CHAPTER 14: The City That Wasn’t Dead Enough

Mirenth was supposed to be abandoned.

A city swallowed by time and rot after the war two generations ago. No guards. No trade. No hearth fires flickering in crooked windows. Just hollow towers and crumbling spires blanketed by ivy and silence. A forgotten place, too ruined to care about.

But as Bell and the others passed beneath the broken stone gate, they saw otherwise.

There were footprints in the mud.

Fresh ones. Several.

Bell raised a hand, signaling for silence. His mare stepped across the threshold with care, hooves clicking softly on cracked cobblestones. The wind here didn't howl — it whispered, threading through shattered windows and over blood-rusted railings.

"It smells like rot and old copper," Cid muttered, wrinkling his nose. "Like a butcher's shop that forgot it retired."

"It's not fresh blood," Seria murmured, crouching to brush her fingers over a dark stain on a wall. "But not old either."

"I wasn't complaining," Cid said. "It's nostalgic. Reminds me of my uncle's cellar. He pickled everything."

Seria gave him a flat look. "Including relatives?"

"He claimed that was a misunderstanding."

They moved through the city outskirts cautiously. The houses here leaned like drunkards toward each other, roofs collapsed inward like rotted teeth. Windows were gaping holes—black, silent, watching. But not empty.

Bones had been arranged into ritual circles in alleyways. Dried herbs hung in withered bunches from rusted lanterns. Strange symbols, chalked over doors in curling, unfamiliar script, caught the eye like half-remembered words from a fever dream.

Seria knelt beside one doorframe, fingers hovering over the chalk.

"This isn't from the Serpent cult," she whispered. "This is something else. A… ward."

"A ward against what?" Bell asked.

Seria hesitated. Her answer was too long in coming.

"Something old," she finally said. "Or angry."

"Great," Cid said. "So we're just playing occult bingo now. We've had snake freaks, angry fog, voice stones — next up, haunted soup."

"You joke," Seria muttered, "but there are recorded cases of—"

"Nope," Cid said. "If the soup screams, I'm out."

They reached the city square by noon.

The remnants of the old marketplace had been cleared—not recently, but not centuries ago either. Merchant carts had been shoved violently aside, some splintered as if tossed by something strong. The center fountain stood dry, cracked, long robbed of water. Yet, it was strangely clean. No moss. No algae. Just stone.

And in the middle of the fountain's basin… was a man.

Naked.

Tied in thorns.

Dead.

His eyes were missing.

Seria turned away at once, a hand over her mouth. Even Cid, who never took much seriously, blinked and lowered his usual grin.

Bell approached cautiously, jaw tight. The man's skin wasn't just marked—it was branded. Loops and spirals, serpentine sigils that shimmered faintly in the light, coiling like tattoos that meant something worse.

Cid whistled low. "Well. Someone's been busy."

Bell frowned. "No blood trail. Which means he was brought here already dead. But why display him like this?"

Seria's voice shook as she looked back. "It's not a murder."

"What do you mean?" Bell asked.

"It's a message," she said.

Cid raised a brow. "To who?"

Seria didn't answer.

But she didn't have to.

They made camp in the tallest tower still standing—a spire once belonging to Mirenth's old war academy. The stairs groaned beneath their weight, ivy wrapped around the upper balcony like a thorn crown. It was cold, and the walls had gaps where wind whispered through like half-heard secrets.

"We stay one night," Bell decided. "Search what we can. Then move east."

"Agreed," Seria said, unpacking her satchel of tomes and journals.

Cid lay down on the dusty wooden floor with a dramatic sigh and his hands behind his head. "If we're murdered in our sleep, I'm haunting Seria first."

"You'd be the worst ghost," Seria muttered without looking up.

"I'd knock over your ink every time you start writing."

"I'd salt your bones."

"I'd scatter mine just to make it harder for you."

Bell chuckled quietly. It was the only laugh any of them managed that night.

Far from the tower, beyond Mirenth's southern ridge, the figure in shadows knelt beside a campfire that did not burn. The clearing was silent. The bodies of seven men lay scattered across the ground — mercenaries, relic-hunters, information peddlers.

Each had whispered Evelyne's name where it was not meant to be heard.

Each had paid.

Their tongues had been removed.

Their bodies arranged in a perfect seven-pointed star — the same symbol burned into the base stone of the sealed ruin.

A symbol erased from every known tome.

The figure dipped a cloth into a basin of still-warm blood.

Carefully, deliberately, they painted the serpentine mark onto the bark of a tree overlooking the road to Mirenth.

Then vanished without sound.

Back in the tower, Bell stood on the balcony, watching the pines stir under a sky smeared with too many stars. The horizon twisted, clouds coiling into shapes he didn't want to name.

He didn't hear Seria approach until she stood beside him.

"You should rest," she said softly.

He shook his head. "Too much noise in my head."

She didn't press. Instead, she stood beside him in silence.

"I used to think the past was just… facts," she said at last. "Things to learn. Record. Understand. But lately…"

She trailed off.

"But now?" Bell prompted.

"Now it feels alive. Like it's watching us. Remembering us. Like we're not discovering it — it's reaching back."

Bell turned to her. "Do you think we're part of something bigger?"

Seria looked up at the sky. "I think we always were. We just didn't know it yet."

They stood quietly after that, until their hands brushed against one another.

Neither pulled away.

When she turned to go, Seria paused at the top of the stairs.

"Bell?" she asked softly.

"Yeah?"

"If something happens to me… don't stop."

He stared at her.

Then nodded.

"Same to you."

Later that night, Cid shifted in his bedroll and sat up groggily.

He stared out the tower window, squinting.

"…Was that a ghost or just Bell being poetic again?" he mumbled. Then louder: "If anyone's going out to monologue in the moonlight, bring snacks!"

Nobody responded.

"Unbelievable," he muttered. "I nearly die of mysterious emotional trauma and no one even shares a biscuit."

He rolled over and promptly kicked over Seria's ink bottle.

"Whoops."

At dawn, beneath the city wall, in an alley too narrow for horses and too forgotten for guards, a new corpse was found.

Face-down.

Throat slit.

No one saw who did it. No one knew why.

But pinned to the back of the figure's robe, where the sigil of a ruined noble house once lay…

Was a silver scale.

Flat.

Perfect.

Cold.

It hadn't existed for over twenty years.

And those who once wore it?

They were supposed to be extinct.