The entrance to the tunnel yawned wide in the dark tunnel. The two companions had found it after digging through the weathered rubble of a collapsed church that had been left to bleach like bones beneath a scorching sun in the salt-blasted desert wind. Above it had been bright and furnace hot. Here, it was black and silent, as though the earth itself had forgotten how to breathe.

  Korran stood at the edge, his boots pressed into crumbling stone, one hand resting lightly on the worn grip of the axe slung at his side. It had belonged to his brother. It still did, in some deeper, unburied sense.

  “Looks inviting,” said Ardyn, peering into the gloom beside him. “Ten gold says it smells like dead priests and moldy sermons.”

  Korran gave no reply. He rarely did when Ardyn joked, and the half-dwarf had learned to take his friend’s silence as a kind of permission.

  After clearing the rubble they had made their way through collapsed tunnels and down crumbling staircases that had once been elegantly carved from the limestone, now barely strong enough to be considered stone at all, crumbling underfoot. The hallways and carved architecture had eventually given way to the darker, older construction that place had been built upon.

  The two descended without ceremony and with few words between them. They had done this before—old ruins, forgotten shrines, hidden vaults with names lost to time and rot. Often they had to evict whatever creature, scavenger, or bone-worshipping cult had taken up residence in the absence of the original owners. So far this one had been empty, but the emptiness brought Ardyn no comfort.

  This place was different. This one felt like a hinge between worlds, even to Ardyn who was far more comfortable with a blade in his hand than he was with a book or scroll. This was a place where something ended, Ardyn thought, and shivered.

  As they delved, Ardyn saw what this place was, or what it had once been used for; a reliquary of the dead. Pockets carved into the weathered stone cradled long-dead remains of people who had once been carefully laid to rest here. Crudely-forged bronze brackets held the rotted remains of torches that would have once lit the way for whatever priests or clerics traversed these halls, performing their sacred rites. The ossuary was older than the catacombs above, carved into the limestone like a wound left to fester. Bone mosaics lined the walls—skulls set in spirals, femurs woven into columns, jawbones framing the archways like silent, laughing sentinels. Every inch reeked of ritual and decay.

  Korran moved with purpose, his dark cloak whispering over the stones. “The Black Salt Cult buried their lost here,” he murmured, more to himself than to Ardyn. “Those who had no names… or who gave them up.”

  “Sounds cozy,” Ardyn muttered. “Next time let’s rob a bakery instead. Maybe one haunted by aggressive muffins.” His stomach rumbled at the thought of food, especially something besides the dry, flavorless hard tack they had been eating for weeks as they navigated the desert at night and tried to shelter from its scorching heat during the day.

  But Korran’s eyes were locked forward. He wasn’t distracted by hunger. He wasn’t here for treasure. Not really. There had been plenty of temples swallowed by sand, a library buried by an act of some long-forgotten god, a fortress being slowly clawed back into the earth by the twisted forest it once inhabited. Those places had mostly been dead-ends, a pun Ardyn had leaned on heavily through the years. Places full of promise that never delivered the knowledge Korran sought, though they did occasionally cough up enough in interesting relics and valuable trinkets to continue to fund their constant excursions. There had even been a few times they were so flush with coin that Korran was able to sequester himself in a musty, scroll-filled library for weeks while Ardyn drank himself into oblivion at the local tavern. Until the money ran out, or until Korran lighted upon some new tidbit about his precious Gate. That’s what they were after; some sort of portal to the netherworld. As far as Ardyn understood it anyway.

  The scuff of Korran’s boot brought the stocky man’s attention back to the present. At the chamber’s heart stood a raised platform of polished obsidian, shaped like an altar wreathed in coiling, thorned runes. The walls around it bowed inward unnaturally, as though space itself resisted the presence of what was buried below.

  Korran stepped forward, pulling from his satchel a polished, jet-black simulacrum of a human skull, the eye sockets filled with a brilliant, clear crystal that reflected and refracted the meager torch-light coming from Ardyn. It had been a relic taken from the wreckage of an old monastery where monks had once whispered truths through stitched lips. Ardyn was floored when Korran told him he couldn’t sell it. It would have kept the half-dwarf soaked with good Korishan wine for a month straight.

  Ardyn’s gaze returned to the tall, obsidian plinth. “What is that?” Ardyn whispered, as if afraid to wake the dead.

  Korran knelt and placed the skull into a shallow depression at the top of the stone slab.

  A whisper slithered through the air. The bones on the walls trembled.

  The symbol beneath him flared — darkness pulled into motion, curling upward like smoke, like fingers brushing the edge of memory. With a sound that made Ardyn grit his teeth at its intrusion into the stillness, a chunk of the dark wall behind the altar began to slide away, some mechanism dragging it into a pocket in the stone.

  Behind him, Ardyn tensed. “You’re sure this isn't going to get us killed?”

  “No,” Korran said softly, and moved to enter the dark passageway. He could feel what he was after, reaching out towards him from somewhere down that tunnel - somewhere deeper. The Black Gate - a portal to that other place, the place many referred to as the Veil.

  He didn’t say what he truly feared — that the Veil was not a place one entered. It was a place that took you. He had seen it. Touched it. Died in its shadow and returned, somehow, to the living. That’s the day he had met Ardyn - the day he burned and rose again from the ashes.

  Even before that day Korran had been driven with a dark purpose; a thirst for knowledge of the Veil, of what existed beyond death, and whether the world of the living could ever enter that space. Not out of a lust for power, but from a deep shame. A voice haunted his sleep. A guilt clung to his soul like frostbite that would not thaw. A name always lingering on his tongue like a bitter aftertaste.

  Kaelin. His brother.

  If there was even a chance Korran could find his brother beyond the Gate — could see him, speak to him, undo the long-aching wound — then he would pay any price.

  Even if it meant crossing a threshold no one returned from unchanged.

  Korran stood still as the darkness bled outward—slow and silent, not shadow, not smoke, but a presence. Cold and watching. It didn’t roar or rush or scream. It waited. Like it knew he would come.

  “Gods,” Ardyn muttered, the word hollow in the stillness. “That thing's not a door. It’s a damn mouth.” Korran let out the smallest of breaths, almost a scoff, then stepped through the stone entryway into what lay beyond.

  Ardyn followed. Ardyn always followed. He had been following ever since that day, when he pulled a naked, wild-eyed man whose skin was so pale it resembled parchment, weak and fragile, from the funeral pyre he had burned in the night before.

  Beyond the threshold, the air was thicker, colder - the press of time settling around Ardyn. The kind of cold that clung to your bones, whispering that he did not belong here. That he had never belonged anywhere.

  The path twisted down, and the stone beneath their boots changed. Not carved, not laid. Grown. As though the world beyond that altar had birthed it from its own marrow.

  Ardyn’s hand never left the hilt of his glaive, his other hand holding up the guttering, flickering torch - even it seemed to be affected by the oppressive nature of this place. He kept glancing behind them, checking to make sure nothing was following them, and desperately trying to convince himself that the door hadn’t slid shut silently behind them.

  Korran walked ahead, eyes sharp, shoulders tight with purpose. He looked almost serene. But Ardyn had seen that look before—on men who had nothing left to lose. Korran’s eyes had grown even more haunted of late, as they seemed to get closer and closer to his prize after years of searching, piecing together clues, bartering for passage to obscure corners of the world and having to contend with all manner of danger along the way.

  The passageway sloped downward, the walls slick with condensation as the air grew colder yet, and then the neck of the long tunnel opened into a cavernous room, the ceiling so high above them the torchlight failed to reach it. On either side of the room were lined statues that towered over the pair, seemingly carved from the walls of the room; robed figures with eyeless faces and hands cupped in prayer. One had its jaw wrenched open too wide, as if screaming. Another cradled something that might have once been a child.

  The companions didn’t speak, stepping as lightly through the room. Even Korran seemed to be loath to make any more noise than a whisper so as not to disturb the silent guardians.

  Then came the sound—distant at first. A wet, dragging scrape. Like flesh against stone.

  Korran halted, Ardyn taking another step and pausing next to his friend and companion, his eyes squinting into the dark, darting from one of the statues to the next, the echoes and strange acoustics of the room making it hard to tell where the noise was coming from.

  From the shadows ahead, something moved.

  Ardyn figured it was inevitable they would find some creature lurking here in the dark - but what he saw was not a creature. Not in the sense of fur and teeth and claws, as he expected. It was a shape wrapped in funeral linen, limbs too long, body stitched together from pieces that never should have known each other. A guardian, perhaps. Or a punishment against trespassers.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Its head twitched once. It had the same eyeless face as the statues, and Ardyn couldn’t tell if was wearing some strange funerary mask or if it was made of the same polished stone. As his mind tried to make sense of the abomination in front of him, it began to advance.

  Korran had felt the power and the proximity of this place growing like a knot inside his chest since they began this descent, and it was even stronger here.

  His hand glowed faintly violet, veins pulsing with the same unnatural rhythm that hummed through the gate’s remnants behind them. He had studied this magic for years, but there were only a few places in the world where the Veil was present, where he could channel the energy of that place into anything more than parlor tricks of light and shadow. He raised his hand and channeled the arcane flow of that other place. He began a slow incantation in a language the walls of this place hadn’t heard in centuries.

  A pulse of energy lashed outward from his hand at the shambling collection of limbs and pieces. The creature reeled but did not stop its advance.

  Ardyn surged forward, swinging with practiced fury as he let the torch clatter to the ground, gripping his weapon with both hands. The blade of his polearm met the thing’s ribcage with a sickening crunch, but it didn’t fall. It didn’t bleed. It roared an unholy screech that felt like it was tearing Ardyn’s soul from his body.

  “Do you even know what that thing is?” Ardyn shouted, barely ducking under a flailing limb made of twisted sinew and bone.

  Korran’s voice was calm even as he retreated a step. “A sentinel. Bound here to watch over the dead.” Korran leapt back from a wild swing of one of the creatures' unnaturally long limbs. “It’s made from the pieces of those it defeats.” Korran grunted the last words out as he flew backwards, yet again barely escaping the sharp, bony claws protruding from an extended hand.

  “Well, that’s encouraging,” Ardyn growled as he parried another attempt of the sentinel to rake its claws across him, and closed in on the creature.

  The fight lasted just over a minute. This foe might have been new to them - and terrifying, but Ardyn and Korran were practiced, familiar with each other’s movements. They danced with a rhythm that they each knew intimately. Together, they brought it down—not easily, not cleanly. It took too long to die, and when it did, it sighed with foul breath and rot, whatever magic was holding the collection of corpses together coming undone.

  Silence returned. Ardyn picked up the torch and held it over the steaming pile of whatever it was they had just fought. He stepped back again as the body began to dissolve into smoke and stench, leaning on his glaive, panting. “If we see another one of those, I vote we run. Or throw a scholar at it. Someone expendable.”

  Korran offered nothing, and didn’t bother to look for the smirk he knew was planted on Ardyn’s lips. He just stared at the dissolving remains, a faint frown creasing his brow. There was recognition there. Not of the creature itself—but of what it meant.

  “What now?” Ardyn asked, quieter this time.

  Korran looked past him, into the deeper dark. He pulled out a sheaf of papers stuffed haphazardly into a journal bursting at the seams, flipping through until he found the section he wanted. His eyes and fingers traced over the faded ink on the ancient parchment. “There’s a sanctum below.” Korran looked up and tilted his head, as if listening for something faint and far away.

  “It’s calling. I think… I think it remembers me.”

  Ardyn sighed. “Great. We’re being remembered by haunted architecture. Just what I wanted.”

  And yet, he followed.

  They found a hollow in the far side of the cavern that reeked of death and decay - the place the sentinel must have occupied in its vigil. Near that, the cavern narrowed once more into a claustrophobic tunnel, and the two companions forged ahead. Beneath their feet, the path continued its labyrinthine route through the catacombs. They moved, ever onward, ever downward.

  Korran had pieced together his knowledge of this place like a puzzle, the pieces having been scattered to the winds of time and the fortunes of cultures that rose and fell over generations. Notes scribbled in a manuscript, an account of a sacred ritual witnessed by an explorer long ago, cryptic references to powerful magic and rituals inaccurately detailed in a half-burned tome, a poem that recounted a tale of myth or legend. Only the legends and the myths were true; the Veil was real, and somewhere buried in a sanctum beneath a great ocean was a Gate that could bridge this world and that.

  Korran had become a scholar. Of history, of geography, of magic, of the rituals and rites that accompanied the dead. Of languages long forgotten and of places that no living thing remembered. All of it pointed here.

  The sanctum they eventually came to was not a room. It was a hollow in the world.

  The architecture, if it could be called that anymore, was wrong here. The ossuary above had been carefully carved, chiseled stone; worked by craftsmen. The catacombs below were older, less perfect, worn smooth by the passage of eons. Now, as they approached what Ardyn hoped was the end of their descent, stone gave way to something alive. Walls became membranes. Protrusions of bone and marrow jutted out in jagged fractures from the rock itself, the coppery scent of blood replacing the smell of moldy earth.

  The spiraling passage ended in a lip of pale rock, and before them stretched a vast chamber that pulsed, faintly, like something alive. Columns of bone spiraled like trees, each one wrapped in veins of metal that flashed in the meager torchlight.

  Korran took a step forward, and both he and Ardyn felt something reaching out towards them both. Something wanted them to approach. It beckoned.

  Ardyn lingered behind, boots scraping the edge.

  “I don’t like it,” he muttered. “This place moves. It feels like we’re inside something that remembers being alive.”

  Korran didn't answer. His hand had gone to the axe at his side, fingers idly caressing the familiar and well-worn hickory handle, feeling the grooves and dents that generations of use had put into it.

  It was his family’s axe. Kaelin’s axe.

  He carried it always, though he rarely used it. It was too heavy in his hands; hands that were far more accustomed to wielding a quill than a weapon. It had been forged for someone stronger, someone nobler. Someone dead.

  The chamber darkened as they entered—though no flame had gone out, no torch had failed. The light simply… retreated. Pulled inward, toward the monolith at the room’s center. Directing the pair towards it.

  It stood twelve feet high, faceless and unmarked, a pillar of obsidian veined with gold that gleamed with no reflection. Not natural stone. It drank the light, the heat, the sound.

  Korran stepped toward it. The air tightened.

  Ardyn made no move to stop him, but his voice carried.

  “Korran…” Ardyn spoke, his voice cautious, his eyes never leaving the obelisk.

  He paused. Ardyn had never been a scholar, he had no true knowledge of any of this; the veil, the magic Korran had started to wield sporadically and weakly years ago, the history of the dead civilizations whose temples and reliquaries they had looted to get here. But something about this moment spoke to him in a place deep inside. The half-dwarf felt himself tense as he senses that something waited expectantly for Korran to do… something.

  “Whatever that is… it wants something.” Ardyn warned.

  “I know.”

  “Are you sure you’re willing to give it?” Korran’s companion asked. He didn’t see the tightness in Korran’s jaw as he clenched his teeth, the smoldering determination that flickered behind his eyes.

  “Yes.” Was all the pale man who had cheated death said through gritted teeth in response.

  Korran approached the pillar. Each step he took towards the obelisk felt like a moment backwards in time—moments unspooling behind his eyes. Kaelin’s face. The weight of the axe the day he first held it. The promise he made, kneeling beside the ruined body of the only person who had ever truly loved him.

  I’m sorry. The words he had tried to say but failed. The vow made to himself, to the memory of his dead brother, to any god or spirit that would listen. I’ll find a way to tell you myself.

  He hadn’t known what that promise meant then. Now, he did.

  The Veil required a toll. A price. A sacrifice. Nothing passed through it freely. Through all of the cultures, the dead languages, the poems, the riddles, that part was always made clear. There were as many versions of the veil and what it was, or what it represented, as there were civilizations to record them. But the one constant remained; nothing passed through the Veil without a price being exacted.

  The axe slid from its holder with a shiver of metal on leather. He held it before him, one hand on the worn grip, the other tracing the runes etched into the haft; the story of a family legacy that paid him no heed.

  The surface of the obelisk rippled, the veins of gold shifting, sliding through the stone like it was made of water, tracing impossible spirals. A whisper sank into his bones.

  Will you surrender what binds you?

  Korran steeled his will, setting his intention.

  The monolith pulsed once, then dimmed.

  A pause.

  An acknowledgment.

  All around them things began to shift and move. Ardyn grasped his glaive and readied himself to strike whatever it was, but nothing approached. The very walls and floor began to shift in ways that reminded Ardyn more of flesh than of stone - muscles rippling under the black surface of the rock, pushing and pulling things into a different shape.

  The columns of bone and metal retracted and stretched. The smooth floor began to shift like tectonic plates, crashing into each other and thrusting upward into ridges that formed concentric circles around the pair as they stood near the obelisk. The room grew and stretched and tore itself into something that resembled an amphitheater, terraced shelves of stone-turned-flesh rising up all around them.

  Faces began to appear at the dark edges of their vision. Bone-white masks without faces save for the eyes that glowed faintly, the way an animals will glow when reflected by campfire light

  “Korran??” Ardyn asked, using his friend’s name as an appeal for comfort or instruction. Korran raised a hand to hold Ardyn back as the stout man prepared to fight. That’s when Ardyn began to hear it - faint at first, but growing steadily in volume. The dying breath of a soldier. Soft weeping of a new widow. Whispers of countless dead from behind the featureless masks, all watching and waiting.

  Korran turned slowly, looking at all of the faceless eyes that looked back at him. His eyes went wide when he turned around to see the obelisk was gone, and in its place stood a black statue that had no eyes, no mouth. Its face was smooth and featureless, its arms draped in carved shrouds, and it held in one hand a set of scales made from the gold that had veined the stone a moment ago and tangled with sinew that grew from the black stone itself. In the other, a censer crusted with ash.

  It bowed its head slowly as the two looked at it in awe.

  Then a voice, not spoken but pressed into Korran’s mind like a brand:

  Gravetouched. You have come to the Threshold. But not yet the Gate.

  You seek passage. You seek truth. And truth has a toll.

  Speak, or be judged for silence.

  Korran felt the pull immediately. A demand for confession. The weight of it settled on his shoulders like the mantle of a king he was never meant to be.

  He stepped forward.

  Ardyn said nothing. Didn’t move.

  Korran looked down at the axe in his hand. Then up at the faceless statue.

  Korran raised the axe higher—hands trembling, but not in fear. This was no longer about the tomb, or even the Veil. This was about who he would become on the other side. A decision a lifetime in the making, crystalizing into reality before him, as time seemed to stretch itself to accommodate.

  A brother.

  A liar.

  A seeker of forbidden paths.

  His breath caught, and for the first time in this journey, he hesitated.

  The axe remained in his hands.

  Then, finally, he spoke.