The Vault of Silence
1168 Words
The world changed when she crossed the threshold.
It wasn’t immediate, not like a switch. It was a slow bleed of wrongness—like stepping into water and realizing only too late that the temperature was wrong for anything natural. The air inside Harrow Keep didn’t move. It hung. Heavy. Scented faintly of ash and iron, layered with something older, like mildew too deep in stone to ever be washed clean.
Bella let her eyes adjust. Her flashlight remained clipped to her bag’s strap, but she didn’t touch it. The Severing Blade's warmth against her ribs was the only light she trusted in here.
The entry hall stretched forward in a corridor of ruined elegance. Fire had once danced across the walls—melted sconces testified to that—but now the stone bore the sheen of damp moss, and the floors were warped by water and time. Ivy had forced its way in through the cracks, but it hadn’t flourished. It had died mid-creep, as if it too had heard the bells.
She walked. Quietly. No weapon drawn yet, but the weight of her body shifted with each step, ready for the echo of pursuit. The silence wasn’t emptiness—it was a presence. Like the building was listening, and waiting.
A long hall branched off to the left, its walls lined with shelves where books should have been. Now, only scraps remained—bindings without pages, paper scoured clean. Erased.
She passed them. Ignored them. The packet’s notes had been clear. The west approach was lost. The keep’s core—the crypt, the records, the chapel—lay in the oldest part, near the back. That was where the advisor would be. Or what was left of him.
Gregor Valtier.
She said the name again, low, a breath rather than a word.
The hall opened onto a stairwell, spiral and narrow. Iron railings. Worn stone steps descending into dark. It hadn’t collapsed, which meant it had been kept that way—preserved. Maintained. Why?
She took a step down. Then another. The deeper she went, the colder it got—not just the kind that sunk into skin but the kind that gnawed at thought. Her memories began to shimmer, bending at the edges. Emily’s face flickered, her voice warped, distant.
Bella clenched her teeth and pressed the dagger’s hilt to her temple like a ward. The pulse came again—refusal, resistance—and her mind cleared. The cold pushed, but something in her held. The blade did not cut only flesh. It cut through the lies places like this tried to spin.
At the bottom of the stair, the corridor opened again. A faint, sulfuric glow lit the edges of an iron door half-hanging off its hinges. Carved above it, almost delicately, were words in Latin:
Quod sileri non potest, audiendum est.
What cannot be silenced, must be heard.
Bella touched the door. Warm.
It swung inward without a sound.
The room beyond had once been ceremonial. Now it was defaced. Statues of saints or penitents stood headless, their faces shattered and heaped in the corners. In the center of the room was a slab of black stone, and on it—
Chains.
Thick. Ancient. Etched with runes and sigils that glowed faintly red. At first she thought the slab empty, the prisoner gone. But then her eyes adjusted further, and she realized her mistake.
The figure wasn’t lying.
He was standing.
Upright. Arms extended, wrists pulled taut by the ceiling chains. Ankles bound to the stone. Head bowed. Hair long, silver-white, trailing over bare shoulders. His skin was gray and stretched tight over bones, as though the body had once withered but then refused to decay.
The eyes opened.
Bella froze. They weren’t white or red or gold. They were clear—like glass filled with smoke, like the sky over a battlefield before the first charge.
She stepped forward. Slowly. The blade hummed.
“You’re him,” she said.
The figure didn’t move, but a voice filled the air—not from his mouth, but from the space itself, as if the stones had memorized it.
“So many names. So little meaning. What name do you seek?”
“Gregor Valtier.”
“Ah. A title made of breath and regret. He died long ago.”
“You’re the Bound Advisor.”
The chains trembled.
Bella raised her chin. “You’re part of the Pale Order.”
“I was.”
The floor vibrated slightly with the words. Dust sifted from above. Bella swallowed hard.
“Emily Granger. She uncovered your name. She died for it. Tell me what she found.”
Silence stretched. Then—
“She found the hinge. The flaw in the silence.”
The air grew tight.
“The Pale Order was not made to protect. It was made to contain. They hunted the monsters they could not kill, and bargained with those they could not contain. I was both. And so—”
His head lifted. The eyes saw her now.
“—they tried to make me useful.”
Bella’s fingers clenched.
“You let them.”
“I let them believe I could be bound.”
A pause. The chains hummed.
“They think they still own me. They feed me prayers etched in silver and sorrow. But they forget—prayers are only cages if you believe the god still listens.”
Bella took a step back.
“You want out.”
The figure tilted his head.
“No. I want witness. I want noise.”
He grinned, and it was terrible. Like something long dead remembering what teeth were for.
“I want you.”
The dagger leapt in her hand. Not of her own will—of its own. The warmth surged. Fire and refusal. The chains on the figure cracked.
Bella moved without thinking. She thrust the dagger forward—not at the prisoner, but at the runes. The blade pierced one.
Light shattered.
The chains jerked.
The figure screamed—not in pain, but in release—and the sound tore through the room like a storm through dry grass. The walls bled black light. A bell tolled somewhere deep and far.
A true bell.
A war bell.
The chains broke.
Dust roared. Stone fell. Bella was thrown backward, landing hard on cracked tile. She coughed. Raised her head.
The figure stood unbound.
No longer still. No longer chained. His eyes burned now, not clear but full—of blood, fire, and the memory of empire.
“I freed you,” Bella gasped.
“No,” said Gregor Valtier. “You awoke me.”
Then he vanished.
Not in smoke. Not in shadow.
In silence.
The kind that screamed.
Bella lay on her back, blinking dust out of her eyes, the dagger flickering faintly in her hand.
She had come to bankrupt silence.
But she’d just broken its vault.
And the things locked inside?
They had heard her coming.
- Writer
