The wind carried a scent of rust.
Not iron. Not blood. But something old—like the bones of a forge, long dead and finally exhaling.
Nerin paused just outside the old glassmaker's shed, the one that had been abandoned since the collapse. Shattered panes leaned against the walls like fallen wings. Dust coated the inside in a thick, silken film. But more than dust—Essence residue. Unstable. Smeared across the doorframe like someone had tried to rub it off and failed.
He kept his hand near the blade on his hip.
Not the worn travel-knife. The other one. The spine-shard blade he'd pulled from the broken altar six nights ago. A relic from a time when blades were grown, not forged.
Tonight, it hummed faintly, vibrating with something deeper than sound.
He stepped into the shed.
Shadows slid up the walls.
And then, with no warning, the door slammed behind him.
"Finally," came a voice.
A figure detached itself from the far corner, stepping into the thin light that spilled through cracked glass.
Another masked one.
But this one was different. No mirrors. No vines.
This one wore a porcelain mask scorched black around the edges, like it had been pulled from a fire. The eyes were empty sockets, but something shimmered behind them—like insects crawling under a film of oil.
Nerin said nothing.
He drew the spine-shard blade slowly. It sang like a whisper between teeth.
"Your questions have been noisy," the figure said. "You chase ghosts. You cut at things that want to sleep. Now you've bled the land."
"Better than letting it rot," Nerin replied.
The masked one laughed. "Rot is how the world remembers."
Then it lunged.
Nerin barely sidestepped. The figure moved like water under pressure—slippery, fast, and vicious. A curved knife flashed, slicing the air where Nerin's ribs had been a heartbeat ago.
He twisted, slammed his shoulder into the figure's chest, and rolled backward, creating space.
No use.
The masked one was already behind him.
A slash caught Nerin's upper arm—too shallow to maim, too sharp to ignore.
"Not bad," the figure hissed. "But you're not made for this."
Nerin gritted his teeth.
He wasn't a soldier. Not truly.
But he didn't need to be.
He needed to think.
He scanned the shed—glass shards, old resin, piles of soot-dusted molds. And the walls—thick with old reflective surfaces, warped with age.
The blade in his hand pulsed again.
That was when he had the idea.
Not a plan.
A map.
He pivoted, slashing low, forcing the masked figure to leap back. Then Nerin ran—not away, but into the far side of the shed, where broken shelves and tools littered the floor.
The masked one laughed again. "Cornering yourself?"
Nerin ignored him.
He kicked over a ceramic vat—sending powdered glass into the air in a cloud of shimmer.
Then he turned and slashed one of the warped mirrors clean off the wall.
It shattered.
Light bent strangely in the fragments.
The masked one lunged again.
But this time, Nerin didn't move to parry. He ducked, letting the masked figure charge past.
Then—crack!
He drove the pommel of his blade into the wall behind the attacker—straight into the socket that had once held a melted lantern bracket.
There was a click.
The bracket snapped loose, triggering an old shelf mechanism—one he'd seen when he first entered.
It collapsed with a crash.
A rain of glass and metal molds dropped like teeth from the ceiling.
The masked figure twisted, trying to dodge—but Nerin was already there, blade angled up. He used the collapsing debris as cover, slashing once, hard, not at the attacker—
—but at the mask.
It split down the center.
For a moment, the figure froze.
Then it screamed.
Not with pain.
With memory.
Images flashed behind the ruined eye sockets—faces, rooms, flame, a river of black hair, a hand reaching through the water.
The figure stumbled, clutching at the shards now fused to its own flesh.
Nerin didn't wait.
He pivoted and jammed the shard-blade into the figure's side—not deep enough to kill, but into the sigil-mark tattooed just beneath the ribs.
It burned like ice.
The masked one convulsed, Essence unraveling from its limbs like steam.
Then the air snapped inward.
And the body collapsed—empty. Only the scorched mask remained.
Nerin stepped back, panting.
He turned the mask over.
A name had been scratched into the inside.
One word.
"Virella."
---
Later that night, back at the tavern, Leyra studied the name over his shoulder.
"You think that was the name of the person who became that... thing?"
Nerin shook his head. "No. It's the name of the mask. Each one's been made with different materials, different patterns. They're not hosts—they're vessels."
"And whoever's behind this?"
"Is building something that remembers too well."
He poured a line of salt across the mask and slid it into a sealed cloth.
Then he rolled out the new map.
Five markers, now.
Five symbols.
And at the center?
Edenrock.
He tapped it with his pen.
"This was never about a single village," he said. "This is about grafting memory onto terrain. Whoever's doing this wants to bind the past into the land so deeply it replaces the present."
Leyra looked grim. "Can they do that?"
Nerin didn't answer at first.
Then he whispered, "If they had enough masks... yes."