Chapter 130: Ash and Glass
The sky bled orange above the ridge as Soren gripped the saddle horn, his knuckles white with effort. Each hoofbeat sent fresh pain lancing through his battered body. The stolen horse beneath him snorted, nervous from the scent of smoke that billowed behind them.
Northaven was burning.
He refused to look back again. Once had been enough, seeing the city he’d called home transformed into a pyre, flames devouring everything he’d known. The wind shifted, carrying the acrid stench of burning thatch, melting metal, and something worse that he refused to name.
’You’re alive,’ Valenna’s voice cut through the fog of exhaustion in his mind. ’That’s the only thing that matters. Rest later, learn what these people can teach you now.’
He swallowed hard, tasting ash on his tongue. The shard against his chest pulsed with familiar cold, anchoring him when the world threatened to spin away into darkness.
Ahead, Sylas rode with predatory grace, his back straight despite hours in the saddle. The assassin leader hadn’t spoken since they’d slipped through the northern gate amid the chaos of fleeing refugees.
His curved blade remained sheathed, but his green eyes constantly scanned the horizon, alert for pursuit.
Naeria rode beside Soren, her gray eyes red-rimmed from smoke, her scholar’s hands clutching reins with awkward determination.
The satchel containing her precious texts was strapped securely behind her, bulging with whatever knowledge she’d managed to salvage from the Cathedral’s purge.
Four hooded assassins completed their small company, positioned like compass points around them. Their silence felt deliberate rather than exhausted, their movements economical even after hours of flight.
Soren shifted in the saddle, trying to find a position that didn’t aggravate some injury. His shoulder wound had reopened during their escape, the bandage beneath his shirt stiff with dried blood. Every muscle screamed for rest, for water, for the oblivion of sleep.
Instead, he focused on Valenna’s words, using them as a tether to consciousness. He straightened his back, mirroring Sylas’s posture despite the protest of his ribs. Learn from these people. Stay alive. Everything else was luxury he couldn’t afford.
The orange glow of Northaven faded behind them as they rode into the gathering darkness, leaving behind everything that had once been certain.
–
Days blurred together like fever dreams. The eastern road had given way to no road at all, just endless dunes of sand so hot it had fused into glass in places, reflecting the merciless sun in blinding flashes. Black stone spires rose from the wasteland like the fingers of buried giants, casting thin shadows that offered no real relief from the heat.
Soren’s cracked lips stung as he took a careful sip from his water skin. They were rationing strictly now, uncertain how far they needed to travel before reaching Sylas’s mysterious destination.
The silence was the worst part. Not just the absence of conversation, the Wastes themselves devoured sound. Hoofbeats fell muffled on the glassed sand.
Wind passed without a whisper. Even the occasional clink of metal against metal seemed swallowed by the dead air.
Naeria rode ahead of him today, her back hunched over a small notebook she balanced against her saddle horn. Every few minutes she would stop, make a notation, then scan the horizon with narrowed eyes.
"Another resonance field," she muttered, loud enough for Soren to hear. "The patterns strengthen as we move east. Fascinating."
She’d been doing this for days, cataloging features of the Wastes that only she seemed to see, muttering about "convergence lines" and "echo points" as if the dead landscape spoke to her in some secret language.
Soren shifted in his saddle, wincing as his healing wounds protested. The past week had seen improvement, but his body still felt like one massive bruise, layered with sharper pains where the Inquisitors had been particularly attentive.
’You still move like a boy,’ Valenna observed in his mind, her voice carrying that familiar edge of critique. ’Watch Sylas, his balance, the way he shifts weight before a strike. Copy that. Strength is habit.’
Soren glanced ahead where Sylas rode point, his tall figure silhouetted against the harsh landscape.
Even after days in the saddle, the assassin’s posture remained perfect, weight centered, spine aligned, shoulders relaxed despite constant vigilance. When he turned in the saddle to scan behind them, the movement was fluid, economical, wasting no energy.
With gritted teeth, Soren began adjusting his own posture, forcing aching muscles to align properly. He shifted his weight to center himself over the horse, dropping his shoulders from where they’d crept up toward his ears.
The difference was immediate, some of the strain across his back eased, his balance improved.
He practiced the motion of looking behind him without twisting his entire torso, the way Sylas did it, a controlled rotation that maintained his core stability.
The first attempt sent pain shooting through his injured shoulder. The second was marginally better. By the third, he’d found the proper sequence of muscle engagement.
Valenna’s approval came as a cold pulse from the shard. ’Good. Small movements build to larger ones. The body must be trained before the blade.’
One of the hooded assassins, the woman who’d spoken briefly during their escape, rode past him, her eyes barely visible within her hood. She gave him an appraising glance, noting his improved posture, then continued forward without comment. Still, Soren felt a small victory in having been noticed at all.
The Wastes stretched endlessly before them, hostile and ancient. But for the first time since fleeing Northaven, Soren felt something beyond mere survival, a sense of purpose taking root beneath the exhaustion. He would learn. He would strengthen. He would become more than what the Church had tried to reduce him to.
He straightened his spine once more and kept riding east.
–
"Here."
Sylas’s voice broke three days of near-silence, startling Soren from the half-trance he’d fallen into during the monotonous ride. He blinked, focusing on where the assassin leader pointed.
At first, Soren saw nothing special, just another broken spire of black stone rising from the glassed sand like countless others they’d passed. Then his eyes adjusted to the harsh afternoon light, and he realized what he was seeing.
Not a natural formation, but ruins. Ancient walls half-buried in sand, their upper edges worn to jagged points by centuries of wind and grit. What had once been a fortress now resembled the skeleton of some massive beast, partially excavated by the desert’s restless movements.
Naeria leaned forward in her saddle, gray eyes widening with sudden interest. "Pre-Concord architecture," she breathed, reaching for her ever-present notebook. "Look at the angled buttressing, classic Eighth Dynasty defensive positioning."
Sylas ignored her scholarly excitement, dismounting with fluid grace. "We’ll leave the horses here," he said, voice clipped and practical. "The entrance can’t be approached on horseback."
Soren slid from his saddle with considerably less elegance, his legs buckling slightly as they took his weight after hours of riding. The sand beneath his boots crunched, not true sand, he realized, but pulverized glass, ground so fine it resembled the real thing until weight was applied.
"Is this..." he began, then paused, uncertain how to ask what exactly they’d reached.
"Home," one of the assassins said, the word carrying a weight of meaning Soren couldn’t fully interpret.
They secured the horses in the shadow of the largest wall, where a small depression held the remains of an ancient fountain, long dry but still offering shelter from the worst of the sun. Sylas led them toward what appeared to be a collapsed section of the fortress, weaving between fallen stones with the confidence of one following a memorized path.
"Watch your step," he said as they approached a narrow crevice in the rubble. "The stairs are treacherous."
Stairs was a generous description for what they encountered, more like a series of broken slabs that spiraled downward into darkness. Soren followed carefully, testing each foothold before committing his weight. The walls around them bore the ghosts of carvings, detail lost to time and the elements.
The temperature dropped noticeably as they descended, the air growing cooler and damper with each turn of the makeshift staircase. After the relentless heat of the Wastes, the change felt almost shocking against Soren’s sun-baked skin.
’Ancient air,’ Valenna murmured. ’Undisturbed for centuries.’
The staircase ended at a massive iron door, its surface etched with patterns similar to those Soren had seen in the chambers beneath Northaven. Unlike those ruins, however, this door looked maintained, the metal free of rust, the hinges recently oiled.
Sylas pressed his palm against a specific point in the center of the door. Something clicked within the mechanism, and the massive portal swung inward with surprising silence.
Beyond lay darkness, then light, a soft blue-green glow emanating from lanterns hung at intervals along a wide corridor. The illumination revealed walls of fitted stone, the craftsmanship so precise that no mortar was visible between blocks.
The ceiling arched overhead, supported by columns carved to resemble twisting vines or perhaps serpents, their forms flowing upward into the shadows.
"Welcome," Sylas said, stepping aside to allow them entry, "to the true refuge of the Veiled Hand."
Soren crossed the threshold, the shard against his chest pulsing with sudden cold as if recognizing something in this place. The air tasted different, mineral-rich and cool, undisturbed by the chaos of the world above.
The blue-green lanterns cast everything in an otherworldly light that made shadows seem deeper, edges sharper.
As they moved deeper into the underground complex, Soren noticed the change in his companions. The hooded assassins straightened, shoulders relaxing from their constant vigilance.
One even pushed back her hood, revealing a face marked with intricate tattoos that seemed to shimmer in the strange light, a woman perhaps a decade older than Soren, with eyes as dark as the Wastes at midnight.
Naeria moved with renewed energy despite days of exhaustion, her gray eyes darting from carving to carving along the walls, fingers occasionally reaching out to trace symbols as if confirming their reality.
The corridor opened into a vast chamber that took Soren’s breath away. Ceiling lost in shadows high above, floor a mosaic of colored stone depicting scenes he couldn’t immediately interpret.
Pillars thick as ancient trees supported upper galleries that ringed the space, while doorways led off in multiple directions like spokes from a wheel.
Most striking were the walls themselves. Every surface was carved in relief, depicting scenes of battle, ritual, and what appeared to be daily life from a civilization Soren had never seen referenced in Northaven’s carefully curated histories.
’Good,’ Valenna said, her voice steady in his mind. ’You’re somewhere you can train without someone trying to burn you alive.’
The simple practicality of her assessment almost made him laugh. After everything, the Inquisitors, the Flame, the burning of Northaven, they had reached a place of temporary safety. The realization hit him with unexpected force, his knees suddenly weak with delayed reaction to the horrors they’d escaped.
One of the assassins noticed, moving to his side with silent efficiency. "The body remembers danger even after it passes."