Ash Protocol
They didn't tell him where they were taking him.
Two handlers and a silent escort of bone-armored guards marched Dareth through a lift shaft that groaned as it descended. The walls of the shaft were smooth, pale metal, inlaid with strips of fossil composite that faintly pulsed in rhythm with the platform's descent. The deeper they went, the less the facility looked like a prison, and more like something clinical, built to dissect.
Dareth didn't speak. After what happened in the Silencing Room, he knew better.
When the lift stopped, the doors opened onto a long corridor unlike the ones above. No crude stone. No containment runes. Just polished floor, seamless walls, and thin white lighting strips running like veins across the ceiling. The air was colder here, but cleaner. Not the sterilized chemical cold of medical chambers, but the kind of stillness that came from things being kept quiet for a very long time.
A black symbol was painted on the floor near the lift doors. A ring, broken at one side, with a jagged line cutting through it. Dareth didn't recognize the sigil, but it made the back of his neck itch.
They turned left, passing a sealed door that hissed when they neared it. Small black glyphs blinked on its surface, each one flickering softly in sync with the mark beneath Dareth's skin. Whatever these symbols were, they responded to him. Or to the thing inside him.
Finally, they stopped.
One of the handlers pressed a small square device to the door. A scanner blinked. The door retracted into the floor, revealing a new room.
This wasn't a cell.
There was no cot. No personal effects. Not even a place to sit. The walls were a mix of bone-smooth white and fossil-lined gray, etched with shallow depressions where strange script ran horizontally like text. A single panel was inset in one wall, a square, seamless slot large enough to pass a meal tray through, though it was closed now.
One wall was entirely translucent, more glass than fossil this time. Behind it, a dark observation chamber. The lights inside were off, but Dareth could sense presence. Someone was watching.
"Inside," the handler said.
Dareth stepped forward. As soon as he entered, the door sealed behind him with a soft hiss.
Then silence.
Even the hum of fossil systems had been reduced here. The floor didn't vibrate. The light didn't flicker. The air tasted of nothing.
On the wall opposite the observation glass, thin script slowly lit up:
"SUBJECT 022 — CLASSIFIED SIGIL TYPE — STATUS: UNDER ASH PROTOCOL."
Dareth stepped closer.
He didn't know what "Ash Protocol" meant, but the words felt heavy. Like being declared a type of weapon too dangerous to handle, but too valuable to throw away.
He sat on the floor.
No clock. No boy.
Not yet.
There were no announcements. No knocks. Just the hiss of the wall seam opening.
Two handlers entered, faceless behind veil-masks, identical in every way but the glyphs stitched into their sleeves. They didn't acknowledge Dareth. One held a small obsidian plate that pulsed softly with amber light, the other a black cord, heavier than the one used before. They didn't speak.
Dareth stood without being asked.
They bound his wrists with the cord. He was led through a short corridor, the floor a seamless slab of fossil-tinted glass. Beneath it, Dareth could see faint bone lines etched into the understructure, spirals, runes, remnants of some enormous creature long buried under purpose.
They reached a room without doors, just a sliding wall that peeled aside like a curtain of stone. Inside was a chamber unlike the others.
At its center floated a single chair, suspended by thick metal arms connected to the ceiling. It wasn't just a seat. It was a harness. It cradled a figure Dareth didn't recognize, a man, or something once a man, stripped to the waist. The figure's skin was gray-white, ashen, and parts of his chest had begun to petrify, fossil veins crawling up through the flesh like tree roots growing the wrong way.
The man was awake.
He didn't blink. His eyes were clouded but aware. His mouth was open slightly, lips cracked, breath shallow.
Handlers moved around the chamber. They wore no armor, only the long robes and insignia of House Vireth's inner archivists. Their hands moved in rhythm, tapping relic keys on a console nearby.
The fossil glass that separated Dareth from the room shifted from transparent to translucent, casting everything in pale gray.
"Begin sequence," a voice said from above.
A relic, jagged, dull, shaped like a broken tusk, descended from a mechanical arm and hovered over the restrained man's chest.
The moment it neared him, the man's back arched. His skin glowed faintly along spiraling lines, his Sigil.
It activated.
A soundless scream stretched across the room. His body trembled. Flames, pale, smokeless, began to rise from the fossil veins.
They didn't stop. One of them spoke calmly:
"Instability confirmed. Memory graft incomplete. Subject incompatible."
Then another relic, this one spherical and smooth, descended.
It pulsed once. The man's glow snapped out. His body seized. Then it began to smoke, not from outside, but from within. His flesh blackened like overcooked bark. His head tilted back. Then stillness.
Dareth stared, frozen.
No one screamed. Not even the man.
The relic arms retracted. Sprays of pale mist flooded the chamber from the ceiling, washing everything down. A low chime rang twice.
The handlers turned to Dareth.
"Subject 022. Observation complete. You will return now."
He didn't move at first.
They didn't wait.
He was guided back in silence, pulse thudding behind his eyes. Back to his cell. Back behind fossil-lined walls.
The window darkened.
Dareth sat against the wall of his cell, eyes fixed on the floor.
The light hadn't changed in hours. Or maybe it had and he'd just stopped noticing. His skin still tingled from the pressure in the observation room, the way the man's Sigil had erupted before turning in on itself. Burned. Emptied.
No one had explained anything. There had been no debrief, no warning, no expression of concern.
He didn't sleep. He wasn't sure he could anymore.
When the handlers returned, they didn't enter. One of them tapped a rune panel beside the glass and stood aside. A new figure walked in, a woman, by shape, draped in layered robes that shimmered with unknown symbols. Her mask was different from the others. Not smooth and blank, but shaped like a serpent's skull. She carried no tools, only a long panel etched with runes and veins of metal that pulsed faintly.
She studied Dareth through the glass. Then the door hissed open.
He didn't rise. He didn't speak.
She stepped inside and circled the room slowly, dragging her fingers across the fossil-etched walls. Wherever she touched, the script responded, lighting up with a warm gold pulse that faded a few seconds after.
Then she crouched in front of him.
She lifted the panel and pressed it against the air. It hovered there, reacting to the mark under his skin. Symbols shifted in response, complex shapes that moved in slow, layered motion.
"You are not stable," she said. "The Silencing Room was not supposed to fail. It has not failed in three hundred and twelve years since it's creation."
Dareth said nothing.
Her eyes, visible through the mask, were gray and cold.
"The echo in your mark suggests predatory behavior," she said. "Your Sigil is not passive. It is not content to remain dormant. It is seeking resonance."
He blinked. "What does that mean?"
She tilted her head. "It means it remembers what it wants to become."
The panel flashed. She tapped one rune.
"Most bearers do not reach the Burning stage without guidance or engineered induction. You did. That makes you useful. But unstable."
He hesitated. "Useful for what?"
She stood.
"We are not authorized to explain that."
He pushed himself up slowly. "Then why are you here?"
She paused at the threshold of the door, then continued walking.
She tapped the panel once more. The door sealed behind her.
Alone again, Dareth turned to the far corner of the room.
The pale boy was standing there.
He hadn't been a moment ago.
"They're not testing your mark anymore," the boy said.
Dareth stared at him. "Then what are they doing?"
The boy smiled.
"They're watching to see if you survive it."
--------
The walls had no corners.
That was the first thing Dareth noticed as he was guided into the next corridor. Everything curved. The ceiling arched high and smooth, lit by strips of amber and gray that gave no warmth. The guards flanking him were silent, their armor whispering with every step. This time, he wasn't restrained, just closely watched.
The corridor stretched long and slow, like the inside of a ribcage that never ended. Dareth didn't ask where they were going. He already knew the answer wouldn't matter.
As they turned a final corner, he saw the tanks.
Dozens of them. Cylindrical, tall, and filled with pale liquid that shimmered faintly in the light. Each tank held a figure suspended within, a person, or the remains of one. Some looked asleep. Others didn't look human anymore.
One tank held a child, no older than ten, with fossil growth spreading from her chest like coral. Another held a man whose skin had hardened to something like obsidian, his body cracked along glowing lines. Many were still. A few twitched.
Dareth's breath slowed. The air felt thinner here.
He stepped forward, drawn without meaning to.
The guards said nothing. They didn't stop him.
He passed a tank near the center of the hall and froze.
Inside, a girl floated, her eyes shut. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her skin was marked with thin lines that pulsed faintly, like veins made of smoke. She looked almost peaceful.
As he watched, her eyes opened.
Just for a moment.
She looked directly at him. Her lips didn't move, but he heard it, clear as a whisper in his own mind.
Run.
Then her eyes closed again.
Dareth stepped back. The air around the tanks buzzed faintly now. Not noise, just the sense of pressure building behind silence.
He turned to the guards.
Neither had reacted.
They gestured forward.
He walked.
The corridor narrowed, turning again. More tanks. More bodies.
The pale boy was suddenly beside him, pacing a few feet away.
Dareth didn't speak. Not yet.
The boy glanced at one of the tanks.
"You still think this is about power," he said. "It's not. Not anymore."
"Then what is it?" Dareth asked.
The boy looked at him.
And then he vanished again, leaving Dareth surrounded by people who were no longer people, all kept asleep by a system that didn't know how to let them go.
Dareth couldn't remember walking back to his cell.
One moment he was standing in the middle of the stasis corridor, eyes locked on tanks that might have once held people. The next, he was alone again, sitting on the floor of the same smooth, bone-walled cell.
His hands shook.
He looked at them, expecting to see cracks of light, the marks of his Sigil flaring again. But they were just hands. Just skin. Pale. Cold.
He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Sleep didn't come. Not like it used to. It wasn't rest now. It was something else.
He drifted.
He stood in ash. Not dust or sand, ash. It clung to his feet and covered the sky. The ribs of something long-dead jutted from the earth like towers. He knew this place, though he had never been here. He could feel the heat of the mark beneath his skin growing stronger, reacting.
A shape stood at the center of the field.
It was tall. Human, at first glance. But too still. Too long in the limbs, and the face was a blur of coal and heat.
The figure raised its hand.
In it was a shard.
Black, sharp, and humming.
Dareth stepped forward, reaching for it.
The mark in his chest burned.
He pulled his hand back.
The shard pulsed. The figure spoke, not with sound, but with a feeling. An expectation.
Take it.
Dareth refused.
He opened his eyes.
The cell was dim again.
He sat up quickly.
At the edge of his cot, resting where nothing had been before, was a shard.
Small. Black. Sharp.
Exactly like the one from the dream.
He didn't touch it.
The pale boy sat in the corner, back to the wall, watching him.
He didn't speak right away.
Then he said, "They didn't put it there."
Dareth didn't look away from the shard. "Then where did it come from?"
The boy tilted his head. "Maybe it found you."
Dareth's voice was quiet. "Why?"
The boy's smile didn't reach his eyes.
Dareth stared at the shard, the pulse beneath his skin matching its glow.
He didn't sleep again that night.