The dust tasted like old pennies. Old pennies and regret. Kaelen traced a fingertip across the basalt face of a crumbling sentinel. It wasn’t stone, not exactly. More like…compressed night. The air hummed, a low thrum against his teeth. He’d felt it for days, this vibration, growing stronger as he approached the Sunken City.
He ran a hand over the cold surface, feeling for a seam, a crack—anything. The kingdom hadn’t just *fallen*. It had been *unmade*.
“Think you can wake the old bones, then?”
Old Man Tiber, perched on a toppled spire, rasped the question. Tiber’s beard resembled a tangled bird’s nest, his eyes glittered like chips of flint. He’d been tailing Kaelen for a week, a prickly shadow.
“Not wake, Tiber. Listen.” Kaelen ignored the barb. “They don’t sleep. They…remember.”
“Remember what? Fairy tales and dust?”
Kaelen ignored him, pressing his palm flat against the statue’s cheek. A tremor ran through the stone, and a sound, like pebbles tumbling down a distant cliff, echoed from within. It wasn’t a mechanical noise. More like…a chuckle. A dry, brittle laugh.
“They’re mocking you,” Tiber observed, spitting a stream of brown juice onto the cracked plaza.
“They’re responding.” Kaelen concentrated, focusing on the vibration. Fragments. Images flickered in his mind: a city of polished obsidian, a king with hands like glaciers, a woman whose voice could shatter mountains.
“Whispers,” he muttered. “I need the whispers.”
“Whispers lead to madness, boy. Trust me. I’ve chased enough of them.”
Kaelen ignored him. He circled the statue, searching. The laughter grew, a chorus of stone voices. One statue’s lips seemed to curve upward. Another’s eyes… shifted.
“The fragments. They’re connected to the laughter. To the statues.”
“Fragments of what? Broken pottery?” Tiber’s voice grated.
“Stories. Lost histories. They’re woven into the stone. Each statue holds a piece.” Kaelen reached out, brushing his fingers across a glyph etched into the statue’s forehead. A jolt surged through him, and a vision flooded his mind: a ritual, a sacrifice, a betrayal.
“I… I think I understand.”
“Understand what? That you’re wasting your time?”
Kaelen shook his head. He was a sculptor. He coaxed life from lifeless stone, but this…this was different. This wasn’t about *creating*. It was about *remembering*. His gift—or curse—wasn’t in shaping form, but in feeling the echo of what *had* been.
“They weren’t destroyed, Tiber. They *devoured* themselves. A sickness of the soul. And these statues… they’re not guardians. They’re witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what? A fancy collapse?” Tiber scoffed, but Kaelen noticed the man’s knuckles were white as he gripped his walking stick.
“To something far worse.” Kaelen touched another statue. Another fragment. Another vision: a darkness spreading from the heart of the city, consuming everything. “There were thirteen. Thirteen fragments. Thirteen stories.”
“Stories don’t change anything, sculptor.”
“Maybe not,” Kaelen said, his gaze fixed on the obsidian ruins. “But they change *me*.” He felt a shift within himself, a growing power, dangerous and exhilarating. “And that might be enough.”
“Enough for what? Redemption? Or just…another ruin?” Tiber’s voice was softer now, edged with a flicker of something akin to fear.
Kaelen didn’t answer. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that the path ahead wasn’t about saving a lost kingdom. It was about surviving the consequences of remembering.
