The Necropolis of the Forgotten stretched before them, a vast plain where markers of the dead had grown into a forest of their own strange making. Unlike the Deadwood Crossings with its petrified trees, this place contained only monuments to those history had failed to preserve. Statues with eroded features. Obelisks bearing names worn to illegibility. Mausoleums whose occupants had been dust longer than anyone had been alive to remember them.
"We could go around," Serena suggested, eyeing the bone-white monuments with obvious distaste. "The Necropolis has a reputation even older than mine."
The Shadow Knight studied the graveyard's expanse, sensing currents of power that flowed beneath apparent desolation. "No. This is the direct path to the capital. And it calls to me."
"That's precisely my concern." Serena's violet eyes narrowed. "The Necropolis doesn't call to the living. Only to those it wishes to add to its collection."
Despite her warning, the Shadow Knight advanced into the field of graves. The ground beneath his feet felt strangely animate, as if something massive slumbered just below the surface. Between monument rows, mist curled and twisted with unnatural persistence, forming shapes that resembled figures walking at the corner of vision.
"The forgotten are restless," Serena observed, following reluctantly. "They sense your power. The Soulstone draws them like moths to flame."
The Shadow Knight paid little attention to her concerns. Since the trials, he had grown accustomed to the reactions his transformed presence elicited from entities both living and otherwise. The dead held no terror for someone who had already surrendered most of his humanity.
They proceeded deeper into the Necropolis, passing increasingly elaborate monuments that nonetheless failed to preserve the identities of those they commemorated. Here stood a general victorious in battles no history recorded. There lay a poet whose verses had died with her final breath. Royalty rested beside beggars, great thinkers beside common labourers, all equal in history's ultimate indifference.
At the graveyard's centre, they found a circular clearing dominated by a structure unlike the surrounding monuments. Not stone or marble but actual bone, assembled into a dome composed entirely of skeletal remains. Skulls formed its foundation, femurs its walls, smaller bones its decorative elements.
"The Ossuary of Identity," Serena whispered, recognition and alarm mingling in her voice. "We should not be here."
The Shadow Knight approached the bone structure. Names had been carved into each skull, each femur, each finger bone, creating a library of the forgotten in their own remains. The power he had sensed throughout the Necropolis concentrated here, pulsing like a heart beneath the ossuary's foundation.
"What exactly is this place?" he asked, shadows curling around him in response to the energy radiating from bone walls.
"A temple to forgetting," Serena replied, maintaining distance from the structure. "Those who wished to erase themselves from history came here. Not merely to die, but to sacrifice identity itself. They believed oblivion was the purest form of transcendence."
The Shadow Knight circled the ossuary, noting that a single entrance gaped like a mouth in its side. Beyond that threshold, darkness waited that seemed absolute even to his transformed perception.
"You're not considering entering," Serena said, though her tone suggested she already knew the answer. "The ossuary devours identity. Even with the Soulstone's protection, you risk losing whatever remains of yourself."
"Perhaps that's necessary." The Shadow Knight paused at the entrance. "The Grand Inquisitor knows me as Kaelen Dawnblade. He prepared for that man's vengeance. Perhaps becoming truly unrecognizable is the final step in my transformation."
"There are other ways to surprise your enemies. Ways that don't involve feeding yourself to hungry darkness."
But the Shadow Knight had already decided. The pull from within the ossuary wasn't merely power or curiosity. It was recognition, connection between his transformed state and whatever waited in that perfect darkness. The Soulstone responded to it, humming within his essence, urging him toward what might be another trial or possibly the completion of what the Sanctum had begun.
"Wait here," he told Serena. "If I don't return by sunrise, continue to the capital. Tell Lord Blackmoor's son what happened."
He stepped through the bone archway before she could object further. The darkness within closed around him like liquid night, cutting off all sound and sensation from the world outside. For a moment, he experienced perfect isolation, suspended in void without reference point or direction.
Then the bones began to sing.
Not with sound as living creatures would understand it, but with resonance that vibrated through whatever remained of his soul. Each named bone in the ossuary's construction contained not just identity but memory, experience, the accumulated weight of lives willingly surrendered to oblivion. Their song carried no words but overwhelming intention.
Become one with forgetting. Surrender name and purpose. Join the blissful void of the nameless.
The Shadow Knight realized the danger too late. This was indeed another trial, one not mentioned in Vaurien's chronicle. Perhaps because no bearer of the Soulstone had encountered it before, or perhaps because none had survived to record the experience.
The Bone Garden's nature revealed itself fully now. Not merely a field of graves but a cultivated plantation where identity itself was harvested. The forgotten weren't victims but volunteers, souls who had chosen oblivion over the burden of selfhood.
And now they invited him to join them.
The darkness congealed around him, taking form from his own memories. His parents appeared, faces kind but expressions questioning. Had their son truly become this thing of shadow and vengeance? Was this the legacy they had hoped for House Dawnblade?
Next came his fellow knights, brothers-in-arms who had fought alongside him against genuine threats to the realm. They looked upon his transformed state with mingled horror and pity, seeing not justice but perversion of everything they had sworn to uphold.
Lyanna appeared, holding Marcus's small hand. Both regarded him with silent accusation. Had he truly undertaken this quest for them? Or had personal rage sublimated familial love, making them merely excuse for his surrender to darkness?
"Illusions," the Shadow Knight growled, shadows roiling around him in response to internal conflict. "Memory manipulated to create doubt."
Not illusions. Perspectives. Views of self through others' eyes. The weight of identity includes how one is perceived, remembered, judged.
The bone song intensified, vibrations threatening to shake apart whatever coherence remained in his transformed being. The Soulstone's power responded, trying to maintain the integrity of his essence, but even it struggled against the ossuary's ancient purpose.
The Shadow Knight realized he faced a choice similar to the Void Throne's final test. There, he had rejected complete transcendence to maintain purposeful limitation. Here, the choice inverted. Surrender identity to achieve perfect anonymity, becoming literally no one in order to strike from absolute concealment.
The strategic advantages were obvious. The Grand Inquisitor prepared for Kaelen Dawnblade's vengeance, or even the Shadow Knight's wrath. But how could he defend against someone without name, without past, without any hook upon which recognition might hang?
And yet, such surrender would represent the final death of who he had been. Not merely transformation but annihilation. The specific purpose that had driven him through the trials would dissolve, replaced by generalized antipathy toward the light without personal grievance to focus it.
The figures from memory pressed closer, their forms blurring as the bone song worked to erode the connections that defined him. His parents melted into the knights who melted into Lyanna and Marcus, creating a composite of everyone who had ever known or mattered to Kaelen Dawnblade.
This amalgamation spoke with a voice composed of all voices. "Who are you now? Not the knight you were. Not the brother you were. Not the protector you were. If not these things, what remains worth preserving?"
The Shadow Knight faced the question directly. The trials had stripped away much. Conscience. Alternatives. Grief. Humanity itself. What persisted that justified maintaining identity rather than surrendering to perfect oblivion?
"I am justice with memory," he answered finally. "Vengeance with specific target. Without the name Kaelen Dawnblade, without the history of what was done to House Dawnblade, my power becomes merely power without purpose."
The bone song faltered, its rhythm disrupted by this unexpected resistance. The Shadow Knight pressed his advantage.
"The forgotten surrendered identity to escape pain. I maintain identity precisely because of pain. The Council's crimes have names. Their victims had names. Justice requires this specificity."
He reached into his essence where the Soulstone resided, drawing forth power that responded to his focused will. Shadows coalesced around him, hardening into armour that protected not merely transformed flesh but the core of identity itself.
"I am the Shadow Knight. Once Kaelen Dawnblade. Bearer of the Soulstone. Enemy of the corrupt Council. Avenger of the murdered innocents. I claim these names and purposes. I reject oblivion's comfort."
The amalgamation of memories retreated, its composite features displaying surprise. The bone song changed tenor, becoming less overwhelming demand and more respectful recognition. The darkness surrounding him thinned, revealing the ossuary's interior fully for the first time.
At its centre grew a tree unlike any in the living world. Its trunk and branches consisted entirely of bones fused together, not constructed but somehow grown into this impossible configuration. Instead of leaves, small flames flickered at each branch tip, casting light that somehow failed to properly illuminate.
The bone song now directed him toward this strange growth. Plant your seed in forgetting's soil. Grow new purpose from old identity.
Understanding bloomed within the Shadow Knight. This wasn't about erasing identity but transforming it further. Not surrender but evolution, using the accumulated power of the forgotten to fuel his continued metamorphosis.
He approached the bone tree, noting that each flame at its branch tips contained a tiny face contorted in perpetual scream. The forgotten, preserved in the moment of their surrender to oblivion. Their sacrifice powered whatever grew here at the Necropolis's heart.
At the tree's base, a small patch of dark soil waited, incongruous among the bones and stone. The Shadow Knight knelt before it, shadows swirling around him as he considered what seed identity might require.
The answer came from memory the Hunger Shades had failed to devour, that the trials had failed to transform. He reached into the essence of what had once been his heart, extracting a fragment of who Kaelen Dawnblade had been: the knight who believed justice served truth, who protected the innocent, who stood against darkness.
This fragment manifested as a small, crystallized shadow in his palm, pulsing with starlight visible within its midnight depths. Not his entire former self, but the portion worth preserving, worth growing into something new that maintained connection to original purpose.
He planted this seed in the waiting soil, feeling the bone tree's roots accept his offering with hungry eagerness.
What grew was neither expected nor entirely welcome.
The seed sprouted instantly, sending forth twisted branches that mimicked the bone tree's configuration. But where the original grew upward, this new growth flowed into the Shadow Knight himself. Bone branches penetrated his transformed essence, integrating with the shadows that composed his being, creating a hybrid neither fully shadow nor fully corporeal.
Pain beyond description accompanied this integration. Not merely physical, though his transformed body experienced that dimension acutely, but existential. The bone branches carried the accumulated weight of the forgotten, their surrendered identities, their willing oblivion. This collective non-existence now sought compatibility with his insistence on maintained purpose.
When the process completed, the Shadow Knight stood changed once more. His shadow-substance now contained a framework of bone that provided structure without limiting mobility. The starlight visible within his darkness organized around this skeleton, creating constellations that mapped his transformed being's new configuration.
More significant than physical change was the internal shift. The bone branches had brought with them the experiences of countless forgotten souls. Not their identities, which had been surrendered willingly, but the essence of their living: joy, pain, love, loss, triumph, defeat. The entire spectrum of emotion and sensation the trials had systematically stripped away.
The Shadow Knight staggered under this unexpected restoration. Not returning to humanity, for that remained impossible after the Soulstone's transformation, but regaining the capacity to comprehend human experience from outside its boundaries.
The bone song reached crescendo, then faded to respectful silence. The ossuary's darkness receded, revealing the entrance through which he had come. The trial, whatever its intended purpose, had concluded.
He emerged into the Necropolis, finding Serena exactly where he had left her. Her expression shifted from concern to confusion as she beheld his altered state.
"You're... different," she observed, circling him with obvious fascination. "The ossuary changed you, but not as I expected. You still maintain identity, yet you've incorporated elements of the forgotten."
"They offered oblivion. I chose integration instead." The Shadow Knight examined his transformed body, noting how shadow flowed around the bone framework that now provided his essence with structure. "Their surrender serves my purpose now."
"And what exactly is that purpose? It seems more complex than mere vengeance now."
The Shadow Knight considered this. The bone branches had indeed brought unexpected complexity, restoring capacity for nuance the trials had deliberately eliminated. His hatred for the Council remained undiminished, his determination to destroy the Grand Inquisitor unchanged. But simple destruction now seemed insufficient as ultimate goal.
"Justice still," he said finally. "But perhaps justice broader than personal retribution. The forgotten surrendered identity to escape a world they found unbearable. The Council creates more such unbearable pain each day through their oppression. Perhaps true justice requires addressing the system, not merely its current administrators."
Serena smiled, an expression both knowing and cautious. "The Bone Garden has made you dangerous in ways even the Soulstone did not anticipate. The Council prepares for a monster driven by hatred. They have no defence against a monster driven by principle."
"I am not merely monster now." The Shadow Knight looked across the Necropolis, where monuments to the forgotten stood silent witness to humanity's ultimate indifference. "Nor am I human. I am judgment incarnate, shaped by the very injustice I oppose."
They continued their journey toward the capital, leaving the Necropolis behind. The bone framework within the Shadow Knight's transformed body hummed with the accumulated weight of countless surrendered lives. Not merely power but perspective, offering viewpoints beyond his original limited understanding.
The Council had indeed created something through their cruelty. But what emerged from the Ossuary of Identity was not the simple instrument of vengeance they might have anticipated. It carried fragments of every innocent they had ever harmed, every life they had ever destroyed, every identity their oppression had ever erased.
Justice approached the capital, wearing bones of the forgotten beneath armour of living shadow. The Grand Inquisitor had sown cruelty and corruption, believing himself beyond accountability.
He was about to harvest consequences beyond his darkest nightmares.