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emmg · 3 months ago

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The Ember Season

*tosses this Hadestown Emmrook AU like yesterday's trash* I did it. I started the thing.

The Veil is cracking. Emmrich built a city to hold it together; a city of ghosts, memory, and ritual. He says it’s failing. He says Rook is the only one who can see why. She shouldn't have come back. But she always does. Above, Bellara builds a machine that might find Neve. If she’s still herself. If she wants to be found. Love is the rhythm. Memory is the trap.

Read below or on Ao3 (sike it’s actually not there anymore cuz i deleted it by accident lol)

Chapter One: The Dead Bloom Slowly

Excerpt from Emmrich’s Research Notes (Unfiled Addendum)

"The Veil is deteriorating at several key fault lines. Surface-level efforts remain inconsistent. Solas and I are in agreement: stabilization must occur from both sides. He holds the Fade. I hold the world. He tends the dreaming. I manage the dead. The Grand Necropolis must serve as a stabilizing anchor, its necromantic field designed to resist volatile Fade incursions at structurally compromised points. The city is not merely a sanctuary for the dead, but a mechanism of containment. Lichdom is not corruption, but crystallization. Ritual intention remains pure. Undeath becomes the framework through which purpose endures. Mortality introduces entropy; emotion distorts the weave. I am, by nature, too human. The living cannot bear this burden forever. The dead do not fray under repetition. She will not understand. Rook fears what does not grow. She believes stillness is stagnation. But stillness is the only reason the walls still hold."

The train to the Grand Necropolis has no windows. It unsettles her every time. She always hesitates, Rook notices. Always. One foot extended, the other still grounded, she teeters at the threshold, suspended between the platform, the train, and the void that lies between.

But inevitably, as always, she boards. Time snaps back into motion. The whistle shrills, the wheels begin to turn. She almost loses her balance, lurches forward, arms flailing, takes three quick steps to steady herself. Behind her, the doors slide shut.

It’s always the same: hesitate, glance down, step in, stumble, recover.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. She hears the great machine; or maybe she feels it. It travels through her bones as much as through her ears, a pulse in the metal spine of the train as she walks the corridor toward her private cabin.

The one that needs a key.

The key she wears on a chain around her neck. The key that rests cold between her breasts, always cold, no matter how long it lies pressed to her skin—and that is always. It never warms. It only leeches.

She stops. Fumbles at the chain, trying to free it. It snags, scratches her collarbone. She tugs. Harder. The chain catches on the top button of her blouse and, with one sharp pull, it snaps. The key flies.

“Motherfucker,” she mutters, dropping to one knee just as the train jolts beneath her. The key skitters away.

A foot steps out from one of the cabins; a pointed boot catches it before it vanishes. Then the other foot follows, this one curved, elegant, and false: a gilded, dwarven-forged prosthetic that ends just below the knee. Its owner leans down, humming as she picks up the key, rolling it along her knuckles like a two-penny magician with a coin. A cheap trick. Still, impressive.

“Thank you,” Rook says, brushing off her knees as the woman holds it out to her.

“Think nothing of it,” the woman replies.

Her smile is small. Kind. A touch reserved.

As soon as Rook takes the key, the woman tilts her head and says, “It must be very important to you.”

"Why do you say that?"

“For starters, you wear it tucked beneath your clothes, not over. You check for it with your fingers without even realizing it. Twice since you stepped on board. You flinched when it hit the ground. You swore when the chain broke, not because of the chain itself, but because the key was loose. You didn’t run after it; you dropped. Dropped fast. Knees first.”

She spins the snapped bit of chain once around her finger before handing it over as well. “Also… you didn’t say ‘thank you’ right away. You looked at it first. Made sure it was intact. Still yours. Still there.”

“Ah,” Rook says, folding the key into her palm. She closes her fingers around it, then covers it with her other hand. It probably looks ridiculous. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to lose it again. “Well, then.”

“Take care, now.”

The woman offers a small nod, then turns and walks back into her cabin, the one she shares with three others. None of them acknowledge her return. Each stares at something else entirely: the wall, the floor, the ceiling. Anywhere but her.

She picks up a bound stack of papers, set aside, apparently, to catch her flying key. She licks her fingers, tugs the ribbon loose, and resumes reading. As her head dips, a loose strand of hair slips forward, veiling her face.

“Just as important as those are to you,” Rook says, nodding toward the papers.

She doesn’t know why she says it. The woman had clearly meant to end their encounter then and there. Rook should let it go. She doesn’t know why her mouth keeps moving.

A pause.

A soft, half-exasperated, half-fond huff. Then, “Yes... though it’d be better if someone hadn’t filled the margins with half-baked schematics.” She lifts a page and gives it a little shake—lines and diagrams scrawled at odd angles, layered between blocks of cramped handwriting. “They’re everywhere,” the woman mutters, more to herself now. “As if her thoughts were leaking sideways.”

She never looks up. Never looks back.

No one goes to the Grand Necropolis for fun.

Rook stands in the hallway, fully aware she’s staring but unable to stop. She wonders who she forgot. Or what.

The Veil has been faltering for a year now. Sizzling at the edges, breaking apart, only to re-knit itself moments later, as if nothing ever happened. Nothing, then everything. Collapse and recovery, over and over.

Some whisper it’s better to be almost-dead, half-dead, very-nearly-dead, anything but truly dead. So they board the train. They go underground. They enter the Grand Necropolis.

No one is truly alive there, Rook thinks.

Not even Emmrich.

Eventually, she moves. Drifts. Leaves the hallway behind and slips into her cabin.

The key turns in the lock without resistance, smooth as butter, as always.

Inside, she presses her back to the door and inhales deeply.

It never changes. Not really. The same every time. Familiar to the point of wrongness. So strange. So perfect.

Rivaini spices from the box of loose teas on the table. The warm musk of amber clinging to the upholstery. A new bracelet—gold, always gold. Never silver, never steel. Only gold. The eternal metal. The one that still shines beneath the earth, even without the sun.

For Gold and Glory, she thinks, or half-remembers. The words come hazy, distant. She’s fairly certain she once shouted them, leaping into a cave to plunder its depths.

She wonders which meaning they were meant to hold. The glory or the sun?

Both belong to the past.

One is hers. The other… isn’t.

It is a ritual.

She sits. Gives the small kettle two taps and waits, silent and patient, for the magic to do its work. Boiling water with no flame, no sound but the faint hiss as heat blooms. Cinnamon, ginger, clove; all ground fine and mixed. Good for headaches. For steadying the nerves. For softening the edges of thought.

She pours a cup, then reaches for the letter that brought her here. Again.

Written in her own hand.

A sigh escapes. A smile follows. And then the impulse, half-dramatic, half-genuine, to cover her face with her hands. As if the gesture might shield her from the absurd sweetness of it all. Something theatrical. Something borrowed. Something Emmrich, certainly.

Not his voice, but hers, written out in a looping, slanted script. A ghost version of herself, leaving messages in the dark: come home, come home, come back down—look what you’ve made me do. I’ve written it in the mirror for you, the words seem to say, so you’ll catch it next time you look at your reflection.

Yes. That is the trick. Not a summons, this letter—a call, soft and strange. That is how Emmrich writes to her.

He constructs a tableau, precise in its staging, uncanny in its intimacy. He does not sign his name. He does not need to. The handwriting is hers flawlessly imitated, down to the curl of the descenders, the pressure points in each curlicue, but the voice beneath it is unmistakably his.

It reads as if she is speaking to herself.

Or rather, as if he is speaking through her.

Or perhaps—as it once was—as if they are speaking together, inside the same sentence.

All she ever has to do is arrive.

You once said you would return when the world cracked open. It is cracking, Rook. The Grand Necropolis hums still, but the rhythm falters. They say it moves souls like clockwork. I believe it only winds them tighter. They do not understand, of course. They were not here when it was soft, when it bloomed. I have missed you. In all the ways you expect, and in those you would not. In silences that shape themselves like your name. If you can come—come now.

And then, a ring.

It arrives precisely as she finishes reading the letter for the umpteenth time, as if summoned by the final line. It does not fall so much as appear, condensing from the air. Another gift. Another gesture. Emmrich’s handwriting in mineral form.

Because beneath the earth, it is always cold. And in the cold, there is pressure. There is rock. There are veins that glitter. Jewels curled like thoughts in the dark. There is gold.

She catches it mid-air, instinctively.

An emerald. Deep, green, and quiet.

It matches the bracelet.

It fits as though it had always been hers.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

It is the Caretaker that greets her.

Something has shifted; she feels it before she sees it. Perhaps it’s the robes: still ceremonial, still immaculate in their own way, but frayed now at the hems, worn thin at the sleeves, as if even the cloth is growing tired.

It stands at the edge of the platform, hands folded in front of it with that patient, impassive stillness it wears like another layer. Waiting, as always.

No one waits for arrivals at the Grand Necropolis. There are no greetings, no reunions, no signs held aloft with names scrawled in haste. No one expects anyone to come.

But she is never unaccompanied. She always has an escort.

She steps off the train and hesitates, her gaze drifting into the press of bodies. Searching. The woman with the reserved smile. The endless scribbled notes. The portfolio tied with that faded ribbon. There, just beyond the platform's edge, being slowly carried off by the tide. Her turquoise cloak already losing its color, leached into the air. She looks smaller now. Washed out.

Rook opens her mouth, but the words tangle in her throat.

Wait. Stay close. I’m not like the others. Be near me. Be my friend. When I’m done, when it’s over, we’ll leave together, I promise. We’ll find our way back.

But the woman does not turn.

And then she’s gone, gently erased by the crowd.

“Onward, dweller,” says the Caretaker, extending one long hand, inviting her to step into the boat.

She’s never grown accustomed to it, the water beneath the earth.

Here, puddles become rivers, thin as threads or wide as streets, cutting through the Necropolis in quiet, meandering veins. There is no source. No mouth. No spring or fall. The water simply is.

It does not flow. It waits.

She glances down as she steps closer. The surface is still, dark as lacquered metal.

So very black, she thinks.

Black like oil. Machinery oil. The kind used to clean rust from old hinges. The kind that smells faintly of iron and something else. Something burnt and ancient, like time under pressure.

It laps against the stone pier, soundless.

It is strange, this path of water, so near to the train tracks. One ends where the other begins, a seamless handoff: iron rails tapering into liquid, steel yielding to shadow. The tracks do not stop so much as dissolve, their last lengths swallowed by the black water, vanishing into it like a thought unfinished.

She boards.

The Caretaker follows. Silently, of course.

It lifts an oar, long, narrow, etched with delicate filigree, the kind of ornamentation meant for ceremony rather than function. Still, it serves. It waits. Extends a hand, palm up. She smiles faintly and places a coin in the middle. It nods once, closes its fingers around the offering, and begins to push them forward.

She leans back, letting the boat rock beneath her, watching as the city reveals itself around them.

It has changed.

Not dramatically. Not loudly. But she remembers it brighter. Warmer. Once it had felt like a shrine. Now it resembles a cathedral made for machines. There is more stone, somehow, though the Grand Necropolis has never been anything but stone. Yet the surfaces seem heavier. Closer. The shadows fall differently now.

She watches the figures moving along the walkways above and beside them.

The reanimated guards, ever silent, march in steady formation, their sockets aglow with veilfire, helmets polished to a gleam that reflects nothing. The mages move in clusters, robed in ash-grey, murmuring to one another in hushed whispers. Their sigils form in spiral-code, complex and recursive, leaving a faint ringing in her ears long after the sounds fade.

The laborers walk with their heads down, shoulders bowed not from the weight of their tools, but the toll of repetition. The burden of ritual etched into muscle and marrow. Their tunics are soot-streaked, threadbare. Many wear gold at the collar, not for rank, but for permanence. An emblem of those who never leave.

There is more metal now.

Bronze tubing coils along the walls, curving like roots. It feeds into crystal-laced hubs set at regular intervals; breathing points, perhaps, or control nodes.

Gold, always gold, runs in fine filaments across the doors, the ceilings, the circular insets in the floors. It catches the low magical light and holds it, like a memory trapped beneath glass. Not veins, but circuits. Not lifeblood, but design.

She sees the fusion everywhere. Dwarven engineering, heavy and modular, wrapped like armor around skeletal statues. Elven spell-forms, graceful, recursive, near-organic, woven through the structure like latticework grown instead of cast.

The city breathes, if not with life, then with intention.

There is something else.

She feels it before anything registers. Before shape, before sound. Though seeing isn’t quite the right word. She doesn’t see it at all, not directly. It arrives as a pressure behind the eyes, a kind of wrongness at the edges of perception.

Her temples throb. She shuts her eyes and rubs them with thumb and knuckle, slow and useless.

When she opens them again, something lingers.

Not sight. Not exactly. But something.

It’s only later—once they’ve disembarked, passed beneath the stone arch of the Vault of the Beloved, just shy of Emmrich’s sanctuary—that she recognizes the shape of it.

Or rather, feels it with more clarity.

She slows. Ceases following the Caretaker. The corridor curves, and embedded in the inner wall is a wide window, its frame seamless with the stone, as though it were grown rather than built.

Beyond it, the rock glows.

Threaded through the stone—beneath the city, within it—are luminous veins, green streaked with gold, winding like marble but too uniform. They shimmer faintly, in motion beneath the surface.

Not light. Not merely magic.

They pulse.

A heartbeat.

She feels it now in her jaw, in her teeth, in the backs of her eyes.

“What is that?” she asks.

The Caretaker does not pause.

“That is the Work.”

And says nothing more.

Deeper, and deeper still they go. Until the city narrows, then opens again, into the place that belongs to Emmrich alone.

No one enters here but him. No one but her, that is.

He is not there.

She finds her room easily, muscle memory guiding her more than thought. It is just as she left it, and not at all.

The bed is covered in flowers.

Lilies. Shroud’s Kiss. Other blooms without names, pale and fragrant and impossible to trace. She breathes them in one by one, appraising yet reverent. Kisses a few petals absently. Presses her face into the pillows.

A teacup rests on the nightstand, still steaming, as if placed only moments before. Beside it, a note. Folded once.

Emmrich's handwriting.

Do you remember the courtyard? Third chime. I will wait.

She does remember the courtyard.

But her gaze travels past the porcelain vessel, past the paper, and settles on the bed. More precisely, on the frame where a dark, ring-shaped scorch mark mars the wood.

That, she remembers more clearly than anything else.

Because once, here, in this bed, she had fucked Emmrich, and her magic had flared at the height of it. Her hand gripped the frame as everything surged through her, and when it was over, the mark remained. A memory burned into the room itself.

It comes back all at once.

The weight of him between her thighs. The heat of skin against skin, slick with sweat. Her legs wrapped tight around his hips, heels digging into his back. His mouth at her throat, then her breast, then open against hers. The rhythm of it, fast and frantic, the headboard knocking against stone. Her breath catching on every thrust.

Fingers tangled in sheets. Hands gripping anything solid.

The jolt. The stutter. His whole body seizing against hers—too soon. The sudden heat of his release inside her. The tremble in his voice: I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry. Her lips pressed to his temple. A kiss. Reassurance.

Then laughter. So much laughter. She’d always laughed easily, absurdly, for any reason at all. Even then. Especially then. It had felt like joy, raw and overflowing. Like more than being alive. Like being extra alive. Like a cat with nine lives stumbling into a tenth and not knowing what to do with it but laugh.

She blinks, hard, and forces herself to look away.

And decides to sleep. The third chime comes only in the morning. She has time.

The Grand Necropolis does that to people, she thinks, somewhere between breath and oblivion.

It drains you.

She arrives a few minutes early.

The space is exactly as she remembers it: a wide circle of black stone steps, ringed with pale lilacs. She can’t tell if they’re alive or merely performing the idea of life, held in some gentle stasis. Their petals never fall. Not a single one.

At the center, the broken sundial. There is no sun. No sky. But still, the sundial remains.

It was one of the first things they built together.

The stone is still warm.

She had asked him for more than one garden, something beyond the Memorial Gardens. Quieter. Without graves.

She is not from Nevarra. The presence of the dead, the weight of mourning woven into architecture, never sat easily with her. Not the way it did with him.

He agreed at once. No persuasion needed.

They planned it together, sketching from memory and impulse. Water lilies floating on still pools. Beds of moss that drank up the damp. Plants that thrived half-submerged, always carrying the scent of salt.

Hari. Flowering ginger. Lemon verbena.

Little pieces of Rivain, scattered in the dark.

"Darling!"

She turns, and the wave of déjà vu hits her so hard it makes her stomach twist.

Emmrich descends the short staircase that leads to the dais, sideways, half-turned, almost exactly as he had the first time they met. That same loose elegance. Arms slightly spread, posture open. So welcoming it hurts to look at him. So excruciatingly sincere.

He sees her and, immediately, snaps his fingers.

The glamour spills over him in a shimmer, skin lapping over bone, brown eyes blooming where empty sockets once were. Not truly empty, of course. The veilfire never leaves. It flickers underneath, soft and hungry, like a secret that never dies. His hair regains its grey. The half-crown remains, though. Still there, embedded in the bone she can now no longer see, crusted with dark stones and old memory. A relic of what he is, of what he’s become.

Part of her wants to stop him. To say, don’t bother. To tell him it doesn’t matter. That it never did. Like she used to say in the early days, when his face startled her in the dark; those first strange, tender months.

That frantic, stumbling reassurance: It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, I love you like that, and how you were, and like this, and—

And fuck, I liked how your smile used to go higher on one side but, oh, it still does that, doesn’t it? You can still smile, I think?

She had meant every word. Meant them desperately.

But she’s a liar. Has always been one. Will always be one. She will never be entirely at ease with the sight of bone. Not his.

Not when she remembers how soft his skin used to be. The warmth of it, the faint sting of aftershave that clung to his jaw, the trace of pomade in his hair, coifed and perfumed. His hands—she remembers those best. The oils he used to rub into them, working it into the creases of his dominant hand, the one that held the staff for hours at a time. She would smell it on him even in sleep.

She’s a liar. A liar. Nothing but a fucking liar.

And she knows it. So does Emmrich.

He’s never chastised her for it. Never called her out. Only smiled, gently, indulgently, whenever she flinched at the truth of him. At the exposed bone, the skinless hands, the echo of a smile he weaves into place with magic.

She hates that she still startles. Hates more that she still loves him.

It clings to her like old perfume, that feeling, faint, persistent, made stronger in still air.

She wishes she didn’t miss him. Wishes her heart didn’t twist in his presence.

Ha.

Ha, she thinks again, dry-mouthed and furious with herself.

Here she is, aching for someone who never left.

"Hello," she says a little sheepishly.

"Darling," he repeats and takes her hands, kissing the knuckles. Two kisses to the left hand, three to the right. “You came. That means something still holds.”

He bows his head, ever obliging. She wants, almost violently, to cross the space between them. To fall into him. To let his arms close around her and be held there, still and forgetting.

But she remembers the Veil. The way it wavers with a kind of irritation, like a curtain in a draft. The way it tears. What slips through when it does.

And how it steadies. Not because of her. Because Emmrich is here. Because he is distant, restrained, holding everything in place, including himself. Because he is not with her.

He offers her his arm, and she takes it instinctively, though something in her chest knots tight as she threads her hand through the crook of his elbow. He begins to walk, and she follows, through this strange little garden of theirs.

But then the path turns. The lilacs thin. The moss fades. And she realizes, with a quiet pang, that he’s leading her out.

Out of their private corner and into the Memorial Gardens.

The silence stretches, shaped by old familiarity.

“You never said why,” she says at last. “Why you wanted me to return. Just that the world was cracking. That the Necropolis was stuttering.”

“Because it is, dear.”

“And?”

He releases her hand, not fully, just enough to gesture outward, to the city sprawled beyond the courtyard. The faint hum in the stone is audible even here, as if the earth itself were murmuring beneath its breath.

They pause near a pillar, taller than the others, its expanse threaded with thick vines that spiral upward in perfect coils. The stems are smooth, almost waxy, their green too vivid, too saturated. Tiny leaves sprout along the lengths, trembling ever so slightly, though there’s no wind here. They look alive. Unsettlingly so. As if they aren’t simply clinging to the stone, but feeding from it. Or feeding into it. Too green for this place. Too alive for anywhere underground.

Emmrich beckons her closer.

“Go on,” he says. “Touch it.”

She places her palm flat against the surface.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

She jerks back, startled, then leans in again, this time with her ear pressed to the stone.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

“There is something beneath this place,” Emmrich says, and she feels his fingers in her hair. A ghost of a touch. The kind of touch designed to pass unnoticed, light enough to escape her defenses. As if he cannot help himself, cannot resist the need to reach for her, but fears she’ll bolt the moment she feels him trying to close in.

“Not a machine. Not a spell. Something far more complicated and beautiful. A system of memory. Of ritual. I call it the Heartline.”

The Heartline.

She repeats the words under her breath, her fingers digging slightly into the pillar. Stone, yes, it’s stone, but something in her recoils at the certainty. It doesn’t feel like stone. It feels warmed. Like bark. Like flesh. Like something that remembers being alive.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

“The people here,” Emmrich continues, “both the living and the dead, sustain it. Even in ignorance, they do their part. They walk familiar paths, speak inherited phrases, hold steady to shared thoughts. It requires rhythm. It requires pattern.”

Yes, she thinks, dazed. That’s what she’s hearing. What she’s feeling.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

“Lately, however,” he says, tone dropping, “there have been deviations.”

The sound—that sound—pushes too far into her. She tears herself away from the pillar, staggered by dizziness.

Her knees buckle.

Emmrich catches her, one arm firm around her waist.

“Darling,” he murmurs, sorrow plain in his voice. “My dearest one. You were never able to remain long in the Necropolis. But it does not have to be so.”

No.

No, no, no.

They cannot talk about this. Not again. Not ever again.

Because one day, she knows, if they do, she will say yes. And if she says yes, she will stay. And if she stays, she will become like the rest of them. A husk, not lifeless, but close enough. Even if he swears she won’t. Even if he swore it back then, when he shed skin for bone and she couldn’t bear the cold that followed.

That was why she left, wasn’t it?

Because she loved him. Loved him even as he changed, even as he became something other.

But the Necropolis always took something from her, each time she returned.

And though she loves him still, each visit leaves her a little more dulled. Each time, she feels a little less alive.

She looks out at the garden as he holds her steady, her weight resting against him before she’s even aware of it. The contact is incidental, but not unwelcome. Familiar.

The garden is no longer theirs.

He has kept the one they made together near his sanctuary, tucked into the folds of the city like a secret too valuable to expose. But here, in the heart of the Memorial Gardens, everything feels altered. Extended. Translated.

There are no lilies. No ginger flowers.

The ground no longer yields. What was once damp earth is now bedrock, rigid and unwelcoming, marked with pale seams of lyrium. The trees have absorbed metal. Their bark gleams in places, like wet iron. Flowers still grow, but their hearts have been replaced, amber cores nestled where soft stamens once were.

Tall arches rise in intervals, carved from obsidian and shaped in the old Nevarran style, ornate, theatrical, too large to be anything but declarations. Bone motifs are everywhere: the ribcages of long-dead beasts replicated in stone, suspended as if mid-roar.

The entire space has become a hybrid, grafted, fused, unwilling to choose between the living and the made.

Wisps, however, still float between the structures, aimless and light. They drift like dandelion seeds caught in a breeze, circling one another, brushing the air with idle joy. Happy puppies, chasing their many tails. Those, she loves. Always has. They are simple, singular, and kind. She is relieved to see them remain.

But the rest—

The rest feels like a place pretending to remember what a garden is.

And something about that pretense makes her hands shake.

She wants to touch Emmrich's face.

So she does, absentmindedly. A little hum escapes her, a buffer for the intimacy, a soft disguise.

After a time, she says, “So. You brought me here because the ghosts are walking out of step?”

He stiffens.

“They are not ghosts,” he replies, defensive, gaze fleeing from hers.

She resists the urge to scoff, to say, really, really, are you sure about that? Have you seen them? The grey skin? The hollow eyes like burnt-out lanterns?

“I summoned you because something is interfering with the Work,” he elaborates. “Its cadence is no longer sound. I cannot locate the source. You are the only one who has ever questioned the rhythm without succumbing to it.”

“No,” she protests. “I left before it could take me. That’s not the same.”

He inclines his head, looking like a dog kicked.

“Perhaps. Nevertheless, you understand entropy. You understand the weight of memory, and its cost. And you have always been—” he pauses to deliberate “—remarkably difficult to anticipate. That quality is more essential than you may realize.”

She presses her teeth lightly to her lower lip, thinking.

“So you want me to find the fault line.”

“I want you to perceive what I no longer can. To recall what I have erased in repetition. To move against the grain.”

“And if I want to leave?”

He turns to her, meeting her gaze fully now. Not blinking. She wishes he would. Wishes the corners of his eyes would crease, just a little.

“No one is held here against their will, Rook. That has never changed.”

“Mm-hm,” she says. And because touching his face feels too much, too close, she takes his hand instead.

It’s neither cold nor warm. Just lukewarm, if absence can be said to carry temperature.

Emmrich draws a slow circle on the inside of her wrist with his thumb.

“However,” he says, his voice softening, “I would advise you to remain until the rhythm settles. To leave before it does would be... unwise.”

They come to the garden’s edge. He reaches toward a shroud's kiss bloom and brushes his fingers along the petals. It does not stir.

“I preserved this for you,” he whispers. “So that something here might remind you of its beauty.”

“You preserved it,” she echoes. “But did it change?” Things are supposed to change. That’s what makes them beautiful. Otherwise, they turn strange. Uncanny. Real, but not real enough. Held in place. Fixed.

“Some things are not meant to.”

There’s a pause, and it stretches just a little too long. She feels it envelop her, the quiet heaviness he always brings with him.

So she tries, clumsily, to puncture it.

“Well,” she says, with a shrug and a crooked smile, “it’s still standing upright. That’s impressive, considering how most things shrivel up without intensive stimulation.”

A beat of silence.

“I mean, plants,” she adds. “Obviously.”

His brow lifts, however slightly, but it’s enough to satisfy her. Maybe even liches, even Emmrich, aren’t immune to a terrible joke about erections.

She looks away before he can smile. Shakes her head like she regrets saying it, though she doesn’t.

From the edge of her vision, she sees his hand rise, fingers hovering just above her hair, not quite making contact.

“Stay,” he says. “See for yourself. I will not keep you from knowing.”

“The water grows deeper.”

“Does it?”

“It tastes of dreams. They drink. And then they drift.”

“They should not,” Emmrich murmurs.

The movement of his hands is not required. He knows that. He could summon the spell with a thought, with a breath. But still, his fingers move. Old habits are hard to break.

Rook has left him. Not for the surface, but further below, deeper into the Necropolis.

As he asked.

To observe. To understand.

Her hair is longer now, he notes with a trace of fondness. He smiles.

Light and color coil together around a Shroud’s Kiss bloom. It dims, then flares back to life. He cradles it in his palm and offers it to the Caretaker, who accepts it with a nod.

The spell anchors itself in the flower. The memory takes shape, soft, refracted, caught in an endless loop.

The first time he gave it to her.

Her fingers brushing his as she took the flower. The quicksilver grin. The Fade erupting around her in sparks like wildfire.

Then another echo. Her voice, cool and clear.

“Don’t make a monument out of me.”

He looks into the shimmer where her image once was, fading back into nothing.

“I have not,” he says quietly. “I made a sanctuary.”

The next day, Rook begins to explore.

Notebook in hand, fountain pen tucked neatly into the breast pocket. She’s dressed in the standard scrubs worn by those who work near the Veil, deep greens threaded with violet, the fabric thick enough to withstand errant magic, and bracers strapped to her forearms, heavy and well-worn. She doubts she’ll be mining lyrium. But the city has changed so much, she’s no longer certain what she’ll be called to do.

The Caretaker shadows her. It does not leave. It never does. Always there: guide and sentinel, loyal to Emmrich, deferential to her. She once loved its paradox, its unwavering patience, the way it obeyed her with something like devotion.

Now she dreams of unmaking it.

They pass through a long corridor filled with rows of seated figures, some living, others half-faded, and a few already reanimated. Each sits before a wall of stone, reciting lines in sync with soft, chiming tones.

As they speak, the words rise before them, lines of light etched mid-air, briefly glowing, then vanishing.

Some are familiar: containment spells, fragments of history, names she recognizes from graves or old letters. Others are incomprehensible, fractured language or sound dressed as language.

“They’re reciting records,” Rook says, watching one scribe mouth the name of a long-dead city.

“No,” the Caretaker replies. “They are reinforcing them. Events decay. Thought slips. Memory fills the cracks.”

At the end of the corridor, she ducks into an alcove, flicks open her notebook, and starts scribbling before the headache forming behind her eyes can settle in. The handwriting’s rushed, crooked. No one's going to read it but her. Hopefully.

Entry 1 Repetition Halls. Rows and rows of people (dead, dying, or just really into silent suffering) chanting to a wall like it owes them something. Spoken words light up in the air for half a second, then poof. Gone. Apparently this isn’t recording, it’s reinforcing. Like memory is a wobbly chair and they’re all here to sit on it until it stabilizes. Caretaker says it’s about keeping the rhythm. That if they stop, the cracks get wider. Which is reassuring. Nothing says “functioning system” like needing undead librarians to whisper the same three phrases forever just so the Veil doesn’t unravel. Is this the problem Emmrich meant? No idea. But it stinks of desperation and ritual with no off switch. Note to self: if I ever start mumbling spell fragments to a glowing wall for eight hours a day, go ahead and set me on fire. Gently.

Farther along, another chamber opens on her left: a gallery of mirrors, hundreds of them, suspended, tilted, arranged like instruments in a vast observatory.

She pauses. Freezes. Just for a moment.

In the nearest pane, she sees herself. And behind her—

A shape. Rigid posture. A cloak she almost recognizes.

She turns on instinct.

Nothing.

Just the Caretaker. Just stone.

“Did someone just pass us?” she asks.

“Only you,” it replies.

She looks back at the glass. Only one reflection now.

She rubs her eyes. Forces her gaze to widen, to take in the room.

Each mirror reflects a single figure. Each figure stands motionless. But their eyes move, tracking the reflections as if reading them. Occasionally, one blinks. Another twitches a finger.

Etched in gold above the entrance:

THE SELF, REMEMBERED, HOLDS THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD

A chill moves across her skin. She turns away. Walks until the mirrors are out of view. Until the hum behind her spine lessens and her skin stops crawling like it’s trying to peel itself off.

Entry 2 Mirror gallery. Don’t love it. They were watching themselves, or something that looked like them. Eyes moving, hands twitching. They track. They read. One blinked at me. I blinked back. What gets me isn’t the setup. It’s the intent. Not metaphor. Not poetry. Literal. Emmrich built this thing on the idea that identity isn't just personal, it’s structural. If they forget who they are, something breaks. Something bigger. Which means the Veil is balancing on people being consistent versions of themselves. Over and over. Like performance, but deeper. Reenactment. Fixing a person in place like a gear so the machine doesn’t seize. But the Veil holds demons, doesn't it? It holds dreams. Why mirrors? They’re not choosing to be still. They’re afraid to change. (Insert hilarious joke here about how I also fear change, especially when it involves mirrors that blink back. Or don't.) But it’s not funny, actually. It’s awful. If the Veil is stabilized by repetition, what happens when you try to heal? When you shift? When you grow past what the mirror expects? Maybe the mirror doesn’t blink anymore. Maybe it corrects you.

She climbs two, three, four flights of stairs. Finds a narrow hall lined with seven doors. She enters the fourth.

Inside, more scholars. Seated at nodes. Whispering. Marking. Watching.

At the far edge, a young man walks a perfect circle, his steps unwavering. With every footfall, a stone beneath him lights up with glyphs that fade behind him. He repeats a phrase under his breath, again and again, without inflection.

“What is he doing?”

“Remembering the boundary,” the Caretaker answers. “If he stops, it frays.”

She snickers.

“Emmrich has built a city that runs on people walking in circles, saying the same thing forever.”

The Caretaker tilts its head. “It is not so different from surface governance.”

The chill deepens.

She feels exposed. There is no folding inward here, no space to vanish into herself, no corners to hide in.

She is watched. Every turn she takes, every hallway—eyes follow. But not with suspicion. With reverence. As if she were myth returning. As if she had always belonged here.

Entry 3 The glyphs respond not to the words themselves but to cadence, meaning the Veil is likely mapping rhythm rather than content. Boundary reinforcement suggests a magical perimeter tied to localized memory loops—personalized, maybe? Not universal. Not stable. Node scholars aren't observing—they’re anchoring. Observers as fixpoints. Veil theory? Neuro-magical resonance? City runs on recursion. Entropy postponed by repetition. Preservation through paralysis. What is Emmrich doing.

She flips her notebook closed, still chewing on a question she hasn’t written down. As she turns to leave the chamber, her eye catches something.

Near the wall where she’d been standing to write. Just above the floor, tucked into the shadow of a broken molding: a glyph. Almost invisible. Not drawn with the bold confidence of the sanctioned runes, but something subtler.

Half-formed. Half-erased.

A scrying mark.

She steps closer. The curve of the rune flickers faintly in the ambient light, like a burn mark trying to hide. Someone had been watching this room. Watching them. Then tried to scrub it clean. But not well enough. The echo of magic still clings to it.

The Caretaker does not stop her. It watches but says nothing.

“Leave,” she says, without looking at it.

“To other shores,” it replies. Then it dissolves, as if stepping out of the world.

She presses her fingers against the bricks. The residue hums faintly. Recently used. Directional.

Downward.

She descends the stairs, two at a time. Through the corridors and back into the arterial depths of the Necropolis, where the walls sweat heat and the lights grow orange from furnace-glow.

Here, in the mouth of the city, the air thickens. Smoke pours from vents and chimneys stitched into the stone like scar tissue.

The lyrium refineries are louder here.

She can hear the clank and hiss of molten ore pouring into molds, the wheeze of coolant fog, the hiss of breath. Here, the furnaces hum like low, furious throats. Smoke pours from bronze vents in the walls, from towers stitched with piping and valves. Lyrium melts in crucibles somewhere below, its heat pushed upward in shimmering waves.

Cerulean dust clings to everything. The railings. The doors. The river below. It looks like a dream, misty and blue and gently falling like ash.

Beautiful.

Until it settles into the lungs. Into skin. Into thought. She’s seen what it makes people become. The twitching, the muttering. The way templars look just before they forget what silence sounds like.

She rounds a corner behind one of the brass-and-bronze processing buildings, following the last thread of that glyph’s pull—

And there she is.

The woman from the train.

Leaning against a pipe-warmed wall, cigarette glowing between her fingers, eyes squinting in the haze.

At her feet, a body.

Face-down. Barely dressed. Covered in pale, branching lyrium tendrils that run like frostbite across the exposed skin, white-blue and raw-looking.

The woman sighs. Whether from exhaustion or irritation, it’s hard to tell.

She holds a wand, not a staff. Small, efficient, carved with sigils worn smooth from use. Frost curls off the tip, cold hanging in the air around her.

Her eyes narrow when she sees Rook. Recognition clicks into place, but she doesn’t smile.

“You,” she says flatly. “From the train. The Lich’s… wife, is it? Partner?” She waves the wand vaguely in Rook’s direction. “I wasn’t sure, back then. But the alleyways are whispering about you now,” she adds. “Didn’t think you’d actually come all the way down here.”

She taps ash from her cigarette, glancing at the corpse like it’s merely taking a nap rather than decomposing.

Rook nods toward the body. “Friend of yours?”

“Hardly,” the woman says. “More like... a question someone tried to bury.”

She holds out the cigarette pack. “Want one?”

Rook hesitates. Then shakes her head.

“Suit yourself,” she says, rolling a shoulder. “This place has a lot of those.”

“Questions?”

“Corpses.”

ARCHIVAL ENTRY — AUDIO RECORDING — UNTIMESTAMPED SPEAKER: Bellara Lutare

[TRANSCRIPTION BEGINS] click Um, this is Bellara. Lutare. Bellara Lutare. I think I’m supposed to say that at the beginning of these? For the archives? Even though it’s just me talking to myself and the wall, basically. But. Um. Official protocol and all that. Right. So I’m making this recording because Neve’s not here, and I know she didn’t say she’d be here, but also she didn’t say she wouldn’t, and she usually leaves notes. Or at least little squiggles on the corner of my reports. But she hasn’t been back in a while. So. This is not a rescue mission. Not yet. It’s a look-around mission. A check-in mission. A… casual concern mission. Anyway. If I find her, I’ll bring her home. Well, I'll ask if she wants to go home. Because maybe she left on purpose and just didn’t tell me, instead of, you know, leaving by accident or getting stuck or caught or veiled into non-existence or... No. Not that. I’ll say sorry. I’ll tell her I’ll do better. I’ll ask if maybe I can help her with her cases. If she has a new one. Like a murder. Or a theft. Or a mysterious baron with a monocle and a secret past. I’ll say sorry again. I won’t hide in the lab so much. I’ll come to dinner when she says “come to dinner.” Yeah. I’ll do that. It’s just that she’s been gone so long. pause All right. That’s the update. Ending the—wait, do I hit this one or— click [TRANSCRIPTION ENDS]

Hammer, hammer. Measure. Cut. Fit.

Melt. Insert.

The table is cluttered. Coiled wires, gears scattered like brass seeds, tiny springs leaping away when she breathes too hard.

The thing she’s building is small. Very dainty. Elegant in the way complicated things are. A tracer, technically. She’s seen diagrams in seven different books, all of them conflicting. She’s combining the best parts, or at least the ones she understands.

It’s meant to follow a signature. Not just magical debris, but personhood. A trace of being. A sliver of identity wrapped around habit and heartbeat and worn-in objects.

The core mechanism rests at the center like a heart: a shiny copper ring, spinning slowly, suspended by hair-fine wires. Spiraled filaments wind around it, feeding into an amplifier no larger than her thumbnail.

It will need something personal. Something of Neve.

She rifles through a drawer without looking and pulls out a fork. Slightly bent at the middle tine.

Yes, perfect. Neve’s favorite. The one she always used to stab fried fish.

Bellara grins. Wipes it down. Carefully slides it into the intake slot.

The machine hums. Low. Curious.

Then it buzzes, stutters, and promptly explodes in a sharp burst of heat and light, sending up a puff of smoke and singeing her eyebrows clean off.

"Fudge."

"I CANNOT SAY."

"Shut up."

She glares at the archival spirit hovering smugly in midair, its translucent hands primly folded.

She rescued it.

Dug it out of rubble. Braved Venatori fanatics, relic hunters, and one extremely territorial nug. Nearly dislocated a wrist and a knee wrestling it out of a half-collapsed ruin. She rebuilt its core matrix from scorched memory-stone and optimism, rewired half its logic lattice using copper salvaged from a broken kettle, gave it back a voice and full operational function.

And now?

Now it plays twenty questions every time she so much as breathes near it.

She sneezes once and it says, “What is the purpose of your query?”

She asks for assistance and it sniffs, “Have you filed a priority request form in triplicate?”

She pleads with it to help reconstruct unstable blueprints before they collapse again and it comments, “Anaris would have considered your jewelry a structural liability and a visual affront to the principles of symmetry."

A spirit of bullshit, Neve had called it once. Bellara hadn’t agreed then. She does now. Enthusiastically.

"Neve said there’s opportunity, down there," Bellara mutters, rubbing her wrists, then her face, smearing soot across her cheek in a streak she doesn’t notice. “But I don’t think she’d actually go, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. How do I get… down there? You know. The Grand Necropolis. I heard there's a train.”

The Nadas Dirthalen floats silently for a moment.

Then:

“The Veil thickens and thins. The Veil is restructured. Recalibrated. Replaced. Pressure modulation: inconsistent. Containment protocols: unstable."

It begins to stutter. Words stack out of order. Phrases loop without reason.

“The Veil thickens and thins. Thickens. Thins. Thickensandthinsthickensandthinsthickens—”

The voice distorts, warping into a higher register, then dropping abruptly, as if dragged underwater.

“—Ingress denied. Egress denied. Boundary error. Memory conflict. Origin: scrubbed. Origin: scrubbed. Origin–”

A static pop. A low whine, pitched just barely beneath hearing.

“Anaris cannot step out. Anaris cannot step out. Anaris cannot–Anaris cannot–Anaris—”

The spirit jerks in midair, its glow flaring too bright for an instant, then pulsing erratically.

It repeats the same three syllables in a loop:

“—Not-out. Not-out. Not-outnotoutnotoutnot—”

Until the voice collapses into a soft whimper. Then silence.

Bellara’s Workshop Log—Personal Tinkering Notes (Filed: Messily, Unsorted)

"Prototype #227b failed. Resonance sync fractured mid-loop. Neve would say it’s because I didn’t test it long enough. I’d say she’s probably right. Again. She said I don’t finish anything. That I leap to the next idea before the first one even settles. I told her I can’t sit still, that I don’t want to. She didn’t laugh. The truth is, I was building something for her. I just never got to the part where it worked. She left before I could name it. Maybe that’s fair. Maybe I would have left me, too."

#editing this thing was such a bitch lol #i mean the html or whatever it's called #whatever lol #never outline a story so much in my life #apparently i need 100 wips at the same time to keep myself sane #bellara is orpheus btw lol and neve is eurydice #emmrook #emmrich x rook #emmrich volkarin #dragon age emmrich #emmrook hadestown au #hadestown au #dragon age the veilguard #datv #my stupid writing

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