Part 1: Below the Bonewood
The Bonewood didn't begin like a normal forest.
There was no welcome of birdsong or rustling leaves. No breeze. No warmth.
Just silence. And ash.
The trees grew tall and twisted, bark bone-white, roots black and exposed like fingers trying to claw their way back to the surface. Each one stood unnaturally straight, as if they'd grown in obedience, not chaos.
Yuji stepped into the tree line first.
His boots sank into the earth—not mud, not soil.
Dust.
Sylvia crouched, scooped a pinch, sniffed it.
"Burned marrow," she muttered. "This ground was never meant to grow anything."
Siora walked slower than usual, fingers brushing bark. "These trees weren't planted. They rose."
Amelia's voice drifted through the shadows. "They grow because something feeds them."
Sacha gripped her axe tighter. "So where's the mouth?"
Yuji held up the torn sigil they'd recovered from the cultist's scroll cache—a crude map scrawled with broken glyphs and a spiral symbol labeled "ASH SPIRE."
They followed it.
No birds. No bugs. No rot.
Just long-dead wind and trees that creaked like they were remembering a scream.
Hours passed before they found the entrance.
It was a stone obelisk buried beneath tree roots, half-collapsed and coated in red glyphs that pulsed faintly at Yuji's touch. The obelisk bore no doorway—but a small circle had been carved into the earth beside it, barely wide enough to crawl through.
Sylvia sniffed. "It goes deep."
Amelia crouched beside the hole and smiled faintly. "Necromancers always build downward. Easier to pull from the grave when you're already halfway there."
Yuji didn't hesitate.
He dropped in first.
The descent was narrow and unlit, the air thick with old power. Magic from a time before runes were written on paper—when they were burned into stone with blood and breath.
At the bottom, the tunnel opened into a carved hallway—lined with bone tiles, polished to a mirror sheen.
No guards.
Just one word carved into the wall in ancient script:
"Ash Spire."
Sylvia muttered, "Something's awake down here."
Yuji nodded once.
"Let's meet it."
Part 2: Flesh in the Walls
Ash Spire was a wound.
Not a fortress. Not a dungeon.
A wound in the earth that festered with death—and something worse.
Yuji moved down the main corridor in silence. The others followed, eyes sharp, weapons ready, breath shallow. Even Amelia stopped her usual commentary.
The walls were smooth stone, but veins of black magic pulsed behind them—like blood pumping through old arteries. Glyphs etched in bone glowed red, feeding the network.
Then they entered the first processing chamber.
And everyone stopped.
Rows of tables. Metal frames. Restraints stained dark brown. In the center: a machine, half magical, half alchemical, fed by tubes that ran into preserved corpses suspended in fluid.
Each corpse glowed faintly.
Not from death—but from life.
Sacha stepped forward. "That's fertility aura," she muttered. "Same as him."
Yuji clenched his jaw.
Siora moved to the tanks. She touched one rune, whispered a charm. The liquid flared gold for a split second—then twisted green.
"It's corrupted," she said. "They're fusing your type of magic… with necromancy."
Sylvia growled. "How?"
Siora pulled a scroll from a nearby table—covered in strange diagrams. At the bottom was a wax seal.
Church stamp. Not recent. But real.
Siora's hand shook. "This is Aratus tech. From the forbidden libraries. The Church purged this kind of fusion magic two generations ago."
Amelia smiled faintly. "Apparently not all of it."
Yuji stared at the tank in front of him.
The corpse inside wasn't entirely dead.
Its eyes flicked open—bloodshot. Mouth stitched shut. Belly swollen unnaturally.
Sylvia gasped.
"It's still producing."
"They're growing death," Yuji said softly, "from stolen life."
They kept moving.
Each chamber worse than the last.
One held cages of women—some demi-human, some monster-kin—chained to glyph circles that sapped them in cycles. None conscious. All breathing. Their auras barely visible—drained but not empty.
In the final room they entered, the walls were soft.
Not stone.
Flesh.
The walls pulsed faintly. Stitched together from corpses and magically preserved, used as living conduits to move energy through the facility like blood in a body.
Sacha's voice was low. "This isn't a temple."
Yuji finished for her.
"It's a heart."
And it's still beating.