The errands took longer than expected. The chandler had the wax but wanted to talk about the weather for ten minutes before he'd sell it. The glassblower was behind the Guild as Endra had said — a squat man with burns on his forearms who produced three thin vials from a rack and charged exactly eight Korn each when Dante said the name Endra. The cord was easy. By the time he had everything in a cloth bundle under his arm, the sun had climbed to mid-morning.
He walked back south.
Past the smithy. Past the farms. Past Henrik and Mara's cottage, where a thin line of chimney smoke said someone was home but nobody was outside. Down to the end of the lane, where the palisade curved, where the last house sat behind its wooden fence and its impossible garden.
He stopped.
The cottage was not there.
Or — it was. The shape was there. The walls, the roof, the fence. But the walls were collapsed. The timber was gray and rotten, split in places, caved in at others. The roof was mostly gone — a few sagging beams and a scattering of thatch that had turned black with age and weather. The windows were empty sockets, dark, threaded with cobwebs so thick they looked like curtains. The door hung from a single rusted hinge, swaying faintly in the morning air.
The garden was dead.
The plots were bare dirt. The climbing stakes had fallen. The trellis by the door was a skeleton of gray wood with nothing on it. The blue moss — the moss he had recognized the first night, the same moss he had used for his poultice in the tree — was gone. The white flowers that moved without wind were gone. Everything that had been alive was gone.
The cottage had been abandoned for decades.
Dante stood at the gate with the bundle of supplies under his arm and the morning sun on his face and did not move for a long time.
(I was inside this house three hours ago.)
(I ate breakfast at that table. I slept in that bed. She was standing at the cellar door when I left.)
(Three hours ago.)
He set the bundle down on the crumbling gatepost. He did not go inside. Not yet.
He turned and walked back toward the center of the village.
The merchant whose arithmetic test he had failed three days ago was setting up his stall in the morning market, arranging small iron tools on a cloth.
"Excuse me. The cottage at the south end of the lane, past the farms — the one near the wall. Do you know who lives there?"
The merchant looked at him as if he'd asked about the weather on the moon.
"Nobody lives there, boy. That place has been a ruin for as long as I've been in Oakhaven. Twenty years, give or take."
"But — an old woman. An apothecary. She called herself Endra."
"Endra?" He frowned. Shook his head. "Never heard the name."
He asked the rope-maker. Same answer. "That ruin? Been empty since before my father's time. Nobody called Endra has ever lived in Oakhaven that I know of."
He found a farmer's wife at the well — not Mara, a different woman, older, who had lived in Oakhaven her whole life.
"An apothecary?" She looked confused. "We don't have an apothecary, son. We've never had one. The nearest herbalist is in Millhaven, two days' walk north."
"But her garden — the plants — she had blue moss growing, and white flowers that move without —"
The woman was already shaking her head. "I've walked past that cottage every day for thirty years. There's no garden. There hasn't been anything growing there since the old widow died, and she died before I was born."
He tried the guards at the gate. Tomás was not on duty — the younger one was, the apprentice with the blond hair.
"The old woman I was with yesterday morning," Dante said. "When we walked out through the gate. You moved aside for her. You remember."
The young guard stared at him blankly.
"You walked out alone two days ago, Virgil. I remember because I thought it was stupid — you just came from the forest and now have a death wish to go back there."
"I wasn't alone. She was with me. Small. Old. Walking stick. A basket on her back."
The guard shook his head. "Mate, I was on duty from dawn to dusk. You walked out alone. You walked back in alone. Covered in blood, which I noted. Nobody was with you."
Dante stood in the square after the last conversation with his hands in his pockets and the morning sun warming the side of his face.
Nobody knew her.
Nobody had ever known her.
The cottage had been a ruin for decades. The garden had been dead for longer. The guards had not seen her. The merchants had not heard her name. The woman he had spent three days with — the woman who had bandaged his wound and taught him to make a tonic and fed him bread and told him to remember which kind of learner to be — had, according to every living person in Oakhaven, never existed.
But the alchemy kit was real. It was hanging from his belt right now. The silver coin was real — he could feel its weight in his pocket. The Auralis needles were still in his bandage. The stamina tonic recipe was still in his crafting menu. The knowledge was in his head. The supplies he had bought for her were sitting on a crumbling gatepost at the end of the lane.
(She was real.)
(Whatever she was — whoever she was — she was real. She taught me real things. She gave me real tools. And then she vanished, and the house vanished with her, and nobody in this town has any memory of her existence.)
He walked back to the lane.
The bundle was still on the gatepost. He left it there. It didn't matter now.
He pushed the gate open. The wood was soft with rot, the hinges seized. He walked up the path that was no longer a path and through the door that was no longer a door.
Inside: nothing.
Dust. Thick, undisturbed dust on every surface. Cobwebs draped from the ceiling to the floor. The hearth was cold — not recently cold, but cold the way stone is cold when fire hasn't touched it in years. No pots. No jars. No plants. No table. The stairs to the upper floor were collapsed, the treads broken through. The cellar trapdoor was nailed shut with boards that had rusted nails.
He walked through the ruin slowly. His boots left prints in dust that no one had disturbed in years. The room where he had slept — if it had been this room, if the bed had been here — was just bare floor and collapsed plaster. The place where the table had been was an empty space with a stain on the boards that might have been anything.
He almost walked out. He almost left.
Then the Sixth Sense tugged. Very faintly. Not a warning — an attention. The same soft pull that had drawn him to the chapel on his first morning.
He followed it.
On a shelf that was barely still attached to the wall — the only shelf that hadn't fallen — there was a small bundle. Dried flowers, tied with a faded blue ribbon. They had been placed there deliberately, and not long ago. There was no dust on them. Everything else in the cottage was gray with years of neglect. The flowers were clean.
He picked them up with hands that were not quite steady.
The moment his fingers touched the petals, something arrived in his mind. Not ALICE. Not the Sixth Sense. Something else — a message, placed, the way a letter is placed in a mailbox, waiting for the person it was meant for.
The voice was Endra's. The same voice. The same cadence. But underneath it, faintly, like a watermark on a page — something younger. Something sharper. Something that had been wearing an old woman like a costume.
Don't forget the lessons I taught you, boy. The world is full of mysteries. And perhaps one day we will meet again. Keep growing. Keep fighting. Your road has only just begun.
A pause. Then, in a different register — quieter, more urgent, the tone of a warning rather than a farewell:
And remember this. Don't use your abilities carelessly. Especially not near clerics or healers. People touched by the Crow are not looked upon kindly by the Church. They are considered cursed. Dangerous. You would do well to remember that.
The message faded. The flowers were just flowers again — dry, fragile, smelling faintly of something he couldn't name.
(Touched by the Crow.)
(She knew. She saw the Shadow Step in the forest and she knew what it meant. She knew what I was. She knew the whole time.)
(The Crow. The god whose name the world can't say. She called it the Crow — like a folk tale, like a superstition passed down from a time when people still remembered, even if they've forgotten what they were remembering.)
(Who are you, Nonna Endra?)
(What are you?)
He stood there with the flowers in his hands for a long time. He did not cry. He had no tears for this — it was not grief, exactly. It was the specific ache of understanding that the first kindness he had received in this world had come from something he did not understand, for reasons he could not see, and that he would probably not understand or see for a very long time.
He put the flowers in the inventory. He turned. He walked out of the ruin.
The morning sun was on the wheat fields. The village was awake behind him. The Guild was waiting. The silver was in his pocket. The kit was at his belt. The road, as she had said, was just beginning.
He started walking.
Somewhere far from Oakhaven, in a place where light did not dare to enter, a corridor stretched into infinite darkness.
The walls absorbed every sound. The silence was total and crushing. The only thing that broke it was the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of heels on cold stone, echoing endlessly between invisible walls like a metronome.
A figure — slender, wreathed in vapor that seemed to rise from her own skin — stopped before a massive door. The door was black as obsidian, veined with lines of deep red that pulsed slowly, like blood flowing just beneath the surface. It radiated an aura of ancient and terrible power.
The door opened with a long, low groan.
Beyond it: a round chamber. Dark — not merely dim but solidly dark, the darkness a presence rather than an absence. At the center of the chamber, a figure hung suspended, inverted, held aloft by chains of black metal that drank the light. The chains were covered in ancient symbols that glowed faintly crimson, pulsing in time with the breathing of the thing they held.
The air was heavy. Charged. As if the entire structure had been designed to contain something that should not be contained.
"How did it go?" asked the chained figure. The voice was deep. It resonated in the stone and made the chains vibrate. A voice that held within it ages of suffering and rage held tight.
"Rough, but he'll manage in the end. He's full of resources — you have to give him that," said the woman. The vapor around her thinned slightly, revealing the outline of a face — young, beautiful, ageless, utterly unlike the old woman she had been.
"Was all that theater really necessary to help him? You couldn't just introduce me to him directly?" she asked, frowning.
"No. It is not the right time," said the chained figure. The voice was final. Absolute. "He must be left to grow on his own. To learn hope — the purest kind, the most luminous kind. Only then will we be able to plunge him into the deepest despair when the moment comes. The fall is more devastating from a great height."
"If you say so. He already seemed plenty desperate when I found him half-frozen in the stable. I don't see why we need to wait."
"That is not the despair I seek. That was only fear and exhaustion." For the first time, a smile appeared on the chained figure's face — half-hidden in shadow, visible only as a line of white teeth in the dark. A cruel smile. A patient smile. "True despair is when you have everything and then lose it. When hope is ripped away at the exact moment you believe you have earned it. And on that day —"
The smile widened.
"— there will be a tremor strong enough to shake the very gods from their golden thrones and send them crashing into the mud where they belong."
The chains clinked softly in the dark.
The echo of those words hung in the chamber like a promise.
Or a prophecy.
[Name: Virgil (alias) / Dante] [Age: 16] [Class: THIEF (Utility)] [Lv. 3] [Blessing: SHADOW] [Rank: I]
[Competences:] [ — Alchemy → Lv.1] [ — Animals → Lv.1] [ — Athletics → Lv.1] [ — Botany → Lv.2] [ — Cartography → Lv.1] [ — Combat → Lv.2] [ — Daggers → Lv.2] [ — Deception → Lv.1] [ — Monsters → Lv.3] [ — Survival → Lv.1]
[Skills:] [ — Shadow Step] [ — Conceal Presence] [ — Stab (0/5)]
[Attribute:] [ — Sixth Sense]
[Recipes:] [ — Stamina Tonic]
[Inventory (new):] [ — Basic Alchemy Kit] [ — Dried Flowers (blue ribbon)] [ — Red Boar Tusks (4)] [ — Red Boar Hides (2)] [ — Mana Core LOW (3)]
