The Buried Metropolis
**
The air shifted as they left the Valkyrie behind.
Faint blue mist drifted through the ruin, pooling around pillars once carved with artistry beyond comprehension. The remains of a city sprawled before them, avenues crushed under layers of stone, towers lying sideways like fallen giants, bridges sheared clean by the world's collapse. Yet through the devastation, light still pulsed. Lines of faint Breath ran through the streets, threading between the ruins like veins of memory, stubborn as old guilt.
"This was once above the clouds," OH said quietly. "They called it Caer Telas, the Crown of Creation. The Titan built his empire here after stealing my light. He thought himself eternal."
Khalen stepped over a broken mosaic, people kneeling before a radiant figure, its face lost to cracks and ash. "He used your power to keep all this alive?"
"Alive, yes. Free, never." OH's tone hardened. "The city glittered, but it was rot beneath glass. They used Breath for everything, to sculpt flesh, to freeze time, to strip will from dissenters and call it mercy. The Titan promised perfection. What he built was obedience."
The path curved past a toppled colonnade where molten glass had fused with crystal veins. Khalen's torch caught glimpses of frescoes preserved by the heat, scientists with shining eyes, children floating weightless, rivers of light pouring through machines that looked half-organic.
"They advanced faster than they could question," OH went on. "They mined the Core's veins for Breath until the earth itself began to scream. I warned them. They called me sentimental."
"Seems you were right," Khalen said, running a hand across a blackened wall. The stone pulsed faintly beneath his touch, like a dying heart.
"For all their brilliance, they could not imagine stopping," OH murmured. "The cataclysm did not destroy them. It only buried the proof of how far they'd fallen."
They passed under an archway where the carvings still gleamed, a thousand names etched into the stone, perhaps once meant to honor the builders. Now they glittered like epitaphs. Some letters were chipped away, as if even the rock had tried to forget.
Khalen slowed without meaning to. The Breath-lines underfoot flickered in a rhythm that felt almost bodily, not quite a heartbeat, more like the afterimage of one. He found himself listening for it, the way a sailor listens to a ship's timbers at night, trying to tell the difference between settling wood and something crawling.
"You said these vaults were below," Khalen muttered. "This is a whole city."
OH made a small sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't carried so much old bitterness. "Below can still be vast."
Further ahead, the corridor opened into a circular chamber. In the center lay the corpse of a four-legged creature, long-limbed and ridged with translucent plates. From its skull rose branching crystal growths, veins of dim blue light still flickering through them like trapped lightning. The thing looked sculpted rather than born, too elegant for an animal, too alive for a statue.
"Beautiful," Khalen murmured.
"Once," OH said. "That breed was shaped by human hands, half beast, half conduit. Their antlers held Breath like reservoirs, their flesh recycled it. People hunted and ate their kind for strength, believing they'd inherit a fragment of their light."
Khalen crouched beside the body, studying punctures along its flank. The wounds were deliberate. Not tearing, not gnawing, not the messy work of hunger. The creature's crystal growths were dimmer near the cuts, as if something had drunk the light from inside.
"Whatever killed it didn't eat for hunger," Khalen said.
"No," OH replied, quieter. "This was feeding for dominance. And the hunter's still near. The Breath trails haven't cooled."
Khalen rose, torchlight catching motes of blue drifting from the corpse. "Then let's move before the Carrionling finds us."
A wet scrape echoed behind them, deep and deliberate. The torchlight shuddered across the wall, as if the darkness flinched.
"Tell me that was the ship settling," Khalen muttered.
"If it was," OH said softly, "it's settling with teeth."
From the dark ahead, something shifted, too smooth, too patient. Breath hissed, wet and low, and the air took on the sour-sweet bite of death-miasma.
The Carrionling had arrived.
**
The First Hunt
It did not announce itself with a roar.
It arrived the way rot arrives, quietly, confidently, already sure you belonged to it.
A hunched shape skittered along the edge of the chamber, too fast to track cleanly. Not large. Not heroic. Dog-sized, maybe, but wrong in every proportion, with a posture like a question that hated your answer.
Khalen turned slowly, fire blooming in his palm. "That isn't wind."
"No," OH said, and there was no humor in it. "That's death getting curious."
The Carrionling slid out from behind a shattered column, half crawling, half twitching. Its skin did not sit still. It shifted in small, restless ripples, as if something underneath was rearranging it from moment to moment. Scavenged bone and meat rose to the surface, then sank again, a patchwork body arguing with itself.
Jagged crystal growths jutted along its spine like tumors, faintly lit with corrupted Breath. Beneath its jawline, something flexed, then split wider. Multiple grinding teeth hid under mandibles, off-center, split-lipped, made for tearing and rasping rather than biting clean.
It had no visible eyes.
It tilted its head anyway, and Khalen felt the ugly certainty of being detected. Not by sight.
By heat. By vibration. By the current of Breath in his body.
OH's voice dropped low. "Carrionling. It lives among corpses. It keeps itself alive by stealing shape. Don't let it touch you."
The creature exhaled, and purple-black miasma spilled across the stone, clouding low and thick, clinging to Khalen's boots like tar. His throat tightened as the haze crept up his shins.
"Don't breathe that," OH snapped. "It's not poison the way you want it to be. It's rot-information. It convinces your body it's already losing."
Khalen's flame brightened, washing the ruin in heat. Across the cracked floor stretched bloodless smears leading to the antlered beast. The Carrionling's head twitched toward it, hungry in a way that felt possessive.
"It's going back for the carcass," Khalen said.
"It's going back for more parts," OH corrected. "If it grafts fresh conduit tissue, it gets faster."
The Carrionling lunged.
Khalen moved first.
His boots struck stone with a sharp click, the rhythm Elyas had drilled into him. Breath surged through muscle and marrow. He leapt and brought his heel down toward the skull-plate.
The Carrionling skittered sideways, impossibly quick, then snapped upward with a mouth that should not have been that wide. Teeth grated across stone where his leg had been.
Khalen landed hard, rolled, and came up with fire licking along his palm.
"Keep moving," OH barked. "It learns your patterns by feel. Don't give it the same footfall twice."
Khalen snatched a jagged stone from the floor. "Ideas?"
"Plenty," OH said. "None you'll like. Overcharge it. Pour your Breath in until it burns white, then throw."
Khalen blinked. "That's your idea of a plan?"
"Well," OH replied, too calm, "you're out of gentle ones."
The miasma thickened as the Carrionling circled. Its skin rippled again, and Khalen saw something new surface along its shoulder, a shard of translucent plate that looked suspiciously like it belonged to the dead beast.
It was already taking.
Khalen snarled, pushed fire into the stone. It vibrated, edges glowing red, then white. He hurled it.
The fragment detonated mid-air, shattering into burning shards that ripped through the Carrionling's flank. Molten dust hissed where it landed. The creature recoiled, and its skin tried to rearrange around the injury, bone shifting, meat folding, crystal veins pulsing like exposed nerves.
"Explosive projectiles," Khalen panted. "You could've mentioned that earlier."
"I did," OH replied, smug. "Just not in this lifetime."
The Carrionling lunged again, faster now, jerky and spasmodic, driven by panic and hunger. It slammed Khalen into the wall, its weight small but vicious. The miasma surged up, filling his nose and mouth with that sour-sweet death-bite.
For a heartbeat his body believed it.
His arm went heavy. His fire flickered.
OH's voice cut in sharp as flint. "No. Don't accept it."
Khalen's jaw clenched. He drove a boot into the Carrionling's torso, channeling a pulse of Breath. Fire roared outward, dense and concentrated. The creature hit the floor hard enough to crack stone.
It writhed, skittering legs scrabbling for purchase. Its mouth opened too wide, teeth grinding, trying to lunge from the ground like a trap.
"Now," OH snapped. "Burn it before it decides what else it wants to be."
Khalen lifted his single hand, Breath spiraling from the stump like a coiling flame. The power condensed and burst forward in a blinding jet.
The chamber ignited.
Walls flexed.
Breath veins in the stone flared gold.
For a heartbeat, the ruin itself seemed to breathe with him, like a buried metropolis remembering it used to be alive.
The Carrionling convulsed. Its shifting skin failed. Bone and meat and crystal stopped negotiating. The miasma flashed violet-black, then thinned into ash.
The creature collapsed into dull fragments that pulsed once, resentful, then went still.
Silence followed, only the hiss of cooling stone.
"Efficient," OH said at last. "If a bit theatrical."
Khalen wiped sweat from his brow. "First kill in a buried god's tomb. I'll take a little drama."
"Enjoy it while you can," OH replied. "They smell burnt Breath for leagues."
Khalen glanced toward the fading embers, then toward the dark where the city continued, endless and unknown. "Then we move."
"And Captain," OH's tone softened. "Remember this feeling. The first victory always costs more than it seems."
Khalen stepped over the remains.
Beneath his boots, the floor trembled, a low pulse, slow and heavy, like something far below had shifted in its sleep.
"The core," he said.
"Closer than you think," OH whispered. "And far more awake."