The steel sank three inches deep behind Roshkar’s ribs with the wet crunch of splitting gristle. He didn't scream. A thick, ink-dark sputum bubbled over his lips instead. The assassin never regained his footing; Roshkar’s counter-swing snapped the man’s cervical vertebrae, tossing the corpse against the cave wall like discarded butcher’s scrap. Then the immortal swayed, his knees buckling on the gravel. He was looking at her. His pupils, swallowed by the Abyssal Weave, sought hers through the choking dust. Yuthra did not deliberate. If he died now, the cosmic balance tipped, the sixty-day tether snapped early, and Kevi dissolved into grease and ash before dawn. Shoving Kevi behind a boulder, she threw her shoulder beneath Roshkar’s arm. His bulk dragged her shoulder toward the shale. Heat radiated through his soaked tunic, sharp with the stench of ozone and rotting marrow. "Move your feet, you lunatic," she muttered under her breath, avoiding his gaze entirely. She couldn't bear to meet those soot-rimmed irises; direct engagement made her throat constrict until she choked. Instead, she focused on mechanics—distribution of mass, drag friction, the three-mile incline toward the high crags. He managed three staggering steps before his legs went limp. He forced a rasping chuckle against her collarbone. "Nimra... you still run sideways like a frightened hare." "Shut up. Don't look at me." She dragged him. It took two agonizing hours of hauling dead weight through ice-sheathed gullies, using her cultivation ropes to hoist him up sheer ledges, until the black mouth of the Shrine of Ozhun swallowed them. Here, beneath statues whose faces had been chiseled away by ancient heretics, the wind lost its teeth. Yuthra dumped him onto an altar slab of pitted granite. She pulled Kevi close, checking the boy’s pulse—rapid, but steady—before laying out her leather kit on a fractured plinth. She worked quickly, peeling back the ruined lamellar coat from Roshkar’s flank. The wound wept viridian slime. The Usharan assassins dipped their steel in wyrm-bile, designed to rot an immortal’s meridians from the inside out. She reached for clean linen, keeping her eyes glued to his ribs, anywhere but his face. If she looked at his eyes, the terror of his presence would paralyze her tongue. A hand, slick with dark blood, clamped over her wrist. She froze, air hitching behind her teeth before she forced it flat. His grip didn't crush; it trembled. "The Qilyan Tree," he murmured. His delirium stripped away the imperial arrogance, leaving only raw, diseased ruin. "On the southern terrace of the Spire. Do you remember it?" "Let go of my wrist, Roshkar." "I ripped it out," he continued, staring at the vaulted stone ceiling where bats nested in darkness. "Tore the roots from the bedrock with these hands. My palms were flayed to the gristle. They told me... they told me the elders buried your remains in the loam beneath the taproot. I dug fifty cubits into the mountain. Nothing. Just dirt. Just worms." The ancient Qilyan had stood for three centuries, its trunk requiring twelve men to encircle. "Why would you do that?" she managed, keeping her voice level and cold. "To see your teeth," he whispered. The word fell into the dark with dry, brittle finality. "To make sure you were dead. Because if you weren't dead, you were hiding from me. And I couldn't decide which thought tore out my lungs faster." Yuthra twisted her wrist free, deliberately jabbing a swab of caustic salt into the rim of the puncture. Roshkar hissed, arching off the stone as smoke drifted from his flesh, yet his cracked lips twisted into a grotesque, satisfied grin. "Still vicious," he panted. "Good." A pebble clattered near the threshold. Yuthra snatched a short-blade from her boot, wheeling around, but the shadow resolving in the arched entry belonged to Sanjea. Her friend slipped through the gloom, clothing ragged, her breath misting white in the cavern cold. Beneath her sleeves, the cerulean tracery of the Starlit Meridian pulsed faintly, answering the corrupted presence on the altar. "I smelled the bile five miles down the ridge," Sanjea said, ignoring the panting monster on the stone. She stopped, staring down at him with unrestrained malice. "You should have let him bleed. The world would be cleaner." "If he rots, the seal on Kevi breaks," Yuthra said, her voice small, slipping back into her habitual defensive cadence. She hated explaining herself. "The Spire elders engineered the corruption. They want the countdown to hit zero. We need him coherent enough to survive the week." Sanjea spat on the flagstones. From beneath her cloak, she withdrew a heavy brass cylinder chased with interlocking gears—the Crest of the Silent Basin, a sacred purification tool stolen straight from the Spire's inner vaults. "I cracked the archive master's ribs to take this," Sanjea said, handing it over. "It drains Abyssal poison, filters the channels, and severs extraneous spiritual ties. It will burn the wyrm-bile out of him and break the tracking resonance he uses to hunt you." Yuthra turned the cold brass artifact in her grasp. The runes matched the lore she had committed to memory before her transmigration: a standard celestial filter meant to siphon impurity and cast it into the earth. "Hold his legs," Yuthra instructed. "If he bites, I take his eye," Sanjea countered, pressing both forearms down across Roshkar's thighs. Roshkar barely registered Sanjea's presence. His fever-glazed gaze remained fixed on Yuthra, tracking every twitch of her brow, every tuck of stray hair behind her ear. "Nimra... whatever trick you've devised, it won't keep you from me." "Shut up," Yuthra said. She pressed the circular head of the brass cylinder directly against the gash in his side. She aligned her spiritual path, preparing to pour her clean, refined qi into the device to trigger the siphon. *Click. Whir.* The internal gears began to turn, grinding with bronze precision. The relic was supposed to flare with brilliant, sunlit gold—the unmistakable hue of absolute purification that would sterilize his core, flush the poison, and snap the resonance holding him to her path. The mechanism hummed, climbing in pitch to an agonized shriek. No gold light appeared. Instead, the brass cylinder turned searing, violent crimson. Four barbed steel prongs exploded from the base of the artifact, punching straight through Roshkar’s wound, while four twin prongs mirrored the strike, whipping forward to bury themselves deep into the palm of Yuthra’s right hand. She gasped, teeth clicking shut against a scream as liquid fire tore along her radial nerve. Roshkar thrashed, his back bowing off the granite, black veins swelling across his neck until they threatened to burst. The relic didn't discharge the poison into the earth. It bridged them. Yuthra pulled desperately, but the metal had anchored itself into her metacarpals, fusing with bone and channel alike. A flood of alien, roaring madness poured into her mind—Roshkar’s agony, his boundless, suffocating fixation, his very core thrumming against her inner sea like a tolling bell. On the stone, Roshkar’s thrashing abruptly ceased. His fever broke. The madness in his face congealed into utter, predatory clarity as he felt her heartbeat drumming in the center of his own chest. His bloodstained lips peeled back over crimson-stained teeth in a terrible, ecstatic smile. "The Spire altered the matrix," Sanjea cried out in horror, drawing a knife to sever the connection, but the repulsion wave hurled her backward against the pillars. Yuthra could only stare at the iron-grip of the red glow joining them flesh to flesh. The relic hadn't cleansed him; it had bound her life-force directly to the immortal's corrupted core, meaning that if his heart stopped beating, hers would explode alongside it.

The Shrine of the Forgotten