Location: Tashlan, Carlon – Catacombs | Year 8002 A.A.
The catacombs of Tashlan groaned like the belly of some buried beast, ancient and unyielding. Water dripped with a patience only centuries could teach, the sound hollow, echoing through the labyrinth as though mocking the urgency of those who passed through it. The walls were slick with moss and mildew, and the air hung damp and heavy, a strange mingling of iron and rot, as if grief itself had long since seeped into the stone. Torches sputtered on iron brackets, their flames bowing low under the weight of unseen drafts. In their unsteady glow, the shadows took on skeletal forms—bony, half-starved wraiths dancing to the footfalls of the living.
Through those haunted halls, Kon Kaplan and Kopa Boga moved as if they had been born to shadows. There was no wasted movement, no careless sound—only the sharp economy of hunters who had stalked too long in hostile ground.
"We gotta move, Kopa," he murmured, voice like gravel, low enough to be swallowed by the walls. "I took out a patrol. They'll notice soon."
"They always notice eventually," he said. "But we are close now. If we can reach the market tunnels, I can reroute us to the north edge."
His words carried no haste, yet beneath them Kon could feel the same tension winding like a bowstring. They had run this road too many times. Always the same—the refugees, frightened, desperate; the narrow escapes; the danger that hunted in silence. How long could they continue to outrun the maw of Carlon before one slip ended it all?
Kon slowed his pace, his eye turning toward the huddled cluster behind them. Dozens of men, women, and children stumbled in their wake. Their clothes were tattered, their skin marked by years of labor in chains. Yet their eyes betrayed something more dangerous than fear: hope. The kind of hope that clung too tightly, that might scream at the wrong moment, that might risk everything for one more taste of freedom. Hope could save, yes—but it could also ruin.
Kon's jaw tightened. His voice came out hard. "If the Ortuk show up, we can't fight with civilians in tow."
He did not have to explain who the Ortuk were. Carlon's black-clad hunters, forged in the very art of killing Ronins. Ruthless, swift, and merciless. To fight them with trained hands was already to wager one's life. To fight them while burdened with innocents… was a gamble no sane man should take.
But Kopa did not answer him at once. The stag's ears twitched. He raised a broad paw, fingertips glowing with the green pulse of his Arcem. Thin roots spread like veins across the stone wall, spiraling outward, mapping energy in the darkness. For a moment he was still, listening not with his ears but with his soul.
The vines recoiled, and Kopa's eyes narrowed. "So far, clear," he said, though his tone carried the weight of one who knew how quickly "clear" could change. He dropped his hand. "Let us shift before that changes."
Kon exhaled through his teeth, low and sharp. He lifted his own paw, summoning the flicker of Interuim, his Arcem. Yellow mana gathered, humming faintly as it wrapped around his scarred body, then pulsed outward in a controlled wave. The air thickened, distorted. Even the torchlight bent strangely, flames bending toward him as if drawn into another reality.
"Gerçek Kayması," he muttered.
At once, the world rippled. The refugees gasped softly as their own bodies blurred, outlines fraying like smoke in wind. Their footsteps, once harsh against the damp stone, fell silent. The light of torches passed through them as though they were heat mirages, wavering illusions in the dark.
Kon's eye narrowed. His voice was clipped, commanding. "We're ghosts now. Keep close. Keep quiet. If you stumble, do not scream. If you fall, do not call out."
Kopa moved beside him, steady and silent as an oak in storm. The refugees clutched one another, trembling but obedient.
_______________________________________
The lower tiers of Tashlan were not streets but scars, festering wounds dressed in the rags of civilization. Here, ruin passed for shelter. Slumped hovels leaned drunkenly upon one another, their crooked backs breaking beneath centuries of neglect. Their stones wept with moss, their gaps stuffed with scraps of bone, cloth, and rusted tin hammered into roofs that rattled against the night winds. The air itself seemed weary, carrying the stench of spoiled grain, burning oil, and the sharper note of human fear.
Children crouched in doorways, their paws cracked, their bellies drawn tight against their ribs. Hollow eyes stared at nothing, or at everything, as shadows slipped by them. They did not call out. They had long since learned that voices invited cruelty. What they saw tonight—two unseen Lords guiding the trembling, flickering hope of their people—they would take for ghosts, or dreams too dangerous to hold onto.
And perhaps they were right.
Kon and Kopa moved like whispers through the alleys, their flock behind them hidden in the shimmer of Kon's Arcem. The invisibility did not banish fear—refugees clutched one another in silence, trembling as patrol torches flared in the distance—but it wrapped their desperation in the thin veil of miracle. They wove past crooked checkpoints where Carlon guards slouched, bored and cruel, spears scraping the stone. They threaded through archways where the Trisoc's banners hung, torn and stained, symbols of an empire that had forgotten how to inspire and only knew how to terrify.
Above them, through slits in the jagged stone, the palace rose. Silver towers gleamed cruelly in the moonlight, sharp and cold like drawn blades. It was a reminder: though they crept like vermin beneath the city, the Trisoc's gaze hung always above, silent and waiting.
"Back gate," Kopa breathed, his antlers low so as not to scrape the stone. He pointed toward a collapsed courtyard where weeds and moss had overtaken broken marble. "Least guarded, only two towers."
Kon's golden eye swept the skyline, tracing every window, every jagged ruin that might hide an archer's nest. His cheek burned faintly where the scar cut deep. He remembered this path. Memory was a soldier's second sight—the only weapon against repetition's fatal snare.
"I know this route," he said quietly. "Took it last cycle. Unless they've reinforced it…"
He did not finish the thought. His eye narrowed, scanning the towers.
They hadn't.
The gate loomed ahead: iron bones rusted through, half-swallowed by fallen stone. It leaned open as though exhausted by its own weight. To the unknowing, it was ruin. To the Ronins, it was opportunity—an escape carved from neglect. Freedom often wore such disguises.
The refugees saw it too. Their steps quickened, whispers of hope rising in their throats. Kon's tail flicked sharply once in warning. Silence.
Then the earth itself convulsed.
BOOOOOOM!
The blast came not from above but from beside them, a wall of stone erupting outward as if struck by the fist of a god. The ground split, vomiting fire and dust. Shards of rock spun like blades, slicing the air. The alley lit in orange fury. Refugees screamed, their cries sharp and thin, the voices of prey.
Kon moved before thought. Training and instinct were one. He dropped to a knee, teeth gritted, his paw slamming against the broken stone. Mana surged, golden and bright, pouring from Interuim in a burst that flared like sunlight caught in glass.
The barrier bloomed outward in a great arc, shimmering as though reality itself had been hammered into a shield. Fire struck it, shrapnel shattered against it. Dust and death pressed close—but did not pass.
The refugees collapsed into the shadow of his protection, clutching each other, wide-eyed. The brilliance of the barrier painted their faces in hues of gold and fear, and some among them dared to think, for a moment, that the tiger himself was more than mortal.
Kon's muscles burned beneath the weight of the shield, but his eye never left the cloud of dust. His thoughts cut sharp and swift: 'That was no patrol. That was no accident. Someone knew.'
Behind him, Kopa's hand glowed green, vines lashing instinctively across the refugees to shield them from debris. His antlers shimmered faintly, the mana within him coiled, ready. Yet his eyes—deep forest green—were not on the gate or the dust. They were on Kon.
The dust parted like a curtain, curling in reluctant spirals as though the air itself feared to reveal what stepped beyond. Refugees clutched one another tighter, their eyes darting between Kon's barrier and the settling smoke. Breath was thin. Hope, which had risen only moments before at the sight of the broken gate, seemed to choke on the ash.
And then they emerged.
First came the hiss—soft, deliberate, like silk sliding across steel. Sahira stepped forward with the easy poise of a serpent in her element. Her scales caught the dim torchlight, emerald and black shimmering with unnatural sheen. A tattoo marked her right shoulder, the ink burned deep into the flesh: Hazël #18. The brand of a chosen, the weight of blood and rank.
Her eyes gleamed in the haze—green fire, sharp as blades and venomous as her kind. They were eyes that drank fear. Her robes, stitched from scaled hides, slithered as she walked, every motion a caress of malice. Her tail coiled languidly around her feet, but there was no mistaking it for idleness. Every curve, every breath, was calculated.
Behind her loomed a shadow made of stone.
Baraz, the rhinoceros. His hide was not hide but granite, his muscles ridged like carved cliffs. His horn burned faintly with searing light, lightning crackling in thin arcs around its point. On his broad chest, branded into flesh and stone alike, the tattoo gleamed: Hazël #20. His voice, when it rumbled forth, was like boulders grinding in a deep valley.
"Ah, the infamous Ronins," Sahira purred, her voice low, curling, amused. It was the voice of one who had waited long to speak triumph aloud. "We wondered when you'd crawl back out of your graves."
Baraz's chest rose, a heavy breath rattling through the dust. "Caught them just in time," he said simply. There was no arrogance in it—only certainty.
For the refugees, it was too much. Whimpers broke among them, muffled sobs as they pressed into the shadows behind Kopa and Kon. Children buried their faces against their parents' fur. To hear Hazëls speak, to see them step from fire—it was like watching judgment itself stride into the world. For them, it was no longer a rescue. It was an execution waiting to happen.
But Kopa Boga did not waver.
The stag stepped forward, hooves pressing firmly into the broken stone, antlers scraping faint sparks from the crumbled arch above. His eyes burned green, steady, defiant. He lifted his chin, voice like oak cracking in flame, dark and unyielding.
"Sahira. Baraz," he named them, as one names demons to strip their shadow of power. "One ensnares the mind. The other vaporizes the body."
Behind him, Kon stood silent, golden eye never blinking, paw hovering near his hilt. His scars, the long years, the battles—all pressed into that stillness. His body was ready, but his thoughts were sharp and narrow: Two Hazëls. One serpent, one stone. Civilians in tow. A thousand ways for it to get messy. Only one to win.
His voice came low, level. "Who's priority?"
Kopa's eyes narrowed. He remembered too well what had been lost in battles past, when hesitation had been bought with lives. His voice carried no tremor. "Sahira. Gagon, her Arcem, binds through the eyes. More potent than mare hypnosis. Petrifies if her focus breaks. If she captures the civilians, we lose before we've drawn breath."
Kon's paw stilled on the hilt, decision crystallizing in silence. His nod was slight, but in it was the steel of brotherhood: I trust you. I trust this.
Sahira tilted her head, emerald eyes flashing with cruel delight. Her tongue flicked briefly against her lips, tasting the fear that hung in the air. Her words slid like venom into the silence.
"You know me, Kaplan," she whispered, a smile curving sharp and slow. "I'm touched."
The way she said his name was not recognition. It was possession, as though his history, his scar, his defiance, were already coiled in her palm.
Kopa's ears twitched, but he did not look away. He could feel the pressure of her gaze even now, the faint stirring of Gagon's hypnotic threads seeking a purchase. To meet her eyes too long was to risk falling into her labyrinth. Yet to look away entirely was to yield ground. He balanced on the knife's edge: seeing, but not submitting.
Sahira's eyes slid past Kon and Kopa and onto the huddled group behind them. For the refugees, it was like being pierced by twin emerald spears.
The effect was instant.
Dozens of bodies stiffened, eyes glazing like glass catching torchlight. Mouths slackened, paws froze half-lifted in mid-gesture. Children froze in the act of clutching their mothers' robes. A man who had been trembling sank suddenly into stillness, his face devoid of fear—as though fear itself had been stolen.
It was not silence by choice, but silence by command.
Kopa's green eyes flared. His jaw clenched. "Damn it," he hissed. "She's got them."
Kon inhaled, the motion sharp, deliberate. His paw twitched against his hilt. Behind the stillness of his face, numbers were racing: distance, angle, the probable radius of Baraz's first blast, the time it would take Sahira to deepen the trance into permanent petrification. He knew before his breath left him that if he struck fast enough, he might save half. Maybe. The other half would be gone, trapped in her illusion.
Baraz shifted. His chest rumbled like a storm brewing in stone. The horn upon his snout glowed brighter, sparks leaping. It was no idle threat; Kon could feel the energy coalescing, a combustion blast ready to tear the alley apart.
And in Kon's mind, a voice as cold as iron whispered: 'If I reveal myself, if I unleash the hidden strength… they'll see me as I am. But if I don't, these innocents die.'
His paw flexed. The scar over his eye throbbed. He could already feel the heat that was not yet born.
Then—
The world changed.
It did not shift as when he bent reality with Interuim. It did not burn as when flames seared the earth. It arrived with the quiet inevitability of snow falling in a place that had never known winter.
A mist.
It rolled in low and sudden, seeping between cracks in the broken stones, curling around hooves and claws. It glowed faintly, crystalline and pale, like the breath of forgotten stars. The air grew sharp and brittle. The torches guttered. Sound itself seemed to recoil.
The cobblestones frosted white at the touch of it. And the moment it reached them—
The world hushed.
Not merely quiet. Hushed. As though every stone, every shadow, every soul, had agreed to hold breath.
Kon's golden eye narrowed. He did not need to name it aloud to know. It was not the chill of ordinary cold. It was not even the damp of the catacombs. It was the other cold. The kind that made mana falter, that made even will stumble. A disconnection not from warmth, but from the very pulse of life.
Kopa felt it too. It came over him like a tide he could neither fight nor outrun. The kind of cold that did not pierce the skin but sank straight to the soul. His breath caught; his hooves shifted involuntarily against the stone.
Sahira went still. All the grace in her spine, the sinuous control of her limbs, dissolved in an instant. Her scales dulled as though the very sheen had been stolen. Her slit pupils shrank into tight points. For the first time since she had spoken, her voice cracked—not with seduction, not with mockery, but with naked fear.
"No…" she whispered. The word slithered, broken. "No, not her. Not that."
Baraz frowned, thunder gathering in his chest. He glanced at his companion, confusion darkening his stony features. "Sahira?"
But Sahira did not even hear him. Her gaze was darting wildly across the mist, her lips trembling. The serpent who had enslaved minds with a glance now shook as though her own body were turning to stone.
"It's her," she breathed. "The White Witch. The one who broke Arcems in the war."
The name dropped like a weight into the alley. Refugees stirred faintly, blinking, their eyes clearing one by one as the hypnotic glaze dissolved. Mothers gasped, clutching children now awake. Fathers staggered, breath returning. Hope sparked where paralysis had been.
Baraz's face darkened. He growled, the sound low and cavernous. "What are you talking about, Sahira? She is a myth. A nursery tale to frighten the weak."
But Sahira's composure was gone. She turned on him with sudden ferocity, her hand trembling as she thrust it toward the mist. "Then why can't I feel Gagon?!" Her voice cracked, rising to a shriek. "Why is my Arcem dead?!"
Baraz's fury broke the silence first. A sound like mountains splitting apart thundered from his throat. His horn flared with raw, burning energy, each spark jagged with violence.
Then he roared.
BOOOOM!
The blast shook the very marrow of the stones. It surged like a cannon of molten light, tearing forward, shredding mist and brick alike. The collapsed courtyard groaned under the force, walls crumbling further, flame licking the edges where stone shattered into dust.
But when the light died and the echoes faded—
There was nothing.
No Ronins.
No civilians.
Not even a shadow caught by chance.
Only silence.
The mist curled lazily around the wreckage, patient, unhurried, as if it mocked the brute force that had tried to disperse it. It wound itself through the broken arch, over smoldering rock, until it parted just enough to reveal a figure.
A silhouette.
It stood in the ruin, cloaked and still, blue fur glinting faintly through the veil. For one heartbeat, it seemed to breathe with the very stones—an immovable presence, a memory made flesh.
And then it was gone.
The mist rolled back into emptiness, leaving only the echoes of what had been.
Sahira's body collapsed before her mind could catch up. Her knees struck the stones, scales scraping against grit. Her emerald eyes were wide, unblinking, as though some unseen hand still held them open. Her voice, usually silk laced with venom, quavered like a child's.
"That Arcem…" She swallowed, her throat tight as though the very word would strangle her. "There's no mistaking it. That was Kurtcan."
The name itself seemed to chill the air anew.
Baraz turned, nostrils flaring, disbelief thick on his stone-hewn face. "Impossible. He is dead. Buried. He cannot be." His deep voice shook, not from doubt of himself, but from the trembling crack Sahira's fear had cut into his certainty.
But Sahira only shook her head, hands clutched against her chest as though she could steady her own heart by force. "You didn't feel it," she whispered. "I did. My Arcem—gone, strangled like a candle under water. That only happens when he is near. When Kurtcan wills it."
Her gaze darted to the empty fog, as if expecting the figure to return and finish them both. "The Witch who broke Arcems. The shadow of the White Witch herself. They said his line ended… but I swear by the Trisoc's throne—it was him."
Baraz growled low, but the growl carried no conviction. His massive fist clenched, stone grinding against stone. He wanted to speak, to dismiss it, to crush her panic with the solidity of denial. Yet his eyes betrayed him, flickering toward the mist that lingered still like an unwanted guest.
The refugees stood in the distance, no longer glazed or bound, but whispering in awed confusion. They clutched each other, some weeping freely, others gazing at the empty air as though the very absence was proof of divine intervention. A mother pressed her cub to her chest, murmuring: "We are free. By Aslan, we are free."
Kon and Kopa had vanished with them, as if swallowed into another world. Not a footprint remained. Only the legend did.
Baraz spat into the dirt, though even that gesture seemed hollow. "If it was him," he muttered, "then all Carlon is in peril. And if the Ronins walk with him…" He trailed off, jaw tightening.
Sahira rose slowly, though her knees trembled. The strength that had made her feared across the empire now looked brittle, like glass under strain. Her voice came soft, almost reverent, almost horrified:
"Kurtcan walks again. The ghost of the Witch walks with the Ronins."
She wrapped her tail around herself, shivering as though the cold mist still clung to her scales.
Above them, the city of Tashlan gleamed as though nothing had shifted, nobles feasting in golden halls, laughter echoing across spires. Yet in the shattered depths below, an old terror had been whispered back into being.
For the first time in centuries, the name of the White Witch stirred in hushed tones.
And with it—Kurtcan.