Rules For The Bled

Yvain stood on a jagged rise overlooking the battlefield, the wind tugging at his coat, dust hissing past his boots.

The astrolabe was cradled in his hands. He turned its dials slowly, reverently, as if adjusting the gears of fate itself. Each click echoed with hidden precision. The device glinted with starlight no longer present in the sky, its golden limbs shifting in and out of alignment.

Below him, the battle raged, and he watched.

He saw Celeste charge like a comet, her body a living weapon of divine chaos. He saw Adeline cast with breath fraying at the seams, burning herself bright just to buy another heartbeat of time. He saw Mars thrown aside, arms flailing, mouth open in some unseen scream.

And he saw Sorel, divine in her devastation.

Even as the sky cracked and the world twisted under the joint illusion of two master enchanters, even as chains thick as temple columns bound her and drew her into a suspended sphere of rust and anguish. Yvain knew.

It would not hold.

The enchantment was strong, yes. Almost real, even. But Sorel was not so easily subdued.

Throughout the fight, she had barely spoken.

More worryingly, she had not yet begun.

Not once had she used her blade's true art, the Elegy in Ash. The legendary swordform passed down through knight lineages and coded into her limbs. There were five movements, each a hymn of ruin. Not one had yet been invoked.

And now.

Yvain squinted as the world rippled. To anyone else, the reality-warping illusion would have obscured what came next. But he was an augur. Where others saw distortion, he saw deeper.

The sphere pulsed, then fractured.

The chains shrieked, vibrating at a frequency that hurt the bones.

Light burst from within. It poured from the cracks like molten metal, each flare painting the sky in false dawn.

He saw her, still bound, but shifting now.

Her sword raised ever so slightly.

Form One.

The beginning note of Elegy in Ash.

Denial.

Yvain turned the astrolabe's final dial into place.

Its delicate limbs snapped into alignment with a soundless click. The starsteel shell shivered in his grasp, and for a moment, it was as though the device were no longer an instrument, but a gateway. He inhaled once, steeling himself.

"I seek an audience," he said quietly, "with the Scream in the Dark Between Stars."

The world vanished.

In an instant, his mind was flung elsewhere, violently.

He found himself adrift in a void of endless black, the kind of darkness that swallowed not just light but memory, will, and shape. There was no horizon. No sound. Only pressure, immense and directionless, like he stood inside the lungs of a dying god. He was naked, and utterly alone.

Then it came.

A voice. Crude, vast, and intimate, forced its way into his thoughts, bypassing ears and reason alike. It carved itself into the folds of his mind.

"Who... beckons... me?"

The sound hurt. Not like a scream, but like a fracture. A tearing within the soul. It wasn't meant for mortals to hear. It wasn't meant to be heard at all.

Yvain fought to steady his breath. "Yvain the Younger comes to parley."

A pause.

Then the voice returned, this time laced with something like disgust. "You reek of angels. A Nephilim?"

"Yes," Yvain said without flinching.

The void pulsed around him. "What do you want?"

"Power," he said. No hesitation.

The darkness stirred in response, subtle and massive, like a sea shifting beneath the surface.

Then the blackness around him began to change. It flowed, not outward, but inward. Folding. Thickening. Turning into something heavier than shadow: ink. Viscous, clinging. He felt it rising around his ankles, then to his knees.

"As ever," the voice muttered, "the mortal tongue has only one prayer."

The ink climbed higher. Cold, impossibly cold. Yvain shivered but stood his ground.

"At what cost?" the voice hissed.

He lifted the astrolabe above the rising black, the device gleaming faintly like starlight. "I hold the Inward Star," he said. "You owe it to me."

A silence followed, as if even the entity were considering the weight of the relic in his hands. "That relic permits you to find me, not command me."

The ink rose to his chest. His limbs began to resist him. His breathing grew labored. Still, he didn't look away.

"Then let us strike a bargain," he said through clenched teeth. "Help me now, and I will aid you."

"What help can a boy offer an Old One?"

Yvain was now neck-deep. His arms trembled as the blackness threatened to pull him under. His voice was hoarse but resolute.

"I seek the fall of the Sanctuary. You know their works. Their knights choke the old rites. They silence your names. Help me, and your worshippers will rise again."

The ink paused.

Then it shifted.

Solidified.

Yvain didn't sink, he was thrown. Upward. Violently. As though the void itself spat him out. Stars streaked past his vision in impossible spirals. Planets blinked into existence and were devoured in an instant. He was unmoored from thought, from shape, from everything.

A whisper echoed in his skull, colder than death and heavier than prophecy. "One minute. I will lend you my strength for one minute. Survive it... and we will speak again."

Yvain staggered back into himself atop the ridge. The world reassembled around him with sluggish resistance, colors wrong, sounds warped. His eyes were now swallowed in void, the irises ringed by a slow-turning spiral of black-on-black. Inside his skull, the scream hadn't stopped.

Below, the battlefield was slipping back toward ruin.

The chains that had bound Sorel lay shattered across the earth. She stood at the center of the wreckage, armor scorched, one lens of her eyes cracked but still gleaming. Though her movements showed strain, her grip on the sword was firm, deliberate. A creature of intent.

Yvain didn't walk, he shifted. One moment he was atop the hill, and the next he folded through space, flickering across the wasted field like an error in perception. He reappeared just before Celeste and Adeline, shielding them with a body that hummed with unearthly resonance.

Sorel's eyes tracked his arrival, narrowing with recognition. Her blade lifted.

"You've come," she said, as though she'd been expecting him all along.

"With company," he murmured, and something in his voice was wrong, doubled, layered, like another being spoke through him in tandem.

Her reaction was instant.

In less than a heartbeat, she crossed the space between them, her body blurring into motion. The sword curved toward his throat with surgical precision, honed by centuries of war and the brutal logic of machine reflex.

Steel kissed flesh, and Yvain's windpipe opened.

But instead of silence or a gurgling collapse, sound emerged.

His voice poured through the wound, twisted and dissonant, rippling with a resonance that did not belong to this plane. He spoke in a tongue that hadn't been heard beyond the edges of the Ashen Lands in over a thousand years, a dialect of Intris, spoken only in old chants and dirges passed from grandmothers to grandsons.

"Nael voris entari." We perceive through silence.

The phrase struck like a gong against the fabric of the world. A ripple passed through Sorel's frame. Her stance shifted. Her sword lowered, not out of mercy, but in acknowledgment. Recognition etched into the tilt of her head. Sheathing her blade with a mechanical hiss, she exhaled.

"How long?" she asked, voice unusually soft.

Yvain pressed a hand to his still-bleeding throat, meeting her gaze.

"For you? A few months," he said, though the words came out warped.

Then the ground beneath her began to ripple, darkening as ink spread from the soles of her feet, swallowing her slowly. The binding did not drag her, it welcomed her, like something reclaiming its own.

"I'll be seeing you, my liege," she said, her voice half-ghost, half-vow.

And then she was gone.

The world stilled. The scream left Yvain like a final breath drawn in reverse.

And the consequences arrived.

He crumpled almost immediately, convulsing forward as he vomited violently into the dust. What emerged was not bile, at least, not only that. A splatter of stringy black goo mixed with burnt hair, jagged teeth, slivers of bone, and pieces of flayed skin hit the ground with a sickening thud. The air thickened around it with a scent of rotting flesh and piled garbage.

Celeste was already at his side, catching him before he collapsed fully. She pressed her hands against his chest, her breath igniting with vitalism as she pushed the healing force into him.

"Did it work?" she asked.

Yvain leaned into her shoulder, still shaking. "Yes," he rasped.

"How long will it hold her?"

"She'll cut her way out," he answered, voice low, wearied beyond measure. "Give or take... a few months."

Celeste looked past him, to the patch of ground where the ink had vanished, and the air now seemed afraid to settle.

The battlefield was still at last.

Broken stone and scorched earth stretched around them, the aftermath of celestial forces clashing in mortal hands. The wind carried the faint scent of burnt metal and bloodless violence. Overhead, the sky began to calm, the sun bleeding dimly through thinning clouds as though the world itself were exhausted.

Off to the side, Mars sat propped against a fractured boulder, cradling his ribs. His shirt was torn, smeared with dirt and dried fear, but he was alive. He looked dazed, but not broken, eyes half-focused on nothing in particular, muttering lyrics under his breath that no one could hear but him.

Adeline lay a few paces away, unconscious but breathing. Her body was curled like something burnt-out, her limbs twitching faintly, the residue of raw breathwork still flickering around her fingertips. She had given too much of herself, and it showed.

Celeste crouched beside Yvain, her hands still resting on his shoulders. The color had returned to his face, though he looked far older than he had the day before.

She brushed strands of hair from his brow, her fingers gentle, her voice low. "To Necropolis?" she asked, though it came out more like a hope than a question.

He didn't answer right away. His gaze swept the ruin around them, the shattered illusion, the spot where Sorel had vanished, the long trail of his own footsteps through this bloody interlude. He looked at Mars. Then at Adeline.

Then back at Celeste.

"To the Buried City," he said at last.