Ashborn: The Hunter Who Returned Before the End

Chapter 6 — The Price of Being Right

The guild did not thank them for saving Greywall.

It placed Kael under arrest before noon.

The hearing took place in the guild’s upper hall, beneath portraits of hunters who had died with clean reputations. Kael sat at a long table with his side stitched and his hands bound in silver wire. Seris stood behind him as a witness. Elia was kept outside by two guards and had threatened to bite one of them.

Guildmaster Oren Marr read the charge. “Unauthorized descent into a restricted quarry. Destruction of guild property. Use of an unregistered relic. Contact with a hostile rift entity.”

“You forgot saving the city,” Kael said.

“That claim is unverified.”

Seris leaned forward. “I verified it.”

Every elder in the chamber looked at her. Seris was not a member of Greywall’s guild. She worked as an independent scout and had no reason to defend Kael except that she hated the truth less than the guild did.

Oren’s mouth tightened. “Your report describes a sealed gate. Yet our instruments detected no gate beneath the quarry.”

“Your instruments are made by men who cannot read the runes,” Seris replied.

Kael nearly smiled. In the future, Seris had become famous for insulting officials until they revealed what they wanted hidden.

The doors opened. Dain Holt entered, pale and sweating. A strip of black crystal ran beneath the skin of his neck.

Kael stood despite the wires.

“Where did he get that?”

Dain’s eyes rolled toward him. “You did this.”

The crystal cracked.

Dain’s body twisted. His jaw stretched, his fingers lengthened, and a black vein spread across his cheek. The guards reached for their weapons, but Kael was already moving. He drove his shoulder into the table, snapped the silver wire against the corner, and seized a fallen chair.

The transformed Dain attacked.

Kael blocked the first claw with the chair’s iron frame. The impact threw him across the room. He landed against a pillar, pain exploding through his stitched side. In the old timeline, Dain had been a minor casualty. Kael had forgotten that the Hollow King never repeated a method exactly.

Seris fired from the doorway. Her arrow struck Dain’s eye but did not slow him.

“The crystal!” Kael shouted. “Break the crystal!”

Dain charged. Kael waited until the last instant, dropped beneath the claws, and slammed the chair into the black vein at Dain’s throat. The crystal shattered. A pulse of cold passed through the hall.

Dain collapsed in human form.

No one spoke.

Kael knelt beside him and found a smear of black dust on his collar. The same dust that had melted into Kael’s palm now clung to Dain’s blood.

Guildmaster Oren stared at the unconscious hunter. “What is happening?”

Kael looked at the elders’ frightened faces. In the old world, he had screamed this question while the city burned. No one had listened then either.

“Your gates are opening early,” he said. “Someone inside this guild is helping them.”

The doors slammed open again.

A young officer entered wearing the gray-and-silver coat of the central Wardens. Kael knew the face. Rook Sarlan was only thirty-two, not yet a commander, but his eyes held the same careful regret.

“I heard there was trouble,” Rook said.

Kael’s hand closed around the black bead beneath his glove.

The bead pulsed in answer.

Rook noticed the movement beneath Kael’s glove. “You were in the quarry when the signal appeared.”

“So were half a dozen miners.”

“Only one of them came out carrying a relic.”

Kael said nothing. Rook’s gaze was calm, almost kind. That was what made it dangerous. In the old timeline, Rook had always made cruelty sound like arithmetic. He had saved villages by sacrificing smaller villages, preserved armies by abandoning scouts, and eventually convinced Kael that survival required obedience.

Not this time.

The guildmaster ordered the guards to take Dain to the infirmary. As they lifted him, a black thread slipped from his mouth and vanished into the floorboards. Kael saw it. So did Seris.

“The infection is still inside him,” she whispered.

Kael watched the thread travel toward the northern wall.

“Then we follow it,” he said, “before it reaches the next body.”

The elders pretended not to hear.

The room remained silent.

Kael noticed the black thread vanish beneath the floorboards.