Chapter 3: Embers in the Vein
The rain did not stop.
It drummed against the roofs like war drums muffled beneath layers of smoke and memory. Alderidge, with its crooked chimneys and alleys steeped in gutter-light, seemed to shrink beneath the weight of its own rot. But Adam did not seek shelter.
He welcomed the rain. Let it wash away the blood that still clung to the cobblestones. Let it choke the gutters with ash.
He had work to do.
Tonight, he hunted.
Not with blades or poisons, but with questions sharpened like razors.
---
His feet carried him southward, where the rain turned alleys into trenches. The Black Brine—a slum quarter thick with salt rot and unlicensed sorcery—was his destination. It was a place where maps lied and men disappeared, where the only law was silence and steel. Even the Church dared not walk here after dusk.
But Adam did.
A memory guided him—Remlen Vass's journal, page thirty-two, beneath a coded line of gibberish: The one who speaks in flame, hidden where even shadows kneel, wears no name, but bleeds red like the rest.
A contact. Or maybe a relic.
Either would suffice.
He passed graffiti scratched in blood across a butchered door: NO GODS HERE.
Promising.
He found the cellar by scent before sight. Iron and old incense. A stairwell tucked beneath a collapsed tavern, guarded by a single symbol—four downward-pointing triangles scratched into brick.
He knocked. Once. Then three times.
Silence.
Then, the door opened.
A woman greeted him. Half her face was covered in ritual scarring—symbols of the Pre-Divine Creed. Her eyes were pale, milky, but not blind.
"You carry the reek," she said.
"I carry names," Adam replied.
She stepped aside.
"Then enter. But do not speak them here. Names breathe louder than men."
---
The cellar was deeper than it had any right to be. Spiraling stairs led into a pit lit only by green-glass lanterns and the soft thrum of chanting beneath breath. It was no temple. Not anymore. But it had been, once—before the Verdant Flame twisted the law and wrote holiness in fire.
Adam counted nine figures inside, seated in a circle. Hooded. Silent.
The woman led him to the center.
"Tell us what you've unearthed," she said.
Adam didn't ask how they knew. He expected no less.
He removed a single page from his journal—one not inked by his hand, but scorched, torn from a book burned in the West Droune purges. On it was the hymn of a god with no sanctuary. A god without voice. One who watched from the cracks between memory and death.
He handed it to her.
The woman held it like bone. "This is… Grave Tongue."
"Old form," Adam said. "Not fully dead."
One of the hooded figures stirred. A wheeze escaped their lips. "Then the Choir… lives."
"No," Adam said. "But they will."
A long pause.
Then, the woman spoke: "You must meet the Ragkeeper. He remembers what even the wind has forgotten."
---
They led him deeper still—through stone doors etched with unmade prayers, through halls of broken effigies where the very walls seemed to pulse with the weight of unsaid things.
The Ragkeeper waited in a cloister of tattered banners and melted wax.
He was not a man.
Not anymore.
A shape hunched beneath layers of stitched cloth and candle soot, eyes blindfolded with a strip of human skin, fingers too long for comfort. He smelled of old books and the kind of rot that came from memory, not flesh.
"You…" the Ragkeeper rasped. "You are not flame."
"No," Adam replied. "I am what flame fears."
A sound like laughter echoed from behind the cloth mask.
Then stillness.
"You seek truth. You seek the marrow, not the bone."
Adam stepped forward. "I seek the names that gods buried."
The Ragkeeper held out a hand. "Then give me your voice."
Adam blinked.
"You want a name."
The Ragkeeper nodded slowly. "No name given freely has weight. Sacrifice a voice, and I shall answer with one buried."
Adam reached into his coat. Removed a folded parchment.
He whispered a name.
One never spoken aloud since he awoke in this life.
"Elliot."
And let the paper burn in the Ragkeeper's outstretched hand.
Flame consumed it without fire.
The cloaked figure did not move. But something behind the wrappings smiled.
Then, with a voice like a tombstone cracking, the Ragkeeper spoke:
"Then remember this: XERANTHAL — The God Beneath Graves."
The room went still.
The green lanterns flickered.
And Adam felt the weight of the name lodge itself in his bones like rusted nails.
Not a threat.
Not yet.
But old.
And angry.
He bowed his head. "Thank you."
The Ragkeeper wheezed. "Thank me… when you survive."
---
By the time Adam emerged from the Black Brine, the rain had stopped, and a pale red glow crept along the horizon—sunrise smothered behind smoke. He held nothing in his hands.
But in his mind, he carried another god's grave.
Another ember.
And in his journal, when he returned to the Iron Latch before the town truly woke, he added the name:
> XERANTHAL — Buried god. Associated with rot, memory, and silence. No recorded worship. Pre-Divine lineage. Dangerous.
And below it:
> Sacrificed: Elliot — first voice. No longer useful.
Then, in smaller script:
> Flame can scorch the surface. But it cannot reach what's buried.
---
By mid-morning, Alderidge had stirred. The streets throbbed with carts and curses, vendors hawking rotfruit and tar-inked pamphlets. Church bells tolled with mechanical devotion, shaking soot from the rafters of a city too tired to protest.
Adam walked among them unnoticed.
The truth was simple: people didn't look. They saw only what they wanted. A thin man with tired eyes, unremarkable gait, no badge, no crest. They looked past him.
And because they looked past him, he could act.
---
At noon, he visited the western ledger-house—a half-rotten building where records went to be forgotten. It was here that he found Tallis Grey again, hunched over a bound book with hands smudged in ink and coal ash. The boy startled when Adam appeared beside him.
"You came back," Tallis said quietly.
Adam raised an eyebrow. "You didn't."
Tallis flushed. "I—I couldn't. My overseer kept me on double shifts."
Adam waited.
"But I still read," the boy whispered. "I found mention of… of the Grave Choir in a census from Year 180 of the Fire Calendar. A list of those excommunicated. They named them singers of the Hollow Breath."
Adam said nothing. Let silence hang between them.
Then, after a pause, "You've already begun."
Tallis blinked. "What?"
"You think this is study. A game. It isn't." Adam lowered his voice. "You've seen the name. Spoken it. That's enough. You're part of it now."
The boy's eyes widened.
"I—what do I do?"
Adam looked at the boy. Really looked.
Weak. Afraid. But willing to follow.
"You listen," he said. "And you remember."
From inside his coat, Adam removed a small folded page. He handed it to Tallis without a word.
The boy opened it. On the page was a single phrase written in Old Grave Tongue.
Tallis shuddered. "What does it mean?"
Adam turned to go.
"It means the Choir is not dead."
---
That evening, Adam stood alone in the chapel ruins behind the Verdant Square—the very ones the Church had condemned after the Black Ember Trials. Wind whispered through shattered stained glass, scattering colored shards across the stone like memory laid bare.
He lit a single candle.
Not for prayer.
For ritual.
He placed the journal on the altar, opened to the newest page. The name burned in silence:
> XERANTHAL
He closed his eyes.
The world narrowed.
Not into darkness—but into stillness. Into the spaces between movement, between time. And there, beneath the skin of reality, he heard something shift.
Not a voice.
A presence.
Old.
Forgotten.
Waiting.
Adam whispered: "I remember you."
The candle's flame went out.
---
When he returned to the Iron Latch, the tavern was quiet. Nella watched him from behind the bar. Her son slept in a corner.
"You go out every night," she said. "Come back looking colder."
Adam didn't answer.
Nella leaned forward. "What is it you're doing, Adam? Really?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then spoke, quiet and even.
"I am killing gods."
She laughed—half a breath, half a defense. "You're mad."
"Maybe," he said.
Then walked upstairs.
---
That night, alone in his room, Adam added one final line beneath the growing list of names:
> Let the world forget. I will not.
> Let the flames rise. I will walk through them.
> Let the old gods tremble.
> I am coming.
---
A knock came at the Iron Latch door long after midnight.
Three short raps.
Then one long.
Adam opened his eyes. He hadn't been sleeping—merely watching the way shadows stretched across the ceiling with the patience of death.
He rose without a sound, slipped on his coat, and opened the window instead of the door. A figure stood in the street below, cloaked, hooded, unmistakably deliberate.
Adam dropped down silently.
The figure didn't flinch.
She pulled back her hood.
A woman—forty, maybe more, with greying braids and a silver pin shaped like a veined leaf. Her eyes had the look of someone who'd survived too much to fear anything living.
"You're Adam," she said.
"I am."
"I'm here on behalf of Isem Brandel."
Adam didn't blink. "Isem's dead."
The woman nodded. "He knew you'd say that."
She passed him a folded letter sealed with red wax—no crest, only a crude depiction of a closed eye. Adam cracked it open and read the words in silence.
The Choir was never mine to command.
But if you want them to sing, look to the tunnels beneath Marrowhill.
There, the flame can't reach.
There, the breath still lingers.
Adam burned the note against his palm. The fire vanished in his skin.
He looked at the woman. "What do you want in return?"
She gave him a tired smile. "Nothing. I've seen what happens when the Church wins too long. Just... make them afraid again."
He said nothing.
But in his eyes, something agreed.
---
The next day passed in observation.
Adam walked the market, ears sharp to the rhythm of a thousand mundane lives. Fear was like a pulse in Alderidge now—subtle, but building. A merchant spoke of black smoke seen rising from the old southern crypts. A boy with ash in his hair claimed his dreams had changed, grown silent.
Whispers.
Nothing more.
But Adam knew the difference between superstition and sign.
The city's spiritual walls were cracking.
The Verdant Flame had become fat with comfort.
And nothing in the world feared comfort more than truth.
---
That evening, he visited the Tower Scriptorium.
Ostensibly a place of learning, it now served as the Verdant Church's censorship arm—where tomes were redacted, edited, rewritten into obedience. But even zealots grew careless with time.
He entered through the southern annex under Tallis Grey's name—newly registered as a junior clerk.
Inside, parchment ruled all. Rows of shelves packed with theological justifications, hagiographies of saints who'd never lived, histories sculpted to suit the righteous.
Adam went lower. Past the restricted vault. Past the catechist's chamber.
To a room called the Ash Index.
Here, every banned book bore a red brand across the spine. Locked behind glass. Guarded by silence.
He stood before one in particular:
"Treatise on the Nine-Faced Silence."
Author: Unknown.
Year: Pre-Flame Era.
He picked the lock.
Because locks were for people who believed in theft.
And Adam was not a thief.
He was a correction.
---
He read beneath guttering torchlight. The pages stank of old ink and older blood. It was not written in a language common anymore—nor even ancient. It spoke around words. Through metaphor, chant, recursion.
But Adam understood.
The Silence was not absence.
It was hunger.
A will older than fire, that refused to speak because all sound lies.
The Nine Faces? Masks, perhaps. Or names.
Or victims.
He didn't flinch.
He copied what mattered into his journal.
And when he left, he placed a single petal of ash inside the book.
A mark.
A promise.
---
Back at the Iron Latch, Nella didn't speak as he entered.
But this time, she didn't watch him either.
That was how he knew she was starting to fear him.
Good.
Not because it made him safe.
But because it meant she saw him now.
The gods never had.
---
Later, as wind beat the shutters and gutterlamps flickered in the fog, Adam wrote three more lines beneath the day's notes:
> The Silence wears nine faces.
Beneath Marrowhill, they remember.
I must make them speak.
He set the quill down.
Closed the journal.
And whispered the first of the Nine Names to himself, like a curse:
"Elaris."
The shadows in the room shifted.
The flame in the lamp burned blue for a moment.
Then returned to normal.
Adam smiled.