Soren and Marcus walked down the tunnel in silence.The air was stale and heavy with dust, the kind that clung to the back of one's throat and turned every breath into a shallow gasp. The tunnel stretched endlessly ahead of them, carved from old sandstone that still bore the marks of tools long forgotten. The walls were slick with condensation, and the faint drip of unseen moisture echoed like a clock marking time in a crypt.
Marcus held a match between his fingers, its frail flame struggling against the dark. The light trembled, throwing jittering reflections across the walls, making the stone seem alive—breathing, watching. He stared at the wavering glow until his vision blurred. His fingers tightened around the thin stick of wood, and he pressed his thumb against it, digging his nail in until it splintered. A tiny prick of pain followed, a drop of blood welling on his skin.
He welcomed the sting—it was real. It reminded him he was still alive.
He wished it wasn't.
The image of the girl's face haunted him behind every blink. Her final words still rang in his mind like a curse, like something that had bound him to this place. He could still see the light leaving her eyes. Still hear the click of Soren's gun. Still taste the metal in the air afterward. Thinking about her wouldn't bring her back. He knew that. But it didn't stop the guilt from gnawing at him.
The least he could do now—the only thing left—was to fulfill her final wish.
The tunnel was quiet save for the occasional scuttling of unseen insects and the faint rumble of the sandstorm raging far above the surface. Then, without warning, even those distant sounds ceased.
Silence.
Not the ordinary kind, but a suffocating, unnatural silence that crushed the space between heartbeats. Even the air seemed to still, and Marcus felt his stomach knot. He glanced at Soren. The older man had stopped walking too, his posture tightening as his red eyes scanned the darkness ahead.
Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Then it came—the sound that had haunted these tunnels before.
A long, scraping shriek of metal grinding against metal.
The noise echoed endlessly, twisting through the tunnel until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Marcus's pulse quickened. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Soren's hand instinctively went to the side of his holster, his entire body shifting into readiness.
From the darkness ahead, a figure emerged.
At first, it was just a silhouette—a smear of blackness within blackness, moving with slow, deliberate rhythm. The light from Marcus's flickering match barely touched it. All he could see was that the figure held something—two blunt objects that glinted faintly in the dim red glow. They looked like clubs or perhaps curved horns of some kind, their metal heads pitted and scarred from countless blows.
The stranger began to walk toward them, unhurried, the sound of those weapons clanging together with every step.Clang.Clang.Clang.
Each impact sent a pulse of vibration through the walls, the noise reverberating deep into the stone like the tolling of a death knell.
"Get ready to fight, Marcus!" Soren barked, drawing his sidearm. His stance was rigid, his eyes locked onto the approaching figure.
Marcus dropped the burnt match and fumbled for the dagger on his belt. The light vanished, plunging the tunnel into deeper gloom.
The clanging stopped.
Silence returned, thicker now—anticipation curling through it like smoke.
Soren narrowed his gaze, the faint glow of his crimson eyes catching the dark. "Where did he—"
He blinked. The figure was gone.
"Damn it!" Soren hissed, turning sharply, his boots grinding against the sand and grit. His senses strained, trying to find the faintest sound—breathing, shuffling, anything. The tunnel gave him nothing but the echo of his own heartbeat.
Then his instincts screamed.
"Marcus!" he shouted, snapping his head toward the younger man.
Marcus turned instantly, eyes wide.
"DUCK!" Soren roared.
Marcus dropped to the ground just as the figure materialized from the dark, no longer a shape but a man—his movement swift as a shadow cutting through flame.
The stranger was tall, broad-shouldered, his skin dusted with the grit of the desert until it had taken on an earthy brown hue. His hair was jet-black, wild and matted, falling across his brow in uneven locks. The matchlight caught the faint glint of rings on his fingers and the worn silver necklace that hung around his neck—a small pendant shaped like a blade.
His jacket was leather, cracked and torn, scarred by both time and violence. His eyes were a deep, burning brown, sharp as molten stone. His expression was one of cruel amusement, lips curling into a grin that was both mocking and feral.
"Peekaboo," he said, his voice a deep, resonant rumble that carried easily through the still air.
Before Soren could react, the stranger's fist connected with his face.
The blow landed with a sound like thunder. Soren's body slammed into the wall, stone cracking behind him as dust and sand erupted from the impact. The echo lingered, rolling down the tunnel long after Soren hit the ground.
The man's grin widened at Marcus as if savoring a slow, inevitable meal. He extended one heavy arm, the club — a crude, horned thing of iron and flayed leather — poised like a judge's gavel. "You're next, pretty boy," he said, voice low and contemptuous, every syllable a taunt that vibrated through the hollow tunnel.
Marcus felt the words burn into him. He did not answer. Words would not unmake what had been done; they would not grant the dead girl reprieve. Only action could honor that whisper in her last breath. He slid his feet into a fighting stance that came from long nights on the road and harsher lessons learned by blade and necessity. His fingers closed on the dagger at his hip until the leather bite of the hilt ached beneath his palm. The match between his fingers trembled like a tiny heartbeat, the flame guttering now to a teardrop of light.
The stranger's club rose in a wide, punishing arc. It moved with the confidence of someone who had broken men before. Marcus saw the motion and moved; instinct and training pulled him aside in a breathless pivot. The club slammed into the sandstone where Marcus had been standing a heartbeat earlier, the shock of the impact shuddering up his arm, dust and grit cascading down like a small landslide.
He lunged, short and swift, aiming not for glory but for survival. His dagger slashed toward the man's forearm, a clean, practiced strike meant to disable rather than glorify. Metal kissed flesh. The stranger hissed, the grin twitching into something raw, as dark red rilled down the sinewed muscle of his arm. He rocked back from the pain but did not fall.
Instead he laughed — a sound without mirth — and the laugh was a statement: it would take more than that to end him. He tightened his grip on the club, brought it down in a brutal hammer-stroke. Marcus rolled, feeling the tunnel's grit tear at his clothing and skin. He rose with blood at his knuckles, lungs burning, mind sharpened to a single thought: finish him.
From the wall where he had been hurled, Soren pushed himself up. For an instant Marcus feared he would be motionless, the blow having felled him as surely as a tree. But Soren's hands found purchase; he forced himself to his feet in a crouch, the crimson in his eyes hard as a brand. The brief flash of blue that sometimes crossed those irises — a remnant of something gentler — flitted like a memory, then was gone. He was present and lethal again.
The attacker advanced with a predator's gait, moving to cut Marcus off. He spoke little now; his voice was spent of games. He swung the club in a low, sweeping strike meant to unbalance and crush. Marcus ducked and, with the dagger in a reverse grip, caught the man's wrist and twisted. Steel met bone and tendon; the man cursed, the noise ragged and animal. Marcus felt the cord of the club's handle rattle under his fingers, and with a wrenching pull tore it from the stranger's hand. The club clanged against the tunnel floor and skidded away into shadow.
For a single breath there was the delicate instant of balance: the man one heartbeat more exposed than before, Marcus' breath ragged but steady, Soren looming at his side. Marcus moved to seize that sliver. He drove the dagger inward with the economy of someone who had had too few chances to be merciful or cruel — whichever the moment required. The blade sank toward the stranger's ribs.
But the man was not yet finished. He twisted sharply, the movement born of muscle memory and the cruelty of survival, and the dagger nicked instead of burying home. Pain flared in Marcus's palm where the opponent's elbow scraped against his grip. The stranger managed to throw a shoulder into Marcus' midsection, knocking the wind from him. Marcus staggered back, breath gone, and the tunnel tilted.
Soren took advantage with a speed that belied his size. He moved like a spring uncoiling, closing the distance and delivering a blow to the assailant's jaw that sent him staggering. The man's head snapped, stars blooming behind his eyes, but hatred was a stubborn thing. He spat blood, eyes blazing not with fear but with a rancid delight in the wound he had taken and would yet inflict. He reached for the pendant at his throat — the small metal sword Marcus had glimpsed — and yanked as if summoning some private talisman. The pendant struck Soren's hand as the man feigned a lunge; Soren's fingers closed around the cupped metal, and the pendant clattered to the ground.
It was then Marcus saw the emblem stamped into the pendant's blade: a sigil of interlocking horns and a single, vertical stroke — the very same mark faintly impressed on the leather tome the girl had clutched. The sight hit him like a second blow. For a breath he forgot pain, forgot breath itself. The world narrowed to two truths: the girl's last words and the pendant now lying in the guttered light, an answer and an accusation bound in worn metal.
The assailant roared, a sound that was not quite human, and launched himself forward with manic desperation. Marcus sidestepped, and as the man passed, Marcus seized the opportunity — a practiced, ragged strike — and drove the dagger home into the attacker's flank. The man staggered, eyes widening as if surprised by the sudden, sharp certainty of his own mortality. He slumped to one knee, breath jagged, crimson soaking the torn leather of his jacket.
Soren stood over him like a judge. He did not speak. The two men — Soren and Marcus — looked at the fallen figure, at the pendant and the book, and at one another. There was no joy in their victory. Only the cold, hard knowledge that a promise had been started and could not be left unfinished.
"Is he—dead?" Marcus asked, voice raw, the tunnel around them closing back into its habitual dark.
Soren's hand tightened around his own pistol. He looked at the man's face, at the gash and the slackening limbs, then down at the sigil on the fallen pendant. "Not yet," he said, measured. "But he won't be breathing by the time dawn reaches the surface."
Marcus wanted to say more—on rage, on justice, on what the girl had asked of them—but words felt thin. Instead he reached, fingers shaking, and picked up the pendant. The metal was warm from the fight; the sigil was a promise and a warning both. Blood, book, and charm threaded into a single, terrible pattern.
Outside, the sandstorm howled like an unanswered name. Inside, the three things that mattered now lay clustered on the stone between them: the dying man, the pendant with its familiar mark, and the leather book that had already spoken the final command.
Soren met Marcus's eyes then, and a something like resolution — older, and far more dangerous than vengeance alone — hardened his face. "We follow the trail," he said. "We find whoever sent this filth. We end them."
Marcus nodded. The match flame, long since spent, had left only the smear of memory in his palm. He slid the pendant into his palm and closed his fingers around it as if to anchor himself to purpose.
Behind them, in the dark, another scuttle sounded — not the soft menace of the tunnels' common life, but the measured steps of someone approaching. They were not alone. The promise spoken over a dying girl hung between them like a spear.
And they moved, together, deeper into the shadow.