Chapter 203: A Whispered Warning
The Singing Teeth loomed ahead, jagged peaks jutting skyward like the ribs of a long-dead beast. Their ascent had grown more grueling with every passing hour. Mist hung in the valleys below like a held breath, and the wind howled through the narrow mountain paths, threading through armor and cloaks with chilling precision.
Isla paused at the ridge’s edge. Her boots dug into frost-slicked stone, her breath visible in the thinning air. Something about this place… felt sentient. It didn’t feel alive, not quite. But it was as if it was watching.
Behind her, the others climbed in silence, Alaine and Brienne flanking Raven, who was half-leaning on Vincent, her breath uneven. Cassian, steadier now but pale, kept close to Aryia. Damian moved last, eyes burning faintly, the Umbrazin inside him pacing like a caged beast. Serel had left, she had disappeared into thin air, which didn’t quite surprise them.
It was as if something was pacing… waiting for them. They had all felt it. A pressure in the chest, as though something ancient stirred beneath the Teeth. The same song Cassian had whispered in his sleep, the one Valkan had once chanted, seemed to ride the wind itself, woven into every howl and echo.
“Stop,” Isla said suddenly, her voice low and sharp.
Everyone froze. Even the wind stilled for a heartbeat.
“What is it?” Brienne asked, hand already on her blade.
Isla didn’t answer. Her hand hovered over the cold stone of the cliff wall beside her. There. A glyph, faint, buried beneath frost and time. It doesn’t seem Sombrosi, but older. Cracked like brittle bone, yet still pulsing faintly with warding magic.
“A warning,” Isla murmured. “This place… it’s marked.”
Vincent moved closer, brushing aside snow. “Can you read it?”
“I don’t have to,” Isla said, a chill prickling her spine. “It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be felt. This whole path was sealed.”
Raven stepped forward, narrowing her eyes at the glyph. “This wasn’t done by the Elders.”
“No,” Isla agreed. “This was a Sealholder’s ward.”
Aryia shifted beside Cassian, her brow furrowed. “Then why is it broken?”
Isla didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. The jagged cracks spoke for themselves.
The spell had been deliberately fractured. Whatever had been sealed here was meant to stay buried and someone had let it out.
Why here? Isla thought. Why this place?
They pressed on. Every step deeper into the Teeth was a step into silence. There were no birds and no beasts. Just the whistle of the wind and the low hum of something unnatural.
Then the scent came, cloying and sharp, like iron-rich blood and something wrong. Rotten lilies. Wet parchment burned at the edges.
“Stop,” Isla whispered again.
She’d barely spoken the word when the mist ahead parted.
They stood in the entrance of a hollowed basin. An ancient ruin lay in the valley below, pillars broken like snapped limbs, runes scorched into stone and at its center, pulsing like a sick heart, a fissure bled light into the sky. Pale blue and black, umbrazin laced with something holy and twisted.
“They opened another Cradle,” Damian said hoarsely.
But Isla’s eyes weren’t on the fissure.
They were on the woman standing beside it, alone, wrapped in a tattered dark cloak, her face pale and bare. Her hair, raven-black, spilled down her back in tangles. She held no weapon, yet Isla’s hand flew to her own.
Because she recognized her.
“…Serel?” Vincent murmured.
But it wasn’t.
This woman looked like Serel. Even moved like her. But her gaze, empty. It was neither cruel nor kind. Just… hollow. As though her soul had been scorched clean.
She opened her mouth, and her voice echoed, soft and discordant. “You should not have come.”
No one spoke.
She tilted her head, studying each of them, eyes pausing on Isla last.
“The song’s already begun,” she said. “The god beneath the Teeth is stirring.”
“Who are you?” Isla asked.
“I am what remains of the warning,” the woman said. “Of what was buried to stop him.”
She then suddenly vanished.
There was no flash of light, no cry, just mist, curling where she had been, and the faint scent of lilac and cinders.
Brienne cursed under her breath.
“What the hell was that?” Vincent asked.
Damian took a slow step forward, his gaze on the fissure. “A soul fragment,” he said. “They burned her into the stone. A guardian.”
“Of the god?” Raven asked.
“No,” Isla answered. “Of us. To keep us from waking it.”
She knelt beside the ruin’s edge, her hand grazing the blackened runes. She didn’t need to read them. The magic, though aged, spoke to her blood. This was the place where one of the first Sealholders had fallen. The cradle had been set as a tomb, not a birthing place and someone had inverted the magic.
“They’re feeding power into the wrong places,” Isla whispered. “Breaking seals, raising gods, twisting the ley lines. That song Cassian’s humming, it’s not just prophecy, it’s more like an instruction.”
A sound echoed then, soft at first, like the grinding of stone. But then it became louder. A tremor occurred and then the ground cracked.
Isla barely had time to shout before the stone gave beneath them. Vincent grabbed Raven. Aryia pulled Cassian back. Brienne and Alaine pivoted toward the cliffs alongside Leo who had gone ahead to scout but it was Isla and Damian who fell straight into the collapse.
Darkness swallowed them.
The fall wasn’t long, but the landing jarred the breath from her lungs. Isla rolled, her back slamming into stone. She coughed, the air thick with dust and something burning.
“Damian?” she called.
“I’m here,” his voice rasped from somewhere to her left.
A moment passed and then his hand found hers in the dark. It was warm, real. But the moment was short-lived because a whisper slithered through the cavern, dry and childlike.
“I know your name…”
Isla stiffened.
“I know your blood,” the whisper said again. “And I know what you are.”
Then hundreds of pinpricks of light opened in the dark, they were eyes and they weren’t human-looking.
Damian’s Umbrazin flared to life. The things in the cavern hissed. Isla drew her blade. The metal rang, and something inside her cracked open.
“I am not afraid of gods,” she whispered.
Then the fight began.