Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale, Her

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  The last thing Kain remembered before the crushing darkness was the sound of shattering glass and people discovering, all at once, that hubris wasn’t nearly as buoyant as they’d hoped. There had been screaming, panic, and the press of countless bodies attempting to outrun a vengeful ocean.

  Many tried. None succeeded.

  Now, it was to a damp and dark reality that a flicker of his consciousness returned. Somewhere nearby, something moaned. It might have been a human. It might also have been a chaise longue giving up the ghost.

  Everything was moist, miserable, and faintly aquatic.

  Coughing up a lungful of water, Kain squinted his eyes open—just enough to assess the situation, not enough to acknowledge it fully.

  The Citadel’s Grand Hall, once a place of gold-trimmed opulence, had been transformed into soggy despair. Chandeliers hung at unfortunate angles, dripping resentfully. Gilded cherubs clung to water-stained cornices, weeping salty tears. Finery lay strewn about like soggy laundry. Silk gloves drifted by like pale, miserable creatures, and a once-pristine cravat hung from a candelabra in tragic surrender.

  And amidst the flotsam, something moved.

  Bare feet, unhurried, splashing softly through the shallow water. Calm. Measured. Like someone taking a midnight stroll, except the moonlight had been replaced by rain, thunder, and despair.

  “Stop Her… stop Her!”

  The words arrived uninvited, hammering against Kain’s skull.

  For a heartbeat, he almost mistook the voice for L’shara Duvain’s, yelling out her grievance. But the voice was nothing like hers, and it hadn't been yelled. It’d slithered straight into his mind, pounding against his senses as something within him yanked him upright.

  Against his will, that voiceless command was forcing Kain to stand. But his one leg was broken, and something unpleasantly sharp had taken up residence near his ribs.

  Before he could find his balance, he’d collapsed once more to a wheezing whimper.

  Blinking through the haze of pain, his gaze fell on the center of the flooded hall—on the Core. It was still there, impossibly, glowing faintly beneath the storm’s fury, surrounded by what remained of its protective barrier.

  It wasn’t a barrier he’d ever seen before, visible now only thanks to the water pressing up against it. Reaching. Crawling. It slithered along the invisible field with intent, with hunger, with the disturbing grace of something certain it didn’t need permission to enter.

  And through it all, the sound of footfalls drawing closer.

  “STOP HER!”

  Kain wasn’t the only one who’d been yanked upright by the insidious command. He was simply the only one who hadn’t managed to stay that way.

  All around him, figures rose from the waterlogged wreckage. The Ashen Knights were the first to move—hulking silhouettes of matted steel, their armor slick with seawater, their visors trickling steady streams that made them look as though they were weeping oil.

  They were followed by others—noble guests in what remained of their drenched lace and velvet, moving with the jerky insistence of marionettes guided by invisible strings.

  And, because the universe has an unkind sense of humor—L’shara and Imane Duvain, side by side, fingers curling like claws and blood red gazes distant.

  They formed a second barrier around the Core, a ragged army of the drowned and the dutiful. The intruder did not slow. She didn’t even seem to notice them. She just kept walking with the serene inevitability of a storm, her steps rippling through the shallow flood.

  As the Knights charged in blurred streaks of armor, the water swirled around her like an old friend, rising in tendrils and blades and serpentine coils. The puppet-nobles twisted and jerked forward, hurtling themselves at the woman in reckless abandon. L’shara and Imane flickered out of existence, moving faster than Kain’s mind could comprehend.

  None of it mattered.

  Their combined efforts didn’t slow a single of Her strides. She didn’t even lift a finger as the water sliced, crushed, and swallowed everything without mercy.

  In the time it took Kain to draw a single, hitched breath, silence had returned, heavy and complete-—the last members of the Duvain family, crumpling to their knees. Decapitated like an afterthought.

  Kain could only watch, half-drowned and wholly terrified, as the woman reached the glowing heart of this world’s ambition.

  She was pale, ragged, limbs like driftwood and hair that clung to her in damp stripes. She looked like a corpse washed up from the depths of the sea, just not the corpse of anything that’d ever been human. Kain was certain of it.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She was a principle. A correction. The kind of unstoppable inevitability that made even gods fear.

  The Core—Kain’s ambition, his burden—had ruled this city, consumed it, bent an entire world to its purpose. It had even set its sight on worlds beyond.

  Yet before Her, it was silent. It knew:

  In the face of an Overlord, even gods had to kneel.

  Now, water rippled and coiled around the Core. It slithered past its barrier like it was made of sand, sinking into the glowing sphere’s depths, threading through the pulsing lattice of runes and light that even Kain himself couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  “N-NO!”

  The Core screamed. Not out loud—sound was far too small a thing for what he felt—but inside his skull, behind his eyes, deep in the soft bits where thoughts were supposed to happen, Kain could hear it.

  “Stop Her!”

  The pressure doubled, trebled, a weight like the universe itself had decided to sit on his mind. It clawed at him, pouring its panic straight into his head in a wild storm of images and offers.

  “Stop Her, and I’ll make you the greatest artificer who ever lived!”

  They flashed past his mind’s eye. Schematics. Blueprints. Cities in the sky running on cogwork and pride. Aetherworks twisting the laws of reality into sublime shapes.

  “A king—no, an Emperor! A Conqueror!”

  Entire worlds bowed in reverence before him. Monuments carved with his name. Choirs singing hymns to his ingenuity.

  “Edrik Kain. All the power you could ever dream of, I’ll give it to you. Just…Stop Her!”

  And yet, the grand temptation failed.

  Not because Kain was possessed of exceptional willpower. Far from it. There was simply nothing he could do.

  Several of his ribs were broken. One lung, likely punctured. A fractured leg, and deep, primal fear held him in their shackles.

  All he could do was clutch at his skull, gasping, groaning, waiting for the psychic tide to pass. And, eventually, it did. The pressure eased, like a tyrant growing bored. The colors faded, the visions dimmed, and the voice of the Core dwindled to a pitiful whisper before vanishing altogether.

  Silence returned, leaving Kain a shivering, snivelling mess in a few inches of cold, filthy water. His breath came in wheezing, ragged coughs, and his fingers clutched at the faint texture of a rug—Luudvark wool, imported at great expense.

  Not that it mattered. None of it had mattered in the end.

  Trapped somewhere between throwing up and passing out, Kain would have laughed if his body allowed it. Instead, he was left rasping for breath as he clutched at his side, where something warmer than the floodwater trickled between his fingers.

  His eyes flickered with the chaotic afterimages the Core had dumped into his brain in its last, dying moments, leaving his thoughts a messy jumble of lights, sensations, and the faint notion that it couldn’t possibly be over like this.

  Yet the Core was gone, leaving only darkness and silence behind. Heavy rain falling over a broken city, and footfalls—deliberate, calm, quietly disturbing the water as they approached.

  And then, for the first time in his life, Edrik Kain heard Her voice.

  “They must have known that I would return here.” Like a breeze carried upon the morning tide, the words weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be. Even at her quietest, the water listened, and it trembled beneath Her authority. “Did they not expect me to get here this fast, or did they simply not think there would be anything for me to find even if I did?”

  Kain knew the question was not for him.

  The next one, unfortunately, was.

  “Say—”

  The water around his hand moved, like a whirlpool with a personal vendetta. It didn’t drag him under, no. That would have been far too polite. Instead, it hurled him upward with the delicate subtlety of a sprouting geyser, twisting his already broken body until he had the distinct misfortune of meeting Her gaze.

  Sunken features adorned with barnacles and whatever unfortunate sea creatures had dared a nibble; hair matted in damp strands across skin that was a pale, almost greenish hue, hovering somewhere between “drowned” and “haunting”; yet it was the eyes… The eyes that nearly spelled his end. Abyssal, dark and infinite, as if the universe had forgotten to put an end to their depths, surging with things he couldn’t comprehend. Things that could chew reality and spit it out like a soggy afterthought.

  “In the final moments of its feeble existence,” She said, voice eerily calm as Kain’s broken body twisted further out of alignment, “that thing called out to you. Why?”

  It was not the kind of “why” that expected an answer. It was the kind that tested the weight of silence. And judged it lacking.

  “I—I don’t know,” Kain stammered, his mind still a flickering mess of arcane schematics, cities in the sky, impossible machines, and—

  “Is that so?”

  He didn’t realize the futility of defiance until it was already too late.

  The water around him coiled tighter, and then tighter still until it pressed into his nose, mouth, ears, flooding his every orifice with surging, crushing authority. It rushed down his throat, burned through his lungs, and filled his mind with the suffocating sensation of being trapped within the deepest pits of the ocean, all before he could even realize what was going on.

  Kain would have screamed, had his lungs not been filled with entire seas of their own—the endless abyss in her eyes, the last thing he saw before darkness swallowed him whole.

  ***

  It was to a cold, shivering, coughing sort of awareness that Edrik Kain realized he had drowned without dying. The taste of salt clung to his tongue like a sickening memory, and every part of him felt broken and drained as he hacked up a lungful of the ocean.

  The storm had passed, but brooding clouds still left shadows pooling in every corner. The steady drip of water filled the hall like an endless, indifferent metronome, broken only by the faint, uneasy hum of a sermon.

  She was gone, but as Kain, wheezing and groaning, pushed himself out of the cold water, he found another figure kneeling over the broken remnants of the Core.

  “It is still calling for us, is it not?”

  The High Priest’s voice, possessed and haunting, slithered through the damp air. It took Kain a moment to realize the words were aimed directly at him.

  “It is still there, within us, is it not?”

  There was something in the man’s tone—something compulsive, hollow, obsessively mad. He crouched deeper, eyes gleaming with a light that had no business existing in a human skull.

  “You can still fix it, Runekeeper, can you not?”

  Kain wanted to protest. To yell that it was all over, that the Core, the city, the storm, and the sheer weight of absurdity had finally been survived. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a whisper still lingered.

  “A king… A conqueror… Edrik Kain, the greatest artificer to ever live…”

  ***

  Even now, I don’t fully comprehend why She didn’t end me back then. Was it mercy? Was it because I’m not from this world, leaving my hands clean of whatever sins its rulers committed in the past? Or did she merely know that Ashenmoor would suffer all the more if She allowed me to live?

  Alas, as you’ve probably realized, my story doesn’t end there in that grand, drowned hall where so many others did. Though, how much kinder it would’ve been if it had…