"Everything begins, and ends, in ash."

So spoke Guildmaster Genivieve Yarlie, the Nephrokinetic. Her storms of cinders were infamous: black skies, choking smoke, a blizzard of embers that stripped flesh from bone. She was a mercenary without mercy, a commander whose word was iron and whose enemies prayed never to hear her name.

And in the end, she died as she lived—by fire and ruin. Her last act was to immolate herself, collapsing into the very ash she once commanded, scouring entire tracts of land into lifeless wasteland. To her, it was no tragedy. To her, it was fulfillment: all things returned to dust.

"Why are you reading the biography of Guildmaster Yarlie?" Cordelia's voice cut through the silence, calm but edged with concern. When I glanced up, her expression wasn't merely curious. It was wary.

I didn't answer at once. Instead, I gestured toward Gin, sprawled lazily beside me. The so-called herald of calamity toyed with a ball of yarn, his sharp eyes flicking between us with catlike amusement.

"We're debating," I said at last, "on the best way to increase my strength before the thirty days are done. Whether or not I'm the one meant to stop what's coming, the truth doesn't change. There is one law that rules every court and every battlefield: Might makes right."

Cordelia folded her arms, her tone sharpening. "If you insist on quoting Conches, at least do it properly. The saying is Might makes right, but terror leads to tragedy. Philosophers framed it as a warning, not a justification."

"I didn't misquote him," I replied, tapping the ash-stained page. "I simply left out what doesn't apply. Terror is inevitable, Cordelia. And tragedy? This entire calamity is tragedy incarnate. So don't preach to me about context."

Her gaze lingered, steady and unblinking, like she was weighing whether I still believed my own words. "You think omission makes you clever. But truth cut in half is still a lie. If you walk down this path thinking only of strength, then all you'll hold in your hands is ash. Just like Yarlie."

Her words stung, more than I cared to admit. For a moment, I looked back to the ink-black biography, its final passages stained with soot as though the book itself had been burned.

Gin, of course, chose that moment to chuckle. The sound was soft, feline, and cruel. "I've always adored Yarlie," he said, curling the yarn into his claws. "A woman who understood the symmetry of destruction. Do you know what made her feared? Not her storms. Not her skill. It was that she never hesitated. Ash does not question. Ash consumes."

I clenched the book shut.

Cordelia stepped closer, lowering her voice so that only I could hear. "Alexander, you've already begun to sound like him." She glanced toward Gin, whose smile was all teeth. "Don't let his philosophy be the ink you write yourself in."

For a long heartbeat, I said nothing. My fingers pressed against the black text of Yarlie's epitaph, feeling the faint texture of the ash that wasn't really there. Cordelia's warning echoed, but so did Gin's purring approval.

Before we got into an argument, two people came into interrupt us. Three. No…four.

Before Cordelia and I could descend into another argument, the chamber shifted with new arrivals. One figure. Two. No—three. Four.

Morres, first through the doorway, as expected. Barbra trailing him, equally unsurprising. But the pair that followed made me pause, my pulse catching for reasons I couldn't quite name. Vanitas, of course—dramatic as ever, dressed in some ridiculous ensemble of violet lace and gold-threaded silk. But it was the last one, a shadow I didn't recognize, that set my nerves on edge.

"Okay," Morres began, loud enough to force silence onto the room. His tone carried the usual bite of pragmatism, but there was something sharper under it. "So. Vanitas and I came to an agreement."

That alone drew the collective gaze. Cordelia's head snapped toward him. Fallias, newly awake, shifted in her seat, eyes narrowing with a predator's sharpness. Even Gin's smile slipped into something more curious than playful. Only Barbra, standing patient as a stone pillar at Morres's side, seemed unmoved.

Morres folded his arms and continued. "We're going to write a tome. Not a book, not a grimoire, but a tome. Twenty-six thousand pages. A lattice of ink and thought. An epic of old stories—some well known, some half-forgotten, others never told at all. And I'll lace it with Paradox."

At that word, a shiver rippled through the room. Cordelia flinched visibly, one hand rising to cover her ear as though the syllables themselves were knives. Fallias hissed, dragging her sleeve against her temple, her face pale as wax, as though the very sound pressed against her skull.

Morres had the audacity to look apologetic. "Sorry," he muttered to them, then looked directly at me with a meaning I didn't miss. "Remember when I told you, back when we first crossed paths, that my mana wasn't…normal? That it didn't belong here?"

I nodded stiffly.

"Well," he said with a shrug that looked almost rehearsed. "That's what I meant. Paradox. It bends rules. Distorts. Breaks. And seeing as Demeterra is a Dominus of Law, you can imagine the kind of…problems this causes."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

He tried to soften it with another shrug, but the weight of the admission lingered like smoke.

Then, of course, Vanitas swept forward with a flourish. His hand cut the air in an elegant arc, his voice rising in a practiced lilt. "What the Box Idiot isn't saying—because he lacks flair, as always—is that we are going to drown this tome in Paradox. Not drizzle, not sprinkle, not lace. Bathe it. Suffuse it. We'll weave the pages until they hum with so much of that impossible mana that the very law of time will buckle. Heavily. Massively. The result? For every second out here, an hour passes within."

His smile, sharp and theatrical, lingered on me. "That buys you just under ten years."

I blinked hard, trying to keep the calculation straight in my head. "Wouldn't that mean I'd…turn twenty-seven in there?"

Morres rubbed the bridge of his nose, grimacing like someone dragged into a conversation he wanted no part of. "Not…exactly. Not how this kind of distortion works. I'm not willing to go into details because…" He trailed off, looking genuinely uncomfortable, before forcing a half-smile. "…because you don't want to know."

Vanitas groaned dramatically and threw his head back. "What Box Boy means, dear Alexander, is that he can't tell you the details. He won't risk it. Because for this to work, we can't do it here. Oh no. Here, Lady Demeterra herself would tear his head off. Bite it clean from his shoulders and spit it into the void."

"And yours too!" Gin chimed cheerfully, appearing at Vanitas's elbow, smile widening until it nearly split his face.

The silence that followed was brittle. The air itself seemed to weigh more. Even Vanitas, who thrived on performance, gave Gin a side-eyed glance of genuine discomfort.

Morres coughed into his fist. "The point is—we create the tome in another realm. Anchor the distortion there, outside Demeterra's direct oversight. That buys you your time. But it also means you'll be standing in a place where Paradox is thick enough to drown. You'll be training inside a contradiction, and contradictions…consume."

I didn't miss the way Cordelia still had her ears covered. Or the way Fallias, jaw clenched tight, stared fixedly at the floor rather than at me. Or the shadowy stranger who'd walked in with them, silent all this time, whose gaze hadn't left me once.

"Okay," I said, finally cutting through the silence that had been gnawing at me. "I'll ask. Who's the silent stranger?"

The robed man stepped forward, his gait slow but deliberate, like each movement had been measured long before he made it. His hood shifted back as he raised his hands, and what I saw forced the breath from my lungs.

The left side of his body was bare bone—gleaming, articulated, unmistakably skeletal. A skull socket with no eye. A ribcage exposed down to the marrow. The right side, by contrast, was flesh: scarred, but human. Skin and bone existing in parallel, as though two beings had been welded together down the middle.

He inclined his head toward me in acknowledgment. Then, with no sound, no voice, he raised a finger and began to write into the air. Glyphs of mana formed, glowing faintly, hanging in the space between us like words carved into smoke.

You may call me Gravekeeper. I am here as… not a favor. But to ensure that certain laws are not broken in this cluster.

The words hung for a moment before unraveling into strands of light, dissolving into nothing.

Vanitas smirked, but Gin was faster, his tone sardonic, words dripping like honey mixed with ash. "What he's not saying—because he's all bone and no charm—is that's Archon Gravekeeper. And yes, his task is exactly what it sounds like. He is the Archon of the Dead. Not of death—that's a different mantle altogether—but of the dead. He makes certain that those who perish do not break their chains. That the fallen are gathered back into the web, to where they belong."

The chamber went still. Even Cordelia stopped covering her ears, staring at him with wide, wary eyes. Fallias's hands curled into fists, tension obvious.

I swallowed. "Wait… then what about vampires? The undead? All the stories I've ever heard—those are real?"

For the first time, the skeletal half of his face moved. The jawbone shifted, clicked once, twice, as though testing memory of speech. Then glowing letters spiraled into the air again.

They exist. But only as aberrations. My task is to see them returned to the wheel. To the cycle. The dead belong to the web. And when they linger, when they claw their way free of it… I am the one who binds them back.

The words carried no sound, but I felt them all the same. Heavy. Cold. Each sentence rang with inevitability, as though spoken by the universe itself.

And in the pause that followed, I realized—everyone in the room, even Vanitas with his mockery, even Morres with his pragmatism—was standing straighter. More rigid. As if they, too, felt the weight of those words.

The Gravekeeper didn't move again, only waited, empty socket fixed on me as if daring me to press further.

"What is this tome going to be about?" Fallias asked, her voice flat, though she punctuated the question with a lazy yawn. Her eyes didn't match her tone; they were sharp, as if she already suspected the answer.

Morres's expression twitched into something between pride and discomfort. "We sort of answered this already, but we'll go into more detail now." His voice dipped lower, like he was savoring the words. "Terror. Tragedy. Myth. These pages will be soaked in old stories—epics and parables of doom. You'll see no happy endings within them. None. Every line will turn downward, every tale drawn toward collapse. And that's why…" He gestured vaguely toward me, his grin widening. "…you won't be going in alone."

I frowned, tilting my head. "That doesn't make sense. My Arte only allows me to enter."

At that, Morres's grin turned sly, like a magician about to reveal the trick he'd kept up his sleeve all along. "Your Arte does allow more than yourself, Alexander. Just not yet. Not until it's…ripened." He tapped his temple, as if the words were some secret only he understood. "But it doesn't matter anyway. Mine already does."

Vanitas snorted behind him, clapping mockingly. "Listen to box-boy preen. He thinks he's being cryptic when really he just likes hearing his own voice."

Morres ignored him, eyes still locked on me. "You won't face this alone. The stories we're weaving are too heavy, too jagged. They'll tear at you. So either you all walk through them together, or you'll break before you reach the last page."

Something in the way he said it made the hair on my neck rise. It wasn't a threat, but it wasn't a promise either.

Helpless is the lamb being brought to slaughter.

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