Rooke's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "I like that. If you face your trials and serve the Duke with unwavering loyalty, he'll make sure you get whatever you want out of this life. Your name in the histories. Your children never toiling a day they don't choose to." He said it the way a man recites a creed he's stopped examining, familiar and worn smooth from repetition. "First you'll need a proper weapon. That dagger you're carrying is fit to kill rats, nothing better." His eyes flicked to the crude iron blade at Corren's belt, the one a frightened bandit had handed over on the coast road less than a day earlier. "Beneath the castle lies the tomb of Vaenor the Warlord. He was buried with his whole collection, so we use it as an armory now. Go down, come back with something that won't embarrass you, and that's your orientation finished."
"Anything I should know before I go down there?"
"Watch for the Tomb Walkers. Nasty things, drawn to ambient magic the way flies are drawn to a wound that won't close." Rooke's grin widened, entirely too pleased with himself. "I've given this exact speech to three other trialists today. You're the fourth."
"What happened to the other three?"
Rooke only shrugged, and the shrug told Corren everything the man had no intention of saying aloud.
The stairs down into Vaenor's tomb had a wall on one side and nothing at all on the other, a black drop that swallowed torchlight before it ever found a bottom, and Corren descended with his crude dagger in one hand and a borrowed torch in the other, listening to his own footsteps echo off stone that had not felt honest daylight in what smelled like centuries. The air changed by degrees as he went, salt giving way to mildew, mildew giving way to something colder and more mineral, a stillness that pressed against his ears the way deep water presses against a diver's chest.
The stairwell finally opened into a wider gallery, and Corren's torch found the first burial niches cut into the walls at shoulder height, small alcoves stacked three deep on either side, most of them holding nothing now but dust and the collapsed suggestion of a shroud. Whoever built this place had built it to be visited, once, by mourners who never came back after the first generation forgot which names belonged to which bones. He counted the niches without meaning to, an old academic habit that refused to switch itself off even here, and stopped counting somewhere past forty when the smell finally reached him: not simply mildew now, but something greener and more organic underneath it, the specific rot of things that had been dead a long time and had not been left entirely alone in all that time either.
They came out of the dark without any warning worth the name: eight skeletal shapes, twisted by whatever residue of magic still clung to a dead conjurer's bones, their eye sockets carrying a faint unholy glow that had no business existing in a face with no eyes left to hold it. Their joints moved wrong when they moved at all, doubling back at angles no living skeleton would have tolerated, and the sound they made crossing the stone floor toward him was less a footstep than a dry, patient clicking, like something counting down. Corren held his ground and threw a loose stone at the nearest one, more out of scientific curiosity than tactics, and watched it dodge the stone with a nimbleness that told him these things thought, after some fashion, even if nothing behind those glowing sockets could be called a mind exactly.
"So I can't just walk past you," he said, mostly to himself, and adjusted his stance into something Master Doss would have at least tolerated. Two of them broke from the loose half-circle and came at him from either side at once, testing rather than committing, and he backed half a step to keep them both in view, cataloguing the reach of their notched, corroded blades with the same clinical patience he'd once given a manuscript's damaged margins. When he waved the torch in a wide, deliberate arc, all eight of them flinched back from the flame in near-unison, an instinctive aversion too uniform to be anything but a shared weakness bred into whatever had made them. "That's promising."
He drew a breath, and let the old Ashvale chant unspool from his chest, cleaner and more compact than the version his own father had once used to light a hearth: a controlled cone of fire rather than a formless breath, aimed low and wide across the tunnel floor. The Tomb Walkers scattered from the heat with the shrieking that only something already dead could make, and the small, familiar hollowness sank into Corren's ribs a half-second later, the mana spent leaving behind the same quiet fatigue he'd come to expect from any working that actually did something, a coin paid the instant it was earned.
The path clear, if only for as long as the fire's memory lingered on the stone, he pushed forward into the burial chamber proper: a wide room ringed floor to ceiling with weapons, swords and axes and things with no name he recognized, cold steel drinking in the torchlight and giving almost none of it back. One weapon alone seemed to resist that hunger. A dark blade, its metal so black it looked less like it was absorbing the light than politely declining to acknowledge it existed, hung beneath a small plaque that read, simply, Morning Star.
The moment his palm closed around the grip, faint inscriptions along the flat of the blade kindled into a soft, cold glow, and Corren felt the specific, electric thrill of recognition settle over him before he'd even finished reading the words. Latin. Not the elegant classical Latin of an old inscription meant to be admired, but the tighter, more functional Latin of a working incantation, every syllable load-bearing.