Death, I've noticed, rarely announces itself with trumpets.

  It lurks in the shadows, waiting for a peculiar moment to strike. Just like this very moment. As the moon threatened to rise, death was already sharpening its claws.

  And when death finally knocks at the door, mortals resort to bargaining—prayers, promises, and pleas. They speak the names of the gods, the dead, and the unseen like shields and currency. They have spoken mine, a time too many.

  They invoke my name, yet the world no longer remembers the age that forged it. They called on the titles—Sister of the Moon-Eater, Keeper of Knowledge, Witness to Folly—but they have forgotten that names and titles carry no weight to the void that sends life to darkness.

  They think that dying is an ending. But it never is. The dead do not rest. They cling to echoes and names, to halls that still remember their footsteps.

  The dead do not fade. They leave traces, waiting for the living to speak their names once more. And the living? They feed the emptiness with every grief they refuse to bury.

  One day, that grief will tear the Veil itself—and the Lunar Convergence will finish what sorrow began.

  But for now, the Veil still holds. Barely. And it trembles with each passing soul.

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  The Veil holds — 11 months before The Convergence

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  Rusty’s Rustic Inn dressed itself in a homely charm—lamplight spilling like melted gold on pitted tables, cushioned seats uneven but undeniably comforting, and the aroma of seasoned broth drifting through every corner. The place lived up to its name: every beam a stain, every hinge a squeak, and every nook a hint of wear that only years of storms could carve into wood.

  Yet beneath all that warmth and well-earned rust, Grand Meister Cedran Morvane, in his tiny, rented chamber, sensed a slight shift in the Veil, as though shadows were whispering secrets only he could hear. This was a scholarly dread—the kind Morvane scholars perceive when Lunar Convergence was truly close.

  With ink and papers sprawled across the rough desk, Cedran buried himself in calculations, sketches, and notes. Work was the only refuge he trusted. If he kept his quill moving, perhaps the creeping dread would not catch up to him.

  As minutes bled into more, Cedran lost track of what the was writing. For a moment, what he sensed grew into a warning, though more of an instinct than reason. It was as if the moon itself had dimmed. Whispers of ancient scripts echoed in his thoughts. He knew he was on the brink of uncovering something profound yet perilous. All the more jarring because his night began in warmth at Rusty’s Rustic Inn.

  Around him, the low hum of chatter and laughter mingled with the rich scents of stewed meats and freshly baked beans. Cedran, who preferred crystal goblets to clay mugs, velvet chairs to lumpy cushions, and quiet halls to rowdy taverns, found Rusty’s far beneath his usual comforts. But he tolerated, even endured its rustic edges, for comfort of any kind had become a luxury. For the esteemed scholar in pursuit of truth, Cedran knew that the silk-draped chambers should easily be abandoned when answers were pressed close against time. And tonight, of all nights, he had no time left to waste for the clock of the Convergence was ticking fast.

  Cedran forced his attention back to work. Driven by the conviction that he was closing in on truth, he clung to his quill and bent over the manuscript of intricately drawn diagrams of the Lunar Convergence. Charts covered every available inch of space: moon phases mapped against tidal surges, ghost-path calculations traced in looping ink, and most disturbing of all, a quiet dread of his discovery. Evidence that made his scholarly blood run cold:

  The Lunar Convergence wasn't drifting closer by cosmic chance—it was probably being pulled by an unknown force. Someone or something was orchestrating it. Cedran had a glimpse of truth that other mortals would have dismissed as folly and it chilled him enough to know he was right.

  Just as he was about to make another note, documenting yet another impossible coincidence in the celestial timing, small rhythmic thuds sounded at the door.

  Cedran muttered a silent spell, "Tago" before reaching for the door. The drawings, notes, and illustrations in his documents suddenly concealed itself.

  It was the inn owner Rusty who approached, delivering a heavy wooden tray laden with food and a bottle of wine.

  "Morvanes still chasing the moons, eh?" Rusty said, a knowing grin playing on his lips.

  Cedran raised an eyebrow, taken aback. "Do you even recognize me?" he asked, incredulous, given his knack for disguising himself during his scholarly pursuit.

  Rusty chuckled, shrugging. "I've seen enough Morvanes and moon scholars to know one when I do. And besides, you've got that unmistakable gleam of ambition—the kind that ends with either a good story or a short life."

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  Rusty peeked at the papers sprawled in the desk, "Don't worry I won't pry. This is on the house... or inn, should I say." He said as he handed the tray.

  Cedran accepted the gesture graciously, though his mind remained fixed on the calculations before him and the looming dread at the back of his mind.

  The wine became his companion as he scribbled furiously, each sip loosening the knots of fear in his chest. Countless men drink for courage, and never did they find it at the bottom of the barrel. Cedran was no different.

  He savored the first few sips but found himself draining glass after glass as the night wore on, his notes growing more frantic with each page. The warmth and comfort of his chair began to take its toll, and he found his eyelids growing heavy.

  Hours passed in a blur of ink and wine.

  A sudden crash from downstairs jolted him awake. Cedran blinked, disoriented, realizing he'd dozed off over his parchments. The noise had come from the common room below… raised voices, drunken song, heated debate, and perhaps a chair overturned. Curious, he peered through a gap in the floorboards, watching the patrons below through the narrow slit.

  His wine bottle sat empty beside him. Rising unsteadily, he made his way down to the bar, seeking another bottle not for clarity, but for the illusion of it. Wine could not sharpen a quill, yet Cedran hung to it as though it might steady his thoughts. The crowd had thickened since he'd last been downstairs, laughter and heated conversations swirling around him. But as he approached the bar, a hushed tension began to creep in as a cloaked figure entered. A person whose mere presence caused an unnatural stillness in the air. The laughter faded, conversations thinned into murmurs, and the room felt heavy.

  Suddenly, unease stirred Cedran. A cold, unwelcome dread sank deep in his gut. He froze mid-step. He couldn’t explain why, but the sight of that figure ignited something primal in him. Its presence was somehow wrong in a way that made Cedran's moon-scholar instincts—honed through years of studying celestial anomalies—scream warnings louder than any voice of reason. The patterns of the heavens had rules. This figure broke them simply by existing.

  The hood concealed its face, yet Cedran swore shadows bent inward as though light itself had learned fear. A serving girl tried to pass by, balancing a tray of mugs. Her hand trembled, spilling ale onto the floor. No one laughed. No one moved to help her. Every eye was fixed on the newcomer.

  His mouth instantly went dry; Cedran worked his jaw, trying to conjure a swallow. He forced his gaze away from the figure, pretending to study a shelf of bottles behind the bar, but his heart hammered so violently he thought others might hear it. The figure stood still for a heartbeat. Two. Then drifted toward the far corner of the room. People shifted aside as if guided by some unspoken command.

  Cedran dared another look. He caught no face like it was hidden. No hand, no hint of humanity beneath the cloak, only the faintest ripple in the air, as though reality itself strained to hold the figure. His gut turned to ice.

  Panic clawed at him. His mind screamed to leave, to move, to hide. He spun clumsily, the wine in his veins betraying him, and hurried back toward the stairs. His considerable bulk slowed him, his slippers catching the floorboards, each step sounding far too loud. He glanced over his shoulder once, twice, unable to shake the fear that the figure’s unseen eyes had fixed on him.

  By the time he reached his chamber door, sweat beaded his brow. His hands fumbled the latch, fingers slick, the weight of the wine dragging his limbs. He shoved the door open with more force than grace, slipping inside and forcing it closed, pressing his back against the wood as if to keep the entire inn out.

  Only then did he dare exhale, though his heart gave him no mercy.

  Once inside, Cedran conjured a quill into the air with a swift stroke of his finger. The feather spun upright, trembling as if eager to flee, then bent to his will and scrawled across the parchment. Words flowed as if transcribing his thoughts with a life of their own: calculations, symbols, warnings, fragments of prophecy. Each letter bled into the paper like ink reluctant to stay bound.

  "The Hollow Veil... Convergence being pulled—" he muttered, but his voice dropped into trailing whispers of fear as a series of papers manifested before him, fluttering around him like a storm of parchment, the ink swirling frantically.

  Then a faint creak—a board groaned in the hallway. His quill froze. A second sound followed: a slow, deliberate scratching at the wood of his door, whispering to him… only to him.

  Somewhere beneath the scratching, he heard a breath—soft, curious, almost tasting his name. Could it be the sound of the void testing him? The ancient hunger that had learned patience over millennia? Or something far worse? He wasn't sure, only that it sought him. But the echo of his own fear chilled him the most.

  With a quick gesture of his trembling hand, the door locked itself. A heavy wooden barrier slipped into place, the door chain tightened, and the deadbolts turned. A final layer—a metal shutter—slammed down with a clang, sealing him in. His heart raced even faster, fear gripping as the quills rolled ominously across the desk. Cedran's hands shivered as he gathered his most crucial documents.

  But even as he sealed himself in, he could see thin coils of shadow seeping through every crack. Beneath the door, they pooled like spilled ink across the floor. Whatever it was, it caught up to him.

  “This is no natural darkness.”

  The shadows began to rise, blending into a form that stung to look at directly. Not quite human, not quite Void—something that existed in the spaces between certainties.

  Cedran’s mind reeled. He forced his thoughts into focus. “The Wolfpit raven,” he whispered. “Please, let it reach in time.”

  A shimmer answered his plea. The black bird materialized beside his desk, intelligent eyes reflecting shadows spiraling at the door. Two parchments rolled themselves tightly like scrolls, sealed with lunar sigils—one containing part of his research, the other a desperate warning. The raven swallowed both with a quick peck, magic sinking into its core.

  Cedran, with urgent motion, thew open the window.

  As the raven took to the night sky, fleeing from the creeping adversity, the shadow-form stepped fully into Cedran’s room, bringing with it the smell of burnt moonlight and forgotten names.

  Cedran turned to face what had come for him. He grabbed his quill—just as men before him had chosen weak shields when stronger ones were beyond reach. But the hunter never cares what the prey is holding. Scholars, by contrast, are brave when there’s no one left to footnote them. But Cedran was cut from a rarer parchment. The courage others sought at the bottom of the barrel, he found in the margin of a page—and in a quill.

  As shadows closed in around Cedran, the Convergence would claim more. And the first tremor will ripple through Wolfpit Castle where Iakob felt the pulse of his axe, the Headhunter.

  The young boy would not know it yet, but the pulse of the axe—calling, whispering, answering a summons older than Wolfpit legends—was the first warning that the mad-driven hunger of Baku had begun to crawl back to them.

  And somewhere in the long, unlit corridors of fate, the world shifted—quietly, almost politely—as if making room for the tragedy that had already begun.

  From the Records of the Sundering:

  What do you think of Cedran? Wise? Just clever enough? Courageous? Foolish enough? Sometimes the quill outlives the sword, but not always the hand that wields it. A scribbler in his time, much like any writer today—trying to shape the world with ink, even when the shadows are already waiting. What’s your verdict?

  What do you think of Cedran?