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“Why’d you lie to the kid?” Chris asked, voice low.
Dixon didn’t look at him. He was admiring the gleam of a polished greataxe propped against the wall, its handle wrapped in pristine leather.
“Those mercenaries are onto something with how they’re living,” Dixon said. “The only reason we’re in this mess is because Saint's had us grazing with the sheep. With this? Our lives don’t have to revolve around surviving anymore. We take a few of these pieces, sell ’em to some nobles, and come back for the rest. One trip. Maybe two. After that, we’re set for life. What do you think will happen to that dream if we let the kid know?”
“I don’t know. He’ll probably want to share it, I guess.”
“Exactly. Little bastard’s lucky he’s blind. ‘Cause I’m done breaking bread with the sheep.”
He spat on the golden stone floor. “From now on, I’m eating wolf portions.”
Chris shook his head slowly. “You think Saint’ll go for that?”
“He’ll come around to it.”
“Alright,” Chris sighed, eyeing the tree. “I’m gonna check out the tree. Those things probably taste like heaven.”
Dixon scoffed, but there was no humor in it. His eyes flicked back toward the tree as he barked, “Seriously? That’s what’s got your eye? We’re standing in a vault of real treasure, and all you can think about is stuffing your damn face?”
He smacked Chris on the back of the head, a little harder than necessary. “Get over there and see if you can find a bow for Saint. Stay focused.”
From across the chamber, Solvanel watched in silence. Though the distance dulled their voices, their flames told him everything.
Something was wrong.
Their souls, still mostly a soft gray, were changing.
Not fully changed, but they’d been touched.
A single tendril of gold writhed within each—thin as thread, but unmistakable. Like a vein of molten metal or a parasite burrowing inward, it pulsed with the same radiance that enveloped the room.
Solvanel tightened his grip on the crook, an unease settling deep in his bones.
He knew the visuals of temptation. For he’d succumbed not long ago.
They scattered like flies pretending to have purpose.
But why has their behaviour changed?
Chris wandered to the center of the room, feigning interest in a suit of armor laid out in display. But his eyes kept drifting upward.
Dixon stayed close to the outskirts, murmuring to himself as he sifted through the piles of weaponry. He glanced toward the tree often, but only when he thought no one noticed.
Solvanel drifted to the other side of the mound, out of sight.
Not toward the center. Not toward the tree. But between the arms of the forgotten.
The relics in this chamber were unlike anything he had seen in the village. Certainly not rusted out of use. This wasn’t the horde of a plunderer or the fruit of a scavenger’s plight. These were sacred.
Not sacred because they were old, or rare, or gleaming.
Sacred because they carried something inside them.
A hammer lay across a fractured dais, its head split with veins of silver and pale green gemstone. Floating within and above its surface, inside the inner walls of the metal, danced threads of radiant script—incomprehensible, yet familiar. The same unknowable language was woven into the Eunuch’s robes.
A similar pulse he now felt from his crook.
None of these were mere weapons.
They were remnants—each bearing the echoes of battles won and lost.
He looked to his crook. It hummed, barely.
He wondered if he was the first person in centuries to understand that these things were more than forged steel and polished art. They were bindings. Wills crystallised in form. Tools given meaning through sacrifice.
Yet each one rejected him.
<>, they said. <
Again, the thought of Chris and Dixon. If not the weapons that want nothing to do with us, then what is it that’s infecting them?
Riches?
Fame?
Glory?
On the other side of the mound, Dixon cursed under his breath. He hadn’t so much as looked at the fruit directly, but it tugged at him. Solvanel saw his breath twitching, trembling like a hand itching to take.
And Chris, even if he hadn’t noticed it, had already closed some of the distance to the center of the room.
They were gentle once. Or at least, simple. Gray flames, flickering with fear and hesitation, but still theirs. Now they glimmer. Gold, faint and shimmering, like someone slipped ink beneath their souls and stirred from the inside out.
His crook hadn’t stopped humming since they entered. It recognised something here. Or someone.
The spirits in these weapons,—this air—they felt them staring back. They felt the weight of their evaluation, even as they stared through glass walls at souls slowly rotting from the inside out.
Solvanel knew there was something he could not see, despite seeing the most in a very long time. Something that was tainting Saint’s comrades at an alarming rate. Then perhaps it was this blindness of his that was sparing him from this temptation.
He moved to a spear with a shaft darker than night, its characters glowing faintly red. he touched it lightly and recoiled. Not from pain, but from pressure. The weight of bloodshed pressed against his fingertips.
Chris knelt beside a half-buried pedestal, brushing golden dust from a dagger inlaid with sapphire and black jade. He turned it in the light, admiring the blade’s untouched edge.
“Damn,” he murmured. “This thing’s worth everything I’ve ever owned.”
Still, his eyes kept drifting back.
The glow of gold gleamed in his pupils, brightening each time he looked. Was that dew on the side of the apple? If only a single taste.
Dixon leaned against a fractured pillar, unmoving at first. But as Chris’s gaze lingered, Dixon stirred—tense, uncertain.
He glanced down at a curved sword beside him. Tried to lift it.
It didn’t budge.
He tightened his grip.
Still nothing.
His jaw clenched. “Tch.”
With a grunt of frustration, he turned instead to one of the smaller crates, half-rotted, and wrenched it open. Inside: gold bars, neatly stacked, banded in twine.
He grabbed one. Held it in both hands.
Its weight steadied him. Gave him a sense of accomplishment the weapon would not.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And yet, even with the bar tucked under his arm, his eyes trailed in the same direction as Chris’s.
The fruit gleamed. It swayed. Was that dew on the side of the apple?
They might have thought they asked the question out loud. But in reality, neither man had said a word.
Solvanel brushed the dust from a chestplate half-buried beneath a silk drape. Its surface shimmered faintly, etched with runes that whispered in silence.
Their souls are almost completely tainted. Should I make an attempt to save them?
Chris turned the ornate dagger over in his hands, then dropped it.“Maybe this is what we were meant to find.”
Dixon didn’t look up from where he stood, knuckles white around the bar of gold. “It’s a trap,” he said flatly. “Just like everything else in this cursed land. It’s all bait dangling over a pit. And the ones who reach for it always fall.”
“But what if this time it’s different?” Chris’s voice rose, not quite angry, but desperate. “You feel it too, didn’t you? Just being this close to the thing makes me want to cry. It’s so damn beautiful.”
“That’s the part that makes it a trap, dumbass.” Dixon snapped, eyes flicking toward the tree despite himself. “You said the same thing about the first lady-bug, and Gabe nearly lost his damn life pulling you out of her web.”
Chris frowned, his inner flame ignited with the rage of injustice.
Though in the end, he only laughed. “You’re right, man. I still owe him for that one, don’t I?”
“Worry about it if you ever get to see him again. Besides, you owe all of us more than one.”
From across the hall, Solvanel said nothing. He stood motionless amid the relics, watching the men.
Their flames writhed with golden tendrils. More of them.
Thicker than before.
Winding deeper.
Like a disease drawing strength from their greed.
If clearly they chose to veil from me the truth, am I to risk my destiny to pull them out of their stupor?
The thought echoed in Solvanel’s chest louder than it ever touched his lips.
He clutched the needle tightly in his hand, its dormant edge biting cold— wrathful and yearning.
Unlike the relics strewn about, it was perfectly content to serve him.
Thoughts of his battle with Jonah bloomed in the forefront of his mind. The bitter taste of defeat at the hands of his brother. The needle, seeming to ask, That traitor is still out there, you know. Are you content with ending on a loss?
But he did not answer the question.
The crook hummed in his right hand. Inside, the words his lying grandmother left behind.
[Choose with wisdom. Lead with patience.]
A reminder. A guide. A burden.
Solvanel exhaled. Then let the needle fall.
It hit the floor with a chime like a cracked bell.
By then, it was already too late.
Chris was approaching the top of the mound, his fingers twitching with some private revelation. His feet slowed, but only because the awe had overwhelmed him. In all directions, weapons gleamed, treasures glistened, legacies lay dormant. But his gaze was blind to all but that which burned the brightest of all.
Solvanel stiffened.
When he stepped, the mound shifted. It was a sound too wet and soft, uncharacteristic of either soil or stone. A soft gasp left his lips, but Chris didn’t hear. He was too far gone.
The glimmer in his soul grew.
That once-fragile thread of gold now thickened, pulsing like a second heartbeat as he reached the final step. One hand hovered inches from the bark.
Then he touched it.
Then he smelled it.
Then he looked down.
And his world split open.
Beneath his boots were dozens.
Hundreds.
Thousands. Maybe tens of.
Looking right back at him with the same horror with which he greeted them.
They were faces. All frozen in the final moments of despair.
Mouths agape in silent screams. Skin stretched tight over skulls like wax melted into bone. Some still bore scraps of silk and gold, remnants of robes once noble, now indistinguishable from burial shrouds.
Reaching.
Yearning.
Fingers stiff in mid-grasp, as if in death they clung to the hope that the tree above would still answer their hunger.
Chris staggered back in horror, the warmth of the bark now replaced by the chill of the grave. The tree pulsed behind him. It had taken root in their failure, grown tall from their ruin.
This was no miracle.
It was a monument to a covenant.
Against temptation. Against greed. Against folly.
And now he stood atop the altar.
This is where all the people went.
Not lost. Not scattered.
Not consumed by the desert or swallowed by beasts.
Something was out there wreaking havoc in their city, tearing monuments out of the sand. But even in the face of certain destruction, they snuck down here one by one.
Each citizen was certain that no other would have the thought.
Past all the chaos and the screams of the dying. Friends and family who were begging for salvation. Past the weapons and past all the armour, riches and glory and the means to defend themselves.
Down the stairs and up the mound, they reached for the fruit of a giving tree.
A kingdom brought to its knees not by invasion, nor famine, nor war…
But by the promise of sweetness.
I have to bring some back for the others.
And that was the last thing he ever thought before the gold bar in Dixon’s hand shattered his comrade’s skull.
A sharp grunt.
A stagger.
Another blow.
And then, silence.
Chris’s body slid down the altar of covenant, joining the dead for the rest of eternity. Arm outstretched, and a tear sliding down his face.