The stench of rust and ancient dread was the first thing to claw its way into Morvan’s nascent awareness. His cheek was pressed against something cold, gritty, and undeniably sticky. It tasted like regret and old copper. He opened one eye, then the other, the effort immense, like lifting leaden curtains. Above him, a perpetual twilight, choked by the pervasive fog of Nocen, bled through the skeletal arches of the Grand Ossuary. Grotesque stone waterspouts carved as lamenting faces leered down from every shadowed niche, their mineral tears streaking the grime of ages.
“Awake, sinner?” A voice, thin and reedy, scraped against his ears.
Morvan blinked slowly. He was lying on a massive, blood-darkened chopping block, its surface gouged with countless marks of finality. Around him, three figures cloaked in vestments of grey and dried vermilion stood, their faces obscured by deep hoods. They held ornate staves tipped with weeping eye symbols. Zealots of the Weeping Divines, he deduced, recalling the fragmented memories of his new host. And they were looking at him with an intensity that suggested he was supposed to be performing, perhaps, a death scene.
“The pantheon demands contrition,” another officiant rasped, his voice like gravel. “Beg for their mercy, wretch, before the Cleaving Blade finds its mark. Speak your repentance.”
Morvan’s gaze drifted past the officiants to a massive, rusted axe leaning against a broken pillar. It looked… heavy. And dull. The sheer effort of *begging* seemed far more taxing than simply letting the thing fall. He registered a dull ache in his neck, probably from sleeping on this uncomfortable slab. The blood beneath him was not his, thankfully. Just… residual.
His eyelids grew heavy again. The whole situation felt like an overly dramatic public inconvenience. A profound, echoing yawn escaped his lips, stretching his jaw to its limit, a sound that seemed to suck all the stale air out of the vast, echoing chamber. It wasn’t a defiant yawn; it was a deeply, genuinely exhausted one, the kind that follows centuries of fighting eldritch horrors and then dying from paperwork.
The robed celebrants stiffened. A ripple of something akin to shock, then outrage, passed through them. “You *yawn*?” the first officiant hissed, disbelief lacing his tone like poison.
Morvan just closed his mouth, the faint pop of his jaw echoing in the sudden silence. He probably should have stretched first. His eyes, however, snapped open with a flicker of genuine annoyance. A crow, black as a void, had landed on a nearby roof chitterer, its caw piercing the relative quiet. It was far too loud.
He pushed himself up, an almost imperceptible tremor running through the ancient stone block. The robed figures recoiled a step. Morvan ignored them. His gaze fixated on the crow, perched insolently on a stone grotesque depicting a sobbing martyr. The bird let out another raucous shriek, flapping its wings, scattering dust and tiny chips of ancient stone.
“Such an irritating racket,” Morvan mumbled, his voice a low, gravelly rumble, unused by his new throat. He looked around for something to throw, something to chase the wretched thing away. His eyes landed on a gnarled timber fragment that had clearly once been part of an executioner’s gallows, discarded near the base of the chopping block. It looked suitably lightweight.
With a sigh, Morvan reached down, his fingers closing around the cold, brittle wood. He swung it, a languid, almost careless arc, aiming vaguely in the direction of the squawking bird. He wasn’t trying to hit it, just shoo it. The dry wood, surprisingly, held together.
Instead of a mere swat, something *else* happened. A whisper of force, invisible but potent, detached itself from the tip of the decaying timber. It wasn’t a focused spell, not a trained technique, just the raw, unchanneled residue of cosmic exhaustion leaking from him. The air around the gallows wood shimmered, then *rippled*, distorting the twilight like heat haze.
This ripple, a kinetic shudder born of sheer, bone-deep disinterest, didn’t merely nudge the crow. It punched through the air with an unimaginable velocity, bypassing the perched bird entirely, and slammed into the distant, fog-shrouded pinnacle of Mount Nocen.
The crag, a jagged, accursed monolith that had stood for millennia, a symbol of Nocen’s enduring gloom and the lords' cruel will, let out a groan that was felt more than heard. A fissure, thin as a spiderweb, appeared on its dark face, then widened with sickening speed. A thunderous crack echoed through the city, shaking the very foundations of the Ossuary. The celebrants screamed, not in pain, but in sheer, gut-wrenching terror.
The colossal peak, cleaving itself in two, began to crumble, sending plumes of dust and rock into the eternal twilight. The crow, startled silent, darted away.
Morvan lowered the executioner’s bough, frowning slightly. He had merely sought a moment of quiet. Now the collapsing summit was making an even bigger mess. He tossed the stick aside, the splintered wood clattering against the stone floor.
The robed celebrants were on their knees, prostrate, foreheads pressed against the blood-stained flagstones. Their trembling voices, once filled with righteous fury, were now a chorus of terrified whispers. “Forgive us, Dread Sovereign!” one wailed. “We have offended the God of Sloth! The Silent Wrath has been unleashed!”
“The summit… the ridge is broken!” another gasped, tears streaming down his face. “A sign! A terrible, glorious sign!”
Morvan sighed. This was precisely the kind of fuss he sought to avoid. He only craved a quiet place to sleep. He stepped over the kneeling, gibbering liturgists, his new noble robes surprisingly clean despite the chopping block.
“Coming along, Morvan?” a cheerful voice called out from the shadows near a massive crypt entrance.
A young man with a perpetually bright smile and dirt beneath his fingernails emerged. This was Davorin, the gravedigger Morvan had somehow befriended in his new, confusing life. He seemed utterly unfazed by the collapsing mountain or the prostrating priests. He merely dusted off his shovel, a small, benign smile on his face.
“They’re making a rather loud display of devotion today, aren’t they?” Davorin remarked, glancing at the liturgists as if they were merely a minor inconvenience, like a particularly stubborn root. “Still, the north side of the Ossuary is quietest this time of… well, this time of day. We should find a suitable crypt there.”
Morvan nodded, accepting Davorin’s company as naturally as breathing. He yearned to discover a crypt, any crypt, and sleep for a decade. The idea of quiet oblivion was bliss.
Their path to the northern wing, however, was abruptly blocked. From the deep shadows pooling near a towering, obsidian buttress, a wall of pure, living night rose. It coalesced, swirling with an unsettling grace, forming into the shape of a woman. Her eyes, twin pinpricks of icy luminescence, fixed on Morvan with an intensity that burned even through his apathy. Clad in midnight-dark plate, her hand rested on the hilt of a blade that seemed to absorb all light around it.
“Morvan of House Valerion,” the shadow-wielding inquisitor, Lysoria, declared, her voice a chilling whisper that promised both exquisite pain and obsessive devotion. The air turned stagnant, thick with cold iron and something sharp and possessive. “The Weeping Divines are dead. Long live the Dark God of Apathy.”