Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale, Cracks

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  Those of us who survived that day did not do so unscathed.

  Nor did we do so empty handed.

  We were left with something. Something worse than death: a calling. A whispering, gnawing obligation that made every breath taste of brine and every quiet moment feel like drowning.

  The world we found ourselves in was broken. Cracked, sharp-edged, and waiting to cut anyone stupid enough to get close. And we were. Not out of choice. No matter how far we tried to run, how hard we tried to escape, it pulled us back to that place—made us remember what it once was; what it could be if made whole again.

  The problem was, no matter how carefully you try to glue a world like that back together, the cracks stay. They always stay. They’re patient. They’re loyal. And it’s in those cracks that the most dangerous things crawl in and make themselves at home. And once they’re in…

  They don’t leave. Not ever.

  ***

  The clack of Edrik Kain’s cane echoed across the cobblestones. The street, slick with mist and rain and the kind of damp that had long ago given up ever drying out, reflected the sulking gas lamps. This was Ashenmoor—a place that had once been a city of dreams, and now was mostly mildew, ghosts, and bad decisions preserved in civic stonework.

  Ahead, leaned over the city like it was about to swallow it whole, loomed the last remnant of the Citadel: the church. Not in the way churches usually do, with graceful reaches toward the heavens and stained glass that caught sunlight like a blessing—but in the way a dying man might loom over his own tombstone, squinting suspiciously at the date.

  Once, this had been a metropolis of ambition and marble fa?ades. Now, the mist had eaten half the skyline, and the sea was slowly chewing on the rest. The town had slipped from hopeful port to the sort of town where the paint peeled faster than people smiled, and the sea air corroded both iron and optimism at roughly the same rate. The rain hadn’t stopped in years.

  Kain’s lungs, much like Ashenmoor itself, had never recovered from what happened back then. His coughs rattled out like loose change in an old tin, but he didn’t slow. The cries from inside the church—wailing, thrashing, desperate cries—were growing louder.

  The Ashen Knights last surviving squire stood awkwardly by the church doors—Cassius. His expression was the universal look of someone who’d rather be in bed, or better still, anywhere that wasn’t Ashenmoor.

  “How bad is it?” Kain asked.

  “Bad,” the young man said, flinching as screams, crashing, and the unmistakable sound of something heavy hitting something fragile carried out from inside. Possibly furniture. Possibly people. Possibly both at once.

  “I don’t think they called you here to save her,” he continued, thumbing his sword as though trying to reassure it that everything would be fine. “She was already too far gone last time I saw her. I… I think they just want answers.”

  Another desperate cry rang out from behind him. The kind that usually preceded silence and stains.

  He watched the young man’s hand twitch toward the door, that noble instinct to charge into terrible situations valiantly—and usually fatally—bubbling up inside him.

  Kain, having long ago run out of noble instincts and patience both, scoffed.

  “What answers can I possibly give,” he asked, “when they refuse to listen? I warned them this would happen. I warned them it would keep happening. But no—truth is like mist to these people. They only see it when it’s right in front of their faces and they’re already walking into a lamppost.”

  Not that he was in any position to preach. His life was a slow relapse dressed up as wisdom. He carried as many sins as the worst of them. More, probably.

  The screaming calmed.

  “You should be able to enter now,” Cassius said with careful neutrality, reaching for the handle without meeting Kain’s eyes. The young man was clever in that way. He knew the things he shouldn’t comment on.

  The scent hit Kain the moment the church doors creaked open—a pungent cocktail of incense, seawater, and blood.

  Inside, the hall was dim and sullen. Shadows clung to the corners like parishioners who’d stopped believing but stayed for the free wine. A handful of figures stood around the altar—big, quiet men with the look of people who’d once been fishermen and now wrestled darker catches.

  Two acolytes hovered at a nervous distance, while the High Priest loomed grimly over the scene, hands folded in prayer or resignation—it was hard to tell the difference these days. And in the centre, beneath the struggling weight of three strong arms and one slightly panicked elbow, was today’s patient.

  Or, more accurately, today’s victim.

  Even as she gurgled like a drowning songbird and twisted in ways no human body should, Kain didn’t feel particularly sorry for the woman on the floor. Sympathy was a luxury he’d misplaced years ago, and in her current state, she wasn’t a person as much as she was…something else. She clawed at the flagstones with taloned fingers. Her nose had narrowed into slits, her mouth had decided that more teeth was better, and her hair was retreating before a steady advance of scales.

  Several of the men holding her down looked as though they’d wrestled a wildlife exhibit. Torn clothes, bleeding arms, that sort of glassy-eyed that suggested the mind had stepped out for a break while the body finished panicking.

  “Who?” Kain curtly asked, as though he were inspecting a shipment rather than a half-transformed woman.

  “Miss Adlington,” murmured one of the acolytes, wringing his hands as if to twist guilt into a more comfortable shape. “She was a devotee, came here nearly every day to—”

  “Evidently, she wasn’t devoted enough,” the High Priest interrupted, coldly. He didn’t look at the woman, or the blood, or the broken pews. He just moved down the aisle, extinguishing candles and capping incense pots with the air of someone tidying up after a particularly disappointing sermon. “Had she been, she wouldn’t be in this sorry state.”

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  One of the men pinning the creature—Miss Adlington, or what remained of her—flinched. Kain’s eyes caught him and, after a brief moment of pity, recognized Mister Adlington in his disheveled state. Which made the whole scene even messier, though not, he noted, surprising.

  “Bring her to the Clatterwane,” Kain said, ignoring the priest’s remark. If faith alone could solve their problems, months of sleepless nights would certainly have been wasted. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  ***

  Getting them to cooperate was, as always, the hardest part. Not the patients—their screaming and flailing was predictable, even comforting in its way—but everyone else.

  “Throw them into the ocean,” Kain ordered, setting down the syringe with the calm of a man that had very little faith in anyone else’s competence. He rubbed at his fingers absently; they still stung where the woman had tried to bite them off. He’d told her husband it was a sedative he was giving her, which was technically true, in the same way that a guillotine technically relieved headaches.

  Silence answered him.

  The two acolytes were staring, frozen, their faces carefully arranged somewhere between horror and religious doubt. They looked like men who’d just walked in on something that would require an entirely new chapter in their holy book.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” he repeated, annoyance threading through his voice. “I have no use for leftovers when there’s a fresh subject at hand. Throw them into the ocean.”

  Their silence persisted.

  There were reasons few people were ever allowed near Kain’s lab. Jars lined the shelves, containing eyes that ranged from uncannily human to eerily aquatic; binders whose contents would make a tailor blush; flayed skin and scales arranged with meticulous care; and teeth, ripped free at the root, lay spread out alongside severed limbs and sharp tools.

  And along the walls, the original owners of these curiosities were chained.

  If the church offered faith and prayer—sweet, comforting broths for the worried soul—Kain’s work was the bitter medicine that pointed out the infection had already reached the bone. The church didn’t like him, and he didn’t much care for the church, but necessity made strange bedfellows.

  “Go!” Kain barked when the acolytes kept hesitating. They were young, soft around the soul, the sort who still prayed before doing something dreadful. “And make sure no one sees you. I shall be here all night, and I do not wish to be disturbed.”

  ***

  Kain paused.

  Hesitation was not something a man who regularly applied surgical implements to the uncooperative should indulge in. Yet here he was, one hand loosely holding the pliers, the other her eyelid, and felt—yes—unease.

  He’d done this before. Many, many times. Enough that the motions should have been mechanical, detached, clean. Yet there it was again—that unpleasant twinge behind the ribs, the feeling that something, somewhere, was watching him.

  The pupil staring back at him from the pried open eye was not the hollow black pit of the dead, it noticed. What should have been vacant, glassy, the ocular equivalent of a “no one home” sign nailed to the soul, offered the faintest glimmer of something present. Something that shouldn’t have been.

  After the amount of arsenic he’d put in her veins, Miss Adlington ought to have been beyond noticing the end of the world. And yet… that faint glimmer, that near-life in its depths, reminded him of Her.

  Was it paranoia? Nerves? Perhaps the side effects of prolonged exposure to formaldehyde fumes and the persistent chanting of the damned?

  For months now, that same suspicion had crept in the back of his mind.

  Back then, before the fall, the Ashen Knights didn’t grow scales. They didn’t hiss or claw or lunge at their comrades. They simply died, as decent soldiers were meant to. But this…

  This was Her curse, lingering like a debt unpaid.

  He shook his head.

  You’re imagining things, he told himself. She has no reason to—

  The groan of floorboards shifting interrupted his thoughts. Somewhere behind him. At the door. Unwelcome.

  “I thought I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed,” he said aloud, hardly caring to mask the annoyance in his voice. But the presence at the door didn’t leave. It grew, settling over the room like an unwanted scent.

  Then came the sound—the unmistakable, leisurely clink of his tools being picked up by someone else’s hands.

  “Hey! Don’t—”

  The rest of Kain’s protest tripped, fell, and died somewhere between his throat and the floor. Standing in the doorway of his carefully curated madness was…

  Her.

  She looked… ordinary now. A woman in a faded dress, hair dark and unassuming, the kind of face you could pass in the street without feeling your soul rearrange itself. Calmly, she inspected the syringe she’d picked up. As if she were just another curious visitor.

  Time had passed, yes, but even a hundred years couldn’t dull his memory of those eyes—eyes that seemed less to observe than to remember what they’d already consumed.

  “It is a curious thing,” she said softly, turning the syringe between her fingers. “To free the little trout from the line, release it into the water, only to watch it jump back into your lap before you can even hook fresh bait. All on its own.”

  Her gaze found his, and there it was again—that sense that she was not looking at him, but through him, into some older, more embarrassing part of his soul. “Tell me, little trout—was the freedom I offered you not good enough?”

  “Wha—” was as far as Kain got before the rattle of chains cut him off.

  An angered, hissing snarl.

  He snapped around, the words turning to ash in his mouth. The woman he’d left half-dead was no longer half of anything. She was alive—violently, terribly alive—thrashing against her restraints with the energy of someone who had every intention of sharing their suffering.

  “How curious,” She murmured, gliding past him. “But also unpleasant, to see my own gifts wielded in such a… crude manner.”

  It wasn’t even a gesture, really. Just a tilt of her head. A lazy, almost dismissive movement.

  There was no flash of light, no swirling runes, no dramatic music.

  Miss Adlington simply changed.

  One moment, she was all scales and screams—the kind of creature you needed four strong men and many a long prayer to restrain. The next, she was just Miss Adlington. Pale, trembling, frightened. Human. For the first time in hours, possibly days, human.

  Then something inside her liquefied.

  With all the ceremony of a wave retreating from the shore, she collapsed. Lifeless. Water, dark and briny, trickled from her mouth.

  “So, this,” She murmured, trailing her fingers across the dead woman’s cheek, “is the power they have been chasing.” There was something oddly affectionate in her tone, like a teacher discovering that her worst student had, against all odds, managed to burn down the classroom. “Who would have guessed that the little trout who jumped willingly out of the water would have so much to tell me?”

  Her gaze turned toward Kain.

  It was no longer a lab. There were no chains, no tables, no walls—only a vast, roiling ocean that went on forever in every direction. He was standing in the middle of it, weightless, drowning on dry land. Her eyes were the abyss, and the abyss had finally remembered his name.

  “Though, one wonders,” She said softly, “how the little trout himself has managed to play with such powers and yet… not be swallowed whole.

  “Ah.” Her voice smoothed the edges of the storm that had been building in Kain’s chest. Her gaze followed the trembling finger he’d pointed across the lab. “Of course. The trout is a clever one. That’s why he was wanted. That’s why he was needed. He didn’t leave the water out of stupidity—he did it because he wished to see the surface. He did it believing, quite earnestly, that he wouldn’t end up boned and filleted.”

  Kain wanted to shout, to plead, to tell her to stop before she did whatever it was she was about to do. But the words stayed locked inside him, trapped in the iron box of his ribs as she drifted across the room.

  “You found a way to escape its call,” She said, holding up the swirling, ticking device now caught in her pale fingers. It looked small in her grasp, but then, so did an entire world. “You found a way—and yet you kept it to yourself, thinking that if you had enough subjects to dissect, you could find the answers you so desperately seek.”

  Kain’s mouth worked soundlessly before words stumbled out, tripping over each other in their haste to exist. “I–I can fix this…”

  But She wasn’t listening. She was looking at the bauble with the sort of fascination one reserves for their new favorite child.

  “You’re a twisted little thing, aren’t you, Mister Trout?” She murmured. The words weren’t cruel, merely… observational. “Still, I suppose I should be thanking you.” Her eyes, dark and bottomless, gleamed with something he couldn’t comprehend. “You’ve just answered a question I didn’t even know I was asking.”