Episode 3
1172 Words
“Mouse. Don’t breathe.”
Thomir’s voice dropped so low it scraped like a knife’s edge against my spine.
I stood frozen, foot hovering above the step leading to the apothecary’s front door. The wards carved into the threshold were flickering again—but not like fire. No, this was worse. A sick, pulsing glow, like coals buried in bone and stirred too late. They weren’t just unstable.
They were afraid.
“Thomir”, I murmured, my breath visible in the dim light. “They’re not holding.”
“I know.” He didn’t look up from the worktable, where he was grinding feverroot too fast, too hard. His voice had gone rough. Tense. Like he was trying not to speak with someone else’s tongue. “They’ve started to… listen.”
“To what?”
His eyes slid toward the door. “Not what. Who.”
I stepped back, letting the doorframe fall out of reach. The wards sparked again—then went dim, barely a whisper of warmth left in their glow.
“They’ve never gone quiet before,” I said.
“They’re not quiet,” Thomir said grimly. “They’re waiting.”
The silence thickened, curling like smoke in my lungs. Even the birds had stopped. The forest held its breath.
Thomir finally turned from the counter, wiping his hands on his coat. “You remember what I told you about when I was young? Before your parents ever held a blade?”
I nodded, just once.
“There was a time”, he said, “when the oaths ran deep—deeper than magic, deeper than law. You didn’t break them. You didn’t bend them. You didn’t speak them unless you wanted them carved into your f*****g bones.”
He stepped past me, kneeling to touch the threshold where the wards were etched. “And when the oaths went bad… when they twisted…” He trailed off. “This is what it felt like.”
A chill spread through my chest. Not fear. Not yet. Just the shape of it, settling into place.
Then we heard it.
Not a voice.
A horn.
Low. Hollow. Like someone had carved it from bone and fed it grief.
It echoed once. Then again.
Not from Windermere.
From the trees.
Then, the screaming began.
***
It started small. One voice. A distant shout, cut off too soon.
Then came the crashing.
The screaming multiplied, tangled in shouts and splintering wood. Boots pounded. Glass shattered. And the smell—gods—the scent of burning herbs, of smoke and seared flesh, rolled in like a wave.
Thomir moved before I did.
“Back room. Now!”
We barrelled past jars and sacks and stacks of drying vines. I nearly knocked over the mortar. Behind us, the windows blew inward with a scream of wind and smoke.
“Wards failed,” I breathed.
“No,” Thomir growled. “They surrendered.”
He shoved aside a cabinet of dried witchmoss and kicked through the false back wall.
Behind it: a tunnel. Narrow. Rough. Hidden behind years of dust.
“You have a tunnel?” I asked, stumbling inside.
“I’m not stupid,” he snapped. “You think I trusted this place to stay quiet forever?”
We scrambled through the dark, the stone- and root-lined path clinging to us like a womb. My prosthetic thudded unevenly on the dirt. Every time it struck the earth, I half-expected it to echo back with something else’s footsteps.
Behind us, wood splintered. A voice—no, a presence—entered the shop.
It didn’t shout. It didn’t speak.
It simply commanded.
“Bend.”
The word hit like a spike through the gut. I felt it reach for me—pressing into my ribs, trying to latch onto my bones, my breath, my blood. But it didn’t stick.
I didn’t bend.
I didn’t move.
“What the f**k was that?” I gasped.
Thomir’s voice came harsh through the dark. “You resisted.”
Another word followed—closer this time.
“Obey.”
It coiled through the tunnel like smoke, slithering into every corner.
Nothing. No burning. No surrender.
I stayed myself.
Thomir cursed. “They’re testing you. You’re not reacting. They’ll notice.”
“They already did,” I said.
We emerged through a concealed door in the hillside behind the town. Smoke filled the sky. Windmere was burning.
But not like raiders do it.
This wasn’t looting or pillaging.
This was cleansing.
Homes still intact, but empty.
Fires burning only where something sacred once stood—the library, the shrine, the fountain stone.
And through the wreckage walked figures.
Tall. Silent. Clad in black cloth that moved like oil.
Oath-bound.
Their eyes glowed faintly in the smoke—embers behind cracked glass.
“They don’t speak,” Thomir said. “They don’t need to. The Whisperer speaks for them.”
I followed his gaze.
One of them stood near the apothecary ruins.
He turned to where we had fled from, tilted his head… then paused.
Like he’d felt me.
I ducked back behind the boulder.
“I saw it,” I whispered. “He tried to bind me. I felt it hit. But it couldn’t stick.”
“Because you’re unmarked,” Thomir said. “Or unclaimed.”
“Same thing?”
“No. One is a choice. The other is a curse.”
We crouched there, watching the town fall.
There were no screams now.
Only silence.
The kind that follows obedience.
***
We stayed low, hidden in a hollow behind a line of tree roots. Thomir passed me a flask of cold water. My hands shook as I took it.
“What do they want from me?” I asked.
Thomir was silent for a long time.
Then: “What if it’s not you they want?”
I turned to him.
“What if it’s what’s in you?”
That bone pendant pressed cold against my chest.
The one my mother gave me.
The one that had never once warmed.
“What the hell am I, Thomir?”
He met my eyes. And for once, he looked like he didn’t have the answer.
“You’re something the old world tried to hide,” he said. “And whatever’s waking up now… it remembers.”
A horn sounded again. Closer this time.
Three notes. Like a broken lullaby.
The trees groaned.
And deep in the distance, a voice—barely louder than breath—whispered:
“Mouse.”
I froze.
That word.
Only Thomir calls me that.
But it didn’t come from him.
He was looking at me. Pale. Rigid.
He whispered, “Don’t answer it.”
The trees went still.
The fire crackled.
And in the silence that followed, the earth beneath my feet pulsed once—like a heartbeat.
Then came the voice, from inside my skull:
“You are the silence we couldn’t bind. But you’ll learn to speak.”
- Writer
