Chương 112: Chapter 26 - Legends

"Vera Morgans," the woman answered, though by this point, Gard was more than half convinced that was far from the truth. She turned from him, and in her hand a fist-sized crystalline orb appeared, bathing their surroundings in cold radiance. Gard reflexively raised a hand to cover his eyes but found, to his surprise, that the brilliance didn't sear as it should. It took him a moment longer to place what he was seeing: one of Kaldrith the Last Sage's fabled Lumen Stones.

A marvel of Resonance artifice—alone, possibly worth more than all of Hollowstone Table. Its glow made it impossible not to see the chamber around them, and when Gard did, he stilled. The floor was scattered with gore: scorched bodies, charred torsos, severed limbs, all twisted and half-melted into the stone.

"Don't worry, they weren't people," the woman said evenly, catching his reaction. She flicked her weapon in a low arc. Gard couldn't see the Resonance weave, but he felt the faint ripple in the air as a Form was invoked. Only when the nearest corpses and limbs skidded across the stone, dragged into a heap before them, did he recognize it. Hollowfall Sweep. A Fourth Seal Form, used as casually as one might sweep dust from a floor. Gard's jaw tightened.

He had spent half a decade mastering just three Fourth Seal Forms, and he could never use them with that kind of ease. Seeing one applied here—to corral severed arms—offended the disciplined soldier in him almost as much as it awed the pragmatist. And then there was the rift she had opened to bring him here. No Fourth Seal Mark could transport someone like that. Perhaps not even a Fifth. Yet this woman had indeed invoked a Mark tied to House Hollow that clearly had.

It made him question how much of what he thought he knew about the highest Seals was even true.

"Is it a bit much for you?" Her voice snapped him from his thoughts. Her silver gaze carried the faintest furrow.

"…What, exactly?" he asked. She began gesturing toward the pile of limbs, then stopped.

"…I assumed you'd be accustomed to these sights. If it's too unsettling, I'm sorry." Gard looked from her to the grisly heap, silent for a long breath. This was… very unbecoming of him. Overwhelmed, distracted—these were not the responses of a veteran Eight Binding Kindled. And yet here he was, feeling like a green recruit again. He shook his head.

"This is nothing. I should be the one to apologize. I simply wasn't prepared for this situation." He nodded toward the remains.

"You meant to show me these?"

"Yes. And I hope you can understand why I didn't feel particularly inclined to touch them."

"I do." Gard crouched slightly, studying one of the more uncharred arms more closely. They were misshapen things of bone and loose skin, long-limbed and resin-coated, etched with the sigil-scars of those following House Hollow's path, or… He rose again.

"This is why you asked if I knew about the Pale Reconciliation?" She inclined her head.

"I think it's likely they are responsible for these creatures." His gaze slid to her arms—hidden beneath cloth and fabric—but he suspected he already knew what lay beneath. Scars, similar to theirs. Gard himself hadn't been in Marrowfen back when the Pale Reconciliation carried out their plans, but even at a distance, their name carried some consequence. He supposed that if anyone could recognize those cult fanatics' handiwork, it would be a Hollow-blood. It was troubling news. Deeply troubling.

He forced his eyes away from her and let them travel the chamber instead. Hollowed stone, carved channels of something like black bone winding like veins through the walls.

"If I might ask… where are we?"

"Beneath the Marrowvault, I believe," she said, glancing upward.

"Hard to say exactly, but very deep. It took a lot of Resonance to step all the way down here at once."

"And how did you find it?"

"I swept the Marrowvault for presences while hunting the Shriekbound Servitors. These stood out." Gard turned back to her, unable to completely stop the stare that came over him.

"…You swept the Marrowvault?"

"I did."

"How much?" She seemed to consider it for a moment.

"All of it. Or most."

"The entirety?"

"Yes."

"How?" She shifted her halberd—a weapon Gard found himself reluctant to look directly at—and traced a glyph in the air. The shape shimmered faintly. Gard didn't recognize the Mark, but he was no channeler or sigilist. It was far outside his expertise.

"I'm afraid I can't sense the Resonance from that, if you expected me to see anything there," he said. It was a humbling admission. She glanced at him, letting the glyph fade.

"Mark of the Stillbound Veil. Suffice to say, it's enough for this purpose." Gard's throat went dry. The name was, in fact, one he recognized. As a First Seal Mark. Was this woman claiming she used a First Seal Mark to cover the whole of Marrowvault? He couldn't even begin to imagine the Resonance required for such a feat. Was she even human? Sweat prickled cold along his neck as he studied her again.

A scion of House Hollow, displaying impossible power, wielding a halberd that radiated more presence than any weapon he had seen in all his years—appearing in Marrowfen, of all places. And her name… Her hair color was wrong. The daughter with her had thrown him off. But it gnawed at him that it had taken this long to connect the dots. He barely dared let the conclusion be voiced aloud. Veralyth Mournvale. The Ashborn Ascendant. Returned.

He had seen Rekindled and Cycle-Forged before, but only from afar, in aftermaths written in fire and ruin. Even then, their feats felt distinct from the scale of what he had just heard. This felt closer to demi-divinity. To myth. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Though that was surely just him being caught up in the grandeur of it all. But the dissonance did cut sharp.

He was having difficulty reconciling the woman he had met earlier in the day, after the writ duel, with the one standing beside him now. Beyond her presence pressing so much heavier on him than before, her very demeanor was different. Graver. Sharper. Earlier, she had seemed like a talented—if headstrong—young woman. Now, he could feel the weight of countless battles in her bearing, struggles far surpassing anything he had endured.

She watched him for a few seconds, then turned, raising a hand toward the chamber's center.

"There's one more thing." She moved forward, toward where the bone-carved channels converged into a basin. Gard followed. The sudden revelations had been so on his mind that he only now noticed what lay there. A pool of shimmering liquid. They came to a halt at its edge, and Gard stared down into it, his pulse quickening. It spoke to the sheer presence of the woman beside him that he hadn't even registered this earlier.

Because what sat before them might very well be the highest concentration of Resonance he had ever felt in one place. It radiated a pressure that filled him with a mounting dread.

"What… is this?" he asked, forcing steadiness into his voice.

"I don't know," she answered.

"But it's what little remains after whatever the Pale Reconciliation did here." Gard stilled, turning sharply toward her.

"What's left?" She nodded.

"Yes." His eyes drifted back to the pool, lingering too long. He didn't want to imagine its purpose, but he had to. It was buried beneath Marrowfen, after all. After a long silence, her voice carried again.

"Has the Pale Reconciliation shown any movement since Whitefinger and the Silent Lords were killed?" It took Gard a moment to place the title she had used. Then his brow furrowed.

"Not as far as I know. Rumors crop up from time to time in the city, and many still act as though the cult lingers in the shadows, but I've never seen anything official to confirm it." He had read the old reports of the conflicts between Marrowfen and the Reconciliation years ago—when the cult had tried, and even succeeded, in bringing forth several of the Hollow King's Silent Lords, including their leader. Many of those accounts spoke of Whitefinger.

Once a monk of House Hollow, he had turned zealot and traitor, and for a time had been a powerful voice in Marrowfen's more powerful and spiritual circles. Even in the years since his death, some among the city still spat his name as though he lived and called for the heads of those once tied to him. Gard himself didn't share the same bitterness as the city's populace. But he had his own reservations, especially about certain figures who held sway within the Concord.

More and more, especially as of late, he'd begun to feel that something unusual was going on. He frowned. Just this noon he had been in private talks with High Warden Vaust Erelan, Chair of the Concord, a man he knew shared some of his doubts. Neither of them, however, had any inkling of anything on this scale.

"A ritual of this magnitude would demand a considerable amount of resources," he muttered to himself.

"This concentration of Resonance doesn't simply happen." Veralyth Mournvale looked at him.

"What are you suggesting?" His frown deepened. He let the silence hang, thoughts racing, pieces clicking together.

"… In its official capacity, the Boneward Concord has been attempting to compensate for the lost Resonance trade caused by their own edict banning most of it through the city—though often at reduced prices. They've accepted contracts from both Hollowstone Table and the guilds, and while little of it is public, I know much of the funding has come from Concord members themselves and several of the city's great houses. As for where all those resources have gone, that's a Concord secret.

The High Warden told me, in confidence, that much of it was supposed to be funneled into preparations for the coming tribulation once it reaches Marrowfen. Resonance weapons, defenses, and such. Sancter Vehl, their appointed Sigilist, has hinted at the same." He looked back at the pool, the shimmer of it unsettling his eyes.

"…But I suspect further investigation into those channels may be necessary."

"Will you be able to investigate that?" Gard turned.

"Not easily. The Chapter-Master will be back within a day or two. He has far more standing among the city's higher circles. But if the Concord itself is compromised, even his influence won't be enough to dig through it cleanly. I'd like to think the High Warden isn't involved, but I can't say the same for many of the others. I don't know them well enough to trust them."

"Then you should probably wait until Vanded's back and start from there," she said. Gard's brows rose slightly at how casually she spoke the Chapter-Master's name, but then he realized the two were probably well acquainted. In fact, wasn't the woman beside him supposed to be one of the most famed Chapter members in all the dominions? He recalled hearing a rumor once, that she had earned the Kindled Mantle rank across every Chapter on the continent.

It could be said that she must have lived and breathed battle like it was nothing else. The weight of her presence earlier had left him dumbstruck. But now, belatedly, he was beginning to process the enormity of who stood before him. There were those who said she was dead. Others that she had grown weary of the battles. And yet here she was, of all times. Fortunate, perhaps, given what apparently stirred beneath Marrowfen.

But Gard couldn't ignore the discomfort coiling in his gut at being the one to deal with her return. As humbling as it was, many of the tales about Veralyth Mournvale painted her with the same brush as Vanded Blazegrip when it came to recklessness. Without much warning, the woman turned and raised her weapon. Another tear split the fabric of reality in the halberd's wake, and she stepped through. Gard stood there for a moment, blinking, then hurried after, nearly stumbling back into the familiar air of his office.

The ease with which she wielded the impossible was hard to accept.

"Serel, find something interesting?" the woman asked, her voice suddenly softened. Gard blinked once more, this time in disbelief at how quickly it had changed. In an instant, the overwhelming legend was gone. What remained was the woman from earlier—'Vera Morgans'—her sharp edges dulled as she looked at her daughter.

"Mmm. Look at this!" the girl chirped, leaning over the sofa's edge and pointing at a painting along the far wall. Ink-black scales coiled around a massive, shattered peak, wings stretched like torn sails against a storm-lit sky.

"It's a dragon!" A faint smile touched her mother's lips.

"Sure is." Gard looked between them, his throat working.

"…That is Vaerazhul the Wyrm-Eclipsed. He nested in the Karthvale Crags until the day the Ember Throne fell. They say some of his bones still smolder beneath the rocks, and that his cries can still be heard on storm nights across the central dominions." The girl turned to him, wide-eyed, all her earlier shyness from before gone.

"Do you like dragons?" He fell silent for several breaths.

"… I do." Dragons were a quiet passion of his. An obsession, truthfully, that he had carried since boyhood. He rarely spoke of it with others—not even the Chapter-Master or Lunette knew more than the fact that he kept an illustration of Vaerazhul in his office. But at home, his shelves sagged beneath worn bestiaries, half-crumbling treatises, and old compendiums of dragon lore he had scraped together from every corner of the dominions he'd visited.

It was not something he'd intended to share with a child he had only just met today. But Serel's expectant gaze made it difficult to dismiss. Her face lit up.

"Have you ever seen a dragon?"

"I have," he admitted.

"Once." During the brief, destructive reign of the Chainfather in the last tribulation, Myrrkhal—the Chained Skydragon—had torn through the dominions. Gard had stood on the outskirts of a city as half of it was reduced to fire and ruin. Even now, he could not decide if what he'd felt in that moment had been terror or awe. Likely both.

"Wow…" Serel whispered, then turned eagerly to her mother.

"Mommy said she's also seen dragons. I want to see one as well." Gard glanced at her—at 'Vera'. That didn't surprise him. She had been among those who slew Myrrkhal, if the stories were true.

"What's your favorite dragon?" Serel asked suddenly, eyes snapping back to him. He paused.

"I don't have a favorite." Her face scrunched, lip jutting forward.

"Then why do you like dragons?"

"…Because they are incredible," he said, the words slipping out before he could stop them.

"Because no one agrees if there were hundreds of them in the last age, or only a handful. Because half the texts say Vaerazhul breathed molten glass, and the other half swear it was frostfire." He caught himself, but Serel was still staring, rapt. Gard cleared his throat.

"That is to say… there are only fragments of what they once were. Buried in basalt, melted gates, broken spires. And of those who remain, almost none would suffer mortals long enough for us to study them properly. The scholar in me that I never became finds that mystery… irresistible." A faint, almost reluctant smile tugged at his mouth.

"... Also, once, as a boy, I read that Vaerazhul swallowed a lighthouse whole, and I thought that was the most marvelous thing I had ever heard."

"What's a lighthouse?"

"It is a tower built by the sea, with a bright pyre at its top to guide ships when storms make sight impossible." Her eyes widened.

"Are they big?"

"The one Vaerazhul is said to have swallowed was nearly as tall as the Marrowvault spire." Serel gasped.

"Wow…" She turned back to the painting, wonder all over her small face. Gard glanced at her mother and found her watching him—an expression hovering on her face that looked perilously close to amusement. Then it was gone, her gaze sharpening.

"So," she said, voice more edged.

"How do you intend to handle the situation down below?"