I never thought digging a grave would change everything.My name is Kane Ashveil. I was nineteen years old, tall and skinny, with messy black hair always covered in dirt. My grey eyes had stopped hoping for anything good a long time ago. I lived in a tiny broken shed next to Valdris City Cemetery. Every day I dug holes for dead people while the villagers called me “Grave Rat” and threw rocks if I got too close to the market. The Eternal Church said dark magic was evil. The Silver Order knights hunted anyone who used it. I just wanted to eat and sleep without trouble.That night it rained hard. Lightning flashed across the sky. I was digging the last grave for an old farmer who had died. My rusty shovel hit something hard. I wiped mud from my eyes and looked down. It was just an old bone. I tried to push it back into the dirt, but my fingers slipped. A drop of my blood fell onto the bone.The ground started to shake.CRACK… CRACK… CRACK!Dirt burst open all around me. Old skeleton

Kane did not wait to find out what the horn meant.He already knew. Every person in Valdris knew. A single long horn in the middle of the night meant the Silver Order was not sending patrol guards anymore.They were sending someone else entirely. Someone whose job was not to chase but to find. There was a difference between the two and that difference usually ended with a body.He moved fast through the trees, his two skeletal soldiers following without a sound.He found the ruins about twenty minutes later. An old stone building the forest had been slowly swallowing for years. One corner inside still had a roof over it. Kane ducked in, sat down against the cold wall, and pressed his back into the stone.He needed to think.His two skeletal soldiers stopped in the doorway and stood there without being asked, their wide bony frames blocking most of the wind coming in from outside. Kane looked at them for a moment."Thank you," he said quietly.They did not answer. But they did not mov

Nobody spoke for a long time after the Hunter left.The seventeen thousand undead soldiers stood in the clearing like a silent sea of old grey bones, their purple fire burning steady in the dark, waiting. The shadow wall Seraphine had built was dissolving slowly at the edges, bleeding back into the trees like smoke clearing after a fire.Kane stood in the middle of all of it and stared at the space where Drav Solus had disappeared.Aldric Voss wants you alive.He remembers the name Ashveil.He said you would understand what that means.The problem was that Kane did not understand. He understood nothing. He was a nineteen year old grave digger standing in a forest at dawn surrounded by thousands of dead soldiers and a girl he had known for approximately seven minutes and a voice in his head that kept handing him information like stones and watching him try not to drown under the weight of them.Seraphine turned to look at him."Kane Ashveil," she said slowly, like she was testing the w

The entrance to the tunnel was not impressive.A rusted iron door half buried in a hillside at the edge of the forest, so covered in dead vines and old dirt that a person could walk past it a hundred times and never know it was there.Kane stood in front of it and pressed his palm flat against the metal and felt what was on the other side the way you feel heat from a fire through a wall.Hundreds of thousands of them.Sleeping in the dark. Packed into the earth like seeds waiting for rain."This is it," he said.Seraphine stood beside him looking at the door with an expression that was working very hard to look calm. "It smells like three hundred years of death." She said looking irritated "It is three hundred years of death," Kane said with a chuckle. "Wonderful," she said. "Open it."The door groaned when Kane pulled it. A sound like something that had not spoken in centuries deciding it still remembered how. Cold air pushed out from the darkness beyond it, heavy and still and ca