The Fang's Memory
The jungle did not cheer.
It mourned.
As Kael descended the temple, the canopy above wept mist instead of rain, a cold fog clinging to every surface, curling around him like the breath of a dying beast. The battle was over, but something deeper had broken. The vines no longer twitched at his passing. The birds did not sing. Even the insects had gone silent—as if the very ecosystem held its breath.
Kael's hand still clutched the obsidian fang. It pulsed faintly, its warmth now a memory, its weight far heavier than stone. Not physically. Spiritually. Like it remembered every death it had ever known.
The compass pointed northwest.
But Kael didn't move.
Not yet.
He stood at the jungle's edge, staring out at a thin path he hadn't seen before—a narrow, root-laced trail veiled in gray haze, like the throat of some colossal beast. He knew, instinctively, that the path had not existed before. It had been earned.
The fang had opened it.
He glanced at the blade strapped to his back. Dented. Singed. But still alive. It had served him well. But something inside him whispered that it would not be enough for what came next.
He slid the fang into a hollow groove in his vambrace—where the Warden had once embedded ceremonial tools of passage.
It fit perfectly.
And Kael shivered.
Not from cold.
But from memory that wasn't his.
He didn't dream that night.
He remembered.
The fire was long dead, but his mind burned. Not images—emotions. Echoes.
A throne of feathers. A circle of gods arguing in a tongue older than language. A shattered oath, and the one who stood outside it—watching, silent, as they turned their backs.
The Denier.
Not a name. A role.
A truth too sharp to speak.
Kael woke in sweat, even though his skin was ice.
The Shard throbbed softly in his chest, and this time—he heard it. Not words. A presence. Watching. Guiding. Hungering.
It wanted to be whole.
But more than that—it wanted to be known.
By midday, the trail darkened. The jungle gave way to stone, then bone. Skeletal trees arched overhead, leafless and petrified, their branches fused with rusted blades and broken chains. The ground cracked beneath Kael's boots—glass-thin crust over pools of black water. He passed statues of knights knelt in prayer, their hands fused to their hilts, eyes melted into their helmets.
Then he saw the gate.
Not towering—but wide. Too wide.
It stretched across a barren valley, flanked by twin obelisks etched with glowing scars. The compass pulsed faster. The fang in his vambrace grew hot.
A figure stood before the gate.
Not a guard.
A mourner.
Wrapped in veils of crimson silk, face obscured, posture limp—but there was something unmistakably ancient about her. The way the fog moved around her. The way her head tilted—not in curiosity, but recognition.
She spoke without lifting her head.
"You killed the Gatekeeper."
Kael didn't answer.
She stepped closer. Her voice was soft, but it carried weight—like the hush before a funeral dirge.
"You carry his memory now. His fang. His burden."
He shifted, his hand drifting to his hilt. "Who are you?"
"I am what remains when gods forget to die."
The veil parted slightly. Pale lips. A hollow cheek. Her eyes were pits of still-burning incense.
"You are not the Denier," she said, almost sadly. "But you are his echo. And echoes can still open doors."
Kael looked at the gate. "What lies beyond?"
She smiled, and her teeth were far too many.
"Answers."
Then she raised a hand—and the air bent.
Not visibly. Conceptually.
The gate began to unfold—not open, but unravel. Stone turned to script, iron to memory, and the path beyond it shifted in and out of focus.
Kael stepped forward—
And the woman whispered: "You will not return the same."
He paused. "I never intended to."
The moment he crossed the threshold, the world changed.
He was no longer in the jungle. No longer in any place he could name.
He stood in a desert of white sand under a sky of blood glass. Twin moons hung shattered above. Towers of bone rose in the distance, wreathed in storms that roared silently.
And ahead of him, black against the horizon—
A citadel.
Its spires twisted upward like a scream made solid, and its walls pulsed faintly—like something inside still breathed.
Kael's compass had stopped moving.
The fang pulsed once, violently.
And somewhere deep within the citadel… something stirred.
Something remembered him.