Why did all of his heroic efforts always come with a side of commentary?
They walked in silence for a while. The further they went, the more the air changed. Heavier, metallic, damp.
“I see something,” murmured Cedric and lifted the torch.
The tunnel widened gradually, until they stepped into something entirely different—hollowed out, vast, round. A cavern. Not natural, not entirely. The shape was too symmetrical, the stone too clean in places and too deliberately scarred in others. There were at least eight separate tunnel mouths ringing the chamber like the points of a compass.
Alaric blinked slowly. “Well, this isn’t ominous at all.”
Cedric was already moving, casting the light of his torch against the nearest wall. Alaric stepped further into the space. His gaze was drawn to the center—there, half-sunken in the floor, stood round slab that looked distinctly like a table. He approached it slowly. Reached out.
His gloved finger swiped across the surface and came away stained dark.
Dried blood.
Cedric’s torchlight swung behind him. “Alaric.”
He turned. Hi companion was standing at one of the walls—one of the few that didn’t host a tunnel. Just a flat, pale expanse of stone.
Painted on it, in dark, rusted streaks, was the symbol.
A circle. Three vertical lines inside it.
It can’t be a coincidence.
They looked at each other. A secret tunnel beneath the castle. A private chamber connected to the Chapel of Orvath. And this—the same sigil Evelyne saw. The same one everyone insisted meant nothing. The same he swore his grandfather mentioned once upon a time.
It was getting more and more significant.
To the side, half-shadowed by one of the supporting arches, stood a pedestal. Simple, unadorned stone with a wide, shallow tray carved into its top. Oil. Alaric recognized the scent beforeCedric even reached for it. He placed the torch into the tray's metal grip, and the oil caught instantly.
Flames flared, and the entire space came alive.
It was somehow worse in full light.
The shadows danced wildly across the stone, wax, and bloodstained chains. Every edge flickered like it might move on its own if they turned their backs. The sigil on the wall looked wet again, though Alaric knew it wasn’t.
At the center of the tray, half-buried beneath old wax and soot, sat a single stone scroll. Rounded and etched, with rusted chains coiled around its base.
“What in the stars is this?” Alaric murmured.
The symbol was unfamiliar. Not Orvath’s. Maybe a heretical branch? A bloodier interpretation of discipline? The Doctrine had splinter groups, of course—anything that preached endurance tended to attract those who saw suffering as a shortcut to divinity.
But this… this was something else.
He turned back to the altar, breath fogging faintly in the cold, damp air. It was surrounded by candles melted into pools. Rusted knives, left carelessly. Chains—some still bolted into the floor. And blood. Dried, spattered, streaked. Everywhere.
The book lay there, thick and bound in worn leather, its surface smeared with something that had once been red. Alaric reached for it cautiously, half expecting the thing to hiss at him.
He cracked the cover.
It was not the Iron Verses, the sacred text of the Doctrine of Orvath. Not even close. The pages were handwritten, uneven, frantic in places.
Poems. Or parts of them.
He flipped through slowly, scanning ink that bled into the parchment in places. Line after line with no title, no source, just sentences that curled into the back of his mind like cold fingers:
“When twin moons fall as mirrored tears,
