The inner keep of Saltmire was a stone lung struggling to breathe. The shadow-sphere encasing it was more than an absence of light; it was a condition. Cold seeped through the granite, not the chill of winter, but the deep, still cold of a place forgotten by the sun. Sounds within the great hall—the shuffle of feet, a child's whimper, the clink of a canteen—were muffled, flattened, as if the dark outside drank their echoes.
Hope was a finite resource, and they were burning through it faster than the lantern oil.
Kaelen moved among the huddled citizens and weary guards, his face a mask of calm command. Inside, a colder calculus ticked away. Food: two weeks. Water: a month, if rationed. Light: days. Willpower: unquantifiable, but dwindling by the hour.
He found Lyssa in a side chamber that had been a scriptorium, its shelves empty of scrolls. She sat on the floor, her back against stone, eyes closed. Not resting. Listening.
"The shadow isn't just outside," she said without opening her eyes. Her voice was thin, strained. "It's pressing on the... the idea of the stone. Persuading it to forget it's a mountain's child, to just be... inert. To stop. If it succeeds, the keep won't crumble. It'll just... become a cave."
He knelt beside her. "Can you fight it?"
"Fight? No." She opened her eyes. They were grey, but in the lantern light, he saw flickers of other colors deep within—the green of a stubborn root, the blue of a deep spring. "But I can remind it. It's a constant whisper. A argument against surrender. It's..." She winced, a drop of blood appearing at her nostril. "...exhausting."
She was the keep's soul, arguing with the void to remember it had one. And she was losing.
On the battlements, the news was worse. Sergeant Durn met him, his face grim. "The shadow, Captain. It's not sitting still. It's... thickening. Against the east wall. Like it's pooling strength there. Planning something."
Kaelen went to the eastern arrow-slit. Durn was right. The darkness outside wasn't uniform. It congealed like clotting oil, a tangible pressure building against the stone. The Umbral soldiers were gone, absorbed back into the mass. This was no longer an army. It was a tool, and the Gentle Dark was preparing to use it.
"What's on the other side of this wall?" Kaelen asked, his voice low.
"The old granary," Durn said. "Then the outer curtain wall. But the granary's empty. We moved all stores in here."
But stone was not just stone. Kaelen thought of Lyssa's words. The idea of the stone. The granary was built on the oldest part of the foundation, atop the bedrock spur that gave Saltmire its name. It was the root of the keep.
The enemy wasn't planning to smash the door. It was planning to convince the foundation to stop being a foundation.
"Get every able body to this wall," Kaelen ordered, his mind racing. "Not with weapons. With noise. With... with memory. This is the oldest stone in Saltmire. Someone here must know a story about it. A founder's tale. A love story. A ghost story. I don't care. We need to remind this rock what it is, loudly."
It was a desperate, absurd strategy. Fighting ontological erosion with folklore.
But as the word spread, a shift occurred. The paralyzing fear of the dark was joined by a spark of defiance. An old mason, his hands gnarled, touched the cold wall. "My great-grandfather laid this course," he murmured, then raised his voice. "He said the mortar was mixed with seawater for resilience, and the memory of every sailor lost that year for courage!"
Others joined. A widow remembered her husband proposing to her in the granary's loft. A former stable boy recalled carving his initials behind a loose stone. They spoke, they shouted, they sang off-key shanties. They told bad jokes. They created a pathetic, human, beautiful wall of sound against the pressing quiet.
Kaelen added his own power, not as a weapon, but as a reinforcement. His pale Dawn of Command—the light of order and sustained will—washed over the interior of the east wall. It was the light of a garrison standing watch. It said, This post is held. This record is kept.
For a moment, the psychic pressure from outside seemed to hesitate, confused by the mismatch. It was a tool for creating silence, met not with counter-silence or magical force, but with a messy, sentimental, bureaucratic clamor.
But only for a moment.
The congealed shadow outside the wall pulsed. Then, it pushed.
Not with physical force. The stone didn't crack. It… yawned. A deep, spiritual lethargy washed through the wall. The mason's story died on his lips, the memory of his great-grandfather turning vague and distant. The widow's joyful recollection was smothered by a sudden, profound indifference. The human noise faltered, smothered under a blanket of existential fatigue.
Lyssa cried out in the scriptorium, feeling the foundation's will waver.
Kaelen's Dawn of Command guttered, the 'order' it was trying to uphold being systematically disordered.
The shadow was winning. It was turning their last bastion into a sleepy, forgotten place that no longer cared to stand.
They were not being destroyed. They were being decommissioned.
And in the aching quiet that followed the failed human noise, a new sound emerged from the pressing dark outside. A soft, precise, rhythmic tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap.