Vescrutia: Legacy

"Hurry, we don't have much time."

A feminine voice whispered under the cover of Iah's elongated night—the sparkle of the stars and the piercing rays of moonlight flitter between the fauna surrounding the mansion. Though a parade of paws scrouged the ground, no sound was released from them, for they were the steps of those who moved in shadow. Four figures clad in dark robes descended upon the perimeter.

"Who died and made you the boss?"

A more masculine and scruffy voice whispered in defiance of the first. A blur of speed before leaping into the air, their body coiled as it twisted through the air, revealing naught but the faint flash of a dagger before landing at the back of the building. It was outlined with several security measures, including guard stations at the front and sides, as well as multiple cameras. A veritable inpenetrable fortress, at least it seemed that way, and had they been amateurs, it might have remained as such. However,

"The boss emself. Now, shut up and dispose of those clowns in the ba-."

The feminine voice from earlier whispered. Yet before she could finish her statement, the thud of three bodies was heard over her earpiece, a coy smirk etched on her face.

"You were saying, Zara?"

"Tch, don't get cocky... they'll be back from the gala soon, let's get inside."

"Oo let me do this one."

A chipper voice, young yet not sounding in the least chummy, it. Xara knew that protesting would be futile, so she allowed them to proceed. The subtle flash of a lock pick was all that was seen before seconds later, the lock fumbled and fell.

"Swift work as usual, Ace."

"Awe Brago"

"Enough, let's go.."

Xara commanded, and the others followed through. The interior was gorgeous, to say the least. Coils of gold spun like threaded vines covered the pillar of the grand hall. Vases of grafted Star metal littered every room, reeking of riches. But they had come for one thing and one thing only.

"You sure the vault is in here?"

"You doubt me?"

"Right... let's go."

They were like shifting shadows, phantoms more than people, eventually coming across an immense vault. It was the image of stolen divinity, a veritable bulwark against would-be pirates.

"Shit, this thing is massive."

"No guards?"

"Well, they don't call it the impregnable vault for no reason?"

The smaller, cloaked one placed a hand on her shoulders. While Zara's lips curled into a confident smile,"

"But we have a secret weapon."

The air in the penthouse vault room was thick with the scent of ozone and old money. It hung in the stillness, a silent testament to the staggering wealth of Lord Valerius, a man who collected impossibilities the way others collected stamps.

Ace, perched on a gilded chaise lounge that looked utterly offended by their tactical gear, looked up from the flickering Luna-Screen of their Magi-datapad. “Shielding frequency is… non-existent. There’s nothing to hack, nothing to bypass. It’s not electronic. It’s… something else.”

Brago, a mountain of muscle and impatience, cracked his knuckles. The sound was like stones grinding against each other. "Something else? We don't get paid for 'something else'. We get paid for opening. Do we have an open, Xara?"

Xara’s smirk widened, a slash of confidence in the dim light. "We do." She turned, her gaze falling not on a gadget or a bomb, but on the fourth figure who had remained a silent monolith at the back of the group. He was slighter than Brago, less overtly energetic than Ace, a patch of deeper darkness within the gloom.

"Right," Brago grumbled, finally noticing where she was looking. "The freak show."

"Show some respect," Ace whispered, though a thrill danced in their voice. "It's Slyver's turn."

Slyver stepped forward. He wore the same dark robes as the others, but his hung on him without the coiled readiness of his companions. He removed his hood, revealing a face that belonged to the starlit deserts of a forgotten world. His fur was the color of liquid silver, shimmering even in the low light, and his ears were long and expressive, twitching at the subtle currents in the room. His eyes, the color of pale, cold iron, were fixed on the prize.

The immense vault door was a swirling vortex of patterns, like captured nebulae. The Star-metal it was forged from was cool and impassive, radiating an ancient stillness. Slyver approached it, his steps silent on the marble floor.

"It's a living lock," Slyver said, his voice a low, melodic rasp. "Magic... mixed with cutting-edge tech. Don't need a guard when the vault itself is one." He raised his hands, long and delicate, and placed his palms flat against the door. He didn't pull out any tools; he didn't need any.

Brago shifted, his sneer a permanent fixture. "Can you open this thing?"

Slyver’s lips quirked into a faint smile without turning. "Just as sure as I am that you'll have a fifth dinner when we get back to the hideout."

Brago’s sneer deepened into a low growl. Slyver ignored him, his smile vanishing as he closed his eyes.

For a moment, nothing happened. Brago shifted his weight again, the leather of his gear letting out a soft groan of protest. "Any century now, Slyver. The champagne and caviar crowd will be home soon."

"Quiet," Xara commanded, her voice a whipcrack. Her eyes were fixed on the vault.

Then, it began. A low hum vibrated through the floor, a resonant frequency that felt less like a sound and more like a memory. It was not stone in the way the off-worlders understood it. It was a solidified memory, a piece of Vescrutia’s crust, laced with veins of resonant star-metal. To a common thief, it was impenetrable. To Slyver, it was a conversation waiting to happen.

The intricate engravings on the vault, which had seemed merely decorative, began to glow with a soft, cerulean light. The light traced paths of forgotten constellations, flowing from Slyver's fingertips and spreading across the entire face of the bulwark.

Slyver's knuckles were white where his hands pressed against the metal, his brow beaded with sweat. This wasn't a simple unlocking; it was a silent negotiation, a battle of wills between a Vescrutian empath and a lock forged from stolen divinity. The air grew thick, charged with an energy that made the hairs on their arms stand up. Ace watched with wide-eyed wonder. Even Brago was silent now, his usual bravado replaced by a grudging awe.

"Hurry, Slyver," Xara whispered, her voice tight. A faint sound had reached her ears through the comms—the distant crunch of tires on a gravel driveway. Far too distant to be a threat yet, but it was a ticking clock.

The hum deepened, the light from the vault’s etchings growing brighter, casting their faces in an otherworldly glow. Slyver let out a sharp, pained gasp, as if the vault was fighting back, screaming its secrets into his mind.

Then, with a final, resonant chime that sounded like a distant star collapsing, the light vanished. Silence returned, heavy and absolute. A thin, vertical seam of pure darkness appeared on the vault's face. It widened without a single metallic groan or the click of a tumbler. The great door swung inward as if weightless, revealing not a room piled with gold, but a small, stark chamber bathed in the soft, pulsing light of a single object.

On a black obsidian pedestal rested an artifact, no bigger than a fist. It beat with a slow, rhythmic pulse of internal light, a captured star breathing in the dark.

"The Wayfinder's Compass," Ace breathed, the words reverent.

Xara moved first, her steps sure and swift. She reached the pedestal, her gloved fingers hovering over the artifact for a beat before closing around it. The moment she touched it, its light dimmed, the warmth it radiated seeping into her hand.

It was then that the trap was sprung.

It wasn't an alarm of bells or sirens. The soft, ambient lighting of the grand hall outside the vault room instantly bled to a stark, blood-red. A low, synthesized hum, entirely different from the vault's resonance, filled the mansion.

“Containment protocol initiated,” a calm, robotic voice echoed from hidden speakers. “Lifeform signature mismatch detected. Unscheduled translocation of Asset Zero. The grounds are now sealed.”

"Shit," Brago hissed, the flash of his daggers returning as he drew them from their sheaths. "So much for a clean exit."

Slyver stumbled back from the vault, looking pale and drained, one hand pressed to his temple. The mental exertion had cost him dearly.

Xara clutched the pulsing crystal, its rhythm now frantic against her palm. "Forget clean," she commanded, her voice cutting through the rising hum. "Just worry about 'exit.' Move! Now!"

The shadows that had crept so silently into the mansion now fled, their phantom grace replaced by a desperate, racing urgency.

"Ya did good....Slyver"

The shift was jarring, a dizzying lurch as the opulent illusion of the Manor frayed at the edges like old silk. Gossamer threads of gold and velvet stretched thin, tore, and dissolved, revealing the raw, earthen reality beneath: the Mud Top Ward. The air in the Under-Barrow was always thick with the scent of damp earth, spiced mushroom stew, and the faint, metallic tang of ambition. To Balfaren, it was the smell of home.

He trotted down the cobblestone warren, his paws nimble on the uneven stones. A small, carved wooden moon-finch, smooth and cool, was clutched in one paw—a gift for his youngest sister, Leah, that he had picked up in the market. The job had gone well. Dangerously so, but the risk had been calculated. The Wayfaring Compass, an artifact spoken of in legends, was now safely in the hands of his guild, “The Palid Pilferers.” Instead of pointing north, it could be attuned to point towards a specific "note" in the Stone's Song, allowing the user to find a person, place, or object based on its unique spiritual resonance—a priceless tool. The guild’s cut paid enough for food and a week’s rent, and more importantly, it was honest work. Pillage the snobby, surface-dwelling nobles of the capital. It was a simple, satisfying philosophy. Unbeknownst to him, honesty was a currency his parents could no longer afford.

His family’s burrow was at the intersection of two major tunnels, a place usually alive with the comforting clamor of passing neighbors and merchants hawking their wares. Tonight, it was silent. An unnerving, hollow quiet that made the silver-tipped fur on his neck stand on end. The heavy oak door, usually barred and locked with a clever little puzzle-bolt his father had designed, hung ajar, a dark gash in the warm glow of the street lanterns.

A knot of ice formed in Balfaren’s gut. "Ma? Pa?" he called out, his voice small in the sudden vastness of the silence.

He pushed the door open. The little wooden finch slipped from his grasp and clattered on the floorboards, the sound unnaturally loud. The main room was a vortex of destruction. Chairs were splintered into kindling, the heavy dining table overturned as if by a giant’s hand, and crockery shattered into a thousand porcelain shards. A clay pot of his mother’s beloved moon-roses lay smashed, its rich soil and pale, luminescent petals smeared across the floor like a mortal wound.

Then he saw them.

His father, a stout, kind-hearted Usagi who taught him how to read the stars by the glowing moss on the cavern ceilings, was slumped against the far wall. His chest was a ruin, his simple tunic stained a dreadful, dark crimson. His two sisters, Rayna and little Leah, barely more than kits, were huddled near the cold hearth, as if seeking a warmth that would never come again. Each one was still. Terribly, unnaturally still. The scene was a brutal tableau, painted in shades of violence he couldn’t comprehend.

He found his mother, Anya, in the back room, near the small shrine to the Moon-Forged Ancestors. Even in death, she retained a shadow of her formidable grace. But her eyes, once twin pools of cunning and fierce love, were vast and vacant, fixed on the ceiling as if she’d seen the heavens themselves fall. Her life, a twenty-year tapestry of loyalty and shadow-work for a cause she believed in, had been cut short.

Balfaren’s world collapsed into a single, silent scream. Grief was a physical thing, a crushing weight that buckled his knees and stole the air from his lungs. He crawled through the wreckage of his life, his paws becoming sticky with the lifeblood of his family. As he reached his mother’s side, his eyes caught it. Carved deep into the wooden doorframe of the shrine, a symbol that seared itself into his soul: a stylized paw, its pads replaced by a shushing finger held to unseen lips.

The Silent Paw.

The name was a ghost story, a whisper to frighten kits into behaving. The blade in the dark. The unseen enforcers of the Zolgrundy clan. But why? Why them? His parents were simple couriers, they’d said—respectable, if humble, members of the Lu’ Jericho society of the Under-Barrow. The lie, so carefully maintained for his entire life, shattered alongside his heart.

As he knelt there, a drowned soul in an ocean of sorrow, the air shifted. The dust motes dancing in a stray moonbeam seemed to freeze as if time itself halted, the universe becoming a hitched breath. A presence coalesced in the shadows of the doorway, a figure whose aura was like the profound silence after a thunderclap.

The stranger stepped into the light. An Usagi, like him, but ancient and imposing. Their fur was a swirl of ash and moonlight, the exact shade of Balfaren’s own. Their eyes were old, holding the weariness of ages.

"They did not deserve this," the figure said, their voice a low resonance, like stones grinding together deep within the earth. It was not a voice of pity, but of grim, unassailable fact. "Your mother was Anya the Whisper-Thief. Your father, her anchor. They served the Zolgrundy clan, and for a moment of conscience, they were erased."

Balfaren looked up, tears blurring the stranger’s form. "Who… who are you?"

"I am a memory of what the Zolgrundy name once meant. You may call me the Ashen One," they said, stepping closer. "Malachi Zolgrundy and his Five Heirs have corrupted the search for the Shards, the Remnants of the Worldstone that once sang a song to Iah's sibling moons. They have turned a noble quest into a machine of avarice. I wish to see it broken, its foundations turned to dust."

The Ashen One crouched, their gaze piercing through Balfaren's grief to the rage simmering beneath. It was like staring into eternity made manifest... and the hollow of the void all at once. "That same power your ancestors touched, the resonance of the Moon-Forged, is a seed within you. You, a Silver Blood, carry the purest rendition of the song within you. I can teach you to cultivate it. I can teach you the Ishi no Uta—the Song of the Stones. You will learn to hear the whispers of the Duat, the spirit world, and command the Remnants of the dead. You will forge them into Vexed, instruments of your will."

The Ashen One's blood red eyes pierced through the darkness, like a beacon of bloody condemnation.

"I will make you a Warlock."

The offer hung in the blood-soaked air. It was not a path to peace. It was no holy crusade. It was a promise of power—a promise of retribution—a path of defilement, befouling the souls of the departed and morphing them into tools of revenge.

And yet...

Despite the heinous acts he would have to commit...

His following words were scraped from the depths of his shredded soul. "Will I be able to make them pay?" Balfaren whispered, the words raw and broken.

"You will become the ghost that haunts their gilded halls," the Ashen One replied, a flicker of something like cold fire in their ancient eyes. "You will be the whisper of betrayal they have sown for so long, come home to roost."

Looking at the hateful mark of the Silent Paw, at the still, beloved forms of his family, Balfaren found his answer. The boy who loved the stars and carved wooden birds for his sister died in that room. "Yes," he said, and the single word was a vow sealed in blood and tears. "Teach me."

The journey had scoured the last vestiges of civilization from Balfaren’s boots and soul. The Ashen One, a figure whose silhouette seemed cut from twilight and smoke, led him far from the dust-choked alleys of Lu’ Jericho, deep into the Blasted Wastes. Here, the world felt thin, a threadbare tapestry worn down by ages of forgotten calamities. The sun was a tarnished coin in a bleached sky, and the wind scraped like a rusty blade against the rocks.

They stopped before a place that defied reason. It was no bigger than a city plaza, yet the air within its invisible boundary shimmered like a desert mirage twisting into a massive tornado of spectral energy. Colors bled at the edges of reality—hues no living eye was meant to see—and the sound was a nauseating blend of high-pitched, keening whistles and a deep, gut-churning thrum that vibrated in Balfaren’s bones.

"This is a Sorrow-Storm," the Ashen One stated, their voice cutting cleanly through the distortion. They stood utterly unaffected, their ashen-hued fur seeming to drink the meager light. "A swirling rupture in the veil between the living world and the Duat. Here, the dead do not rest. They scream. Roar with the raging tempest of regrets, and equally as fierce," they gestured with a slender, grey-furred hand towards the very center of the shimmering chaos, a point of unsettling calm within the vortex.

"You will sit in its eye. You will not fight the voices. You will not flee from them. You will open yourself completely. Listen for the hum beneath the chaos. That is the Ishi no Uta. Find it. Resonate with it. If you fail, your mind will shatter, and your spirit will become just one more voice in the din. If you succeed… You will be deconstructed... but then you will be reborn."

With a ragged breath that felt like his last, Balfaren stepped across the threshold. The world dissolved.

He was instantly submerged in a torrent of raw, undiluted existence. A thousand lifetimes crashed over him in a single, brutal second. It was not a vision; it was an experience. He felt the mud and blood fill the lungs of a soldier dying in a forgotten trench, the all-consuming heartbreak of a mother losing her child to fever, the bitter, metallic taste of regret in a traitor’s last moments as the knife found his back. Voices, bodiless and desperate, clawed at his sanity, a cacophony of pleas, curses, and weeping.

Please help me! Betrayer! I loved you! The psychic shrapnel tore at him, shredding his sense of self. Then, the storm turned personal. It dredged up his own deepest wound and forced him to live it anew. He saw the splintering of his family’s door, felt the shock and terror of his father's final seconds as he fell defending them. He felt the bewildered fear in his sisters' eyes, cut short by merciless steel. And he felt the sharp, agonizing blade that ended his mother’s hesitation forever. Her final thought, a desperate psychic cry that now echoed through eternity, was of him. Balfaren. Be safe.

The grief was a hook, sharp and barbed, threatening to drag him down into the madness, to drown him in the shared sorrow of the dead. He was losing himself, his identity atomizing in the spectral storm. His name, his face, his life—it was all becoming meaningless noise. He was about to break, to let the madness take him and scream alongside them, when he remembered the Ashen One’s words. Listen for the hum beneath the chaos.

With the last iota of his will, he forced himself to ignore the screams, the sorrow, the terror. He focused inward, past the gnawing pain in his own heart, past the shrieking echoes of the dead. He let the tidal wave of emotion wash over him, but sought a current beneath. And he heard it. A deep, primordial thrum. It was not a sound for the ears, but for the soul. The song of the stone and the soil, the patient, eternal music of the world itself. The Ishi no Uta.

He clung to it like a drowning man to driftwood. He let its steady, powerful rhythm become his own heartbeat, the anchor for his fracturing mind. The chaos of the Duat did not cease, but it changed. It was no longer a tidal wave threatening to overwhelm him; it was an ocean, and he was learning its currents.

As he resonated with the Song, he began to perceive the voices not as a mob, but as individuals. Remnants. Echoes of will and emotion left behind. He could feel their rage, their sorrow, their lingering attachments like phantom limbs. And with the Ishi no Uta as his instrument, his conduit, he found he could reach out with his own will and touch them.

When the Sorrow-Storm finally receded, its energy spent, Balfaren stood in the quiet plaza. But he was not the same. His grief was no longer a weakness; it was a cold, hard diamond at the center of his being. His fur, once a common brown, now shone with the same ethereal, ashen-silver hue as his mentor’s. Upon his right hand, the flesh was blackened as if charred, and in its center manifested a mark like an orb of burned flame, a sigil that pulsed with a faint, malevolent light.

The Ashen One watched from the edge of the calmed rift, their expression unreadable. Yet the smallest interpretation of a grin crept sheepishly upon their face, a flicker of satisfaction in their obsidian eyes.

"My mark," they said, the sound startling in the sudden silence. "A symbol of one who has touched the abyss… and lived. Of the Pact that now exists between us."

The Ashen One manifested before the newly forged warlock, their hand extended not in aid, but in welcome. "This is just the beginning. There is much more for me to teach you. Come… my Anointed."

He took the offered hand. He was no longer Balfaren, the grieving survivor. That boy had been deconstructed in the storm. He was Slyver the Warlock, a willing pawn in a game ages older than he, and his soul was now tuned to a darker frequency.

And in the gilded halls of the Zolgrundy estate, the whispers of betrayal were about to find a new, terrible voice.

The Scene flushed once more, from the terror etched lands where the Sorrow Storm rampaged to a veritable wasteland where only a stubborn fauna managed to grow. Here, the only constant symbol that life once existed was the leagues of shattered weapons and brittle, decayed armors. The moment Sylver's foot touched the nearly hallowed earth, he was beset by a flash flood of bloodlust, an ethereal presence that sent his senses into shock. It was fiercely dioriting like standing under the waterfall off a mountain. His knees buckled, yet the Ashen strode in front of him, competently unfazed by the spiritual burden.

"What you are feeling is a sensation known as Astral Albatrose...it is the spectral manifestation of a Remnant's burden...the weight of their lingering emotions. When the pressure pressing against the Boundary is great enough, it can create Spectral Rifts. Yet...it can also serve as a feeding ground for the spirit bound to that place."

The Ashen one's steps were silent against the hardened earth, like standing upon rustic marble. Their lazy yet piercing gaze scouring over the many fallen. This entity has been for quite some time, eons even. It would prove the perfect test for his Anointed.

"It's nearly as powerful as the storm some years ago...what...or who died here?"
Slyver said as a brisk wind flung the hood of his cloak from over his face, revealing his silver fur thumming with the faint hue of seven moonlight. His hand was gloved, hiding his cursed etchings bestowed by his patron. The Ashen One did reply, not immediately, merely leading him farther across the battlefield, and in its center lay a rusted guillotine. It had to be centuries old, yet there was no sign of grime or rust. The closer they got, the fiercer the weight of the Astral Albastrose

"That is for you to find out. We have spent the first two years mastering the basics of your craft, and you have shown exceptional skill mastering techniques that would take others decades to perfect."

Slyver did not meet his master's gaze. Instead, his eyes lingered on the field of fallen weapons. It was faint, thin, but he could sense the Stone's song ebbing through this place, but it was being stifled, smothered by a rage as if the land was crying out for blood.

"...."

"That said, a Warlock with no vexed under his command his no Warlock at all. So today, you will be using everything I taught you to subdue the spirit that haunts these fields and transform it into a Vexed."

The Ashen One continued coming to a halt near the Guitlone.

"This...this thing feels"

Slyver said as his eyes wavered for but a moment while the Ashen One's gaze narrowed into daggers.

"Don't tell me you're afraid? Perhaps I was mistaken after all..."

They said, turning their back on Slyver as if preparing to leave him.

"No...I'll do it. I've come too far to turn tail and run now."

Slyver said with a guttural resolve. He had heard the cries and pleas of a thousand different dead and survived the maelstrom of their lamentation, their regrets, and cries for vengeance. Yet none of them were louder than the pleas of his fallen family. He would do this, and he would succeed.

"Very good, and remember. The Duat is always near...you just merely need to use your ears..."

With that, the Ashen One dematerialized into a grey vapor, leaving Slyver to investigate alone.

The silence that followed the Ashen One’s departure was a living thing, a heavy blanket smothering the faint, mournful song of the Stone. Sylver stood alone in the heart of the necropolis of steel, the rusted guillotine looming before him like a skeletal judge. The Astral Albatross pressed down, a physical weight that made the air thick and hard to breathe. It was a pressure cooker of despair, rage, and an insatiable thirst for vengeance. Every shattered sword seemed to hum with it; every dented helm seemed to watch him with hollow, hateful eyes.

He would not fail. The faces of his slaughtered kin flickered behind his eyes, a fire that burned hotter than any spectral rage. They were his reason, his resolve.

Taking a deep, centering breath, Sylver sank to one knee, placing a gloved hand upon the parched, cracked earth. He remembered his training. First, one must listen. Hear the song, the whispers of the Duat

“Kiku,” he whispered, the ancient word a key unlocking a door in his perception. He closed his eyes, not against the world, but to open a different kind of sight. The wind ceased to be just wind. It became the carrier of echoes, of ghosts of sound.

The battlefield erupted in his mind, not with the muted hum of the Albatross, but with the sharp, deafening cacophony of its birth. He heard the clang of a thousand swords in a battle that had never happened here. He listened to the furious, betrayed roar of a single man, a voice like grinding boulders. He heard the jeers of a crowd, a sea of faceless voices baying for a blood-sport execution. He felt the sickening thump-slice of the guillotine’s blade, a sound that echoed not once, but hundreds of times, as if replaying the moment for every soul the general had ever commanded, for every victory he had ever won. And beneath it all, a single, crystalline thought, forged in the final seconds of a life of honor, now twisted into an everlasting curse: I will not be forgotten.

I will not be forsaken. All who tread this ground will slake my thirst.

Sylver’s silver fur bristled, the faint moonlight hue intensifying as the ethereal energies washed over him. He had heard the Remnant’s story. Now, he had to see its face.

He rose to his feet, his gaze fixed on the space just before the guillotine. “Miru,” he commanded, his voice ringing with a newfound authority. He channeled his will, his connection to the Duat that manifested as an ethereal hand of green light reaching into the Unseen Realm, forcing the spirit to manifest. “Reveal yourself!”

The ground trembled. The blood-red dust coating the field began to swirl, shifting into a lilac plume, forming a cyclone of grit and memory. Shards of rusted swords and broken arrowheads lifted from the earth, drawn into the vortex. The Astral Albatross condensed, focusing on a single point until the pressure was nearly unbearable.

From the maelstrom of spectral energy and shrapnel, a form began to coalesce. First, sandals of spectral, pitted leather, then a kimono bearing the crest of a forgotten kingdom, and finally, a mask from which two points of burning lavender ignited like coals from a haunted forge. In its gauntleted hand, an unusually long Katana materialized, not of solid steel, but of compressed rage and the slivers of a thousand other broken blades.

Kawaki no Yaiba. The Unslaked Blade stood before him, a monument to betrayal. It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Its very presence was a scream of pure, undiluted hatred.

The spirit lunged.