The morning sun tore through the heavy blanket of clouds, casting a brilliant light across the expanse of Yanaha.
Mount Kharok, the dead volcano sharing the land with the ancient forest, glittered under a pristine crown of snow jewels, its long-extinguished nature masked by winter so completely it could easily be mistaken for a permanent peak of the high mountains.
Beneath the retreating fog, however, the Yanaha forest harboured no peace. The royal guards occupied it.
Formidable and fiercely loyal, these elite soldiers served as the king's eyes and ears, distributed equally across every corner of the realm to monitor the pulse of the kingdom.
While the villagers hundreds of miles from the capital might never set eyes upon their sovereign, they all knew the royal guards. Towering as tall as elephants, these giants were recruited from the distant southern reaches of the world. They carried no swords and wore no armour, riding atop beasts even more monstrous than themselves—colossal warhorses that dwarfed the riders they carried.
Four of these towering mounts now stood quietly beneath the trees, carrying the giant sentinels in a silent ring around the corpses hanging from the gnarled branches.
As the guards reined in to inspect the grim display, the rotten rope gave way and one of the corpses fell. The body plummeted—and one of the guards reached out from his saddle and caught it bare-handed.
Upon contact, the corpse squashed like a ripe, over-soft fruit. The giant did not flinch. He simply turned his massive head toward his commander, waiting for the order on what to do next.
***
A few miles away from the Yanaha.
We've found something!" a man shouted from within the dig site.
He dug his bare hands into the sludge, scraping away layer after layer until a small, tightly wrapped woollen pouch emerged from the dark soil.
A tall wooden ladder reached from the pit to the surface. Clutching the fragile find like a newborn bird, the worker ascended, stepping out into the biting wind and handing the pouch directly to an older man standing at the perimeter.
This man was Lyarupung, the head of this archaeological team.
Lyarupung had the tired, heavily lined eyes of any old man who had spent too many decades staring into dust and dim lamplight, his posture slightly stooped with the weight of the years.
Without a word, he turned on his heel and strode toward the warmth of the main archive tent, slipping inside away from the biting chill.
With careful, deliberate hands, Lyarupung worked the damp wool open. Inside lay two brittle, water-stained sheets of ancient parchment. He gently cleaned away the clinging silt with a soft sponge, holding the pages up to the amber glow of the oil lamp.
Faint, dark strokes began to bleed through the wet fibres, coming together in intricate, jagged characters.
"Ancient script," Lyarupung whispered, the words catching in his throat.
He didn't hesitate. He stepped to the tent flap and summoned a guard. "Bring Vilina."
Moments later, the tent flap parted, letting in a swirl of cold wind as Vilina stepped inside. She held a clay cup of deep red wine between her fingers, sipping it leisurely. In her early thirties, she possessed a quiet, disarming composure—brilliant, cynical, and effortlessly elegant, wearing her intellect like a finely tailored coat.
Her gaze drifted to the glowing amber of the lamp, then down to the wet parchment resting on the table.
"Black is the final destination of everything," she murmured, her voice carrying a strange, distant rhythm.
Lyarupung blinked, pulling his gaze from the text. "What's that?"
"Something my father used to say," she replied with a light shrug, setting her wine cup down on a corner of the cluttered desk.
She leaned over the table. There were two distinct sheets: the first contained only a single, isolated line of text, while the second was dense with a flowing, narrative script.
Her fingers brushed the smaller parchment. She traced the jagged strokes of the ancient dialect, her voice dropping into a low, steady cadence as she read aloud:
"If that sword kisses that blood again, will the devil walk again?"
Lyarupung narrowed his eyes, the lamplight catching the deep web of wrinkles around them. "It's a question?"
Vilina offered a faint, melancholy smile. "Or a doubt."
Without waiting, she moved to the second, larger sheet, carefully unrolling the delicate parchment. A faint scent of damp earth and old time rose from the paper.
"There's something written at the top," she said, her eyes scanning the margin.
"'2949th Alignment.'"
She took a slow breath and continued:
"The evening was growing cold. He lit the fire and sat alone by the camp, watching the dancing flames paint shadows across the dark timber.
Then, from within the stillness of the night, came the voice of a man of my own age.
He spoke, 'She is not your blood, nor even human in truth. Yet you call her your daughter. Do you really believe bonds can be forged beyond flesh?'
That man's voice didn't affect him at all. His expression didn't waver an inch. He simply glanced down at Nivara, who lay fast asleep in his lap.
'What do you know about it, old man?'
The stranger chuckled, a dry, grating sound, and pressed on. 'I am older than you, and far more experienced in the ways of this broken world.'
He let out a slow, heavy sigh. 'Your living longer doesn't make you more experienced. Experience has nothing to do with age. And as for her... blood means nothing. Time does. The longer you walk with someone, the deeper they carve into your soul. Bonds aren't born…they're built.'"
Vilina suddenly paused. Her breath hitched, and a shimmer of unexpected moisture pooled in her eyes, threatening to spill over.
She pressed a hand to her chest, her voice trembling slightly. "It's a strange, haunting thing. Without ever hearing this man's voice, without even knowing his name, I feel as though he is the same spirit as the man from the fragment I translated a year ago up north. Even though the context of these two pages points toward entirely different lives, entirely different moral weights... there's an eerie thread connecting them. It's frustratingly painful."
Old Lyarupung smiled softly, his tired, age-softened eyes locked onto the quiet storm in Vilina's expression.
"That's the curse of a true translator, my dear. You're a deeply passionate soul, and those tears are proof of it. This man doesn't have a voice anymore—he's just a collection of dead words on rotting skin. But you... you are his voice. You're living alongside him in real-time, and whatever you feel because of it matters."
Vilina wiped the single tear from her cheek with the back of her hand, swallowing hard before bringing her eyes back to the parchment.
"As the old man came closer, the flickering firelight sharpened the harsh lines of his face.
'And yet... she is not like you. She wasn't born of woman. She was made, shaped by the dark, bleeding hands of the first prophet of death. Can such a thing truly love? Can she truly feel?'
He reached down and tossed a handful of water onto the fire, dimming the blaze into a sullen, glowing bed of embers. His voice softened, but grew hard as stone.
'Love isn't a privilege granted only to flesh and bone. It's a force far beyond it. If she laughs when the world is bright, if she grieves when the dark closes in, if she holds my name within her heart... what more proof could any father possibly need?'"
Silence settled heavily over the tent, broken only by the distant whistling of the wind outside. Vilina lowered the page, her hands resting flat against the rough wood of the table.
"That's all," she whispered.
She reached back, picked up her clay cup, and took a long, slow sip of the deep red wine to wash the dust of the past from her throat.
Lyarupung stood up, pacing slowly toward the entrance of the tent before turning back, his brow furrowed in deep concentration.
"Far in the north," Lyarupung murmured, his voice distant, "a friend of mine discovered two similar pages not long ago. Those fragments were marked with the alignments 2923 and 2828. And now this one bears the number 2949."
He walked back to the desk, his calloused finger hovering over the first, smaller parchment. He picked it up, staring at the solitary line of ink with an unsettled expression.
"But this first page..." Lyarupung muttered, looking up at Vilina. "It has no alignment number at all. But why?"