The Vault of anguish
1111 Words
Bella dragged herself up from the cracked floor, coughing grit from her lungs. The Severing Blade pulsed against her palm like a living heart, fever-hot. Her ears still rang from the scream—or release—that had ripped through the chamber, a sound she knew the keep itself would not contain.
She staggered to her feet, legs trembling, the air thick with dust and that sulfurous tang that clung to her tongue. She expected silence. She expected the hollow aftershock of breaking chains. But the stillness was not empty now—it was hungry.
Her eyes darted back to the slab of stone. Empty. Shattered links lay like dead serpents across the ground, their runes fading ember by ember.
“Damn it…” Bella muttered under her breath, though the words felt pitifully small against what she had just unleashed.
The packet’s notes had spoken of secrets, of rot, of the Pale Order’s lies buried under Harrow Keep. But none of them had warned of this. None had said that Gregor Valtier still breathed—or whatever passed for breath in a body like that.
She bent, sliding her hand across the cracked tile, and found a piece of one broken chain. It was cold to the touch, unnaturally so, but even that chill seemed to be fading. She tucked it into her satchel. Proof. A fragment of what she had witnessed. Something to remind her she hadn’t imagined the eyes, the voice, the grin.
She moved toward the doorway, blade still in hand. The Latin above it caught her eye again.
What cannot be silenced, must be heard.
It felt less like an inscription now and more like a warning she’d ignored too late.
As Bella climbed back toward the stairwell, the atmosphere of Harrow Keep shifted. The oppressive weight remained, but it no longer felt contained. The keep itself breathed again, its stones groaning, its long-dead ivy twitching like something remembering it had once been alive.
She paused at the base of the spiral stairs, head tilted. There.
A sound.
At first she thought it was her imagination—the echo of her own blood still roaring in her ears. But no. It was distinct. Faint. A rhythm like boots on stone.
Someone else was here.
Bella tightened her grip on the Severing Blade. Her instincts screamed to move, to get out before the keep finished waking, but she forced herself into stillness, pressing her back against the wall beside the stairs. Listening.
The footsteps weren’t hurried. They weren’t even careful. Whoever it was, they knew she would hear.
“Bella Charron,” came a voice from above. Male. Steady. Almost cordial. “You’ve gone and rung the bell for us.”
Her stomach dropped.
The Pale Order.
They had known. They had followed. Maybe they had even wanted her here.
She stepped out from cover, lifting the blade into view, its red-gold flicker throwing light up the stairwell. “Show yourself.”
A figure descended, boots crunching faintly against the grit. He was tall, draped in the charcoal-gray robes she had seen only in sketches—robes that carried the faint glimmer of silver thread, stitched with prayers that were never meant for gods. His hood was lowered, revealing a gaunt, hawkish face, cheekbones sharp as blades, hair tied back in a soldier’s knot gone white at the temples.
He smiled thinly.
“I should thank you,” he said. “It would have taken us decades to weaken those bindings enough to draw him out. You’ve done it in one stroke.”
Bella felt her throat tighten. “Who are you?”
“An auditor. One of the Pale Order’s faithful. But you may call me Marius.” His eyes flicked to the blade in her hand. “And you may lower that. It cannot cut what I carry.”
Bella didn’t move. The blade hummed louder, reacting to his presence as though it disagreed.
Marius’s smile faltered for a breath. Then he tilted his head, like a teacher correcting a stubborn child.
“You think you freed him,” he said. “But all you did was shift the lock. Gregor Valtier is not a man. He is a hinge. He was made to swing between silence and song. You’ve set him moving again. And the world will feel it.”
Bella’s grip tightened. “Then I’ll find him. I’ll stop him.”
“Stop him?” The man chuckled softly, as if she had told a child’s joke. “You’ll be lucky if you can even follow him. He doesn’t walk forward. He walks backward. Into the cracks of history. Into the places we paved over with lies.”
The keep shuddered again. Dust rained down from the stairwell above. The air carried the faint chime of distant bells. Real ones. She didn’t know if they were inside her head or somewhere far across the land.
Marius spread his arms as if in welcome.
“The Order is moving now. He will draw others like himself—the Bound, the Bargained, the Buried. And you, little witness, will be the spark in every report. You’ve announced yourself.”
Bella’s blade flared, fire licking at the runes along its edge.
“Good,” she said.
For the first time, Marius’s expression soured. “You really don’t understand what you’ve done.”
“I don’t need to understand it. I just need to cut it.”
And she lunged.
The blade met air.
Marius vanished in the span of a blink, his voice trailing, woven into the stones like Valtier’s had been.
“We will meet again, Bella Charron. And next time, you won’t mistake the lock for the key.”
The keep fell quiet.
Her own breath echoed loud in her ears.
Bella stood alone at the foot of the stairs, every muscle trembling with the aftermath of something she couldn’t yet name. She forced herself upward, one step at a time, the blade guiding her out of Harrow Keep’s belly and back into the stale, damp corridors above.
By the time she reached the entry hall, the air outside had shifted. Clouds churned like a wound in the sky. The world beyond the threshold felt wrong, tilted, as though reality itself had bent a degree out of line.
Bella paused in the doorway, hand against the cold stone. She didn’t dare look back.
Gregor Valtier was free.
The Pale Order was watching.
And somewhere deep, the bells had started ringing.
Not to warn.
To summon.
Bella stepped out into the storm, blade still hot in her grip, and knew this was only the beginning.
- Writer
