Chapter Two – Whispers in the Mountain
Snow fell in silent spirals over the Jade Spine peaks.
The mountains stretched jagged and black against the dim sky, their ridges crowned with endless frost. The air was thin here, sharp with cold, so pure it burned in the lungs. Each flake of snow drifted down with deliberate slowness, settling across stone and pine, cloaking the world in a silence so complete it felt sacred.
The monastery clung to the spine of the highest peak, its black walls half-swallowed by winter. No banners hung from its towers. No bells marked the hours. The gates, once carved with golden prayers, were long stripped and bare. What had once been a beacon of doctrine and discipline now stood as a relic, forgotten by all but the wind. And even the wind seemed reluctant to touch it, moving around the fortress with uneasy restraint.
Deep inside the Monastery of the Thousand Breaths, past colonnades where icicles had fused with crumbling stone, past halls where dust had lain undisturbed for centuries, a single chamber resisted the long freeze.
Here, candles burned.
Their light was muted, smothered by shadows that pooled like ink in the corners of the chamber. The flames bent and quivered in the cold draft, throwing pale arcs against the walls etched with fading sigils. The silence here was not the silence of abandonment, but something heavier..the silence of things that should not be named aloud.
Two monks sat across from one another in that darkness. They were old, their backs bent like withered branches, their robes thin and worn to threads. Time had hollowed their faces, carved lines of quiet endurance into their skin. Their eyes, though clouded and tired, still carried the weight of centuries of silence.
They spoke softly, their words fragile as ash, meant for no ears but their own.
"It was not supposed to happen again," the first monk whispered. His voice rasped, dry as the cold air that crept into the chamber. Blind eyes, milk-clouded and pale, still turned instinctively eastward..toward the horizon, toward the unseen.
The second monk exhaled, the sound wheezing through cracked lips and failing teeth. Each breath seemed to take effort, as though the very act of speaking cost him strength. "The vessel walks," he murmured, gaze lowered to the candlelight. "The taste of it lingers on the wind. Old blood… dangerous blood."
The blind monk's brows furrowed faintly. His hand twitched once, then curled over the beads of his rosary. "Which?"
The second's mouth trembled before the word came. "Both."
The candles flickered.
His voice, though barely more than a whisper, carried the tremor of dread. "The remnants of the Eternal Line..shattered but never erased. And the bones of the Ancients..scorched but never broken. Two rivers of god-tier blood, mingled into one vessel. A vessel unprepared. A vessel unworthy."
The blind monk tightened his grip on his prayer beads until the old string creaked, ready to snap. His throat bobbed once before he spoke again. "And the soul?"
The second monk closed his eyes. Shadows pooled deeper in the hollows of his face. "Foreign," he admitted. "A trespasser from beyond our sky. It wears the body, yes, but it is not the body. It has no roots here, no anchor. Such fusions are…" His voice faltered. "…unstable."
As though in response, the candles hissed, their flames guttering low, drowning the chamber in half-darkness.
Silence stretched between them, long enough that the creak of old wood and the faint whistle of the wind beyond the stone walls seemed to echo like thunder.
Finally, the blind monk spoke again, his words soft, weighted. "Do you remember the First Cataclysm?"
The other flinched. His answer came slowly, as though dragged out of him against his will. "Only in nightmares. When the Laws were whole, they ruled us all..Power, Soul, Mind, Reality, Time, Devouring, Eternal. Each absolute. Each indivisible. And when they broke…" His lips thinned. "…the Laws became Cores. And the Cores became Sins. The Celestial War was their shadow."
The blind monk's lips curled faintly, not into a smile, but something thinner..sorrow, perhaps. Regret. "And now," he said softly, "one of those Cores stirs again."
The second monk shuddered visibly, shoulders folding inward as though to shield himself. He leaned forward, whispering the word as if it carried poison.
"Gluttony."
Even spoken so quietly, the syllables seemed to shiver through the chamber, staining the air.
"The hungriest of them all," the second continued, his voice breaking. "It does not rest. It does not sleep. In the wrong vessel…" He shut his eyes tight, his chest tightening with the weight of it. "…it will not stop until the world is hollow."
The blind monk lowered his head. For a moment, the only sound was the crackling hiss of the candles, as though they, too, disapproved of the word.
Neither man spoke.
The chamber returned to silence...anot peaceful, but suffocating, as though the very stones of the monastery pressed down upon them, holding the dread in place. Outside, the wind shifted. It blew harder against the monastery walls, rattling loose snow from the eaves. The old stone groaned in the cold.
Somewhere beyond those walls, far beneath the mountains, beyond the reach of these monks and their whispers, a man stirred. His eyes opened to a body not his own. His breath came ragged, torn. His veins burned with a hunger that was not hunger.
And the sin of Gluttony awoke with him.