FIFTEEN
RATHOK
The debt-golem fills the doorway. Then fills the chapel.
It expands as I watch—unfolding, multiplying, becoming something massive and wrong. Contract-paper stretches over a skeleton of compressed bone-debt, thousands of defaulted souls crushed into structural support. Its arms split into tentacles, each one tipped with a face that used to be human. The faces scream in unison, a chorus of the damned that vibrates through my skull.
I’m moving before I finish processing what I’m seeing.
My axes clear my belt in a single motion. The first strike opens the golem from collar to hip—black iron biting through paper-flesh, parting contracts like water. But there’s nothing inside to spill. No blood, no organs. Just parchment and broken promises and the ghosts of obligations never fulfilled.
The wound seals itself before my axe clears the flesh. Contracts rewrite themselves, paper fusing back into place, the dead voices screaming louder.
A tentacle catches me across the chest.
The human face at its tip bites down—teeth sinking through leather and muscle, grinding against my ribs with the desperate hunger of the eternally indebted. I recognize that hunger. Felt itmyself during those first desperate years after Shattered Peaks fell. The need that eats you alive when you owe more than you can ever repay.
Pain flares hot and sharp. I grab the tentacle with my bare hand, feel the face gnawing at my flesh, and tear it free.
A chunk of my own chest comes with it.
Blood sprays across the shattered pews. I ignore it. Pain is for later. Now is killing.
I hack through another tentacle. Another. Another. The golem has dozens—each one a debtor claimed, each face a soul consumed. Every severed limb falls twitching to the floor, then crawls back toward the main body, reattaching, reforming. I’m not winning. I’m not even slowing it down.
The golem grabs me.
Multiple tentacles wrap around my torso, my arms, my legs. The faces bite and tear, dozens of mouths working at once, stripping flesh from bone. I feel my ribs crack under the pressure. Feel something important tear in my shoulder. Feel blood running down my body in streams.
The construct slams me through the chapel wall.
Stone shatters. My spine hits something that cracks—a pew, the altar, my own bones. Stars explode across my vision. The world goes white, then red, then nothing.
When my sight clears, the golem is reaching for Ivalys.
She’s backed against the far wall, a splintered pew leg clutched in her fist—jagged, heavy, useless against this thing. Absolutely useless. The golem’s tentacles extend toward her, faces screaming her name, her brother’s voice buried somewhere in that chorus of the damned.
I don’t remember standing. Don’t remember deciding to move. My body acts without permission, fueled by something deeper than instinct. Blood pours from my side. One arm hangs wrong—dislocated, maybe broken. Doesn’t matter.
“RUN!” The word tears out of me. “The Bone Market—there’s a woman there who owes me—GO!”
She doesn’t run.
Of course, she doesn’t run. She never does. She just looks at me with those fierce depths, fury and terror and something else burning in her gaze—something that makes my chest hurt in ways that have nothing to do with my wounds.
I throw myself at the golem.
Both axes bury in its chest. I climb it—using the wounds as handholds, hauling myself up its paper-flesh body, leaving bloody smears on every contract I touch. The faces bite at me as I ascend, tearing strips from my arms, my shoulders, my back. I keep climbing.
The golem tries to shake me off. Its body convulses, contracts rippling across its surface, tentacles whipping back to pry me loose. I hold on with one hand and hack with the other—blind, furious, desperate. My axe bites through paper and bone-debt and screaming faces.
Every construct has a core. A heart. A center point where the magic concentrates.
I find it by touch—a knot of compressed contracts pulsing beneath the paper-flesh, beating with stolen life. I drive my fist into the golem’s chest, tearing through layers of parchment and obligation, reaching for that pulsing heart.
The contracts fight back.
They wrap around my arm. Burrow into my skin. I feel them writing terms on my bones, demanding payment for the debt of existing. Words sear themselves into my flesh: CLAIMED. OWED. DEFAULTED. The Ledger Master’s magic, trying to bind me through his own construct.
