Dawn came slowly to the hospice of Saint Willow.
Finn watched it arrive through the small window beside his cot—watched the grey sky lighten to pearl, then blush with faint pink, then settle into the pale blue of early spring. He'd watched countless dawns from this bed, had measured his life in their coming and going, but this one felt different.
This one felt like a beginning.
The Covenant pulsed beneath his skin, a constant presence now—not painful, not intrusive, but there, like the awareness of one's own heartbeat. It whispered occasionally in the back of his mind, fragments of thought that weren't quite words, impressions that weren't quite images. Finn had spent the night learning to ignore it, to push it to the edges of consciousness where it could murmur without distracting him from the business of breathing.
One. Two. Three.
He was still counting his breaths. Some habits didn't break overnight.
Around him, the ward stirred to life. Old Marta's humming shifted into something recognizably a hymn. Young Thomas coughed himself awake, the familiar rhythm of his suffering. The dying woman—still nameless, still unconscious—breathed her shallow breaths.
And Sister Margarete appeared in the doorway, as she did every morning, with a tray of weak tea and yesterday's bread.
Her eyes found Finn immediately, as they always did, and her face shifted through its familiar sequence: concern, relief, determination, hope. She wanted so badly for him to be better, to be well, to be the one patient she could save from the hospice's slow harvest.
"Good morning," she said, crossing to his cot. "You look... different."
Finn almost laughed. Different. Yes. He'd inherited the power of a three-thousand-year-old necromancer, made contact with the God of Death, and gained a sentient fragment of divinity in his soul. Different was one word for it.
"I slept well," he said instead. "Better than usual."
Margarete's eyes brightened. She set down the tray and pressed her hand to his forehead—cool, gentle, familiar. "Your fever's down. Really down, not just pretending." She smiled, and the sight of it made Finn's chest ache. "Maybe spring is finally helping."
"Maybe."
She fussed with his blanket, adjusted his pillow, straightened the small wooden table. The soup from last night still sat there, cold and congealed. Margarete looked at it, then at Finn, and something flickered in her expression—confusion, perhaps, or the beginning of suspicion.
"You didn't eat."
"No." Finn met her eyes. "I'm sorry. I wasn't hungry."
"It's all right." But her voice had changed, grown careful. "Was there someone here last night? I thought I heard—" She stopped, shook her head. "Never mind. Dreams."
Finn said nothing.
---
The morning passed in its usual rhythm. Breakfast. Bedding changes. The physician's visit—a tired man named Doctor Hemlock (no relation to the old goat-keeper, as he'd explained once, with the particular weariness of someone who'd answered that question a thousand times) who listened to Finn's chest, frowned at his lungs, and pronounced him "holding steady."
Holding steady. That was the phrase they used for patients who weren't getting worse. Finn had been holding steady for months, which meant he was dying slowly instead of quickly, and everyone pretended that was good news.
When the physician left, Finn closed his eyes and reached for the image Ash had planted in his mind: the door in the oak, half-hidden among ancient roots, waiting in a cemetery he'd never seen.
The image sharpened as he focused on it, gaining detail. The oak was massive—centuries old, its trunk wider than Finn's cot was long. The door was small, barely waist-high, made of wood so dark it was almost black. Iron hinges, rusted but solid. A handle shaped like a human hand, frozen in the act of reaching outward.
Ash's sanctuary.
The thought came not from Finn but from the Covenant—a whisper of understanding, a gift of knowledge. The last necromancer's home. Your home now, if you want it.
"Finn?"
He opened his eyes. Sister Margarete stood beside his cot, her expression worried. "You went somewhere just now. Your eyes—they went silver."
Had they? Finn hadn't noticed. "Just thinking."
"About what?"
He could lie. He'd spent sixteen years learning to lie—small lies, necessary lies, lies that smoothed the rough edges of other people's concern. I'm fine. It doesn't hurt. Don't worry about me.
But Margarete had brought him soup every night for three months. She'd held his hand during the worst coughing fits. She'd cried once, quietly, when she thought he was sleeping, because she couldn't bear to watch him fade.
She deserved better than lies.
"There's somewhere I need to go," Finn said. "Today."
Margarete's face went still. "Go? Finn, you can barely walk to the outhouse without resting twice."
"I know." He pushed himself up, ignoring the protest in his ribs. "But I have to try."
"For what? What could possibly—" She stopped. Her eyes searched his face, looking for something—fever, delirium, the confusion that sometimes preceded the end. She found none of it.
"Last night," she whispered. "Someone was here. I felt it. Something changed."
Finn nodded slowly.
"Was it—" She couldn't finish the question. Didn't want to know the answer.
"It was a choice," Finn said. "Someone offered me a chance. Not to get better—I don't think I'll ever get better. But to have more time. To do something with the time I have."
Margarete's eyes filled with tears. "Finn..."
"I don't know what happens next." He reached out and took her hand—thin and pale against her sturdy warmth. "I don't know if I'll come back here. I don't know if I'll see you again. But I know that you've been kind to me when you didn't have to be, and I won't forget it. Ever."
She was crying now, silent tears tracking down her cheeks. "You're leaving."
"Yes."
"Today."
"Yes."
She squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. "Then let me help you get dressed."
---
An hour later, Finn stood at the hospice gates for the first time in three years.
The world beyond was impossibly vast—fields stretching to distant treelines, a road winding toward the village he'd only heard about, sky that went on forever without ceiling or walls. The spring air smelled of wet earth and growing things, and every breath sent a complicated mixture of pain and wonder through his damaged lungs.
Margarete had given him a pack—bread, cheese (Old Man Hemlock's cheese, she'd said with a watery smile), a water skin, a blanket. She'd also given him her father's walking stick, oak with a worn handle, and made him promise to use it.
"Three miles to the village," she'd said. "The road's mostly flat. There's an inn—the Sleeping Fox—if you need to rest. And from there..." She'd trailed off, because neither of them knew where "from there" led.
Finn had thanked her. Had hugged her, which made them both cry. Had promised to return if he could, knowing it might be a promise he couldn't keep.
Now he stood at the gate, looking at a world he'd only imagined, and felt the Covenant pulse with something that felt almost like anticipation.
South, it whispered. Follow the road south. The cemetery waits.
Finn took a breath—four hundred thirty-two—and began to walk.
---
The road was harder than he'd expected.
Three years in bed had wasted his muscles to thread. His legs shook with every step. His lungs burned. His ribs screamed. He stopped every hundred paces to lean on the walking stick and count his breaths until the world stopped spinning.
But he kept moving.
The Covenant helped, in its way. It didn't strengthen him—couldn't, apparently, or wouldn't—but it distracted him from the pain, filling his mind with fragments of knowledge, whispers of power, glimpses of the vast inheritance Ash had left behind.
Necromancy is negotiation, it murmured as he staggered past a field of winter wheat. Death is not an enemy to be conquered but a force to be understood. Every corpse has a story. Every soul has a price.
Finn wasn't sure he wanted to know those stories or pay those prices. But he kept walking.
The village appeared around midday—a cluster of buildings huddled around a crossroads, smoke rising from chimneys, chickens scratching in yards. Finn stopped at its edge, suddenly aware of how he must look: thin as a skeleton, pale as a corpse, leaning on a stick and shaking with exhaustion.
Children stared at him from a doorway. A woman pulling water from a well glanced his way and quickly looked elsewhere. A dog barked once, then fell silent.
They sense death on you, the Covenant observed. Not your own—the death you carry now. The power in your soul. They don't understand it, but they feel it.
Finn pulled his thin coat tighter and kept walking.
---
The Sleeping Fox was exactly what its name suggested: a small inn at the village's edge, its sign depicting a fox curled around a tankard, its windows warm with candlelight. Finn pushed through the door and found himself in a common room that smelled of woodsmoke and ale and roasting meat.
His stomach clenched with a hunger he hadn't felt in years.
The innkeeper—a broad woman with grey-streaked hair and arms like hams—took one look at him and was at his side in moments. "Easy, lad. Easy. Sit down before you fall down."
She guided him to a chair by the fire, pushed a mug of something warm into his hands, and hovered until he'd taken several sips. The drink was spiced cider, sweet and strong, and it spread heat through his chest like medicine.
"Margarete's boy," the innkeeper said. It wasn't a question. "She sent word with the miller this morning. Said you might be coming through. Said to look after you."
Finn blinked. Margarete had sent word? When? How?
"She's a good woman, that one." The innkeeper pulled up a stool and sat, studying him with sharp eyes. "Took in my sister's youngest when the fever took her. Didn't ask for payment. Didn't even ask for thanks." She tilted her head. "You're the one she talks about. The boy in the corner bed."
"Yes."
"She says you're special." The innkeeper's eyes didn't waver. "Says you've got a kind heart. Says she'll miss you when you're gone."
Finn's throat tightened. "I'll miss her too."
"Good." The innkeeper stood. "You'll stay here tonight. Eat something. Rest. Then tomorrow, you go wherever you're going." She paused at the kitchen door. "And if you ever come back this way, you'll have a bed at the Sleeping Fox. Any time. No charge."
She disappeared into the kitchen before Finn could respond.
---
He ate.
Gods above, he ate.
Bread and cheese and thick vegetable stew and more bread and a piece of meat pie and a small cake soaked in honey. The innkeeper kept bringing food, and Finn kept eating, his starved body desperate for fuel it hadn't seen in years.
The Covenant pulsed contentedly, absorbing the energy, storing it somewhere deep.
You'll need this, it murmured. The journey tomorrow is longer. And the sanctuary will demand its price.
"What price?" Finn asked aloud, then winced as the inn's few other patrons glanced his way.
The Covenant didn't answer.
---
Night fell. The inn grew quiet. Finn sat by the dying fire, wrapped in his blanket, watching flames consume the last of the logs.
Tomorrow he would find the cemetery. Tomorrow he would open the door in the oak and step into Ash's sanctuary—into the heart of necromancy itself. Tomorrow his real journey would begin.
Tonight, he allowed himself to feel afraid.
The fear had been waiting all day, patient as a hunter, lurking at the edges of his exhaustion and wonder. Now it crept closer, wrapping around him like the cold he couldn't quite shake.
He was sixteen years old. He'd never been more than three miles from his cot. He had a disease that was killing him, a power he didn't understand, and enemies he'd never met who wanted him dead.
What was he doing?
You're living, the Covenant answered, its voice gentler than he'd ever heard it. For the first time in your life, you're choosing to live. Not just survive. Not just wait for the end. Live.
"But what if I fail?"
Then you fail. And you die—which you were going to do anyway. But at least you'll die trying.
Finn stared into the fire.
That's the difference, the Covenant continued. Between you and everyone else in that hospice. Between you and every person who's ever given up. You're trying. Even when it hurts. Even when you're afraid. Even when failure is the most likely outcome. You're trying.
That's what kindness is, Finn. Trying. Over and over. Even when the world gives you every reason to stop.
Finn closed his eyes.
And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he slept without counting his breaths.
---
The cemetery was smaller than he'd expected.
Finn found it the next morning, an hour's walk beyond the village, tucked into a fold of hills where the road dwindled to a path and then to nothing. Ancient headstones leaned at angles, their inscriptions worn smooth by centuries of rain. Weeds grew thick between them. Birds sang in the bare branches of a massive oak that dominated the cemetery's heart.
The oak.
Finn's heart hammered as he approached it. This was the tree from Ash's vision—the same massive trunk, the same spreading roots, the same sense of ancient power sleeping beneath the bark.
He walked around it slowly, searching, and found the door exactly where Ash had shown him: half-hidden among the roots, nearly invisible unless you knew to look. Dark wood. Iron hinges. A handle shaped like a reaching hand.
Finn knelt in the damp earth and touched it.
The handle was warm.
Not the warmth of sunlight or stored heat, but the warmth of life—as if the hand were real, as if someone were reaching back through the wood to meet his touch.
Open it, the Covenant whispered.
Finn gripped the handle and pulled.
---
The door swung inward, revealing not darkness but depth—a tunnel of roots and earth that stretched impossibly far, lit by the same faint blue light that had surrounded Ash. The air that flowed out smelled of old stone and older magic, of libraries and tombs and places where time moved differently.
Finn looked back, once, at the cemetery, at the grey sky, at the world he was leaving behind.
Then he crawled through the door, and it closed behind him with a sound like a heartbeat.
---
The tunnel went on for what felt like hours.
Finn crawled on hands and knees, his pack bumping against his back, his walking stick strapped to the pack, his lungs burning with exertion. The blue light pulsed around him, steady as breathing, and the Covenant whispered encouragement when his strength failed.
Almost there. Keep going. Almost there.
And then the tunnel opened, and Finn fell forward into light.
Golden light, warm as summer, pouring through windows he couldn't see. He was in a vast circular chamber, its walls lined with bookshelves that stretched up into dimness, its floor paved with stone carved in intricate patterns. A desk sat at the chamber's center, cluttered with papers and strange instruments. A fireplace crackled against one wall, though no wood fed it. Chairs that looked comfortable and ancient were scattered like afterthoughts.
And everywhere—everywhere—were bones.
Bones arranged in patterns on the walls. Bones suspended from the ceiling in mobile arrangements. Bones stacked in corners like firewood. Bones carved into tools and ornaments and things Finn couldn't name.
Welcome home, the Covenant said.
Finn stood on trembling legs and stared at the impossible space around him. This was Ash's sanctuary. This was his inheritance. This was—
"Hello?"
The voice came from somewhere in the shadows between bookshelves. Finn spun, heart pounding, hands raised in a gesture that wouldn't protect him from anything.
A figure emerged.
She was young—his age, perhaps, or a little older—with pale skin and dark hair and eyes the color of twilight. She wore a simple dress of grey fabric, and she moved with a peculiar grace, as if she weren't quite used to having a body.
But it was her presence that struck Finn most. She felt... incomplete. Like a song missing half its notes. Like a painting where the colors should be brighter.
"You're real," she whispered, staring at him with those twilight eyes. "You're actually real."
"I—" Finn's voice failed. "Who are you?"
She took a step closer, then stopped, as if afraid he might vanish. "My name is Sera. I've been waiting for two thousand years."
She smiled—a broken, hopeful, terrified smile.
"For someone real to talk to."
---
END OF CHAPTER 2