The night was absolute. No stars. No moon. Only the restless mist that clung to the Salt Hollow like a dying man's final breath.
Vaelen moved unseen.
The Choir's forward camp lay ahead, marked by flickering torches and the low, mournful chant of their sentries. A dozen men. Two casters. One warhound chained to a spike.
Amateurs.
"Calreth's map was accurate," Vaelen noted. Not with gratitude — simply fact. A tool had functioned. He could discard it later.
From a ridge of broken stone, he watched.
Pattern.
Timing.
Weak points.
He saw it all.
The patrol changed every forty beats. The casters sat by the main fire, overconfident. The warhound's chain rusted and too short to cover the eastern flank.
Predictable.
He knelt and drew a sigil in the salt, one of the lesser Threnodies. It shimmered, a thin line of mist coiling upward. He whispered three words in the forgotten tongue.
A shadow peeled itself from the Hollow.
A salt wight. Crude. Fragile. But enough to distract.
It lumbered toward the camp, dragging itself with broken, crystalline fingers.
A sentry cried out. Others rose, weapons drawn. Casters began an incantation.
Vaelen struck.
Precise. Efficient. Merciless.
A dagger through a throat from behind.
A stone to a temple.
The warhound's chain severed — it lunged toward its own masters in blind fury.
Chaos bloomed.
The wight dissolved in a burst of brittle dust. But by then, half the camp was in disarray.
One caster completed his spell — too slow.
Vaelen's dagger spun through the firelight, embedding in the man's eye.
A wet pop. A gurgle.
Gone.
The second caster panicked, calling for aid. Vaelen appeared from the mist like a wraith, snatched the man's wrist mid-sigil, and twisted until bone splintered.
"No more tongues," Vaelen whispered, before driving a shard of salt into his chest.
The rest tried to flee.
He let two go.
Let them carry terror back to the Seer. Let them speak of a phantom. Of salt that drank blood. Of a name whispered in the mist.
He gathered what he needed — maps, tokens, sigils of rank — and set the corpses in a circle around the fire, their hands clasped, their faces turned inward.
A message.
The Seer would read it.
"I am coming."
Before he vanished into the Hollow once more, Vaelen looked to the west. The Salt Cathedral's jagged spires rose in the distance.
Soon.
And when he reached it — when the Seer finally knelt before him, broken and weeping — Vaelen would not offer mercy.
Only silence.
The Salt Hollow stretched endlessly, a pallid wound beneath a lightless sky. Vaelen moved in silence, the broken earth crunching beneath his steps. Blood crusted dry on his hands, and the mist thickened around him like a smothering shroud.
The air grew colder.
He should have turned west, toward the Forgotten Heights, but something gnawed at him — a subtle pressure in the air, like a half-heard voice murmuring from beneath the salt.
A sigil half-buried in brittle ground caught his eye.
Not one of the Choir. Older. A circle of twisted lines surrounding a crude depiction of an eye. Faded, carved into stone older than memory. Vaelen knelt, brushing salt aside. The Threnody pulsed faintly at his side.
And then — a sound.
A ragged breath.
He rose instantly, dagger drawn.
A figure lay slumped against a broken salt pillar. A man, though time and death had hollowed him. Skin like parchment, stretched over brittle bone. One eye gone, the other clouded with death. But the talismans strung across his throat told the truth. A Namebearer. One of the old orders.
He was dying. Had been dying for days.
And in his hand, a scrap of leather parchment, stained dark.
The man spoke, a dry rasp.
"...You walk the path, though you do not know its name."
Vaelen said nothing.
The dying Namebearer coughed, blood flecking his lips.
"You... you mustn't let them awaken the Blood Seal. It lies beneath... beneath the Hollow's heart... the Vault of Endless Teeth..."
A shudder wracked the corpse. He pressed the parchment into Vaelen's palm with his last strength.
"Seek the Forgotten Dais... follow the Path of Unmoored Stars... or we all fall to the Silence..."
Then — stillness.
No final breath. No grand death scream. Just the wind through salt and brittle bone.
Vaelen stood, fingers tightening on the leather scrap. Symbols unfamiliar, half-rotted away, yet something in the Threnody's pages echoed them.
A half-forgotten invocation:
"The unmoored find passage, the unclaimed find name."
He would decipher it. Learn what the Vault of Endless Teeth was. And if others sought it — they would bleed for it.
He turned west, toward the cliffs. The mist parted like a dying thing.
The Hollow wasn't dead.
It was waking.
[To be continued…]