began to move.
The storm broke.
Not with sound, but with sensation. The weight of it came first: pressure behind the eyes, a sudden ache in the teeth, the air pressing down like an invisible fist. Then came the heat. Not fire—remorse, made physical. Every regret they’d buried peeled open inside them like old wounds learning how to bleed again.
Seris dropped to one knee, teeth clenched hard enough to grind enamel. Her hands pressed to the floor. The ground was made of names. It pulsed with every one.
Aldric reached for her. The tether held them together, but not gently. It dragged. It clawed at their ribs, pulling them into alignment. Not physical proximity. Spiritual convergence.
The voice that met them wasn’t the world’s. It wasn’t the spirit’s.
It was their own.
“Choose.”
The chamber shifted.
No longer ash and bone.
Now a chapel.
Clean. Whole.
High ceilings. Sunlight spilling through stained glass windows.
Benches lined in perfect symmetry.
At the altar: themselves.
Aldric, dressed in pale robes. Seris in her first ceremonial armor, the kind they gave you before you learned what it was for. They stood hand in hand, heads bowed. Peaceful. Unscarred.
A marriage.
A memory that never happened.
Seris stared at it. “No.”
But the tether hummed. She felt it—possibility. Not promise. Temptation.
Aldric walked forward, slowly. “This isn’t from me.”
“I know.”
They passed the pews. With each step, the image shifted, showing them different versions. A battlefield soaked in rain. Aldric cradling Seris’s lifeless body, her sword still warm in his hand. A throne room, shattered. Seris standing alone with blood to her elbows, a crown at her feet. A child. Laughing. Their child. Running between gravestones.
Seris faltered.
Aldric caught her by the elbow. The tether flared. Their breaths synced involuntarily.
“This is the cost,” she said.
He nodded.
“I thought it would be a blade.”
“This is worse.”
The altar opened.
No longer a memory.
Now: the spirit.
Not in form. In presence.
It filled the chapel. Made the glass tremble. Made the walls sigh.
Not evil.
Inevitable.
“Your bond defies balance,” it said. “The world cracks beneath it.”
Seris stepped forward. “Then take it.”
“No,” Aldric said. He moved in front of her. “Me. Take me.”
The spirit pulsed.
Seris shoved him back, harder than she meant to. “Don’t do that.”
“I started this.”
“You didn’t carry it alone.”
She looked up, not at the spirit, but at the image of herself. The one in armor. The one untouched.
Then she unsheathed the memory of her blade.
It wasn’t metal. It was a choice, given shape.
She lifted it.
And did not strike.
Instead, she turned it.
Placed the tip against her own chest.
Aldric surged forward—too late.
“I remember what I wanted,” she whispered.
Then she drove it in.
White light.
Searing.
But not death.
The chapel fractured like a mirror dropped on stone.
Aldric screamed. Not in grief, but in transformation. The tether flared so brightly it became all things. Not rope. Not light. Law.
And then—
Silence.
He was alone. Kneeling.
The chapel gone. The storm quiet. The blade gone.
Seris was gone.
But the tether still pulsed.
Once. Then again. Then nothing.
The world did not snap back.
It settled.
Like a breath held too long, finally released, but not in relief. In resignation.
Aldric remained kneeling in the place where Seris had vanished, though the chapel was gone. No altar. No pews. Just a plain of silent ruin stretching in every direction; stone cracked in spirals beneath his knees, as though some great force had been anchored there and then torn free. The sky above him was no longer blood-veined, nor blackened, nor bruised.
It was open.
Soft gray, as if the color had returned but hadn’t yet decided what to do with itself.
He placed a hand over his heart. The tether no longer hummed, no longer pulled or burned or breathed. But it left something behind. A warmth in the chest that had nothing to do with magic.
He stood.
The bones of the world had shifted. He could feel it under his boots, in the silence—not empty, but expectant, like the pause between thunder and the rain that follows.
The mountain had flattened behind him, crumbled into ridges that pulsed faintly with runes he couldn’t read. Where once they’d carved names into stone, the earth now bloomed faintly with golden grass—short, newborn blades erupting through cracks that had never grown a thing.
He walked toward the horizon. Not because there was something waiting.
Because there wasn’t.
That was the change.
No more spirit watching. No Summoner holding a book of sins. No mirrors showing him what could be lost. Just a world, breathing slowly, trying to decide if it would forgive itself.
He reached a river where there had never been one. Not wide, but deep. The current shimmered not with water, but with memory—as if the soul-thread had unraveled and poured itself into the earth. Every ripple told a story he almost recognized. The burn of her palm. The click of her blade catching his spell mid-air. The way she’d stopped breathing just long enough to whisper what she wanted.
He knelt at the edge.
Not to weep.
To listen.
And then he heard it.
One breath.
Not wind.
Her.
Not a voice—never that. Just the rhythm. The beat that had synced with his when she first came back, when she first screamed his name and didn’t know why it hurt to say it.
She was gone.
But the tether, the principle of it, remained.
Not binding. Not claiming.
Just witnessing.
And because of that, the world no longer shook at the memory of them.
It had made room.
The laws were changed now. Light no longer burned death on contact. The old temples would crumble. The paladin order would fracture. Necromancy would cease to be a weapon—they would call it a threadwork, a weaving, a rite of return.
It would take generations to understand what had happened here.
But Aldric knew.
Seris had not been unmade.
She had been woven in.
He turned from the river, walked toward the new horizon.
Not searching for her.
Just carrying what she left behind.
He found her in everything.
The trees that weren’t supposed to grow here, tall and ash-colored, bark flaking in soft curls like old parchment, bore leaves shaped like the sigils burned into her armor. He ran his fingers over one without thinking. It buzzed faintly beneath his touch, warm. Alive. When the wind stirred, they whispered not in voices, but in rhythm. The rhythm of footfalls in lockstep. Of breath shared under siege. Of two heartbeats trying to become one and failing, again and again, until failing was the rhythm.
He walked with no tether now. But the memory of it still lived in his body. A phantom pull beneath his ribs. A warmth that flared sometimes behind his sternum when he passed places that had once known blood.
No one spoke her name.
Not yet.
But he could see the world remembering her anyway.
A woman at a riverside shrine lit a black candle with two wicks.
A boy scrawled a glyph into wet earth to keep a bird from dying overnight.
A dying man, half-buried in mud and mercy, reached for a necromancer’s hand and called it holy.
She wasn’t in those acts.
But the shape of her was.
He crossed the Redstone Divide in early dusk, where the sky painted itself in colors the old gods used to hoard. Somewhere behind him, the ruin of the mountain still steamed beneath new moss. The wind had teeth again, but not cruel ones. It pressed into his cloak and whispered against the side of his neck like a voice trying to remember how to speak softly.
He let it.
By the time he reached the village, his boots were cracked, and his silence had settled into something permanent. The people didn’t ask who he was. They didn’t ask why the ground no longer screamed. They just gave him a room with a window, and food without questions, and space enough to sleep without dreams.
On the fourth night, a child knocked once on his door and said nothing.
He opened it. She held out a shard of mirror. It had been wrapped in cloth, crudely, like a relic.
“It shows things,” she whispered. “Not always real. But always true.”
He didn’t take it.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded and left.
He set it on the floor.
He looked.
Not at his reflection.
At the space beside it.
Nothing appeared.
Nothing shimmered.
But the floorboards beneath it warmed.
He turned away before it could finish whatever it had almost shown him.
Some things weren’t meant to be retrieved. Only carried.
The next morning, he rose early. The village was still asleep. He walked beyond the fence line, past the frost-covered fields and the boundary stones, out into the liminal edge of the world where magic hadn’t yet decided whether to root or retreat.
There, he knelt.
Dug a shallow hole with his bare hands.
Unwrapped the cloth.
Inside: not her blade. That had burned. But the broken clasp from her pauldron. He laid it into the earth.
Not as offering. Not as burial.
As witness.
The soil drank it like it had been waiting.
He rose.
Breath steaming.
The air smelled like dawn and ash and the iron-salt of clean endings.
He walked east, toward whatever remained.
No tether.
No vow.
Only the memory of what it had cost to make the world capable of holding them.
And the knowledge that even if no one ever carved her name into stone, the world would still remember.
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