From the Litany of Dust
(Inscribed upon the inner gates of the Silent Archive in Dharuj)
Now the wind, a weary shroud, does not stir.
It trails the ashes in spectral wakes—
paths etched by what was once fire.
Names once sacred
Buried beneath the weight of stars.
Their monuments weep rust.
Their glories worn smooth
by the heel of time.
These fields no longer echo thunder.
These stones hold no oaths.
The hush here is not peace—
it is the tomb where memory is laid to rot.
We clawed open graves the earth had sealed in mercy.
We stirred what slumbered in ruin's sleep.
We etched remembrance into flesh,
and found only rot beneath.
Let the chronicle weep.
Let these pages fade into dust.
The hymns have cracked.
The bards' tongues lie still.
No anthem rises from rubble.
This is the echo after myth,
the grief beneath the glory.
Here ends what never truly began.
Year 932 of the Withered Calendar
Wind-Scoured Plateau
The wind was a sculptor of absences. It carved hollows in the silence and polished the bones of the long-dead until they gleamed like promises. On this plateau, nothing rotted. Knights in armour the colour of a winter sky lay beside their fallen mounts, expressions of shock still frozen on their faces. A mage, hands raised in a final, futile ward, was a statue of defiance, the dust of ages collected in the folds of his robes. Peasants lay in heaps, grief etched into their faces so perfectly it seemed a kind of art. The air was clean. Too clean. It carried no scent of decay, only the cold, mineral tang of stone and the dry whisper of dust.
Here, the world had died and forgotten to lie down.
Maereth the Pale stood at the precipice, a figure of ink against a slate-grey sky. Her crown of polished knucklebones was a stark white constellation against her black veil. Below lay the Shrine of Names Forgotten, a wound in the cliff face, a litany of scars carved by generations of dying hands. Some names were etched deep, defiant assertions against oblivion. Others were faint ghosts, surrendering to the wind's patient erasure.
She closed her eyes. The wind was a chorus of ghosts.
"They are louder here."
The voice at her side was thick, as if dredged from a deep well. The warlock stood beside her, chained and dream-drunk. The iron links coiling his arms and torso were cold and silent, having forgotten the sound of struggle. His eyes were bruised nebulae, pupils swimming in a private night.
Maereth did not turn. "The closer one comes to being forgotten," she murmured, her voice as thin as a thread, "the harder the memory screams."
The warlock swayed, a pendulum marking time that no longer passed. "I dreamed of a boy with a broken sword," he rasped. "He stood among corpses and wept at the sky. I do not know his face. I woke with the taste of blood."
"The shrine does not ask for your dreams," Maereth said, her tone turning to frost. "Only your offerings."
A low whistle, sharp enough to cut the wind. One of the three Crows approached, cloak snapping like a black banner. The warrior's mask was a beak of polished bone, its eye-slits voids of shadow. He stopped before the warlock and nudged him with the butt of a spear, a gesture of casual contempt.
"Dream of gold next time, spell-slinger. We could use it."
The warlock hissed, a sound like grinding stones. "Careful, Crow. There are gods in my sleep. They have no patience for mockery."
"Pity," the Crow said, tapping the side of his beaked mask. "I have little else to offer them."
A second Crow joined them, this one limping, his mask chipped at the beak. He offered no words, only a slow, deliberate nod toward Maereth. A third hung back, a detached shadow who never spoke, never bowed, but always seemed to know where the wind would turn before it did.
Then came a hum, a light, tuneless sound that seemed impossibly alive in this dead place.
The child acolyte trudged into view, her small boots kicking up puffs of grey dust. Runes, faded and renewed, adorned her brow like a second skin. She clutched a threadbare doll made of sackcloth and whispers.
"We're close, aren't we?" she asked, her voice clear as a bell in a graveyard.
"Very," Maereth replied. "Have you found the name?"
The girl's brow furrowed. "It slips. Like water. It starts with a song… A… Sa…"
The mute scribe stepped forward, the last of their procession. His skin was a living tapestry of the dead, a parchment of names tattooed in his own blood. His lips were sewn shut with sinew, but his eyes burned with the furious light of a library set ablaze. He tapped a space on his chest, where the skin was still raw.
Fresh ink glistened there: Seranil.
Maereth's veil stirred as she leaned closer. "Your brother?"
A single nod. Slow. Weighted with the gravity of a world.
"You carry his name now." It was not a question.
The scribe pointed to his temple. A memory. Then to his chest. A record.
"Hah," the first Crow grunted. "He remembers so the rest of us don't have to."
The child tugged Maereth's sleeve. "Will the wind take my mother's name, too?"
"Only if you let it."
"But I forget things all the time. I forgot my doll's name yesterday."
Maereth crouched, bringing her bone-crowned head level with the girl's. Her voice softened, a crack in the ice. "Then you must remember the forgetting. That is the echo a soul leaves behind."
The warlock snorted. "A riddle, Priestess?"
"Everything I say is a riddle," she replied, rising once more. "It spares you the agony of truth."
They walked on, the plateau unfolding before them like a map of sorrows. The first Crow fell into step beside the warlock, his stride a counterpoint to the other's shambling gait.
"Oi, spell-slinger," the Crow said, his voice a low rasp from behind the mask. "All that muttering to yourself—you getting anything useful? Or are the dead just complaining about the damp?"
The warlock's head turned with the slowness of a tide. "They don't complain. They repeat. The last thing they saw. The last thing they felt. There is no conversation in the Threnody Thread, only echoes."
"Right. So no 'Watch out for the cliff,' just a lot of 'Gods, my spleen.' Useless." The Crow gestured with his chin towards the iron links. "What about the ironmongery? That your Anchor? Bit heavy for a trinket."
"My Anchor was the memory of a face. It cracked," the warlock stated, his tone as flat as the stones beneath their feet. "The chains are for when the echoes try to borrow my legs. They like to walk."
The Crow stopped for a half-step. "They walk? Hells." He started again, shaking his head. "So what was the Tithe for all this… insight? Must've been a steep one."
"I gave the Veil the memory of warmth," the warlock said. "I know the sun exists. I see its light. But I no longer remember what it feels like on the skin. I only remember the cold that came after."
The Crow was silent for several paces. "You're telling me you traded sunshine for ghostly screams?" he finally spat. "Worst fucking deal I've ever heard."
Maereth's voice cut through the wind from ahead, sharp and cold as ice. "He did not make a deal, Crow. The Veil made it for him when his ambition outstripped his will. Pester him again, and I will let you feel the Tithe required for a moment of your silence."
By twilight, they stood at the foot of the shrine. The cliff face was a cathedral of scars, an impossible library of loss reaching up into the bruised sky. Piles of bone offerings lay at its base like fallen prayers.
From a satchel, Maereth produced a vial of bone-dust, a cloth still damp with tears shed a century ago, and a shard of obsidian etched with a single, secret glyph. She placed them upon a flat altar stone, her movements brittle.
"You," she said to the limping Crow.
The warrior hesitated, then drew a small charm from a pouch—a child's tooth, yellowed with age, bound in twine. He placed it on the stone. His voice, when it came, was rough with disuse. "It was mine. From before my mouth learned the shape of silence."
The first Crow chuckled, a dry, mirthless sound, and tossed a half-burnt letter onto the altar. "She wrote that she would wait. A liar, like all poets."
The third Crow, the silent one, knelt without a sound. He drew a knife, cut a lock of black hair from beneath his mask, and laid it beside the tooth and the letter. It curled on the stone like a question mark.
The scribe stepped forward. He unrolled a fresh strip of linen, dipped a needle in a vial of his own blood, and with steady hands, began to tattoo a new name onto his forearm.
Then the child approached. Her voice was small but did not tremble. "Asara. Her name was Asara."
The scribe's needle paused for a heartbeat. He glanced at the girl, then finished the final stroke of the name he was writing. He would give Asara her own space. A clean patch of skin.
Finally, the warlock.
He stumbled to the altar, chains rattling a frantic rhythm. He opened his mouth.
And he screamed.
It was not a human sound. It was the sound of earth splitting open, of a star dying. It shook the bones of the mountain and the bones in their bodies. Blood, black in the fading light, poured from his eyes, tracing the glowing glyphs on his cheeks. He collapsed, clawing at his chains, at his face.
"A name!" he gasped, words tearing from his throat. "It is not from a dream! It forced its way in, a thief in the night of my mind!"
"Whose name?" Maereth whispered, a hand outstretched.
The warlock convulsed. His finger, slick with his own blood, drew a glyph in the dust on the altar stone. A rune of jagged lines and broken circles. The sigil for betrayal.
"Kaelen," he choked out, the name a shard of glass in his throat. "The name is Kaelen."
The wind died. Absolute silence descended upon the plateau.
A sharp crack echoed in the stillness. A fissure, fine as a spider's thread, ran down the center of Maereth's bone-white mask.
The third Crow—the silent watcher—slowly turned his head to the north.
Maereth took a staggered step back from the altar, her hand flying to the crack in her mask. Her voice was a hollow echo from a ruined temple.
The warlock went limp. The shrine seemed to exhale, a tremor running through the stone. And the wind rose again, hungry, carrying the new name in its chorus. The child huddled against the scribe, who stood like a statue of ink and flesh. The other Crows shifted, hands on their weapons.
The first Crow strode to Maereth's side, his voice a low growl. "What in the seven hells was that? 'Book of the Living'? Enough riddles, Priestess. Speak plain."
Maereth did not look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the blood-drawn sigil on the altar. "Think of a name as the rope that tethers a soul to this world, Crow. When death cuts that rope, we hear the whisper of it falling into the Threnody Thread. An echo. This... this is no echo. This is the sound of a rope that was never supposed to exist suddenly snapping taut, pulled from a void."
"So a ghost is back. We've killed ghosts before."
"A ghost is a memory clinging to its own grave," she whispered, her voice trembling with something other than cold. "This is a memory the world itself was forced to forget. That name wasn't lost to time. It was cut out of the tapestry of history. The price—the Tithe—for a spell so vast it broke a kingdom was not a life, but existence. The existence of that man. To make that man never have been."
The Crow's bravado faltered. "An Eclipse-weave? Fuck. What power could undo that?"
"The Veil cannot," Maereth breathed, a hint of true fear in her voice. "Its laws are absolute. A Tithe of that magnitude is permanent. For it to be undone means a power that does not bargain with the Veil has simply... taken it back. A power that walks through the walls of our reality as if they were mist, a power that does not recognize the Veil's authority. Something that does not pay Tithes because it considers our entire reality a passing whim."
"A god?" the Crow asked, his voice now a strained whisper.
"Perhaps once," Maereth murmured, her gaze turning to the north, to the vast, empty canvas of the world. "Or perhaps something that has forgotten it ever was one. Something that answers prayers with silence."
"So this Kaelen… he's the cataclysm?"
"No," Maereth said, turning to face him at last. Through the crack in her mask, her eye was ancient and terrifying. "He is the key. The key to a lock we all prayed would never be found again."
The Crow looked from the warlock's still form to the shrine, then back to her. "And this pilgrimage? All this… walking and weeping and leaving trinkets. What is it for, then? A fool's errand to carve another name on a rock?"
"We came here to read the erosion," she said, her voice hollow. "To measure the pace of the world's forgetting. I came to see if one name—a name I carry—had finally been scoured from this stone, freeing me." She touched the obsidian shard she had placed on the altar. "Instead, I find a name has returned from the void. Forgetting has failed us. Oblivion has been cheated."
A long silence stretched, filled only by the moaning of the wind. The Crow looked north, to the endless, empty horizon.
"What do we do?" he asked. The foul-mouthed swagger was gone from his voice, replaced by something brittle.
"What one always does when the Book of the Living turns a page against its will," Maereth said, her gaze following his. "We listen to the story it wants to tell."
"And?"
She turned her head, the cracked mask a broken moon in the twilight.
"And we pray to the forgotten gods that we are not the ones whose names are written on the final page."