Another cursed morning and yet another pile to clear. A cold whisper rattled through the vault, bending cobwebs like ghostly threads. He angled the splintered handle by reflex, each pass grounding him in the crypt's hush.
He muttered, his jaw clenching with silent fury.
His sweep faltered, bristles catching at the shattered femur as exhaustion wobbled his strokes.
"Cerys and her endless inspections," he growled. "She thinks I volunteered to be her brittle little underling. I didn't."
"These halls were supposed to be peace, not her theater of praise and torment," he spat before continuing his work. "Skulls crack, femurs chip, ribs get kicked loose by those idiots from corridor delta, and who's left to tidy it all? Me."
Moss clung to ancient runes along these pillars, and a cracked censer lay half-swallowed by cobwebs. Scriv brushed a faded glyph clean, smoothing away dust with a reverent swipe, his silent tribute to a place forgotten by living voices.
Quiet and forgotten.
He traced a worn inscription into the pillar dust and regret dancing across the cold glyph.
His ribs creaked with a hollow echo, a reflex born of centuries of routine. He resettled into stillness, irritated by the habit's persistence.
A single mote drifted through the silent vault, tracing a slow arc in the still gloom.
No eerie acolytes, barked orders, or war drums echoed through the crypts.
A shard of stained glass skittered across the glyph, fracturing the silence with refracted light.
Ichor wept from Veynir's rune‑etched skull onto Scriv's broom. He leaned in until the back of Scriv's skull creaked under the weight of his gaze.
"Look at you... scrubbing death in circles like a mindless rat," Veynir spat, voice ice and venom. He tapped the chain of vertebrae against the floor. "I half-expect your dust to choke you before you're deemed fit. Fail me again, and I'll toss your brittle carcass into the skeleton fusion chamber. Let's see if you survive the reforging."
With a casual motion, he snapped his fingers: a skeleton collapsed into ash at Scriv's feet. Veynir smiled, an empty, mocking curl of bone. "Discipline begins with the culling of the weak. Order is not kindness, it is the only thing older than death."
Scriv yanked the broom upright and stepped forward, resolve coiling in his bones. He leaned forward slightly, the angle of his spine rigid with something ancient. Anger? Maybe. The kind that once burned through flesh but now just tightened bone around bone, helpless and useless. His sockets fixed on the ash where Shelf Six had stood, unmoving, unblinking.
"That was Shelf Six," he muttered. "They shelved torsos. Never complained. Liked spine work. Gone now."
Veynir's burning gaze lingered. "Tend your dust."
With a swirl of ichor-lit runes and a shimmering ripple of bone dust, he vanished, summoned by Cerys's decree to audit the vault, gone before the echoes died and the ichor trail cooled behind him.
Scriv didn't move. Not until the echo faded too slow to be certain, too loud to trust.
His grip on the handle didn't loosen. Shelf Six had always been careful. Always precise. That didn't save them. Eventually, he moved, each stroke slower, leaving tiny tremors behind.
"Shelf Seven, the row of ceremonial skulls, won't forgive this," he whispered.
A deep crack, long ignored, split wider across the vault. A slender shard of stone fluttered to Scriv's feet, clinking softly in the hush. Dust fluttered from the fissure as an ominous tremor pulsed through the floor. Scriv's sockets flicked upward, tension coiling in his bones.
Stone shrieked; debris rattled as a living body burst through the breach her tattered banner, bearing the faded crest of Stormhaven, fluttering in the chaos.
Scriv froze as a living girl lay before him out of place and wrong, her ragged breath disturbing the stillness like a lantern lit in a tomb. His posture tensed, gaze locked. There was no form for this, no column to file under "living anomalies." She didn't belong here. Her presence scorched the cold stone like spilled embers, sharp with heat and the faint hiss of breath where none should be.
Blood streaked her side, soaked into cloth that had once been a tunic. She stank of smoke and damp stone.
The handle clattered from his grasp before he even realized it had slipped.
"Absolutely not. This isn't my responsibility. There's no protocol for unsolicited mortal impact events, vault alarm glyphs should have screamed their warning, and the warded seals remained eerily unbroken. No checklist. No form."
He lunged forward, seizing a rib from the nearest shelf as a makeshift shield, his bones creaking with panic. "This section was sealed! No visitors! No test subjects! No scrolls filed!"
He tilted his skull up toward the breach light seeping through like judgment.
"Patch it with rib and prayer?" he muttered, half in disbelief, half in panic, a joke for no one but himself, and even he didn't find it funny.
He edged closer, each step tentative, skull angled to peer down through the breach. The girl stirred again.
"She's breathing. That's... inconvenient."
Dread settled where marrow used to live, old, heavy, and wordless.
"She can't see me like this."
Scriv scrambled back, snatched a scapula from a nearby shelf, clutched it to his chest like a shield. He slackened every joint, angled his skull, slouched his spine. Just another mask in the crypt. One he'd worn long before bones.
If she thought he was just another one of the silent ones, maybe she wouldn't look twice. Maybe she'd crawl past, dazed and bleeding, and never even register him amid the dust. Die quietly. Leave him out of it.
She didn't move. Maybe dead. Maybe he'd be lucky.
Then a finger twitched.
His joints stiffened mid-pose, locking as if he'd been struck. His grip faltered on the scapula. It rattled once before he tightened it again, an old reflex echoing through memory, not muscle. Somewhere deep, it reminded him of fear, though he hadn't felt it in centuries. His bones froze, but the reflex seized him all the same. A micro-spasm in his jaw. If he had breath, it would've hitched.
She groaned again in one trembling shudder, a single crack of life that broke the silence.
Scriv slipped into the shadows. One careful step at a time.
She rolled onto her side with a faint moan, living, real. Scriv froze, torn between duty and dread: no protocol for this!
He sank into a dark alcove, shoulders slack and joints loose, each bone settling in shadow as he weighed duty against self-preservation. He hadn't felt fear since the day he died. But this? This felt close.
The girl coughed. He slipped away before her eyes could open. And then he stopped. A faint glyph pulse stuttered underfoot, more skeletons, pacing nearby. Scriv knew better than to be caught shirking discipline while a living soul bled on their floor.
He resumed the practiced stillness he'd perfected over decades, head bowed, spine loose, sockets dull as archived ash. An artifact. Background.
And now quiet felt like waiting. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was he still hadn't decided.
Scriv slowly turned his head, just slightly, toward a scattering of bones near the collapsed wall. "Shelf Eight," he muttered. "Hypothetically... how bad would it be to tell her?"
"Right. Bad. Probably the worst idea." He shifted slightly, jaw working in an imitation of thought, automatic now, ritual more than reason. "But it's a living soul. That's never happened before. Not down here."
He tapped one bony finger against the floor, a motion halfway between ritual and nervous habit; its hollow clack sounded like a lone bell toll in the void.
Tap. Tap.
"Should High Priest Cerys know about this?"
The bones did not respond. Scriv nodded, as if the silence were an answer.
His finger trembled on the skull's cool crown, ready to tip it for judgment.