The lantern light didn't reach very far.
It gave him a small circle of warmth and gold, maybe three paces wide. Beyond that, the tunnel swallowed everything: stone, air, sound. It was like walking through a throat that never ended.
Evin kept one hand wrapped around the lantern's handle and the other against the wall. The metal was warm; the stone was cold. His fingers ached, joints stiff from strain and shock, but he refused to let go.
Left foot, right foot.
One step.
Then another.
The remnants were quiet.
Not gone.
Not at peace.
Just… quieter. Their voices had retreated from a scream to a low, constant susurration that sat beneath his thoughts like distant wind through broken windows.
He wasn't sure if the silence was mercy or warning.
The tunnel pressed in around him, narrow and uneven. The ceiling dipped low enough that the top of his head brushed rough stone in places. Water seeped from cracks and ran in thin trails along the walls, dark lines glistening in the lantern's glow. The air smelled of damp rock and something older beneath it — dust that had lain undisturbed for years.
Evin's boots slipped once on a slick patch of algae. His heart lurched as his weight pitched sideways. The lantern swung wildly, throwing shadows into frantic motion.
His shadow stretched, snapped, and then shuddered as it fell back into place beneath him.
He caught himself with a palm against the wall and stayed there for a long breath, forehead resting against the cool stone.
"Still here," he rasped.
His voice sounded small. The tunnel swallowed it almost immediately, passing it along in muffled echoes that came back wrong, like someone else repeating his words back at him.
Still here.
Still here.
He pulled away from the wall and kept walking.
Little things told him he wasn't the first to come this way.
A scuff of fresher rock where someone had kicked loose stone aside.
A smear of chalk on the wall, drawn in a broad, simple line.
A rusted metal hook with a length of rope tied in a knot that hadn't rotted through yet.
A shard of candle wax hardened on the floor, clean and pale against the grime.
Someone had passed through recently enough to leave a trail.
Not like the Church's ordered markings. No stamped sigils, no tidy runes, no numbered arrows. These were personal and quiet, as if whoever made them didn't want them noticed by anyone except the person they were meant for.
Evin lifted the lantern closer to one chalk mark. It was just a line. Not pointing anywhere. Not forming a symbol. Just… there.
The remnants stirred faintly.
Seen this.
Long ago.
Forgotten.
The impressions faded before he could grasp them.
"Helpful," he muttered under his breath.
The tunnel bent left, then right, then narrowed until his shoulders grazed stone on both sides. He turned sideways to fit, the lantern bumping against one wall, scraping metal on rock. Once he emerged on the other side, the passage widened again, opening into a slightly taller stretch of corridor reinforced with old, iron-braced beams.
Here he found a waterskin hanging from a rusted nail.
It looked wrong.
Too intact.
Too recent.
Leather, cracked but not disintegrated. A cork stopper that had not crumbled. He stared at it for a long moment before reaching out with his free hand and lifting it down.
It was light but not empty. He pulled the cork and sniffed cautiously.
Water. Stale, but drinkable.
The remnants shifted in uneasy ripples.
Evin hesitated, throat burning, then raised it and took a careful swallow. The water tasted like old stone and metal, but it eased the sandpapery scrape in his throat. He took another small sip before forcing himself to stop.
He re-corked the skin and hung it back on the nail.
Someone had left this for him.
"Why?" he whispered.
The tunnel had no answer.
His body reminded him of its limits a short while later. His knees started to wobble. His breath grew thin. A dull ache took root under his sternum — not the sharp tearing pain of rupture, but a sore, drained pull, like the Veil had left bruises on his insides.
His fingers twitched around the lantern handle. Every few steps, his free hand spasmed too, curling and uncurling without his permission.
He recognized the signs now.
Too full.
Too tired.
Too close to breaking again.
He slowed his pace.
The remnants muttered in disjointed fragments.
Down.
Away.
Safe— no, never safe—
They contradicted each other, a half-dozen fears layered on top of each other, none clear enough to follow.
"Pick one," he whispered. "Just one at a time. Please."
For a few steps, they obliged. The noise inside him dipped low, almost fading entirely. His shoulders eased just a fraction.
Then the tunnel changed.
He didn't see it at first. He felt it.
The angle of the floor dipped sharper, sloping downhill. The walls lost the telltale smoothing of regular traffic, becoming rough-hewn, closer to natural stone. Old reinforcing beams appeared more sparsely. The air cooled further, and a thin, stale breeze began to move against his face, like the exhale of something sleeping far below.
He lifted the lantern higher.
The stone here looked different — older, darker, veined with minerals that caught the light in dull, uneven glints. The symbols carved into them were faint, eroded by time. Not the neat, angular scripture of the upper Sanctum, but looping sigils, incomplete circles, lines intersecting at odd angles.
He stepped closer to one patch of wall and raised the lantern.
Someone had chiseled words there, long ago.
Most had been defaced, gouged through, or scraped until they were unreadable. Only one phrase remained mostly intact, sitting between scars of deliberate erasure.
FOUNDATION EXILED.
The letters were shallow but sure.
Beneath them, someone had once etched a name. It had been obliterated so thoroughly that not even the groove remained.
The remnants prickled uneasily under his skin.
Before them.
Before her.
They buried this.
The impressions shuddered away again.
Evin reached out and traced the shallow groove of the word FOUNDATION with one fingertip.
"Who did you throw away?" he murmured.
The lantern flickered.
Something deeper in the tunnels answered with a single, soft sound.
Tap.
Like a cane striking stone. Clearer this time. Closer.
Evin snatched his hand back.
"Where are you?" he called, voice rough.
Silence.
He waited.
No answer. No movement. No shuffle of clothing or scrape of feet.
Only the faint drip of water somewhere behind him.
The remnants inside him did not scream or recoil this time.
They went still.
The quiet inside him felt wrong — like a room where someone had been shouting seconds ago and now held their breath all at once.
Evin took a step backward from the wall, unsettling the silence, then turned and moved on.
He kept the lantern up, palm tight around its handle, knuckles whitening. His shadow stretched ahead of him, elongated by the angle of the light. For a moment, it seemed to fork — splitting into two versions of him, one slightly ahead of the other — and then it snapped together again.
He pretended he hadn't seen it.
The tunnel opened without warning into a wider space.
At first, Evin thought he'd stumbled back into a hall like the one he'd shattered, but this chamber was different. Smaller. Lower. Circular instead of long. The walls curved around him in an almost perfect ring.
Faded glyphs lined the stone, circling the room like a band. Their paint had long flaked away, and time had eaten at their edges, but he could still feel the structure of them. Not quite like the Church's prayers. Not entirely alien, either. Something in between, a language that had been translated, rewritten, stolen.
The center of the chamber held a raised stone platform, waist-high, its surface cracked and blackened in places. Old iron loops were set into its edges — restraints, rusted and stiff.
Evin's stomach turned.
He didn't need the remnants to tell him what this room had been for.
They whispered anyway.
Held us here.
Tried to fix us.
Tried to break us.
Did both.
He stepped closer to the platform.
Scorch marks stained the floor around it. The discoloration spread out like petals, or radiation from an impact. He could almost see someone lying there — wrists bound, eyes wild, mouth forming words that were never written down.
He touched the edge of the stone with two fingers.
Nothing flared. No memory slammed into him. Just a dull, cold weight that matched the ache in his chest.
"Did it work?" he asked the empty room. "Did you fix anyone?"
The silence that followed felt like answer enough.
He turned away from the platform and scanned the walls.
No doors.
No obvious passages.
Only shadow and the faint, stubborn glow of his lantern.
He was about to step back into the tunnel when a voice brushed past his ear.
"Lantern looks heavy."
Evin spun around so fast his vision blurred.
"No—" he gasped. "Where are you?"
The chamber was empty.
No one stood by the platform.
No one leaned in a doorway.
No one occupied the edges of his lantern's reach.
Just Evin.
The circle of stone.
The quiet.
"That's not funny," he said, voice shaking. "If you're helping me, then help. Don't hide."
Silence pressed in again.
He wasn't imagining the voice. He knew the difference between remnants in his head and sound carried by air.
That had been real.
Old.
Roughened by time.
Almost amused.
He swallowed hard.
"Please," he said, forcing the word past his teeth before pride could swallow it. "Just… talk to me. I can't keep doing this alone."
Nothing.
The remnants shifted uneasily under his skin, but they didn't speak up this time. They seemed as cautious as he felt.
Eventually, the cold settled deeper into his muscles, and standing still hurt more than moving. Evin turned away from the center of the chamber and walked the perimeter, lantern held high, searching for something he'd missed.
He found it behind a half-collapsed set of shelves almost completely eaten by mold.
A stone panel in the wall, slightly ajar.
Not much. Just enough that the line of it was visible — a clean, deliberate cut in the rock where no natural crack should be. He set the lantern down carefully, put both hands against the panel, and pushed.
It grated, then shifted.
Cold air rushed out, smelling of old dust and something metallic.
Behind the panel, a shaft descended into dark.
A ladder had been bolted into the stone — iron rungs stained and worn, but intact. Evin leaned over the edge, lantern raised.
Light poured down a short way, painting the metal in dull gold.
The darkness below it stayed thick.
He listened.
For water.
For breath.
For whispering.
For song.
Tap.
One clear, sharp strike of a cane on stone.
From below.
Evin flinched back from the edge, heart slamming into his ribs.
The sound didn't repeat.
He stared into the shaft, throat dry.
"Of course," he muttered, voice ragged. "Down."
His legs wanted to fold, not climb.
His fingers throbbed from gripping the lantern too long.
The remnants were a low, anxious hum, but not outright refusing.
Down.
Lower.
Old.
He picked up the lantern again. The flame inside stuttered at the movement, then steadied.
"Rell walked with me," he whispered. "So I walk."
He put one foot on the top rung of the ladder.
It held.
He took a breath that did almost nothing to calm him, tightened his grip on the lantern handle, and began to descend.
The tapping did not come again.
But each time his boot found the next rung, he couldn't shake the feeling that someone far below was listening, counting every step.