Chương 29: Chapter 30: The Warden of Bones

The hallway went on longer than the ruin above it had any right to suggest, its walls shifting somewhere along the way from crumbling stone to something older and smoother. The air grew colder with every step, carrying a dry, papery scent that reminded Stelle of nothing so much as the inside of the Vanguard Barracks archive shelves, if those shelves had been built from something other than paper.

Corin walked ahead of her without hurry, carrying a small lantern that glowed with a cool, pale violet light, clearly not fire in any ordinary sense.

"Careful where you put your feet from here," he said, not glancing back.

"The dead don't much mind being stepped on, but the wards keeping this place quiet mind it plenty." [NOTICE] [Ambient mana density: elevated.] [Signature: unfamiliar.] Stelle catalogued the readings without comment, stepping precisely where Corin's boots had already fallen. The deeper they went, the carvings along the walls resolved into long, repeating rows of names—thousands of them, in scripts she barely recognized, some worn so smooth by time that only the ghost of a letter remained.

"There are tons of names written on the walls," she murmured.

"Yes. Those are the names of the people resting here," Corin said softly.

"Their kin bring their dead to this place." He paused, letting the violet glow of the lantern sweep across the endless inscriptions.

"It's said that burying a body elsewhere means accepting their death. Bringing them here instead means waiting for their resurrection. Every soul that falls is said to walk the land of souls afterward—and those who travel far enough to reach their destination become the bridge to their own rebirth."

"So a mortal can be reborn?"

"That's a question I'd like answered myself, snowflake. But I've heard countless stories of people being reborn. So possible." The hallway finally opened into a wide, circular chamber, its domed ceiling lost somewhere above the reach of Corin's small violet flame. Bones lined the walls in careful, deliberate arrangement—something closer to a library, femurs and ribs and skulls stacked with the same patient order as the names carved outside. At the chamber's center, a low stone dais held a single, unlit brazier.

[TARGET SCAN: Unknown Female. Estimated Age: 60–70.] [Mana Output: Tier 4.] The woman knelt before a cluster of skulls and bones arranged at the chamber's heart, both hands raised as though in offering. At the center of the arrangement sat a single, massive skull, assembled entirely from smaller bones fused seamlessly together. Stelle held very still.

"Corin," the woman said at last, her voice dry and unhurried, like wind through old paper.

"Still alive and well, I see. I half expected to be bringing you here to rest among them one of these days."

"I'm genuinely surprised you're still breathing yourself, Maren." Corin's tone stayed calm, though something almost fond crept into it. Maren's head turned toward them, then paused on the small figure beside him.

"Corin. What have you brought into my place?" Her expression flickered with real surprise.

"This is my friend," Corin said, watching the old woman with a rare trace of curiosity.

"She'll need your help."

"A corpse? No... she's alive. But I can't see it. Her soul." Stelle glanced at the old woman, trying to make sense of the comment.

"Something's different," Maren said.

"You carry a life force, but your soul... is missing."

"What is it, old woman?" Corin asked, uncertainty coloring his voice for the first time since Stelle had met him.

"I don't know..." Maren said simply.

"And I've seen a great many things, over a very long time. This child carries nothing I've ever sensed in anyone before." She paused.

"But... there is a trace."

"A trace?" Stelle asked.

"A very old one. We'll need to look closer to understand it properly." Maren's clouded gaze settled on her fully.

"Corin said you need my help. Let's hear it first." She can see something in me, Stelle thought, filing the moment away with the same careful precision she gave every anomaly. A missing soul. And a trace. Did the old woman misunderstand what she was looking at, or did she simply see more than anyone else ever had? Stelle finally spoke.

"Corin said you could help make me invisible to other Mystics. During my escape, I left my forearm behind. I believe it could be used to trace me."

"Mm. It could be," Maren said.

"A body part carries enough connection to trace its owner—to ask whether they're dead, to find where they linger, even to curse them through it. I take it someone wants to find you, and you'd rather they believed you already gone?" The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Yes. That's exactly what I want."

"But... did you know you're a strange one? Has any divine ritual ever touched your soul before? The Church, perhaps?"

"I've undergone one, with a priest in Oakhaven. And with Corin." The old woman looked at Corin.

"You people really are easy to fool. Poor child, taking this man's hand without knowing how terrible he actually is." Corin didn't seem to mind.

"You don't need to ruin my name. We actually have a fair deal, which is something I rarely offer. I'm not that bad." Maren's clouded eyes lingered on Stelle a moment longer.

"And the priest's ritual? What actually became of it?"

"It broke," Stelle said.

"He ended it himself, before it finished."

"Ended it?" Stelle considered the distinction carefully.

"I don't know for certain. There was blood coming from his eyes, once it stopped. He never explained it to me afterward." Something crossed Maren's face at that—brief, guarded, the same flicker of recognition Stelle had already caught once tonight, the moment Maren had first looked at her properly. The old woman fell silent, her clouded eyes drifting somewhere past Stelle entirely, toward a thought she clearly wasn't ready to share out loud.

"A ritual doesn't simply break on its own," Maren said finally, her voice more careful now than it had been a moment before.

"Not unless something is wrong. Interesting, that a servant of your Church would spill his own blood rather than let a divination finish on a mere child."

"You know something," Stelle said. It wasn't a question.

"I know a great many things, child. Whether any of them are the thing you're actually asking about is a separate matter entirely." Maren's expression smoothed back over, closed and unreadable once more.

"That's a conversation for a day when I've had longer than an hour to consider it properly." She waved one thin hand, setting the thought physically aside.

"Anyway. Since Corin's divination only requires a bargain, it wouldn't have touched your soul either way. But if this concerns the soul... then we may have a problem."

"So you can't help me?"

"No, no. You don't understand. You may not need my help at all."

"What does that actually mean?" Stelle asked aloud.

"Life and death are simply the way the living move through this world. Every mortal is born with a soul to begin with, and that's what makes them a living being." Maren looked into Stelle's eyes.

"You, on the other hand... you're different. Your soul is missing, yet a fragment of it still clings inside your core. That shouldn't be possible. A mere trace shouldn't be enough to hold a consciousness together." For a moment, Stelle said nothing at all. It was such a small sentence to have landed as hard as it did.

'A mere trace shouldn't be enough to hold a consciousness together.' And yet something in her chest tightened around it before she could stop it, some quiet, unfamiliar question she'd never let herself actually finish asking. If a trace this small shouldn't be enough to hold together a person... what does that make the one currently standing here answering you? She had spent months treating her own existence as a settled fact, a starting condition rather than a question.

It had never once occurred to her that an outside observer might look at the same fact and see something closer to an accident that simply hadn't finished falling apart yet. She let the feeling exist for exactly as long as she could afford to, and then set it aside, the way she set aside everything that didn't have an immediate use. She isn't wrong. Stelle hadn't been born. She'd been created by her creators, her presumed Mana Core nothing more than her own System Core wearing a familiar shape.

But what did she actually see? The Ghost Core, or the real one underneath it? Both ran on the same mana, in the end. The only real difference was that the Ghost Core was built to resemble what a normal Awakened's core should look like, while the System Core beneath it was something else entirely—something artificial, something that had never belonged to this world's rules at all. Based on her reaction, though, I don't think she's caught the distinction.

She seems to be reading the Ghost Core, not what's underneath it. Let's keep it that way, for now.

"Do you know what the trace actually is?" she asked, her voice giving away nothing of what had just passed behind it.

"Your mana carries frost—but it isn't originally yours. It answers to your will regardless, in a way I don't fully understand. When I look at an Awakened, I usually see their soul and element bound together, drifting around them. But in you, it has taken root inside your very core, dwelling there simply because its true home no longer exists." Maren's brow furrowed slightly, as though the reading itself troubled her.

"And it isn't entirely quiet, either. Something that old should have gone still centuries ago. This hasn't."

"..." Not originally mine. Stelle turned the phrase over carefully, setting it beside everything she'd already gathered on quiet nights she hadn't told Corin about. A frost that isn't hers, and yet answers only to her. Rooted somewhere its true home no longer exists. And still, somehow, not entirely still. A fragment surfaced from the small, quiet chronicle that had turned up in her archive weeks ago.

An old sage and a woman resting in frost, a heart that had never fully stopped reaching outward even after it stopped beating. Is it really possible, she thought, that something up there is still in some sense listening? Whatever Maren had glimpsed within her was only the outline of the mystery, not its full shape—just a faint edge, much like the one Stelle had only recently begun to trace back toward some far-northern peak.

If that small trace in her core genuinely pointed toward something real, and something still faintly awake, she would have to see it through to the end herself.

"Ha. You really are full of surprises," Corin said, though the usual ease in his voice had thinned considerably. He glanced between the two of them, something almost careful in his expression now.

"I'm starting to think our contract might actually be worth what I'm paying for it. And I don't say that often."

"Still," Maren said, "I need to confirm whether you're truly immune to a ritual concerning the soul." Maren stepped closer and plucked a single strand of hair from Stelle's head.

"Since you're already here, this will be enough. Take my hand, and we'll see your status through the eyes of Death." Maren closed her eyes, her left hand raising Stelle's own to shoulder height while her right hand opened, the strand of hair resting flat across her palm.

"Now, let your mana flow toward my hand." The ritual itself was simple and quicker than it should have been for something so significant. Maren's eyes opened, and the strand of hair in her palm withered and crumbled to dust.

"You... you're already dead."

"Dead?"

"To be clear... the origin of your mana reads as dead, or simply gone." Stelle didn't answer, and another silence settled over them.

"So," Corin said, "the people looking for her have no way to confirm she's actually alive?"

"Perhaps. We can't know that for certain. What I do know is that anyone attempting to verify her soul through the eyes of Death will receive the same answer I did." Maren's clouded eyes didn't waver.

"This is far more convenient for you than the standard method. If we'd resorted to that instead, it would only have been temporary—once it faded, you'd need to find me, or someone like me, to renew it. But you still need to be careful, child. This isn't something you should feel entirely comfortable with. Something as strange as you tends to draw the wrong kind of attention eventually."

"I will remember that. Thank you."

"That's exactly why you shouldn't trust this man. He's always a step ahead in every bargain he makes. Once your contract with him ends, don't make another."

"Come now," Corin said.

"Are you still upset about the day I gave you that fake wyvern bone?"

"Fraud merchant. Don't talk to me!." Stelle stayed quiet, absorbing everything she'd need to weigh later—whether this discovery would prove to be a hurdle or an advantage remained to be seen. Then she remembered something else.

"There's actually one more thing," Stelle said.

"Someone else I'd like hidden from the eyes of Death as well."

"Someone else?" Maren looked at her, then to Corin.

"Hey now, snowflake" Corin said.

"You're not planning on killing me, are you?" Then a headless body dropped onto the stone floor between them.

"Help me with this one instead," Stelle said.