Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale, Gift

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  I shan’t bother you with the tedious bits: the endless days of poking, prodding, papercuts disguised as contracts—thicker than a troll’s skull and just as forgiving—and the sort of threats that involved sharp smiles, long silences, and the occasional glance towards my vital organs.

  In the grand scheme of things, I doubt any of it mattered. Perhaps there were other artificers with my particular blend of talent, moral flexibility, and complete lack of long-term commitments—but they’d have had to search very hard to find one quite so... obligingly available.

  I’ve never considered myself a good man. I wouldn’t even call myself a particularly brave one, unless you count the kind of bravery that involves saying “yes” to dangerous people offering mysterious opportunities and very small print. I was never one to fight for justice—unless justice was offering a generous retainer that month. I simply wanted the usual things: a comfortable life, a well-stocked workshop, and the sort of reputation that meant other artificers spat on the floor when they heard my name.

  But most of all, I wanted what all pursuers of the arcane want. I wanted something big. Something marvellous. Something so impossibly clever that it kept me awake at night, whispering to me in the language of gears and blueprints. Something worth handing over my soul for, if only so I could tinker with it properly.

  And what they showed me...

  Well.

  Giving up my soul was just the down payment.

  ***

  By the time Edrik Kain reached the end of the white marbled hallways, any trace of the routine he’d once known had been scrubbed clean, buffed to a sheen, and politely incinerated.

  Whoever he’d been when they came for him—plump, a bit too comfortable, and mildly overfond of breakfast pastries—that version of him had long since evaporated. What remained was a thinner, twitchier man, the sort who looked both ways before thinking.

  He felt hollowed out, as if someone had mislaid a vital organ or two and replaced them with anxiety.

  The things he’d seen over the past month were not the sort easily forgotten. Even if he tried, there were the nightmares, and if the nightmares took a night off, there were the sudden silences in his own head that reminded him anyway. The city’s gleaming exterior went no deeper than the marble polish, and polish only lasts until someone with muddy boots turns up.

  And the worst part? He hadn’t even seen the bad bits yet.

  Kain slowed his steps.

  His eyes shifted, left and right, eyeing the unmoving figures guarding the great doors.

  The Ashen Knights. He’d been around them for weeks now, had passed them in hallways, in antechambers, once even in a lavatory. Not one had spoken. Not a word. Not a cough. Not even a sniff.

  They didn’t give the impression of people in armor as much as armor that’d given up waiting and decided to get on with the job themself. And if they were statues, then someone had gone to great lengths to make them just a bit too lifelike—the kind of craftsmanship that suggested either genius or madness, and in this place, it was usually both.

  Behind him, dozens more lined the hall, silent as judgment and just as cheerful.

  “I, erm…”

  One of the visors shifted, ever so slightly, to look down at him.

  He didn’t need to finish his sentence. He didn’t need to mutter something along the lines of I am expected. They already knew. They always knew.

  The doors slid open.

  Up until that point, Kain had tried very hard not to form any expectations about what lay beyond them. This wasn’t some grand philosophical stance—it was more of a self-defence mechanism.

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  The brain, when pushed past a certain number of inexplicable events per hour, begins to self-regulate by switching to survival mode, where all predictions are replaced by a single recurring thought: Don’t think about it.

  And so, nothing—absolutely nothing—could have prepared him for the voice.

  It wasn’t a voice that came from someone. It was a voice that came from somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn’t here.

  The hall beyond the doors was vast, vaulted, and dimly lit. Not because it lacked windows—there were several, enormous stained-glass affairs that were meant to stare out over a distant sea. The problem was the city outside: a dozen new towers clawed at the sky, locked in an architectural arms race to see who could be the tallest one around. Any and all natural light, blocked by the hubris of the city’s rulers.

  Still, there was no mistaking the impact of the place.

  Two dozen figures knelt across the floor in symmetrical rows; foreheads pressed to the stone as though hoping the floor might forgive them. The scent of incense hung in the air, and a low, pulsing chant rose from the assembly—not quite music, not quite prayer. It wavered and thrummed like the heartbeat of something large and unknowable. Something that should not be woken up.

  “Edrik Kain…”

  His name echoed through the air—not loudly, not even clearly, but with the kind of intimate familiarity usually reserved for long-lost trinkets and memories, misplaced and suddenly rediscovered in a coat pocket. It rode the hum, tucked neatly inside it: unnoticed until it wasn’t.

  He might not have heard it at all, had his eyes not already been snared—caught by the thing every figure in the room was kneeling toward.

  It floated above the center of the chamber like the very building had been erected around it. A sphere, a dodecahedron, or possibly some third category of shape that hadn’t yet been discovered.

  Half of it looked like the work of some Master Artificer of legend—beyond what either Kain or his master could have sprouted into the world. Not even in their wildest dreams.

  Etched plates, suspended gyros, tiny gears that clicked and spun without being attached to anything at all. The other half shimmered with the vague, ominous glow of raw magic, the sort that crackled at the edges of the mind and made nearby shadows reconsider their purpose in life.

  All of it, bound together by lines of runes that sparked, fizzled, and rearranged themselves like students nervously writing down answers on an exam only to erase them just as quickly.

  And in the middle—where artifice and arcana collided—was a gap. A not-quite. A shape still becoming, as though the thing was less completed than slowly being summoned into existence.

  Even so, in that moment, everything made sense to Kain. Not in the tidy, reassuring way that answers normally work, but in the way a sudden migraine can clarify the limits of your day.

  Even if the City of Eternal Promise had been a mountain of gold, held aloft by acolytes chanting in Old Draconian over a roiling ocean of lava, it would have made sense.

  He was standing before something that had no business being understood. And yet, like all truly dangerous things, it insisted on being noticed.

  “Where did you get this?” he breathlessly asked.

  At some point—somewhere between the heartbeat and the eternity he’d been staring at the Core—L’shara Duvain had materialised at his side.

  The pale woman’s lips stretched into a smile—a small, tidy sort of thing that would have been pleasant if not for the neat row of sharp teeth behind it.

  “It was a gift,” she said, in the calm, unhurried tone of people who don’t need to lie because the truth was far worse. “From the Overlords.”

  Oddly enough, in the shimmering, twisting light of the Core, even that explanation somehow made sense. Where else could it have come from?

  Even so, Kain could feel himself flinch at their mention. Not out of fear, exactly. Not the sharp, shrieking kind that makes you run, at least. This was the quieter sort—the kind that sits behind your eyes, uncertain if the flickering shadows at the corner of the room were truly there or just a prank of the mind.

  In every realm he had ever walked, invoking the Overlords was akin to calling upon the gods—if gods had all the comprehension and compassion of a thunderstorm. Their legends were written not in myths but in smoking ruins. Every tale, every dire superstition, accompanied by the uncomfortable footnote: and then their world stopped being.

  They existed much like dragons existed: undeniably, terrifyingly, and preferably somewhere else.

  “And…” Kain swallowed, eyes darting between the core, the kneeling figures, and the pale woman whose smile had not diminished in the slightest, “what did you give in return?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” L’shara replied. Her blood-red eyes glittered with an inhuman delight, the sort that was joyful, greedy, and sadistic all at once. “We merely gave them what they were looking for.”

  ***

  I should have known—no, I did know—right then and there that it was all heading for tragedy. But we were moths to a flame, drawn to something bigger than we could have ever imagined.

  Still, they needed my talents. The Core was incomplete. In that aspect, my eyes hadn’t deceived me, yet what I failed to see was that it should have stayed that way.

  There were signs, of course. There are always signs. What it was doing to us. The whispers. The dreams.

  And yet I held fast to a belief—a noble, stupid, thoroughly human belief: that all of it could be understood and reasoned with, eventually. That no mystery was so deep it couldn’t be poked with the right combination of maths and arrogance.

  I clung to that idea like a man clings to a map in a country that no longer exists.

  Years passed. The work continued. And I never saw it—never saw the debts we were racking up, interest compounding in dimensions I couldn’t pronounce. Because some things aren’t paid in gold or favours.

  Some things are paid in reckonings.

  And those… those always arrive right on time.