The Smoldering Silence of What Remains
The first thing Ashkore saw when the smoke parted was a cradle made of bones.
It sat in the center of the ruined village, barely upright in the blackened mud, surrounded by the silent corpses of a hundred souls, human, shadowkin, and the other things that should never have had names. No crying. No wind. Just that godless cradle and the twitching flicker of firelight reflected in blood puddles.
He hadn't meant to find it. He was only here to scavenge armor from the dead.
Ashkore moved like smoke. His shadow wrapped around him, flexing and trailing behind his long coat, mimicking the tattered wings he no longer had. The air shimmered with heat and leftover spells, some still sparking like dying stars in the ash. He didn't flinch when the ground hissed or when bones cracked beneath his boots.
He didn't believe in omens anymore. He didn't believe in much.
But the cradle was humming.
He crouched beside it, wary of tricks. Nightweavers, his mother's cursed lineage, knew illusions could take on memory's shape. But there was no glamour here, no enchantment. Just a filthy cloth, barely a blanket, and beneath it…
A child. Alive.
His breath caught. His instincts didn't.
Ashkore reached inside his coat, fingers brushing the curved bone-hilt of the fang-blade on reflex. If this was bait, he'd slice through whatever sick trick the Council had set. But the moment his gloved hand neared the child, the shadows twitched.
Not his. Hers.
They recoiled, not in fear, but reverence.
She was maybe three months old, maybe older. Wide, soot-smudged cheeks. Mismatched eyes: one green as spring, the other silver like dying stars. No wounds. No blood. Just silence.
And still breathing.
He should have left her. Every instinct, learned, beaten, carved into him, screamed it. She was human. And he was…
Not.
Half Nightweaver, half Voidborn. The Council's favorite curse-word. A living contradiction. Every realm he touched had tried to erase him. Every faction had weaponized him, then buried the evidence.
But the girl looked at him, not screamed, not wept, not flinched. Looked.
Ashkore felt something in his chest twist, like an old scar yanked open.
A shadow fell across them.
He spun, blade drawn, shadows lashing out in jagged arcs, but stopped. The wind shifted.
Over the ridge came the clank of armor. Standard issue from the Order of the Silver Dawn, those sun-blessed hypocrites with halos etched into their blades and child-blood on their boots.
Worse still, behind them, the shriek of Boneclaws. Revenants and corpse-beasts rising from the slaughter, scenting the child's blood like hounds sniffing prophecy.
"Shit," Ashkore muttered, lifting the child into one arm.
She didn't cry. Just blinked. The shadows around her coiled, clinging to his wrists like they recognized him. Maybe she did too.
He ran.
He ran like he was made for it, because he was. Over ruined rooftops, through war-split alleys, across broken prayer circles where the holy runes still hissed when his feet passed over them.
The girl, he would learn her name later, tucked against his chest, her warmth foreign and wrong. But he held her like a secret, like a sword he wasn't sure how to use.
The Boneclaws came first, crawling out from beneath the earth, teeth of rusted metal and bone-forged limbs dragging through the dirt. Ashkore flared his shadow wide, a cloak of writhing ink that danced like flame and cracked like glass. Illusions shimmered around them: phantom flames, false turns, sound loops of weeping women.
It bought seconds. That's all illusions ever gave you. Seconds to run, seconds to kill, seconds to die.
He used them well.
Ashkore twisted mid-air, hurling a spike of void-essence into a revenant's eye. It collapsed, whispering a name it had forgotten centuries ago. Another lunged. He let the shadow take it, unraveling its spirit into glittering ash mid-leap.
He reached the treeline. Just as the Silver Dawn knights burst from behind a fallen steeple.
They were quicker than he remembered.
One hurled a sanctified chain lit with runes, blessed by some poor priest who hadn't seen sunlight in months. It wrapped around his arm. It burned. Not with fire, worse. With memory.
Ashkore screamed through gritted teeth as the chain forced his thoughts into light: every betrayal, every kill, every mercy he failed to offer. The baby cried out, finally, and the sound shattered something.
The void inside him flared. Shadows lashed out from his skin not like ropes, but like vines from a nightmare forest. The chain broke. His attacker fell.
Ashkore vanished into the trees.
Later, at the edge of the burned world, when he found the old Boneclaw medic's hut buried in the Veil's thinning mist, he finally stopped.
The child had fallen asleep against him. Shadows curled over her chest like a second blanket, purring with quiet sentience.
Grim, the medic, took one look at her and whispered, "By the Old Blood… You brought her out."
Ashkore didn't answer. He just sat. For the first time in years.
He looked down at the girl in his arms.
"Luna," he murmured, the name falling from his lips before he could stop it.
He didn't know why. Only that it felt older than him.
Older than the war.
Older than shadow.