Content Warning: Graphic violence, gore, body horror, death.
POV: Seraphina
The knocking woke her before dawn.
She was on her feet before the second knock, reaching for the blade beside her bed. Sleep had been shallow.
"My lady." The voice through the door belonged to one of Eleanor's guards. "You need to come. Now."
She dressed quickly and opened the door. The guard's face told her everything.
"The morgue," he said. "The bodies."
They moved through corridors that felt too quiet for this hour. Yesterday had brought violence and madness and death. Today was already worse.
Other guards joined them as they descended toward the lower levels. No one spoke. The tension in their shoulders said enough.
The morgue doors stood open. Torches burned low along the walls.
Empty slabs. Three of them. The linen sheets lay crumpled on the floor. The restraining straps hung loose, unbuckled from the inside.
She stepped closer. The preservation herbs still scented the air. Beneath them lurked a different smell. Rot and wrong.
"The burial detail arrived at first light," the guard said. His voice cracked. "They were already gone."
Three witnesses. Three bodies. Vanished without a sound.
"Who was on watch?" Caelan's voice came from behind her.
"No one." The guard swallowed. "The morgue does not require guards. The dead do not need watching."
"Someone took them." She examined the straps. Unbuckled, not cut. No signs of forced entry. "But why? The witnesses are already dead. What use are the bodies?"
"Evidence removal?" Caelan suggested. "Hiding something in the corpses themselves?"
"Find who took them," she said. "Check the gates. Question the night staff. Someone moved three bodies out of here. Someone saw something."
Eleanor received the news with iron composure.
"Find them," she said. "Before anyone else does."
The search began within the hour. Guards deployed in pairs. Servants were confined to quarters with orders to lock their doors. The palace gates sealed tighter.
Thalion took command of the eastern sectors. Caelan coordinated the lower levels. Eleanor assigned her the central halls, where she could be watched and useful at the same time.
"The Flamebearer curse," she heard one advisor mutter. "First the witnesses die. Now their bodies vanish."
She did not respond. The accusations would grow louder until she proved them wrong. Words would not change that. Only actions.
The first report came from the servants' wing.
A chambermaid found clutching her arm where blood seeped through her sleeve.
"Something grabbed me." Her voice trembled. "In the dark. I could not see what it was. I just ran."
Bite marks. Deep enough to bleed, shallow enough to survive.
"Where?"
"The back passage. Near the old storerooms. It smelled wrong. Dead wrong."
Guards searched the area. Found nothing.
An hour later, another report. A guard with bite marks on his hand. He had been checking a storage cellar when something lunged from the darkness.
"It moved wrong," he said. "Jerky. Unnatural. And its eyes... Black. Completely black."
Both victims were sent to the infirmary.
The third report changed everything.
A footman, shaking badly. He had seen his attacker clearly.
"It was the Archivist," he whispered. "The Imperial Archivist. But he was gray. Wrong. Dead." His voice broke. "He was dead and walking and he tried to kill me."
No one had stolen the bodies.
The bodies had walked out on their own.
Midday brought worse news.
A kitchen boy found in the vegetable cellar, badly mauled. His wounds were deep and ragged. He was alive, barely.
A maid discovered in a storage room. She had been thrown against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Blood matted her hair. She did not wake when they lifted her.
The infirmary was filling. The bitten, the mauled, the broken. All lucky enough to survive.
Or unlucky enough to be left alive.
The reports spread across the council table. Attacks scattered across the palace.
Thalion entered without knocking. "They are hunting. Separately. Three hunters."
"And we cannot find any of them."
She traced the attack locations. All in low-traffic areas. Servant passages. Storage cellars.
"They are avoiding crowds. Taking victims one at a time."
He moved closer to study the map. The tension from yesterday had not faded.
"My advisors say the Flamebearer raised them. That this is your doing."
Her fingers curled against the table. "And you?"
"I have decided nothing. Except that I am watching you."
"Then watch closely. And try to keep up."
She walked out before he could respond.
The scream came from the servants' hall.
She ran. Footsteps pounded behind her, and she did not need to look to know Thalion had followed. Guards fell in behind them as they descended the narrow stairs toward the lower domestic quarters.
The smell hit her first. Blood and rot and old decay. Then wet sounds that made her stomach turn. Something feeding.
A laundry woman lay on the stone floor. The thing crouched over her was feeding, frantic and animal, and Seraphina knew instantly that it was already too late.
Standing over the body was a figure that had once been the Imperial Archivist.
Gray skin stretched tight over bones. Its eyes held nothing but depthless black. Its jaw hung dislocated, dark with what it had been eating.
It looked up at them.
Kneel.
The word did not come from its throat. It came from everywhere. The curse worked in stages. First the mind, making victims freeze and submit. Then the body. Then the soul. Those who knelt could not run. Could only wait to be devoured.
One of the guards behind her dropped to his knees, hands clutching his head. Another turned and ran screaming into the darkness. A third drew his sword with shaking hands.
The creature rose from its kill. It moved wrong, joints bending in directions they should not, limbs jerking with a speed that dead flesh should not possess. Blood dripped from its hands and jaw as it assessed them with those empty black pits.
Then it charged.
Thalion met it head-on. His blade sang through the air and caught the thing across the shoulder, shearing through gray meat and cracking bone. The arm hung loose, nearly severed. The creature did not slow. It swung with its remaining hand and caught Thalion across the chest, sending him crashing into the wall hard enough to crack stone.
He recovered fast, earth magic flaring. Stone spikes erupted from the floor, impaling the creature through the torso. The undead looked down at the stone piercing its chest, then wrenched itself free, leaving chunks of flesh behind.
Two guards rushed forward. The first died instantly, nails punching through his throat. The second managed one swing before the thing grabbed his arm and twisted. Bone snapped. The creature's teeth found his face.
She called her fire.
Golden flames erupted from her palms. The creature was already moving. It threw the dying guard at her and she had to dive aside, her fire going wide and scorching the wall black. The undead scrambled across the ceiling with movements that belonged to insects, circling toward her flank.
Thalion was back on his feet, blood running from his forehead. Vines burst from between the stones, wrapping around the creature's limbs. The undead tore through them without effort.
"Nothing holds it," Thalion snarled.
He intercepted the creature as it dropped from above, his blade catching it mid-torso and driving it backward. Steel ground against bone.
"Now!" he shouted.
She did not hesitate. Golden fire surged from her hands in a torrent, catching the creature as it clawed toward her even through Thalion's blade. It tried to escape, tried to reach her even as it burned.
The creature screamed without voice, a sound that existed only in the mind. Its body blackened and crumbled, collapsing into ash that scattered across the blood-slicked floor.
Silence fell. The pressure against her skull faded.
Three guards dead. Two wounded. Thalion bleeding from his forehead. His magic had failed. His blade had failed. And this was only the first.
He wiped blood from his eyes. No gratitude. No acknowledgment. Just cold fury.
"Your fire," he said. "That is the only thing that destroyed it."
"Yes."
"My blade cut it. My magic pierced it and bound it. Nothing worked." He stepped closer, voice dropping. "Convenient, that only you can kill the things you are accused of raising."
The accusation landed hard. She let it.
"Believe what you want." She held his gaze without flinching. "But there are two more out there. And unless you want more bodies, you will need me to destroy them."
His jaw tightened. For a moment she thought he might argue, might let his suspicion override his pragmatism.
"Two more," he said finally. "Find them."
"I intend to."
They found the second in the kitchen stores.
The screaming led them there. Not a single scream but several, overlapping and rising and falling, then cutting off one by one until only silence remained.
The door hung off its hinges. Blood smeared the frame in handprints where someone had tried to pull themselves to safety.
Inside, the flour stores had become a slaughterhouse.
Three bodies. A scullery boy lay nearest the door, his head at an impossible angle. A kitchen maid had made it halfway to the exit. She had not made it farther.
The third was still alive when they arrived. Barely.
An older cook, pinned against the grain sacks. The creature was bent over him, feeding with the same frantic hunger as the first. The cook's eyes were open. He saw them enter. Then the light in them went out.
The creature that had been the Retired Investigator rose from its kill. Half its face had rotted away, exposing bone beneath.
Caelan and four guards had it surrounded. Wounds crisscrossed its back. The thing did not care.
"We cannot kill it," Caelan said. "Nothing works."
He proved it. Wind howled through the confined space, a razor gale that should have flayed flesh from bone. The creature staggered, chunks of rotted meat tearing away, but it kept moving. The magic that could shred a living man barely slowed it.
The creature released the cook and spun toward them. It launched itself at the nearest guard, hitting his shield hard enough to buckle steel, driving him into his companions. They went down in a tangle.
Caelan hit it with another blast, pinning it against the wall. Stone cracked from the force. The undead pushed through, fighting against the gale step by step, reaching for him.
She circled for a clear shot. The creature was fast, weaving between guards. One man lost fingers. Another took a bite to the shoulder.
The thing grabbed a fallen spear and hurled it at her. She dove aside. The weapon buried itself in the doorframe where her head had been.
"Get clear!"
Golden fire exploded from her hands, a wall of flame that filled the space. The undead tried to find a gap. There was none.
It burned. It screamed. It crumbled to ash.
Kneel.
The echo faded into silence.
Caelan's wind. Thalion's earth. Steel and stone and magic. None of it had worked. Only her fire. Only the Flamebearer's curse, as they were already calling it.
Seven dead today. Two undead destroyed.
The third was still out there.
Evening fell and the final body remained unfound.
Guards patrolled every corridor. The palace held its breath, waiting for the next scream.
The attacks had stopped. Wherever the third undead had gone, it was hiding. Waiting.
The infirmary was crowded when she arrived. Healers moved between beds with herbs and bandages.
The chambermaid bitten that morning lay beneath a thin blanket, face pale, breathing shallow. The guard with the wounded hand occupied the next bed, equally still.
The kitchen boy and the maid were worse. Neither had woken since they were found. Their skin had gone gray, veins showing dark beneath the surface.
"How are they?" she asked the senior healer.
"I do not understand it. The wounds are clean. We have treated them properly. But they are not improving."
"Let me try something."
She moved to the chambermaid first. The bite was angry red, but the gray had not spread far. She placed her hands over the wound and called her fire. Not the killing flames. The D'Lorien healing.
Golden light pulsed from her palms. She pushed it into the wound.
There. A thread of wrongness coiled through the woman's blood. Cold and hungry.
She burned it out.
The chambermaid gasped. Her breathing steadied. Color returned.
"The guard. Quickly."
The bite on his hand was deeper, gray spreading up his wrist. She poured healing fire into him, chasing cold threads through his veins.
He woke with a cry. The gray receded.
Two saved. The effort left her shaking.
She turned to the kitchen boy. Her hands found his chest and she pushed healing fire into him. The corruption was deeper here, wrapped tight around his core. She burned what she could reach, but it clung stubbornly.
"He is not responding as well," she said. "The damage is extensive."
The maid was the same. Healing fire pushed against the corruption but could not clear it completely.
She pulled her hands back, exhausted. "I have done what I can for now."
"The injuries were severe, my lady." The healer made notes on her chart. "Perhaps another session tomorrow, once you have recovered your strength? The fever should break if the healing takes hold overnight."
"Tomorrow then."
Yona appeared in the doorway. "My lady, you look pale. You should rest."
"I will." She glanced at the four patients. Two sitting up, alive. Two still unconscious, skin carrying that grayish tinge. "Tomorrow I finish what I started."
She let Yona guide her toward the door.
She did not see the kitchen boy's fingers twitch against the sheets.
Caelan found her in the corridor.
"The third one has gone to ground," he said. "We have searched everywhere. Nothing."
"It is waiting."
"For what?"
She thought of the infirmary. The fevered victims. The gray skin.
"I do not know yet."
His hand found hers, brief and grounding.
"We will figure it out," he said quietly. "Whatever this is."
She wanted to believe him.
Sleep did not come.
She lay in the darkness, listening to the palace settle around her, waiting for screams that never came.
The third undead was still out there. Still walking. Still killing.
And in the infirmary, the patients she had promised to heal tomorrow had gone very, very quiet.
Tomorrow might be too late.