Where the Locket Breaks

Ash in the Rain

The storm did not fade with the night. It deepened. By dawn, the streets of the lower quarter steamed with runoff that smelled faintly of rust, as if the city itself had started bleeding. Bells still tolled, softer now, but constant—a heartbeat that didn’t belong to any single tower. No one slept easily under that sound.

Bella pushed through the wet streets, hood drawn low, keeping to the gutters where shadows pooled thickest. She had not returned to her flat; there was no point. The Pale Order would have torn it apart before midnight. Instead, she had followed the bells as one might follow a river, letting them guide her down to the riverfront where the oldest stones sat heavy with secrets.

The Severing Blade hung at her side, its once-golden edge dulled to a low, sullen ember. It didn’t like being quiet. Neither did she.

Ahead, a bridge arched over the swollen river, its supports veined with ivy black as pitch. At its center stood a figure draped in a sodden cloak, hunched over something at their feet. Bella slowed, one hand resting lightly on the Blade’s hilt. The figure straightened as if they’d felt her long before they heard her boots.

“You’re early,” came a rasping voice—low, tired, familiar.

“Liora,” Bella said, letting the hood fall back.

The other woman’s dark hair was plastered to her face, her temple marked by a deep gash where blood had dried into a crooked line. She looked like someone who hadn’t slept in days, though Bella suspected none of them had. Liora was a whisper broker—she knew what the Order buried, and sometimes, she dug up the bones.

“You’re bleeding,” Bella said.

Liora snorted. “We’re all bleeding now. Just some of us from the head.”

She kicked something with the toe of her boot. Bella glanced down—and froze.

A man lay half-submerged in the runoff, throat split in a precise, ritualistic cut. His wrists bore faint circular scars that glowed a dull, shifting violet beneath the rain.

Order markings.

“Patrol?” Bella asked quietly.

Liora shook her head. “Watcher. He’s got Marius’s seal.”

The weight in Bella’s gut turned to stone. Watchers didn’t bleed out in alleys like common thugs. Watchers didn’t die without the Order making the world tremble for it. And yet, here one was—carved open like a lamb, his seal still clutched in his hand.

“Gregor?” Bella asked.

Liora’s dark eyes flicked to the river. “Or something walking in his wake.”

The bells tolled again—two long, low notes. Across the water, rooftops sagged and shifted, like they remembered shapes they weren’t supposed to. A whole row of houses seemed to exhale, boards creaking in a wind that didn’t touch anything else. Liora crossed herself without thinking, fingers tapping a sigil most had long abandoned.

“He’s opening seams,” she whispered. “Old ones. They’re spreading.”

Bella crouched beside the Watcher’s body, peeling back his collar with careful fingers. His skin beneath was covered in etched words—scratched too deep to have been done after death. It was a litany. A last message.

She could make out fragments between the rivulets of rain.

…he walks backward…

…the bells are not ours…

…the Buried remember…

The last line was smeared, half-lost to the water.

“He wrote this with his own blood,” Bella said softly.

“Then whatever killed him didn’t have time to silence him,” Liora answered. “Or didn’t care to.”

Bella rose, letting the cloak fall back into place. “The Order will be here soon.”

“Then we should be somewhere else.”

Liora turned, ready to melt back into the mist, but Bella caught her arm. “No. We follow it.”

“Follow what, Bella? The thing tearing reality open? That thing isn’t a man. He’s a hinge. Hinges don’t talk back—they just open doors and let the monsters walk through.”

“Then I’ll find the door before he does,” Bella said. “Or cut it out of the wall.”

Liora stared at her for a long moment, rain dripping from the tip of her nose. “You’re going to get killed.”

“Probably.”

The whisper broker let out a sharp exhale that was halfway to a laugh. “Fine. But I’m not dying in the rain.”

They moved.

The city shifted around them—not in the way a place breathes, but in the way something trapped begins to stretch its limbs. Walls leaned at odd angles. Windows flickered with brief visions of rooms that no longer existed: a wedding table, a child’s toy, a priest whispering into empty air. The seams Gregor opened weren’t stable; they were memories, stitched to reality by old bindings.

And something followed in their wake.

Bella felt it before she saw it—the prickling at the back of her neck, the way the Blade went rigid in her hand, heat rolling beneath the runes. In the fog behind them, footsteps echoed out of time with their own.

Liora hissed, “Don’t turn.”

But Bella did.

The thing was tall. Human-shaped, but wrong in the way sound is wrong when played backward. Its jaw hung open too far, its eyes like wet mirrors, showing everything but itself. It didn’t walk. It leaned forward and let gravity decide.

A Bound.

The first one she’d seen up close.

Its mouth moved—not to speak, but to let the bells pour through. She heard the tolling not with her ears but with her teeth, with her lungs. Liora stumbled, clutching the side of her head.

Bella raised the Severing Blade. Its edge blazed white.

The creature lunged.

Her first strike cut clean—too clean. The blade didn’t meet resistance, but the world around the creature buckled. The sound it made was not pain. It was recognition.

“Bella,” it said in a voice made of echoes. “Witness.”

The creature broke apart like smoke.

Not gone.

Just somewhere else.

Bella panted, gripping the blade so tightly her knuckles ached. “He’s calling them,” she said. “Every step he takes wakes another.”

“And every one of those things remembers something it shouldn’t,” Liora answered. “Gregor’s not just walking backward. He’s pulling the past with him.”

They reached the river’s edge where the old chapel stood—half collapsed, its steeple bowed like a dying man’s spine. This was the oldest part of the city, predating the Order’s clean white stones. If Gregor wanted seams, this was where they’d be weakest.

Liora crouched at the base of the chapel steps. Symbols carved into the mossy stone bled a faint, steady light—gold shifting to violet. Bella recognized them. She’d seen their mirrored versions in the Pale Order’s archives.

Seals.

Cracking.

She whispered, “He’s already been here.”

Liora pressed two fingers into the mud, smearing away a layer of moss. Underneath, the sigils writhed like living veins.

“Bella,” she said, voice tight. “This is a gate.”

Before Bella could respond, a shadow broke from the mist ahead—a single figure walking backward through the rain, coat frayed into nothing.

Gregor Valtier.

His steps barely disturbed the water pooling around the stones. Bells chased his movements like obedient hounds. Behind him, more Bound flickered into existence, their parchment-skin etched with stories that should have stayed buried.

Liora’s whisper cracked into a hiss. “We need to go.”

Bella didn’t move.

Gregor’s face lifted toward her—half in shadow, half illuminated by the light bleeding from the broken seals. He didn’t speak this time. He smiled.

The stones of the chapel groaned as if something beneath them exhaled for the first time in centuries.

This was no ordinary seam.

It was a door.

And it was opening.