The scent led him down. It was a vein of corruption running through the dungeon's flesh, a trail of ferrous temptation. The damp brick of the catacombs gave way to hewn rock, then to a rough, natural basalt that wept a constant, slow bleed of mineral-rich water. The path became a spiral, a tight corkscrew turning ever deeper, and with each turn the air grew heavier, thicker, warmer. The scent clarified, separating into distinct strands: the sharp, clean tang of fresh blood, the older, coppery reek of spilled viscera, and underpinning it all, that cloying, ceremonial sweetness. Myrrh. Frankincense. Incense burned to mask a truth too vile for open air.
This was not a place of battle. It was a place of butchery sanctified by purpose. A slaughterhouse built for a god.
Cahara's torch, his fourth, became a liability. The air was so still and thick the smoke pooled around its head, choking him. The flame burned low and sullen, painting the spiraling walls in greasy, shifting tones. His leg was a knot of tight, angry pain, a heartbeat of pure agony with every downward step. The locket bounced against his chest, a cold, dead weight.
He lost track of time, measured only in the diminishing length of the torch and the increasing pressure in his ears. The spiral tightened, the walls closing in until the stone brushed his shoulders. He was being funneled. Delivered.
The spiral ended.
It opened onto a narrow gallery hewn from the living rock, a balcony overlooking a vast, cylindrical pit. The torchlight failed to reach the opposite side or the bottom. This was a negative space, a hollow tooth in the jaw of the mountain.
But it was not silent.
Sound rose from the abyss, a layered symphony of suffering.
The lowest register was a liquid, groaning sigh, the sound of great weights shifting in a viscous medium. Overlaying that, a rhythmic, metallic creak… creak… creak…, the protest of aged iron under constant, gentle strain. And above it all, a sound that was almost human. A low, continuous, tonal hum. It was not a song. It was a vibration, a collective exhalation of pain so constant and uniform it had become a kind of music. The humming of a ruined choir.
Cahara crept to the edge of the gallery, peering over. His light reached down perhaps twenty feet, illuminating the first of the horrors.
Hooks.
They were everywhere. Great, rusted iron hooks, each the size of a sickle, driven into the pitted basalt walls of the pit in spiraling rows that descended into the black. From many of these hooks, chains depended, and from the chains…
Figures.
Some were skeletal, mere assemblages of bone and ragged cloth, turning slowly in some unfelt current of air. Others were fresher. Much fresher. He saw the glisten of recent fat, the dark purple of congested flesh, the pale yellow of subcutaneous fat revealed by careful, artistic flaying. They hung at various stages of undoing, like cuts of meat in a butcher's cold room, each positioned with a terrible, deliberate care. This was not random torture. This was a process. A sacred curation.
The creak… creak… was the sound of the hooks bearing their burdens. The liquid sigh was the pit below, a reservoir he dared not imagine. The hum was the sound of the not-yite-dead, suspended in a twilight of agony, their voices blended into a single, resonant note of devotion.
This was the Blood Pits. The chapel of the god who fed on martyrdom.
A movement, closer than the rest, caught his eye. On the wall directly below his gallery, perhaps fifteen feet down, a figure stirred. It was a man, or had been. He was suspended by two hooks punched through the meat of his shoulders. His head lolled, but as Cahara's light touched him, it lifted. His face was a mask of serene devotion, etched in lines of unbearable pain. His eyes were milk-white, blind. His lips moved, shaping silent words.
Cahara leaned further, against every instinct. The man's whispered voice, thin as spider silk, drifted up to him.
"…blessed… is the hook… that pierces the veil of flesh… blessed… is the blood… that waters the roots of faith…"
The man was praying. He was thanking his torturer.
A cold deeper than the dungeon's chill seized Cahara's heart. This was the power of the place. It did not just inflict pain; it consecrated it. It twisted the victim's own spirit into a collaborator. This was the fate that awaited D'arce. To be transformed from a knight of devotion into a liturgical object, singing praises as she was unmade.
He had to find her. Before the conversion was complete.
The gallery ran along the circumference of the pit. There was no staircase, no ladder. The only ways down were the hooks and chains themselves, a vertical labyrinth of rust and agony.
As he weighed the impossible descent, a new sound cut through the rhythmic symphony. A sharp, clear, and utterly human cry. A woman's voice, strained to breaking, shouting a single word that echoed with defiance, not devotion.
"LE'GARDE!"
D'arce.
The cry had come from further along the gallery, and from below. She was alive. She was still fighting.
Cahara moved, shuffling along the narrow ledge, his back to the terrible open space. The gallery curved. Ahead, he saw a break in the wall—a small, arched doorway leading out of the pit chamber, back into solid rock. Light, a warm, torch-like flicker, spilled from it. And voices, human voices, rose in a monotonous chant.
He reached the doorway and peered inside.
It was an antechamber, a preparation room. Rough stone altars lined the walls, stained dark and gleaming with recent, hurried cleaning. Tools hung on racks: flensing knives, bone saws, prods of black iron. And in the center of the room, three figures in deep crimson robes, their heads shaved, stood around a fourth figure who knelt on the floor.
D'arce.
She was battered, her plate armor gone, stripped down to a stained linen undershirt and breeches. Her arms were bound behind her. A dark bruise bloomed across one side of her face, and a cut on her lip wept a slow trickle of blood. But her head was high, and her eyes, fixed on the lead cultist, burned with a fire that had not yet been extinguished.
The lead cultist, a tall man with a face like a kind, concerned grandfather, held a simple wooden cup. The other two held her shoulders.
"The final draught, child," the grandfatherly man said, his voice gentle, soothing. "The Wine of Lethe. It will soften the edges. It will help you see the beauty in the gift you are about to give. To become a note in the eternal hymn is no small thing."
"I am a Knight of the Midnight Sun," D'arce spat, blood flecking her words. "My faith is in my lord, not in your butchery. He will come for me."
"Oh, my dear," the cultist sighed, with genuine pity. "He is the one who sent you here. Your beloved Le'garde. Your suffering is the cornerstone of his ascension. Did you think his path to godhood would be paved with anything else?"
The words struck D'arce like a physical blow. The fire in her eyes guttered, replaced by a widening horror, a crack in the bedrock of her reality.
Cahara saw it. The moment of vulnerability. The instant where faith curdles into despair. That was when the hook would go in, literal and metaphorical.
He had a choice. A clear, brutal equation.
He could retreat. Slip back into the gallery, find another way. Her fate was not his business. Intervening meant fighting three fanatics, in a room adjacent to a pit full of their brethren, with a wounded leg and a dwindling torch. The profit was negative. The risk was total.
He saw the cultist raise the cup to D'arce's lips. He saw her clench her jaw, resisting even as the terrible truth hollowed her out.
He remembered the locket around his neck. The kind-eyed woman. The lock of hair. A life reduced to a keepsake in the muck.
He was not a hero. But he was, perhaps, still a man. And some transactions, even in the economy of suffering, were too vile to witness without becoming a party to them.
His hand found the hilt of his sword. The torch, he jammed into a crack in the wall by the door.
He would give them a different kind of offering.
Silence was a weapon he could no longer afford. Cahara drew his sword. The rasp of steel leaving leather was a small, clean sound in the humid chant-filled air. It was the sound of a line being crossed.
He did not charge. He stepped into the doorway, filling it, a silhouette backlit by the hell-glow of the pit. His movement was slow, deliberate, an announcement.
The two acolytes holding D'arce's shoulders flinched, their monotonous chant dying in their throats. The grandfatherly cultist, cup poised at D'arce's lips, did not turn. His gentle sigh was one of profound inconvenience.
"An interruption," he said, his voice still soft. "The liturgy is precise. Unseen, please attend to this."
One of the acolytes released D'arce, his hand going to a hooked flensing knife at his belt. He moved with a startling, fluid speed, his robes whispering. There was no anger in his face, only the blank focus of a gardener removing a weed.
Cahara met him in the center of the room. He had the reach with his sword, but the acolyte was fast. The knife licked out, not to kill, but to maim—a slash towards Cahara's already wounded leg. Cahara parried, the clash of iron on steel jarring up his arm. The force was surprising. This was no fanatic weak from fasting; this was a trained killer in priest's robes.
Behind them, the grandfatherly voice continued, a serene counterpoint to the struggle. "The Wine of Lethe, child. To forget the pain of the flesh, to embrace the ecstasy of the spirit. Your knight errant is too late. His violence is just another flavor of suffering we will sanctify."
D'arce stared past her captor, her eyes locking with Cahara's. In them, he saw the crumbling of a world. The horror of the cultist's revelation about Le'garde warred with the desperate, animal need for rescue. She gave a minute, almost imperceptible shake of her head. Go.
Cahara ignored her. He feinted high with the sword, and when the acolyte raised his knife to block, Cahara kicked out, his boot connecting with the man's knee. There was a wet pop. The acolyte went down without a sound, his face still blank. Cahara drove his sword down, through the robe, into the chest beneath. The man shuddered and was still. The kill was quiet, functional. A piece of business.
The second acolyte released D'arce and drew two knives, circling. The grandfatherly cultist finally turned. He placed the wooden cup carefully on the altar, his movements bespoke regret, not fear.
"Violence un-consecrated is such a waste," he murmured. "It generates heat without light. Pain without purpose." He drew no weapon. He simply stood, his hands folded. "You may take the woman. Her faith is already broken. The offering would be… diminished. But you, Interloper. You have spilled sacred blood in the sanctum. A debt is incurred."
The second acolyte attacked. This one was more cautious, his twin knives weaving a defensive pattern, aiming to bleed Cahara out, to tire him. Cahara's leg screamed with every shift of weight. He was slowing. He parried one thrust, sidestepped another, his back foot slipping in a patch of something wet on the floor. He stumbled.
The acolyte pressed the advantage, a knife aimed for Cahara's throat. Cahara caught the man's wrist, their faces inches apart. He saw the acolyte's eyes, empty as polished stones. No hate, no fear. Just duty.
With a grunt, Cahara headbutted him, a brutal, inelegant move. The acolyte reeled. Cahara drove his sword into the man's gut, twisting. The acolyte folded, his silence finally breaking into a wet gasp.
Cahara wrenched the blade free, panting, his vision swimming. The fight had taken seconds, but it had consumed his last reserves of adrenaline. He was a shell of pain and exhaustion.
The grandfatherly cultist applauded softly, three slow claps. "Efficient. For a mortal. The debt remains." He looked at Cahara not with threat, but with the serene certainty of a banker. "The Yellow King has marked you. We are… affiliates. I will add this blood-debt to your ledger with him. He will collect, in time."
The Yellow King. The name was a drop of ice in Cahara's spine. His debt was being sold, transferred, accruing interest in the ledgers of different horrors.
"Cut her loose," Cahara managed, his voice raw.
The cultist smiled, a gentle, terrible thing. He produced a small, ornate dagger from his sleeve and with a single, fluid motion, severed the bonds on D'arce's wrists. "As you wish. The transaction is noted."
D'arce scrambled to her feet, rubbing her wrists. She looked from the dead acolytes to the serene cultist to Cahara, her expression a storm of betrayal, terror, and dawning, awful gratitude. She said nothing.
"Go," the cultist said, gesturing to the archway that led out of the antechamber, away from the pit. "That passage leads to the old guard routes. It will take you from this sacred place. Your presence offends the liturgy."
Cahara didn't need telling twice. He grabbed his torch from the wall, its light now guttering and weak. He nodded to D'arce. "Move."
She moved, stumbling at first, then with more purpose, staggering past the altars and the tools of her intended unmaking. She did not look back at the cultist.
Cahara backed out after her, his sword still held towards the room. The grandfatherly figure simply watched, his hands folded again, a benign sentinel in a charnel house.
Once in the corridor, a narrow, ascending tunnel of rough stone, they ran. Or rather, Cahara limped desperately and D'arce stumbled ahead, driven by a terror that had not yet found its shape. The sounds of the Blood Pits—the creaking, the sighing, the humming—faded behind them, replaced by the ragged symphony of their own breath and footfalls.
After a hundred yards, the tunnel leveled out. A small, collapsed niche offered a semblance of cover. Cahara slumped against the wall, sliding to the floor. The torch, he stabbed into a pile of rubble. They were in near-darkness.
D'arce stood a few feet away, her back to him, shoulders heaving. The silence between them was a living thing, charged with all that had almost happened, and all that had been said.
"He was lying," she said finally, her voice a broken thing. "About Le'garde."
Cahara didn't answer. He fumbled for his long-empty waterskin, brought it to his cracked lips out of habit, tasted only dust.
"He had to be lying," she insisted, turning. Her face in the low light was a map of fresh bruises and old faith. "Le'garde is… he is a liberator. A savior. He would not… bargain with that." She jerked her head back towards the pits.
"The man in there didn't look like a liar," Cahara said, his words flat, devoid of comfort. "He looked like a man stating the price of a thing."
"What would you know of faith? Of sacrifice?" The fire was returning to her voice, but it was a desperate, defensive flame.
"I know the price of things," he said, tapping the merchant's scale at his hip. "I know when something is too expensive. Your god-king's ascension seems to be priced in the flesh of his followers." He met her eyes. "You were the currency."
She flinched as if struck. The truth, voiced aloud in this dank hole, was more violent than any hook. She sank to her knees opposite him, the fight draining out of her, leaving only a vast, hollow exhaustion.
"Why?" she whispered, not to him, to the dark. "Why did you come? You're a scavenger. You seek gold."
Cahara looked at the dying torch. He thought of the locket, of the kind-eyed woman. He thought of Ragnvaldr's contempt, Enki's pity, the Yellow King's appetite.
"I'm running out of reasons," he said, the honesty surprising himself. "Maybe I just wanted to see a different kind of coin get spent."
They sat in silence for a long time, the only sound the drip of water and the slow, hungry crackle of the torch eating the last of itself. Two victims, one of faith, one of greed, stranded in the dark between horrors. The cultist's words hung in the air, a promise of a debt yet to be called.
The First Hunger was the hunger for the light. Their light was dying. And in the growing dark, new fears were already beginning to stir.