With her fingers numb from the cold, Mara traced the equations the boy had drawn. The symbols shifted like living things when they were touched, creating fresh patterns that caused her scar to burn.
Jarek squatted next to her, his breath hazy from the early morning cold.
"This isn't just a lock. It's a map."
The boy gave a serious nod.
"Under the ancient stones, the hungry ones sleep."
The fused hilt throbbed in Mara's hand.
"Show us," she whispered.
The child touched the ice with his thorny hand.
The world wavered.
…..
Twelve stones stood in the middle of them, each carved with sigils that oozed black sap. The earth was rotten and sunken over eleven mounds that were arranged in a perfect circle.
The twelfth space was vacant.
The parchment that Jarek had stolen flitted to the floor.
"This is impossible. These ruins are older than—"
"Older than your lies?" Mara's voice wasn't entirely her own. Her wrist was now affected by the hilt-thorn fusion, with veins of void and gold running up her arm.
The boy walked to the empty grave.
"She's not here anymore," he said simply.
…..
Only eleven stars were visible in the sky above him as the glass plain reformed around him, but the reflections were now incorrect.
Only one shard was dark.
Ethan reached for it.
The void resisted.
"Not yet," whispered the Duskheir's voice within him. "First, the reckoning."
…..
They found her at the standing stones' edge, her emerald-darkened veins now pulsing black.
"You revived the whispers," she accused, pointing at Mara's fused arm. "Now the key turns."
Jarek stepped between them.
"What happens when it finishes turning?"
The girl smiled.
"What always happens when graves open?"
…..
As the first standing stone screamed, pain rushed through her fused arm.
With its bleeding sigils glowing emerald, the ancient rock let out a shriek. The ground beneath the nearest mound began to rise.
Something was coming out.
Mara's vision doubled; she saw the burial ground both as it was and as it had been.
Twelve women, each with bark for skin, each swallowing a shard of dying light.
One of the youngest is resisting.
One of the thirteenth watching.
She felt the hilt in her arm twist by itself.
…..
He could not stop what came out with his knife.
The thing from the first mound wasn't a corpse. A hungry silhouette with too many joints and hollow eyes staring at Mara was the manifestation of absence.
On the key.
Jarek did the only thing left.
He cut his palm and spread the blood on the closest stone.
The sigils flared crimson.
The creature hissed and recognized him.
"Ravenscroft," it breathed.
…..
The historical records had been false.
The Twelve weren't prisoners.
They were failures.
And the empty grave?
"She got away," the boy whispered, watching the creature advance. "The one who refused the hunger."
Mara broke her fused arm.
The void-hilt grew into a blade of living darkness rather than a fragment.
The creature smiled.
"Little key," it meekly said. "Let us in."
…..
Mara raised her newborn blade.
Not at the creature.
At the empty grave.
"Show me the truth," she demanded, and stabbed the weapon into the barren earth.
…..
The world is divided.
And a voice that was neither Ethan nor the Duskheir nor the Star murmured from the mysteriousness between moments.
"Find me."