As I put together my gear for the expedition beneath the temple, my mind wrestled with something entirely new to me, something I could scarcely recognize—jealousy.

  I laced up my boots in the dimming room, golden streaks of sunset spilling across the walls. My brow furrowed, though I couldn’t say why. I stood, slung my pack over one shoulder, clipped my cloak into place, and pulled the cowl over my head. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I’d wanted to slip out without running into Lyria. Perhaps because I was afraid, because if I saw her, I couldn’t trust myself to say nothing.

  Of course, I had no such luck.

  There she was. Right in front of me, walking toward the rooms I’d just left. My heart rate doubled. What would she say… What would I say? I glanced at her as I passed, but her eyes stayed fixed ahead, her expression unreadable. She passed me without so much as a glance.

  I snapped my head forward, drew a silent breath, set my jaw, and carried on. My cloak flowed behind me as I turned down the stairs, my footsteps quickening as I left the inn behind.

  I had no way of knowing that shortly after I’d passed her, she did turn around. My name caught in her throat as she watched me leave—unable to bring herself to call out. Her light lavender eyes glistened beneath the flickering lanterns. She stood there a moment longer, hesitating—then finally turned and retreated to her room.

  * * *

  The evening air was still warm against my skin as I walked. My body, as restless as my mind, carried me forward, though my thoughts remained unusually quiet. Nearing the temple I focused inward, drawing on a serene sense of focus I’d learned from countless hunts. It didn’t matter how you felt, the forest didn’t care about your problems, and if you wanted to survive, to succeed, you needed to find clarity no matter the circumstances.

  Just as the last remnants of reds and pinks faded from the evening sky, I found Ron at the back gates, as promised. His expression started warm in greeting, but quickly turned serious.

  “Yukon—before we enter the crypt,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I have only one rule. Touch nothing unless I say it’s safe.”

  I nodded.

  With that, Ron led me to a small rocky path that wrapped down behind, and almost beneath the temple. After several strides down the path, we reached a small rocky outcropping pressed into the hillside—there, an imposing door stood carved into the stone. The entrance was made of chiseled tan stone, carved with ornate designs fitting for a temple's crypt. Ron approached cautiously, his eyes darting behind us to ensure we hadn’t been followed, and produced a small talisman. He held the small golden sunburst to the door, and whispered something I couldn’t quite make out.

  The runes in the door glowed faintly, and with the distinct sound of grinding stone, the door pushed in, dust falling around the entryway as it opened.

  “I didn’t bring any torches…” I lamented quietly, as we stood peering into the darkness.

  Ron shook his head, “we don’t need those, besides, they can be dangerous when travelling underground. One pocket of natural gas and you’ll light the whole place quicker than a fire drake—”

  He pulled his mace from his belt and stepped inside, whispering an incantation under his breath. The mace lit like a beacon.

  The entrance opened into a small antechamber. The chamber was built from the same tanned stone—bricks stacked high to form the walls, while the floor, worn smooth with time or perhaps simply unfinished, was made of packed sandstone the color of old parchment. An ancient looking statue of the Sunwarden stood in the center of the room where the ceiling domed up. I didn’t say it out loud but it looked almost sinister in the cool light of Ron’s mace.

  “...That’s a pretty useful spell…” I said, looking around cautiously.

  “Do you have something of yours you want me to cast Light on?” Ron asked.

  I thought for a moment, and then pulled out a single arrow. Deciding it best to leave my sword unlit. If fighting ensued, I didn’t want my own weapon blinding me.

  Ron cast the same spell on my arrow, and we pressed on into the dark.

  Every odd gust of warm air, falling pebble, or droplet of water that echoed through the crypt, made me flinch. The entire place had me on edge.

  Cobwebs clung to every corner. Murals, cracked and weathered, loomed half-seen in the dark, while broken statues watched silently from the edges of the path. Yet, strangely, all felt… still. Undisturbed. We passed countless offshoots that seemed to lead further down into the crypt, but Ron continued past them all.

  “Have you been down here before?” I asked, breaking the eerie silence.

  “Yeah, once, but it was years ago. Back when the old head priest had us routinely clear it of any monsters or other unwanted denizens,” Ron explained, his face pale in the light of his mace.

  “So…you’re saying this place hasn’t been cleared out in years?” I pressed, my eyes darting around a bit more now.

  He didn’t respond. My nerves tensed.

  “...And, do you have any idea where the information about Lun and Ten may be..?”

  “Yeah—If my memory serves me right it’ll be in a different section entirely,” Ron said, his eyes glued on the darkness ahead.

  The sound of rushing water eventually grew louder as we pressed on. Soon, we exited the tanned brick tunnel and entered into a vast underground cavern. A waterfall cascaded down the far side, barely visible in the dim light offered by Ron’s spell. The path had become a crumbling spiral of stone steps clinging to the cavern’s edge. Straight ahead yawned a vast black void, at its base—I imagined a still lake, perhaps, or something deeper.

  “Hug the wall here, the moisture can make the stone slippery,” Ron instructed as he started down the steps to the right.

  “What is this place…” I muttered.

  “This was once a part of the actual temple,” Ron explained. “A massive open walkway that led to shrines for other gods. When the temple was rededicated fully to the Sunwarden, they sealed this whole wing off.”

  We moved in steady silence, the air thick with age and earth. Offshoots branched from the path like skeletal fingers, each one swallowed quickly by darkness. Eventually, we came to an old arched doorway, the stone dark with time and slick with moisture.

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  Carved into the arch was a familiar symbol—two wolves endlessly circling each other, one dark as pitch, the other carved from pale stone so light it caught Ron’s spell-glow like moonlight.

  Lunae. Tenebrae.

  “This is it…” I murmured, halting just outside the threshold.

  I stepped past Ron, lifting my glowing arrow as I led the way. The tunnel beyond was short, and we soon emerged into a large, vaulted chamber—silent, still, untouched.

  Stone wolves lined the walls, their heads lifted in an eternal howl, teeth bared in reverence or warning. The air shifted slightly—stirred not by wind, but by presence.

  I took another step forward—and froze.

  The walls on either side of the chamber stretched into the gloom—vast, cracked murals carved directly into the stone. One side was bathed in the glow of Ron’s spell, the other still obscured, but together they seemed to form a single, mirrored narrative.

  To our left, the story began with Lunae—her form depicted as a brilliant wolf of white fire, a moon above her brow. She stood at the beginning of a winding path, surrounded by mortals: kneeling, praying, reaching. Her paw prints burned across mountains and through shadow. In each scene, she was a protector, guardian, light in dark places.

  Across from her, on the opposite wall, barely visible through the haze of shadow, was Tenebrae. His form was longer, leaner—etched in darker stone, swirling with black ink. In his scenes, the mortals didn’t kneel—they fled, or fought. Where Lunae brought light, Tenebrae moved through shadow. Where she protected, he destroyed.

  But both journeys—paralleled—moved forward through the mural. Trial after trial, moment after moment. A rising story. One path led upward toward a bright mountaintop. The other wound downward into the abyss.

  And then, they converged at the far back wall.

  We moved closer, but our light couldn’t reach the final panels. They vanished into the darkness above and around a tall stone pedestal that rose in the center of the chamber’s end. There, resting on its cracked surface, sat an old container. A chest.

  Its surface was a patchwork of deep gray and pale bone-white, it would have been sealed by two locks—one shaped like a crescent moon, the other like a downward-facing fang, but both hung open.

  Ron let out a slow breath beside me.

  “This is older than I remember,” he said, voice nearly a whisper.

  I stepped toward the chest, but the mark on my skin chilled—an icy warning from Lunae. I froze.

  Behind us, somewhere deep in the cavern, a sound echoed.

  Not a footstep. Not stone.

  A breath.

  A long, slow exhale that didn’t belong to either of us.

  Ron and I turned slowly, peering into the gloom. A foul presence had awoken somewhere in the darkness. I could tell immediately it was different to Lunae and Tenebrae, different even to those pitch black shadows that had assaulted me in the ancient ruins before. We didn’t have much time.

  “Ron—cover me!” I snapped, breaking into a sprint toward the end of the chamber.

  I had to see what I could—I had a feeling I wouldn’t be coming back to this place again.

  My boots pounded up the stone steps to the top of the pedestal. I lifted the glowing arrow high, trying to catch what I could—

  —but the far wall was still swallowed in darkness.

  I needed more light—

  My eyes dropped to the arrow in my hand. I’d been holding the answer all along. I slung my bow from my back, nocked the arrow, and fired.

  The glowing shot arced like a comet through the vault, embedding in the stone. Light bloomed, and the mural came alive.

  Lunae and Tenebrae stood together now, flanking a lone figure—humanoid, indistinct, radiant with power. Whether they had become him, or were just standing beside him, I couldn’t tell.

  But what stood above them left no room for doubt.

  At the highest point of the wall towered a monstrous figure—tall, draped in a shadowy cloak of screaming faces, crowned with a black helm shaped like a twisted skull. Skeletal hands stretched outward like a god bestowing a curse, and below him surged a tide of the dead.

  The King of Death.

  I didn’t understand it all—but I knew this wasn’t just history. It was prophecy. A warning.

  Then came the scream.

  “YUKON!”

  Ron’s voice cracked with panic. “WE HAVE TO GO!”

  I spun. And saw it.

  Something massive loomed just past Ron, half-hidden in the gloom—A thing of bones and ruin.

  Fifteen feet tall, its skeletal frame towered over us. But inside its chest, glistening and wet, organs pulsed—alive, fresh. Its skull was vaguely human, though its crown stretched into a cone, the mouth ran straight down its face like a gaping wound lined with jagged teeth. Two circular black voids rested where its eyes should have been. A cavernous and heavy heartbeat could be heard beneath its grinding bones.

  I had to bite back the bile rising in my throat. The monster seemed to be trying to regenerate its flesh.

  Cords of muscle and sinew knit themselves over its bones, stretching thin skin across ribs—only for the flesh to melt off again, steaming as it sloughed to the floor in bubbling puddles.

  My stomach turned.

  It was stuck in a cycle—dying, reviving, dying again.

  A curse in motion.

  Ron backed away, mace raised, trembling. The abomination lumbered closer—slow but relentless. Every breath it exhaled felt like rot in the air.

  I turned back to the pedestal. The chest sat in silence, twin locks already undone. Ron’s warning echoed in my head—Touch nothing unless I say it’s safe—but I didn’t have the luxury of safety. Not anymore.

  I stepped forward and threw the chest open—

  Empty.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I hissed. My fingers scraped the bottom, searching for anything. Someone had already taken whatever was inside. My mind raced. Was I too late? Was this some cruel trick? First the pages ripped from the tome, now this?

  Behind me, I heard Ron shout again. The creature was coming. I couldn’t delay—Then, just as I turned to leave, something shifted. A glimmer—no, a flicker—of silver and black twisted into being inside the chest, as if it had only been waiting to be seen.

  A weapon.

  I stared, breath caught.

  It was a short sword; its sheath lay beside it. The hilt was wrapped in dark leather, the crossguard shaped in the image of the twin wolves—Lunae and Tenebrae—locked in an eternal circle. The blade itself, was a marvel of impossible forging—silver and black iron intertwining like crossing rivers, splitting and converging again at the midpoint. One half shimmered like moonlight, the other absorbed it like a void. At the very tip, the two metals parted like a confluence—one half pale, the other dark.

  My hand hovered over it. The mark on my skin burned—but not in warning. In resonance.

  As if whatever this was… it had always been mine.

  I grabbed the hilt.

  A whisper, not from Ron, not from the monster, but from somewhere deeper, stirred in my mind—

  "Remember."

  Then the whole chamber shook.

  “YUKON!!” Ron roared.

  Sword in hand, I turned, heart racing.

  Time to run.