The Iron Basilica of Averenth had not known silence in five hundred years.
Its vaulted ceilings, carved from bone-white stone and supported by monolithic columns of onyx, always hummed with the ceaseless drone of politics, ritual, and whispered betrayals. But tonight — after the Gate's shattering — a terrible hush clung to the hall like wet ash.
Seated around the obsidian table, eleven figures sat in rigid, fearful silence.
The air smelled of old incense and blood.
High Chancellor Oryth Valen broke first, a tremor running through his ancient frame. His crimson robes, once immaculate, hung askew, and his bearded face was drawn tight with horror.
"The Eye just went dark," he whispered.
No one responded.
The Eye of Velthaen — the great seeing orb held in the Basilica's heart — had watched the lands of Averenth unblinking since the time of the Starfall. It had witnessed invasions, betrayals, and even the fall of the Wyrm-Prince. It had never faltered.
But tonight… it went blind.
A hooded figure at the table's end shifted.
Arch-Seer Maldris of the Velthorn Covenant, his voice brittle and papery, spoke without lifting his gaze.
"It is the Morghast boy."
That name cracked the silence.
Several councilors flinched, as though the syllables themselves bit at them. One man, Lord Karven, muttered a protection prayer under his breath, his lips bleeding as the words turned sour in his mouth.
The Warden-General, clad in black armor, leaned forward.
"The Ashen Blades swore the bloodline was ended," she growled.
Maldris gave no reply.
A faint pulse, like the beating of a distant drum, thrummed through the floor beneath them. No one acknowledged it.
It had begun.
High Chancellor Valen pressed his trembling hands together.
"If the child awakens the Old Blood, if the Gate has opened—"
"—then we are already dead," Maldris finished, his voice like old dust.
Another pulse.
A servant at the far end of the chamber collapsed, blood trickling from nose and ears. No one moved to help him.
In the distance, outside the Basilica's thick stone walls, the city stirred. Dogs howled. Birds scattered into the dark. A pregnant woman screamed as her child twisted in the womb.
The world itself was reacting.
And the figure seated in shadow at the head of the table — the one none of them addressed, the one whose face was hidden beneath a veil of tattered grey silk — finally spoke.
A voice soft and sweet as a lullaby.
"The Womb Beneath All Stars remembers."
A single phrase.
And eleven hardened men and women who ruled Averenth felt cold creep into their bones.
The veil shifted, revealing pale, lidless eyes that did not blink.
"Find him," the veiled figure whispered.
"Or burn the world trying."
A final pulse shook the Basilica.
And in the mist-cloaked forests beyond the city's edge, a pale-haired boy stood beneath the dying light of the moon. The Threnody of Broken Stars hummed in his grasp, and the air bent around him like a living thing.
Vaelen Morghast turned his gaze toward the distant capital.
And smiled.
The hunt had begun.
The chamber was alive with rot.
It wasn't the decay of flesh alone, but of time itself. The walls bled a thick, pale ichor from ancient runes, and the ceiling hung with fleshy growths that pulsed in time with some far-off, monstrous heartbeat. The air tasted of charred bone and spoiled milk.
At the chamber's heart stood the Circle of Twelve, the last voices of the Choir of Pale Ash. Hooded figures, their faces eroded and cracked like old tomb statues, ringed a shallow pool of liquid black glass. In its reflection, nothing moved — no light, no shadow, no life.
Only one among them spoke.
Althiran of the Cinder Tongue, whose throat had been hollowed and replaced with a chain of writhing ash-worms. His voice was a rasp of brittle glass.
"The gate... has broken."
A ripple moved across the still pool, and one of the other figures flinched. An old man with skin stretched too tight over his skull, his eyes lidless and scabbed with ash. His voice, barely a whisper:
"It is not possible. The Morghast line was culled. We saw to it ourselves."
Althiran's head tilted, the worms in his throat writhing. "Then explain the scream we heard from the earth. Explain the bleeding sky over the West."
A new voice spoke — dry, as though dragged from the marrow of the world itself. Mother Inthera, the Pale Matron, whose bones were inked with the names of every soul she had devoured.
"It is the child. The one that slipped the knife. Vaelen Morghast. The Threnody found him."
The pool rippled again.
This time, a shape moved beneath its surface. A sliver of something vast, coiled and sleeping, too immense to comprehend. Its eye, if it could be called that, opened — a fathomless void in which stars drowned.
And every one of the Twelve felt its gaze.
Althiran faltered. Blood wept from his hollow sockets, staining the floor.
"He opens the paths we sealed." Inthera's voice was a chant now, old and cracked.
The others joined her, and the chamber itself seemed to tremble.
"He stirs what we buried."
"He calls what we forbade."
"He awakens what we left to die."
A deep, sullen drumbeat echoed from the earth.
The voice of the thing beneath the pool spoke, though no lips moved. A wordless command, ancient and absolute.
"Find him."
"Kill him."
"Or kneel."
The Twelve faltered. None spoke aloud the fear they felt — that they no longer had the power to kill what walked now in Vaelen Morghast's skin.
That perhaps the world itself no longer belonged to them.
Althiran turned to Inthera."Summon the Silent Host. And call the Obsidian Cabal. If we fall, they will be next."
Inthera's bones creaked as she nodded."And the old gods?"
"Let them watch." The worms in Althiran's throat coiled into a cruel grin. "It will be their doom, too."
As the chamber began to collapse into itself — reality warping as the Twelve fled through conjured rifts — the pool's surface shimmered once more.
A single pale eye appeared in the blackness.
It blinked.
And then it smiled.