Rhain Cinder-Grim’s gaze pinned Korvan to the blood-splashed cobblestones. The Lodge master’s subtle smile held no amusement, only the calculation of a butcher over prime meat. Korvan, still fighting the Loom’s searing retribution, pushed himself up, his right arm throbbing where the dark relic had fused to his flesh. The ravenous edge clawed incessantly at the edges of his control.
“A Grave-Walker, returned to the Morven Lodge,” Rhain continued, his voice level and flat. He turned, iron-shod soles grinding against the broken edge of the butcher cleaver on the flagstones. “A weapon of immense potential, or so rumor claims. And you, Korvan Geth, possess something very dear to this Lodge. Something you seem desperate to preserve.”
Korvan’s vision blurred, yet his thoughts turned sharp. He met Rhain’s eyes without flinching. The Lodge master knew about Jorvel. Cold distrust flared, verifying his darkest assumption: there were no secrets in this damned place, only transactions.
“Your friend, Jorvel Tyros,” Rhain stated with casual cruelty. “His particular affliction, the Charnel-rot… it progresses, does it not? An unfortunate, terminal condition. Unless, of course, one had access to specific remedies.”
Nestra, standing paces away, went rigid. Her brows drew tight as she tracked Rhain and Korvan in turn. She clearly had not known.
Korvan locked his breathing down. He had told no one of Jorvel’s rot. The rifled storeroom, the missing tincture—the pattern aligned instantly. Rhain had not stumbled onto this; he had engineered it, leaving breadcrumbs to steer him.
“I imagine you sought a cure,” Rhain mused, palm resting on the petrified raven’s skull capping his black staff. “From our inner stores, perhaps? A foolish foray. The Aegis-Balm is not so easily plucked.” He let the offer hang like bait on a barbed hook.
“What do you want?” Korvan rasped, throat raw, the Loom’s murmurs throbbing against the back of his skull.
Rhain showed clean, unbroken teeth. “Simple. A breach in the catacombs, deeper than any mapped run. A nest spreading unchecked in the Sunken Maw. It fouls the foundation channels, threatening to destabilize the perimeter wards.” He pointed a black-gloved finger at the flagstones. “A task for unique talents. Descend alone. Purge the nest. Return with its core. Deliver that, and Jorvel Tyros receives the balm. Refuse, and his decay will be displayed before the entire student court.”
Nestra stepped forward, fingers dropping to her rapier’s wire-wound hilt. “That is a death sentence. The Maw was sealed after the seventh cohort died there.”
Rhain tilted his chin. “Then perhaps it is time for an old name to earn its keep. Or for a stray to find a tomb.” He fixed his cold stare on Korvan. “Do we have terms, Korvan Geth?”
Cold resolve took hold. With Jorvel’s life held hostage, hesitation meant burial. He would drag the marrow out of whatever crawled in the dark to keep that debt alive.
“Agreed,” Korvan ground out, his forearm seizing as the soul-bound weapon pulsed.
[Sacrifice accepted. Efficiency is survival. Mercy is weakness.]
Rhain’s dry laugh trailed Korvan out through the vaulted nave, cutting through Nestra’s sharp objections. He pushed past the frozen ranks of students, tuning out their murmurs. The stairwell swallowed him whole, the air turning greasy with cold rot. Beyond the warding perimeter, damp darkness gathered along the stones like oil on water.
He took the crumbling spiral downward, boots finding purchase on black mold until lantern light died out completely. Pale shelf-fungus offered the only gleam, casting crooked outlines against the dripping masonry. The Night-Render shuddered within his tendons, an unsated parasite testing its tether. The Loom hissed behind his ears, urging bloodshed.
The first shapes emerged from split masonry: bloated Charnel-Hulks, gray flesh swollen with necrotizing damp. Their wet rasping died as Korvan released the tether. Tendrils of black pitch whipped from his forearm. The edge cleaved through rotted bone, feeding as it cut. It drank their spilled dregs straight into his marrow, momentarily quietening the void in his chest.
[Dirge energy assimilated. Shadow-blade stabilization achieved.]
Clarity replaced the initial burn. He ceased resisting the relic’s hunger and steered its arcs instead. Each thrust left collapsed skins and thinned gray vapor behind him. He pushed past the chalk boundary marks of the Lodge cartographers, dropping into unmapped depths spoke of only over tavern tables.
The air turned sour with wet rot and the brass reek of pooled iron. A sickly phosphorescence seeped from the stone. Veins of black slime linked the wall-fungus, flexing in unison like exposed arteries. The Maw was no simple den of beasts; something was feeding it.
He slipped through a split in the bedrock, scraping his shoulders against weeping granite. The chamber opened into a circular crypt. Dozens of missing initiates sat propped along the perimeter, gray-skinned and hollowed of their Dirge resonance, jaws locked agape. Filaments of black ichor ran from their sternums into an enormous, glistening mass at the floor’s center—a bloated organ of blighted power thumping against the bedrock like a war drum.
Suspended directly above the mound, bound by the very cords that siphoned the dead, hung Jorvel Tyros. Charnel-rot blackened his collarbones, his chest lifting in faint, shuddering gasps. Unconscious, serving as the live siphon for the slaughter Rhain had planned all along.