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The Keeper of the Forgotten Fear
The days after the "dizzy spell" incident settled into a new, unsettling normal. For Ryley, everything was frustratingly clear. Liam had cracked under the pressure. It happened. The Spire, the constant fear, the grotesque reality of their new diet—it was enough to make anyone's mind bend. The mage had hallucinated some nonsense about a cult, and the bad air in the lower sanctum had given them both a scare. Problem identified: Liam's fragile psyche. Solution: keep an eye on him, give him simpler tasks, and stay out of the creepy basements. Ryley's focus snapped back to the tangible, the concrete: the wall, the hunts, the inventory, the next climb. The incident was a closed file, misfiled under "stress casualties."
For Liana, the file was wide open and burning.
She watched Liam, not with Ryley's dismissive concern, but with forensic intensity. The mage wasn't acting "cracked." He wasn't paranoid or raving. He was… hollowed out. The vibrant, terrified energy he'd had when he burst in with his story was gone. Now, he moved through his duties like a sleepwalker, flinching at loud noises but unable to say why. When she asked him, again, about that day, he'd just shake his head, his eyes losing focus. "It was nothing, Liana. Just a bad dream I got mixed up. The dark down there… it plays tricks."
It plays tricks. The phrase was too neat, too passive. It sounded like something he'd been told, not something he'd concluded.
Her suspicion was a silent, screaming thing with no voice. She had no evidence, only the chilling discrepancy between the before and the after. She tried to voice it to Ryley one evening as they reviewed the hunting rota.
"Ryley," she started, her tone carefully neutral. "About Liam's… episode. It doesn't add up."
Ryley didn't look up from the scrap of hide he was using as a map. "It adds up perfectly. He's the softest of us. He saw things, his brain short-circuited, and he made up a story to make sense of the panic. Now he's embarrassed. End of story."
"He was certain," Liana pressed, the words feeling futile even as she said them. "He described details. A smell. A feeling. People talking."
"Hallucinations have details, Liana," Ryley said, finally looking at her with a hint of impatience. "That's what makes them scary. Look, we have real problems. Gregor's faction is hoarding scrap metal. The west well is tasting brackish. We're two days from attempting the fourth floor with a mage who might freeze up. That's what's fishy. Not some phantom cult in a basement that only a kid having a breakdown managed to find." He leaned forward, his expression earnest but dismissive. "It's in your head. You're worrying about a ghost because the real monsters are too much to think about all the time. Let it go."
The dismissal was absolute. To Ryley, her vigilance was not insight; it was a distraction, a failure to prioritize. She was seeing patterns in the static. His logic was impeccable, rooted in the brutal pragmatism that had kept them alive. And against it, her gut feeling was nothing but air.
So she buried it. She became a vault for a secret no one else believed existed. It changed her. Her silence grew deeper, her observations more detached. She smiled less, spoke only when necessary. To the others, it was just Liana being Liana—the quiet, deadly professional.
But her routine shifted. She began taking longer, more circuitous routes through the Sanctum. She visited the lower levels not to salvage, but to observe. She memorized the faces of the broken and the listless, not to pity them, but to see if any moved with a purpose that belied their empty eyes. She sniffed the air in empty corridors, searching for that faint, sweet-rotten scent Liam had mentioned before his memory was scoured clean.
She found nothing. No gatherings, no pulsing flowers, no white-haired prophets. The Stillborn Heart, if it existed, was a phantom. And phantoms, as Ryley had made clear, were not a threat you could fight.
The strain of knowing the unknowable began to wear on her. During a sparring session with Jax, she overreacted to a simple feint, nearly taking his eye out with a dagger. He'd roared in anger, but she'd just stared at her own hand, trembling.
"Where's your head at, Rogue?" Jax had grumbled, nursing a cut on his cheek.
"Nowhere," she'd replied, her voice flat. "It's nowhere."
That was the truth. Her head was in a nowhere place, guarding a door that might lead to nothing, or might lead to the real heart of the darkness in the Sanctum. She was the sole sentinel at a post everyone else had declared irrelevant.
One night, as she took the late watch on the wall, looking out over the moonlit, rust-cursed plains, the isolation crystallized into a cold, hard resolve. She couldn't convince them. She couldn't find proof. So she would do the only thing left.
She would become the counter-shadow. If there was a faction that moved in silence and stole memories, then she would be the silence within that silence. She would watch for the gaps—the conversations that ended too abruptly, the people who seemed to reset their motivations overnight, the strange lulls in the usual chaos of the Sanctum that felt less like peace and more like a held breath.
Ryley saw a kingdom they were building from rust and will. Jax saw a fortress to be hardened. Maya saw a hospice for the wounded. Liam saw a nightmare he was trying to wake up from.
Only Liana saw the invisible cracks in their foundation. And so, alone under the bruised sky, she made a vow to herself. She would protect them from the enemy they didn't believe in. Not with warnings they'd ignore, but with a vigilance they'd never notice. She was the keeper of the forgotten fear, and she would stand her lonely watch until the hidden heart, stillborn or not, chose to beat again in the open. Then, and only then, would she have the proof that was more than just a feeling in the dark.