The knife slipped again.
Veer cursed under his breath as another stitch unraveled from Aash's side, the black thread hissing into smoke the moment it snapped. The wound beneath pulsed like a second mouth, exhaling thick, tar-black fluid that smelled of burnt hair and temple incense.
Aash bit down on the leather strap clamped between his teeth, every muscle in his jaw rigid. His knuckles clung white to the rusted cot frame, as though pain might be conquered if he only held on hard enough.
"Hold still," Veer growled, voice roughened by whiskey and wear. His cautery iron glowed a sickly orange—not nearly hot enough. It was the third one tonight. The first had shattered on contact. The second cracked lengthwise, split open like dead bark.
The black fluid dripped to the floorboards. It didn't pool. It shaped. Curling and twitching, the liquid etched itself into forms no wound should produce—a twisted trishul, then horned silhouettes, then what might have been a screaming face before it collapsed into smoke.
Veer wiped sweat from his brow with a shaking hand. His oldest scar—slashing through his left eyebrow and cheekbone—glowed faintly, as if remembering its own fire. "This isn't working," he muttered.
Aash spat out the strap. His voice scraped through his throat, dry as ash. "Then try harder."
The moment the words left him, the wound split wider, the skin parting with the sound of tearing parchment. Darkness spilled from it—not just fluid now, but language. Words rising unbidden against his fevered flesh.
see
me
Veer moved instantly, palm smearing across the syllables, the contact burning Aash's skin like ice. "Don't read it," he hissed, eyes too wide, voice too flat. "Don't even fucking look at it."
But Aash already had.
The message pulsed behind his eyelids, threading itself into the rhythm of his breath, into the aching drum of his heart.
Dusk clung low over the inn's courtyard, a sky bruised purple and gray. In its fading light, Veer tossed the used bandages into an iron basin salvaged from the temple ruins. They were stiff with dried black secretion, curled like ancient snakeskins.
He struck a torch. The flame caught, but the fire didn't spread. It hesitated. Then, it reversed course—burning backward, crawling toward their hands.
Veer cursed, flinging the basin to the ground. For a heartbeat, the fire behaved.
Then it shifted.
The bandages unraveled with a wet, choking sound, slithering into living tendrils that climbed the basin's lip like ivy. Aash reached instinctively—compelled—not with curiosity, but recognition.
His fingers passed through them like mist.
The tendrils dissolved.
In their place, one word appeared—charred into the iron in jagged strokes:
soon
Veer kicked the basin aside with a clang that rang hollow through the quiet courtyard. The sound startled a cluster of crows from the temple's broken spire. They didn't caw.
They screamed.
Human screams.
"We're leaving," Veer said, far too calmly.
The ruined temple's ditch lay quiet beneath the eclipse-hung sky. There, the cultists' bodies had been dumped like refuse. Not one had decayed.
They lay in unnatural order—arms folded, masks fused to skulls. What had once been silver-painted porcelain now twisted into tight, mocking grins. The silence around them was wrong—not empty, but listening.
Aash stepped closer.
His shadow stretched long before him—not in front, but behind, dragging as if reluctant. The grass beneath his feet didn't crunch. It sighed, exhaling the scent of old copper and forgotten prayers.
"Don't touch them," Veer warned, drawing his knife.
Too late.
Aash's shadow brushed the nearest corpse.
Six mouths stitched shut with temple thread twitched in unison.
The threads burst with soft, wet pops—like knuckles breaking.
"He sees you now."
The words didn't come from mouths. They arrived in Aash's bones, behind his ribs, in the hollows of his skull. Not a voice, but an intrusion.
Veer yanked Aash backward as the shadow detached—lunged without him, stretching claw-like fingers toward Mount Veerbhadra in the distance.
"Look," Veer snapped, gripping Aash's chin, forcing his gaze downward.
Each corpse held something in stiffened hands: shards of blue glass.
Reflected in them was not the sky.
But a horned figure, descending from the mountain.
Its movements were wrong. Too fluid. Too smooth. As if gravity obeyed it out of fear.
Back at the Ashhollow cellar, Aash stood over packed earth and dusted relics. He raised trembling hands, summoning flame.
The brand on his back—the Trishul and Third Eye—flared in pain.
For a moment, the fire came.
Then it recoiled.
Slithering down his arms, the flames fled across the floor, toward the eastern wall—toward Mount Veerbhadra.
Veer intercepted, the iron rod in his hand glowing red-hot where the fire kissed it. The flames coiled at his feet, circling him like a starved serpent, then sputtered into smoke. That smoke rose upward, forming—for a blink—a noose.
Veer stared at it, unmoving. "It's not refusing you," he murmured.
He looked at Aash, but the words weren't truly for him.
"It's saving itself for something worse."
Night fell like a lid sealing the world shut.
The inn creaked with the cold. Wind whispered under the doors, never quite entering. Aash lay curled on the cot, fresh bandages tight against the pulsing wound. Each throb of pain cast a faint blue light, jagged and sickly, across the ceiling.
He pressed fingers to the injury.
The skin gave.
It parted—not like a wound, but like a door.
His fingertips met something beneath. Not muscle. Not bone.
Something else.
There was no sound.
Only vibration—a deep hum that spread through his hand, up his arm, into the back of his teeth. Into the cage of his ribs. It wasn't felt so much as known.
And then came the voice.
Not from the world.
From within.
"Hello, vessel."
Aash froze.
And from the far corner of the room, where no candle flickered and no breath stirred—
—his shadow smiled.