Velrath sleeps under an iron sky, its churches soaked with old blood and fear. In the king’s cathedral, witches scream in their chains as the fires burn low, their ashes scattered to please a god who has long turned his face away. The fields rot under endless storms; the villages choke on the weight of holy law. But deep beneath all that pious rot, something far older stirs.

Inquisitor Marrek Vane snaps awake from a nightmare slick with sulfur and the taste of burnt bone. His eyes flick toward the dark window — the storm outside howling like the dead in the gallows. He does not know her name yet, the girl in the ruin. But in his dream he smelled the open pit, felt the stone floor tremble with an old god’s return. He kneels by his bed, muttering prayers that feel like water on a flame already out of control.

Far from his cell, she kneels in the Ruined Chapel of Ashmoor — a place no priest will enter, not even to salt the bones that rise in the spring rains. Her family’s blood was poured into this soil by decree of a king who damns the world in the name of salvation. Their screams rot in her chest. She digs her nails into the circle carved in salt, bone dust clinging to her raw skin, and lifts her shaking voice to the dark.

Her breath hitches on the first words, but the shadows lean closer as if hungry for every syllable.

“Adornus vel tharan, dethira vel nox... karath zurae, karath maer — solis vertum, anima fractum...”

A gust of wind rattles the broken stained glass. The candles gutter as if something is breathing them out one by one. Her voice cracks, blood trickling from her bitten lip.

“Zareth kael, zareth kael... I offer my blood, my name, my grief... come forth, abyss — come forth, ruin.”

The salt circle quivers, the bones blacken to ash, and the shadows rush in — alive, coiling around her wrists like snakes that burrow beneath the skin. They pin her to the stone, forcing her back on her knees. Cold seeps through her bones as if she’s kneeling in her own grave.

She gasps when the chain slithers out of the pit — a black serpent dripping with a heatless flame. It slides around her throat, then tightens until her vision pops with white stars. The mark burns itself into the base of her spine — ancient script stitched into her flesh with every labored heartbeat.

When her eyes roll open again, she sees him.

A shape steps through the dark, taller than any man, broad-shouldered, draped in robes darker than the chapel’s ruined rafters. His horns catch the dying candlelight like a crown forged from broken halos. His eyes burn red — not a mortal red but the red of coals buried in the ribcage of the world. Clawed hands flex as he studies her, but there is no warmth there. No pity. Only the slow curl of a predator’s smile.