The rusted iron staircase gave way to cracked stone, then fractured tile—remnants of a city buried beneath its own shadow.
Kazuo's boots echoed with each step, the sound swallowed quickly by the dark. Above, the sun had already vanished behind Yurelda's towers. Down here, there was no light at all.
Only cold.
The kind that crept inward, slow and deliberate—sinking past skin, past muscle, until it settled deep in the bones.
He reached the base of the stairwell, where a rusted pipe dripped slow droplets into a pool. Moss clung to the walls in patches, faintly luminescent. Kazuo struck the side of an emberstone — one of the small magical torches Gramps had packed — and soft orange light bloomed into the space around him.
He stepped into the corridor. And found silence.
The Hollow Veins...
They were real. Not myth. Not a scare story whispered by desperate men—but stone, and tunnels, and breathless dark.
The tunnels stretched wide in every direction, carved with purpose and precision. Every corridor bore the marks of ancient hands — tools, symbols, patterns etched into stone with care that time couldn't fully erase. Age clung to the walls like dust, but the structure remained intact. Solid. Measured.
Stone arches rose above him, framing the path like the bones of a buried cathedral. Glyphs lined the walls, their edges dulled but still pulsing with forgotten meaning. Some glowed faintly beneath the emberlight — others looked scorched, broken mid-symbol, as if whatever they once contained had escaped.
Murals sprawled across the rock, faded but still vivid in shape.Rivers flowed across cracked tile, drawn in winding veins of cobalt.Silver-threaded spirits twisted through moonlit skies.Spireless cities rose from the earth, their towers cut flat, their horizons open to stars now long dead.
Kazuo walked slowly, torchlight flickering across histories no one remembered.The silence around him was complete heavy.
What is this place…?
He'd heard stories before. The Hollow Veins were supposed to be ruins — tunnels buried beneath the capital, dangerous and long abandoned.
But this was something else.
The air felt older than the stone. Every step echoed like it didn't belong. The walls weren't just decayed — they remembered.
He passed a rusted sign, its words long erased. Whatever it once warned, the silence said more.
At one point, the tunnel forked.
To the left, the air was damp. To the right, it was dry — and silent in a way that made the skin itch.
Kazuo took the right.
Somewhere deeper in the tunnels, a whisper curled through the dark.
Kazuo froze. It wasn't a word—more like a breath, exhaled from somewhere that had no lungs.
He drew closer to the wall, hand resting near the hilt of his sword. Water dripped steadily in the distance.
Then a creak — a rusted pipe — and silence again.
He moved onward.
A while later, he found what had once been a platform. The edges were crumbled, stones missing in jagged chunks. But it overlooked a vast channel — a man-made river long since dried, now home to silence and rot.
He sat for a moment, trying to orient himself.
Gramps was right. This is no place for normal people. I wonder what happened here.
He leaned back, staring up into the dark ceiling far above.
From here on out, he didn't belong to the surface anymore.
Kazuo heard the sound before he saw the light.Not voices but movement. Cloth brushing stone. The soft clink of glass. A lull in the air, stirred by something like breath or fire.
Then came the flickers.
At first he thought they were lanterns. But as he crept closer along the cracked corridor, torch in hand, he realized the lights moved too freely — drifting, pulsing, like living things.
He rounded a bend and found a wall of woven tarps, stitched together from fabric and old sails.
Below, through the gaps, he saw it:
A market.
Underground.
Lit by jars of colored fire.
Alive and loud.
Makeshift stalls lined a wide corridor carved into the earth. Shadows danced behind thin cloth walls. Steam curled upward from blackened pots. He could hear laughter. Bartering. Coins. People.
Not just humans.
He spotted pointed ears, scaled skin, tails vanishing behind drapes. Fairies. Beastfolk. Mixed and mingling freely.
And yet, the old order still bled through.
A black-eyed boy crouched near one of the stalls, scrubbing stone with a rag wrapped around his knuckles. His hands were cracked. His face sunken. The vendor standing above him barked at a customer without looking down once.
Further along, another black-eyed figure stood holding a lantern above a merchant's wares — arms trembling, eyes glassy, naked. No one thanked him. No one saw him.
Kazuo's mouth tightened.Even down here, where law had rotted, their chains still held.
He stood still for a moment, the torchlight flickering against his jaw. Then he exhaled, low and bitter, and turned his eyes away from the boy.
But he didn't leave.
If there are people down here, he thought, then it's better to be among them than alone.
He lingered at the edge of the platform, watching the flickering glow below.If there are people down here, he thought, then it's better to be among them than alone.
He stepped down — slow, deliberate — and began walking toward the market.The sounds of fire and trade echoed faintly ahead. Cloth. Voices. Coin.
That was when he heard it:
"You don't belong."
The voice cut through the stone like a knife.
Old. Cracked. Female.
Clearer than wind. Sharper than instinct.
Kazuo turned.
A figure sat just off the path — hunched, wrapped in layers of green and brown cloth. Her face was veiled in dark fabric, frayed and stiff with age. Her hands, if she had any, were folded beneath the robe. She didn't move.
Kazuo stepped toward her, cautious. Torchlight flickered on the wall behind her.
"What do you mean?" he asked.