Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale, Price

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  At some point over the years—perhaps quietly, while he wasn’t looking—the lines on Edrik Kain’s face had stopped being “worry furrows” and started being features. The bags under his eyes had unpacked and moved in permanently, and the calluses on his fingers were no longer something he had and started being something he was.

  People no longer called him young. Or promising. Or apprentice. Not even aspiring artificer, which had once been his favorite title, implying as it did both ambition and plausible deniability.

  He’d even stopped calling himself those things. These days, he mostly called himself tired.

  But the one thing age had stubbornly refused to bring him—despite the promises and several well-thumbed books on the subject—was peace of mind.

  Especially not that morning, as he leaned over one of the Citadel’s less-travelled walkways, staring down at the courtyard below. Kain had always thought of this particular junction as his own little sanctuary, a place to collect his thoughts, unravel his worries, and practice the ancient art of not being around other people.

  Which, of course, made it the perfect place to be interrupted.

  “Something on your mind, Runekeeper?”

  For what it was worth, his body had—over the years—become better at not reacting. While his heart may have tried to exit via his throat, outwardly, he managed only a tight blink before turning toward the speaker.

  It was Imane Duvain, loitering in the shadows.

  The young woman had inherited several of her aunt’s less socially advantageous features: ghastly pale skin, blood-red eyes, and a nose that looked as though someone had once stepped on it. Yet, to Imane’s favor, there was at least something striking about her sharp cheekbones, in the way one sometimes admires the clean edges of a very dangerous knife.

  Since L’shara had secured her seat on the High Council, her niece had—by means mysterious and bureaucratic—become Kain’s overseer. “Overseer,” of course, being the title Kain only ever dared to use inside his own head. Out loud, he settled for words like “acquaintance” and “yes, ma’am.”

  “Good morning, Miss Duvain,” Kain said, adding a courteous nod and subtracting everything else he might have liked to say. In many ways, Kain would have preferred to keep a healthy, continent-sized distance between himself and anything with Duvain ancestry, no matter how sharply cheekboned.

  But his thoughts weren’t cooperating this morning. They kept slipping away from the looming dread and sliding back, once again, to the courtyard below.

  A handful of Ashen Squires were sparring in the cold morning light—clashing wooden blades, shouting breathlessly, occasionally displaying movement no living being should have ever been able to display. Normally, Kain wouldn’t have spared them a glance. But today, his eyes kept being dragged—like a reluctant cow to the butcher—back to her.

  The girl in green.

  “Say…” he began, with all the caution of a man setting a bear trap he wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t already armed. “That girl down there, the way she swings her sword… Does it remind you of anything?”

  Imane blinked. Once. A slow, lizard-like blink that suggested the question had caught her off guard, which meant either she hadn’t noticed the girl, or she simply hadn’t expected Kain to ask about it.

  Still, she stepped forward.

  Her crimson eyes slid down to the courtyard like knives deciding where to fall.

  A moment passed. Then she nodded, once. “She uses the same sword form as the late Lord Aers.”

  “She does,” Kain agreed softly. Then, after a pause: “But as far as I know, the late lord never took a squire. Or an apprentice. Or even offered anyone the kind of nod that might be mistaken for approval…”

  ***

  Every day, the signs grew clearer. And every day, I stayed. I stayed like the fool they warn you about in parables, the one who hears the thunder, sees the lightning, and still thinks, ah, but it won’t rain on me.

  I told myself I was different. That I wouldn’t become like them. That I’d simply misunderstood something, which was a comforting lie because misunderstandings can usually be corrected with a decent explanation and maybe a diagram.

  But another three years, and my unease only grew. It grew to the point I could no longer turn away. I needed answers. Fortunately, there were plenty of those around. At least for those who didn’t mind asking unsanitary questions.

  At least for those who didn’t fear what truth might lay at the end of that road.

  ***

  Every breath dragged more of the cursed incense into Kain’s lungs, and with each lungful his thoughts—thoughts he would have preferred to be sharp, precise, and preferably his own—frayed around the edges.

  He’d told the acolytes again and again to stop burning the stuff in here. To burn it anywhere in his presence, in fact.

  Neither he nor the Core cared for it, but the High Priest insisted.

  None of them understood. They couldn’t understand. They weren’t as attuned to the Core’s voice as he was. That’s why it called for him.

  Kain pressed his knuckles into his eyes until stars bloomed there like unwelcome fireworks. No, no… don’t drift. Don’t listen. You know what happens to people who start listening…

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  He took another breath—because of course he did—and the air seared down his throat like he'd just inhaled a wizard’s beard oil laced with pepper and regret.

  Damn incense. I can’t stay here for much longer.

  “Remove her armor,” he rasped, managing a cough that sounded like someone stepping on a bag of dry twigs. “Hurry.”

  The acolytes hesitated. That was expected. Most people hesitated when asked to defile the body of an Ashen Knight. It wasn’t just superstition—it was the right kind of superstition. The kind that kept one’s limbs attached and soul unbartered.

  But Kain was no longer the sort of man whose direct orders could be ignored. Age, scars, and an alarming reputation had that effect. Too many rooms had gone quiet when he entered. Too many people had seen what he worked with and decided they’d rather not get involved, thank you very much.

  And so, the acolytes moved. Hesitant hands worked at the ancient clasps and rune-sealed joins. Armor, piece by piece, clattered to the stone floor like the world trying very hard not to remember something. The armor resisted a little, as old things often do, but the corpse did not.

  Even in death, few would have dared to look at her. Even fewer dared to look long enough to think about what they were seeing. The Ashen Knights were not just fighters—they were symbols, myths, cautionary tales with swords. And dead myths had a way of making the living nervous.

  But Kain looked.

  He’d long since outgrown superstition. He had seen too much, heard too much, and read things that had left footnotes in his dreams. His unease was of an entirely different kind now—less fear of curses, more fear of answers.

  He pulled on his gloves, the soft leather whispering around fingers that knew exactly what they were about to do. He stepped forward.

  It wasn’t even her face that turned his stomach—though it tried its best, what with the flesh that had already begun to rot before she died. Blisters bloomed across her skin without wounds to justify them, scars traced stories no blade had ever written. No, what turned his stomach wasn’t the death.

  It was what the death meant.

  That morning, he’d seen another fresh face down in the courtyard—a thickset boy of barely twelve—eagerly wield the late Lord Aers’ swordsmanship. A child so green he hadn’t even been taught how to polish a knight’s sandals yet, swinging the sword with uncanny familiarity.

  All of it, before the young woman before him had even turned cold.

  “Bonesaw,” Kain grunted. Then, without looking up: “And if you’re going to throw up, Ami, do it somewhere else.”

  There were faint shuffling and a hurried retreat behind him.

  Another acolyte was left to pass the tool into his hands, doing so with the reluctance one usually associates with passing over a venomous snake. As Kain gripped the tainted instrument, there was a thought—small, quiet, unwelcome—that slid through his mind like oil under a door.

  To whom did this knowledge belong to before it became mine?

  The way his hands moved, precise, efficient. The confidence with which he dissected what had once been human. The whispers the Core had fed him, line by line, cut by cut.

  Was this even his knowledge? His skill?

  Or had it once belonged to someone else, someone who had asked for greatness and not realized the prize for such things? Was he, too, just a vessel waiting to be emptied and refilled?

  He didn’t know.

  But he needed to.

  And in that place, needing to know was a very dangerous thing indeed.

  ***

  “She was a sacred child of the Core, and yet you dared defile her remains?”

  Kain felt their gazes press down on him, heavy as robes dipped in lead and woven with guilt. He’d known this was coming. Every action, no matter how well-intentioned, came with a cost. But he’d needed answers, and answers, as things would have it, were the costliest of all.

  “Not a child,” he muttered beneath his breath, “a victim.”

  Not that they would understand such subtle distinctions. His fingers twisted, nails biting into the back of his hand until it hurt, because pain, strangely, was the only proof left that the thoughts racing through his head were still his own. Louder this time:

  “Have you never wondered where the gifts the Core bestows upon us actually come from?”

  He raised his eyes to the dim chamber, where shadowy figures drifted like moths around candle flames.

  “Do you merely rejoice every time a new boon appears? When knowledge you’ve never had before seeps into your mind, and your hands perform actions you’ve never conceived of, as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Have you never stopped to consider that there might be a price for the way we live?”

  “Heresy!” A voice cut through the murmurs before they had a chance to settle. “After all the Core has given you, you dare question its guidance?”

  The hairs on the back of Kain’s neck rose like tiny sentinels on duty as he followed the voice upwards.

  Unlike most of the silhouettes present, the High Priest was not sitting. Oh no. He hung from the rafters, suspended by spindly limbs that seemed to possess either far too little—or far too much—autonomy.

  They twitched, scraped, and sought new purchase as though possessed even as the High Priest kept swinging his sceptre with religious fervour.

  “Do you see now, council,” he shouted, “what bringing an outsider into our circle has wrought? A non-believer in our midst! One who dares to oppose the Core’s will! Matters of its existence should be left to us, the rightful members of the—”

  The raised hand of Supreme Chancellor L’shara Duvain cut him off with all the subtlety of a guillotine. “Must I remind you, priest, that it was the Core’s will that brought Master Kain to us?” Her voice was quiet, Calm, and devastatingly effective—the sort of silence that could fell armies.

  Where wrinkles and gray stubble marked the passage of time on Kain’s face, the pale woman seemed entirely unbothered by the years. And when her eyes found his, those same blood-red orbs were every bit as terrifying as they had been the first day they met.

  “And must I remind you, Master Kain,” she continued, her gaze slicing through him like a perfectly honed blade, “that everything you are, everything you have become, is thanks to the Core? Are you ready to forsake all of that over baseless accusations?”

  I am my own man! Kain wanted to shout. I am me because of my struggle, my research, and countless sleepless nights! The Core has nothing to do with— But, of course, the Core had everything to do with it. Without its whispering guidance, he wasn’t even sure he could trust himself to attune a simple rune-lock anymore.

  “Of course not, Supreme Chancellor,” he murmured instead, eyes falling to his hands, smeared with his own blood. Once again, he had dug his nails too deeply. New scars would form, and he would wear them quietly.

  “I’ll accept my punishment,” he said. And, as ever, it felt oddly like the correct thing to do.

  ***

  I feared it. What we were doing. What the Core was gradually becoming. How could I not?

  I was the closest to it. I was its Runemaster, architect of pylons, engineer of the infrastructure that would one day hold its empire together. I saw it grow stronger day by day, but everyone around me remained blinded—blinded by their own greed, envy, and pride.

  I told myself I wasn’t like them. That I was just being cautious. That maybe I'd misunderstood. That maybe the Core wasn’t quite as… hungry as it appeared.

  Of course, by that point, I had already seen what it did to others. What it gave them.

  It gave divine gifts, yes. Power. Insight. Skills that no human hand should have known.

  But it never gave anything for free. That would have been unfair.

  And the Core, you see, was nothing if not fair. It gave generously to those who desired most—and then, quite politely, took everything else.

  Souls were just the beginning.

  And the worst part? It never had to ask.

  People gave themselves willingly.

  Because there is nothing more dangerous than a gift from the gods—especially the kind that comes wrapped in your own ambition.

  But such was our hubris. We believed we knew power. Believed it was something to grasp, contain, and maybe even… understand. That was until She returned—the very being they’d handed over in exchange for that cursed, glowing thing. And then we realized: perhaps we hadn’t understood anything at all.