Chapter 2: The Children who weep wrong

Grimpel's POV

Ah, the smell of impending violence.

Like cinnamon—

If cinnamon had been beaten to death with a shovel and buried under three curses and a bad childhood.

Clive trudged forward, heavy with that signature mix of righteous fury and deeply repressed emotional damage. Poor lad looked like a broken statue someone had tried to patch with guilt and wet cloth.

His hair was a mess. His jaw locked like he was always chewing secrets.

And me? I bobbed behind him like a cursed windchime, tied by a leather strap to his pack. Not that I minded. I've had worse travel arrangements. Like that time I spent three years in a warlock's sock drawer.

I should probably clarify.

I'm a skull.

Yes, that's right. Bone. Hollow. Enchanted.

One eye socket chipped clean through. The other glows faintly—not with wisdom, no—but something old and possibly malevolent. But let's not dwell on that. We're having fun.

> "Do you have to storm around like a wounded bear with a vendetta?" I asked, mostly to annoy him. "Even the trees are starting to pity you."

> "Shut up, Grimpel," he snapped.

Ah. Classic Clive.

Stoic. Bitter. Easily provoked.

Exactly the kind of hero the moon loves to watch break open.

The forest ahead thinned—and that's when I felt it.

Stillness.

Not the peaceful kind.

The kind that means something is watching, and deciding whether you're worth the effort to kill.

No wind. No birds.

Only the whisper of twitching moss, breathing like a sick thing.

The air was saturated with old spellwork—thick and sour, like soup gone to rot. I could taste the sigils layered beneath the soil, all warped and pregnant with grief.

> "Hold up," I muttered. My eye flared, unbidden. "She's left remnants."

Clive didn't slow.

He never did when I asked nicely.

Then they came.

From the treeline, crawling and twisting—things born from failed incantations and unloved memories. Maedra's spawn. Her unfinished children.

They looked like they'd been stitched together by someone who understood anatomy only as a suggestion.

Too many legs. Not enough eyes.

One walked backward.

Another laughed with a voice I hadn't heard in centuries.

> "Ah," I murmured, "there she is."

Clive froze.

He always hesitated with them.

He'd faced warlocks, revenants, and a priest who ate tongues like grapes—but Maedra's creations? They reminded him of things he hadn't buried deep enough.

> "Hey," I said, keeping my voice light, "you may want to wave that fancy staff around before your spine becomes a chew toy."

Then one of the horrors lunged—

And Clive finally moved.

He slammed his staff down. A sharp crack followed, and violet fire erupted from the ground, curling around him like a wounded halo.

Messy casting. Sloppy with the third rune.

But it did the job.

The smaller creatures shrieked and stumbled backward.

Except one.

A long-limbed horror with a stitched face and sobbing mouths on its knees.

It launched through the flame.

Clive didn't have time to cast again.

So I did something I wasn't supposed to do.

I hummed.

Low. Old. The kind of hum you don't hear—you feel.

It slid between the cracks of reality and pulled shadows back where they belonged.

The stitched creature froze mid-air. Twitched.

And then it screamed like something that remembered being human—

—before collapsing into a pile of gray petals.

Clive didn't notice.

Good.

He mustn't notice.

Not yet.

That hum? That wasn't in any bard's handbook.

> "How many more?" he asked, panting, chest heaving.

I swiveled ever so slightly, scanning the edge of the clearing.

> "Three. Maybe four. One's chewing the wrong direction, so who knows."

He didn't flinch. Just whispered another incantation and loosed it with fury.

They burned.

Not cleanly.

Screaming all the way down.

Clive stood in the smoking ash, shoulders high, fingers twitching like they wanted to strike again.

But there was nothing left to kill.

> "This isn't normal," he muttered.

> "No," I agreed. "This is Maedra."

The name was a scar. You could hear it in his voice.

> "They weren't guarding the shard," he said.

> "No. They were mourning it."

He didn't reply.

That's the thing about grief spells.

They don't protect. They remember.

They bleed echoes into the ground until the whole forest forgets what silence is.

Maedra was good at that.

Leaving grief behind like breadcrumbs.

Each soul fragment Clive claims brings back more than just memory. It brings back the weight. The consequences. The rot he left buried.

And for me?

Each shard brings us closer to the gate.

The place she locked me out of.

The place he still doesn't know exists.

Clive doesn't realize it yet—but every time he bleeds to pull himself back together…

He's building the key.

I hummed again, softly. Just to feel the way the world flinched.

> "You're smiling," Clive said, turning slightly.

Oops. Too loud.

> "I don't have lips," I replied cheerfully. "But yes. This is shaping up to be a very character-building evening."

"I hear something I don't think you got them all" I said

What, rather who is that?