Vullum – Three Nights After the Chapel
The cold had followed us back. Not just the bite of Vullum's eternal damp, but the silence—the kind that crawls up the spine and sets root behind the eyes. It sat between us in the apothecary, heavy as iron. Dorian hadn't spoken since we returned from the chapel. Not really. He moved like a man sifting through ghosts, each step measured, as if afraid the floor might give way beneath him.
He'd been reading that velvet-bound book over and over again. I watched him from across the counter, chin resting against gloved knuckles, saying nothing.
In truth, I didn't want him to speak. Not yet. If he said it aloud—what we read in that chapel—then it would become real.
The Heartbinder rite wasn't done.
It had never been.
And worse, someone wanted to finish it.
I heard him sigh finally. "You've gone quiet."
I tilted my head. "You always complain when I talk."
He gave a weak, humorless smile. "Not when you're quiet like this. This one has a… sound."
"What does my silence sound like?"
"Regret." He leaned back in the chair, arms crossed. "And maybe fear."
I didn't respond. I wasn't sure I could lie to him anymore.
"You felt something when you touched me," he said, voice lower now. "Not just my grief. You felt him, didn't you?"
I met his gaze, and for a moment, I wished I still wore the mask. "Yes."
He leaned forward slowly, jaw tight. "Is he alive?"
"I don't know. What I felt... it was old. Deep. But not... gone." I swallowed. "More like buried."
His fists clenched around the edge of the book. "Lucien would have been sixteen this year."
"And Cassian would've been nineteen."
We both fell into silence.
A knock at the apothecary door broke it.
We weren't expecting anyone. No one knocked this late. Dorian reached instinctively for his coat where he kept a knife tucked inside. I rose first, though, and opened the door.
No one.
Only a folded piece of paper weighed down with a stone and something else—damp, delicate, and familiar.
A spider lily.
I bent and picked up the note. Dorian joined me, watching with a narrowed gaze.
I unfolded it slowly, half-expecting the glyphs of blood we'd seen before. But it wasn't blood this time.
It was ink, and the words were clear:
"You are remembering. Soon, you will return. The Mourner watches. The Mourner weeps."
Beneath it, the same spiral mark from the chapel. Only smaller. Crisper. More deliberate.
Dorian took the lily and studied the stem. "Fresh. Whoever left this... they're close."
He looked down the street. The mist was thicker than usual, curling between the lanterns like living smoke.
I clutched the note. "They want me to remember something I buried."
"Then we dig," he said. "Together."
The Council's Next Move
The Inner Ring, beneath the Obsidian Spire
They met beneath the city, not above.
The Council of Stones no longer trusted open light—not even candlelight. Their chamber had no windows. Just iron sconces choked with cold flame, their greenish hue casting ghost-shadows across faces both noble and rotted.
Seven chairs. Six filled.
The seventh, draped in mourning silk, remained untouched.
The figure known only as Thorne stood in the center of the chamber, cloak soaked from his descent through the damp tunnels. Moss clung to his boots. A crimson lily, crushed and mud-streaked, had somehow stuck to his shoulder.
He plucked it off without looking.
"She is stirring," he said, voice like gravel being chewed. "The girl—the one who walked the Rite."
A woman to his left, pale and serpentine-eyed, tapped long fingers against the blackwood table. "Lenora Vale. The name we erased."
"No," said a deeper voice from the shadows. "She erased herself. We simply let the silence settle."
"And now?" Thorne asked.
The eldest of them—Councilor Brecht, face like dry bark, eyelids sewn with fine silver thread—spoke without moving. "Now the spiral reopens. The murders are not random. Nor are they acts of rebellion. This is a return."
"To what?" the woman hissed. "To the Heartbinders?"
"Worse," said Brecht.
Thorne pulled something from his coat. A piece of chalk. Old. Worn smooth at one end. But the scent of spider lily clung to it, as if it had written blood into stone.
He set it on the table.
"They're recreating the Rite," he said. "Each death is a glyph. Each glyph... a memory made manifest."
Another councilor, the youngest among them, rose halfway. "If she completes the circle—"
"She doesn't know how," Thorne interrupted. "She doesn't remember."
"She will," said Brecht. "If someone wants her to."
Silence fell.
Then Brecht continued, words deliberate and cold: "Summon the Ashkeeper."
The woman stiffened. "That thing is bound to the Catacombs."
"It is bound no longer," Brecht whispered. "We loosened its chains the moment we looked away."
"Are we so afraid of one girl?" the young man asked.
Thorne turned slowly. "We are afraid of what sleeps beneath her skin."
A pause.
Then Brecht spoke the old phrase—dry, almost cracked with age.
"The one who touches heart and hollow... must be buried before bloom."
The vote passed without dissent.
Back in Vullum
Lenora's Apothecary, Midnight
I knew something had shifted.
I didn't feel it so much as... taste it. Like iron in the air. Like old breath exhaled after centuries of silence.
Dorian was asleep in the corner chair, head tilted awkwardly against the edge of his coat. The velvet-bound book had fallen open on his lap, and even in dreams, his fingers remained on the edge of the page.
I sat at the table by the window, a candle guttering beside me, the Mourner's note beneath my palm.
I traced it absently. Again. And again.
The Mourner weeps. The Mourner watches.
What does she want me to remember?
I rose and moved to the small glass cabinet in the corner—the one I never unlocked. Not since the fire. Inside were relics. Hairpins from my mother's dresser. A bone-white comb carved with a spiral. A single, black ribbon stained with ash.
And beneath it all...
...a silver bell.
I stared at it.
Then I heard it.
No wind.
No hand.
But it rang.
Soft and slow.
And from the street beyond the shutters, someone whispered my name.
The bell stopped ringing, but the sound lingered like smoke in my lungs. Dorian didn't stir. The book lay heavy across his lap, open to the page Cassian had marked: We begin again.
Outside, the whisper came again.
"Lenora..."
It wasn't a voice. Not in the human sense. It was the sensation of memory given breath. The name curled against the window like frost.
I rose without knowing why.
The candle flickered violently as I reached for the latch. The metal was cold. My gloves didn't dull it. I stepped into the street.
Vullum was quiet. Too quiet.
Even the fog felt different tonight—thicker, almost sentient. It clung to my skirts as though it meant to drag me back. The Mourner's lilies—the ones she had left me days ago—wilted on the steps, their red bruised into near-black. One had split down the center, its pollen bleeding onto stone like dust from a wound.
The whisper didn't repeat itself.
But my feet moved. Toward Deadlight Alley. Toward the crypt-market ruins where I used to steal herbs before I knew their names.
Flashback
Snow. Not white, but pink. Tinted by crushed petals.
I was ten.
Cassian held my hand. His was warm, mine shaking. We stood inside a ring drawn in crushed lily and chalk. The glyphs glowed softly—even under moonlight. Even before blood.
The moon above us bled red, and it wasn't metaphor. It dripped.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Good. It means you still know yourself."
Then the hooded figure stepped forward. Clothed in white, veiled in gauze. Her face—no mouth, no eyes, just an impression of sorrow stitched into porcelain.
The Mourner.
She raised the knife.
My hand jerked back to the present, slamming against brick as I reached the alley. I didn't remember walking the distance. My gloves were off. My palms scraped. Bleeding.
"Lenora..."
It came from below.
The iron grate behind the old market had been pulled open. A spiral staircase, revealed by moonlight, descended into damp silence.
No sign of a person. Just the smell of lilies.
And the hush of memory waiting to be unearthed.
Elsewhere in Vullum...
Dorian stirred. The room was colder, the fire burned low.
He blinked at the velvet-wrapped book, still open in his lap, but it was the absence beside him that fully woke him. No shift of fabric. No soft breath behind the mask.
"Lenora?"
Silence.
The front door was ajar.
He stood, cursing under his breath. "Of course. Because wandering into fog after unearthing death cult scriptures is perfectly sane."
He closed the book and tucked it under his arm. His coat was barely on before he was down the stairs, past the lilies, his boots thudding through puddles left from fog's kiss.
The streets were empty. But something hung in the air—like the moment just before a scream.
And in the distance, toward the ruined market, he saw it:
A flicker of white disappearing into shadow.
Not Lenora.
The Mourner.
"Damn it, Lenora... what did you walk into this time?"
He followed.
And the night opened like a mouth.