The fog didn't roll into Eldmere—it clung. Like a mourner refusing to leave the grave.
Kaelen Veyne stepped off the ferry with nothing but a satchel, a dagger sheathed at his hip, and the kind of silence that made street dogs go still. He didn't look at the harbor's skeletal cranes or the gilded spires of the Luminarch Quarter rising behind the mist. His eyes stayed low—on the wet cobblestones, the scuff of boot heels, the way shadows pooled beneath archways like spilled ink.
He'd come for one reason. And reasons, in Eldmere, had a habit of eating the people who carried them.
The Festival of Drowned Lights was in full swing. Paper lanterns floated on the canals, their flames guttering inside glass shells shaped like teardrops. Children laughed, chasing echoes down alleyways. But Kaelen heard what they didn't: the hum beneath the city. A vibration in the stone. A whisper in the salt-laced wind that spoke in syllables long forbidden.
You're late, it seemed to say. She's been waiting.
He ignored it. He'd learned, years ago, that some voices only grew louder when fed attention.
The Hollow Lantern Inn stood crooked between a bone-charm apothecary and a shuttered puppet theater. Its sign swung on rusted hinges—a lantern with no flame, carved from driftwood blackened by time or fire. The innkeeper, a woman with silver-streaked hair and knuckles scarred from knife fights, barely glanced up from her ledger.
"Name?" she asked, voice dry as parchment.
"Renn," Kaelen said. Not his name. Not even close. But names were currency here, and he wasn't spending his real one.
She slid a key across the counter—iron, cold, shaped like a broken keyhole. "Third floor. Back room. Don't light candles after midnight. The walls… remember things."
Kaelen nodded. He knew better than most how walls remembered.
His room smelled of damp wool and old regret. One narrow window overlooked the canal, where a lone lantern drifted, its light dimming. He set his satchel down, then ran his fingers along the doorframe—routine, reflexive.
And froze.
Carved faintly into the wood, almost invisible unless you knew to look: three intersecting spirals. The Mark of the Unbound Tongue.
His breath stilled.
He hadn't seen that symbol since the night Ashveil burned.
Before he could react, a flicker of movement near the bedpost. Instinct took over. He spun, dagger half-drawn—but stopped.
A girl crouched by his pack, fingers hovering over the strap. She couldn't have been older than nineteen, dressed in patched trousers and a coat two sizes too big. Her eyes—sharp as flint—met his without fear. Only calculation.
"You move quiet," she said, straightening. "But not quiet enough."
Kaelen didn't lower his blade. "You picked the wrong room to rob."
"I wasn't robbing." She tilted her head. "I was checking if you were him."
"Him?"
"The one they're whispering about. The ghost from the north. The one who walks through fire and doesn't burn." She smirked, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Turns out, you just walk through fog."
Kaelen studied her. No tremor in her hands. No darting glances toward the door. She'd expected resistance—and planned for it. Clever.
"And if I am him?" he asked.
"Then you owe me a favor." She tossed something onto the bed—a small brass token stamped with a raven's eye. "My brother vanished three weeks ago. Last seen near the Old Docks. They say someone's taking people who ask too many questions." She paused. "I think you ask the right kind."
Kaelen sheathed his dagger slowly. "Why tell me this?"
"Because," she said, stepping closer, voice dropping, "you looked at that symbol on the door like it stole your soul. And if something scared you… it's worth my attention."
Silence stretched between them, thick as the fog outside.
Finally, Kaelen spoke. "Your name."
"Mira." She crossed her arms. "And before you ask—I don't work for the Luminarchs, the smugglers, or the cultists under the market. I work for answers."
"A dangerous trade."
"So's breathing in this city." She turned to leave, then glanced back. "Oh—and don't trust the lanterns. Some of them don't hold fire. They hold echoes. And echoes… lie."
The door clicked shut behind her.
Kaelen exhaled. He walked to the window, watching the last lantern sink beneath the black water. Then he knelt, pressing his palm flat against the floorboards.
There it was again—the hum. Deeper now. Hungry.
And beneath it, a voice he hadn't heard in seven years.
"Kael… you shouldn't have come back."
It wasn't memory. It was present. As if Elara stood just beyond the wall, speaking through the grain of the wood.
He closed his eyes. "I didn't come back for you," he whispered. "I came to bury what you became."
But even as he said it, doubt coiled in his gut. Because the symbol on the door wasn't just a warning.
It was an invitation.
And someone in Eldmere knew exactly who he was.
---
Downstairs, Mira slipped through the inn's back alley, her pulse steady despite the chill. She hadn't lied—her brother had vanished. But she hadn't told Kaelen everything.
Like how, the night before he disappeared, her brother had drawn the same three spirals in ash on their kitchen table.
Or how he'd whispered, "They're waking her up."
She touched the raven token in her pocket—the one she'd actually stolen from a Luminarch courier two days ago. The one that led her to believe Kaelen Veyne wasn't just a ghost.
He was the key.
And keys, in Eldmere, were either used… or broken.
--
Back in his room, Kaelen opened his satchel and withdrew a journal bound in charred leather. He flipped past pages filled with coded script, maps of ley lines, and sketches of ritual circles. On the last blank page, he drew the three spirals.
Then, beneath it, a single word:
ELARA?
The ink bled slightly—as if the paper itself recoiled.
Outside, the festival music swelled. Laughter rose like smoke. But in the quiet dark of Room 3B, time didn't feel like a celebration.
It felt like reckoning.
And Kaelen Veyne had never been good at running from those.