He stood still and listened. Words reached his ears. They were ancient words, forged by a grammar that felt less spoken than chiseled. It was composed of angles and intent, rather than breath and habit.
The corpse was delivering a message. It articulated each word with meticulous precision, sounding as if a man were reciting a letter he had committed to memory.
Mordecai's grip tightened on his arm. "We need to leave."
"No." Elias did not budge. "It's saying something."
"I know it's saying something. Prolonged exposure to this language damages the mind, even its mere echoes can wreak havoc," Mordecai began to explain, but Elias cut him short.
"I can understand it," Elias said.
Silence fell over the room.
Even the corpse's raspy voice seemed to falter. It hadn't truly ceased, yet in that moment, there was a distinct pause.
Mordecai slowly released his arm.
Eldric had ushered his own apprentice out through the back exit. Now, the two of them were alone.
Elias stood in the center of the morgue, flanked by a standing corpse and a Seal Hunter.
He was listening to a language that had been dead for four hundred years, and he understood every single word.
The message was brief.
"The rite begins on the night of the New Moon. The Warden holds the site, but he cannot hold it for long, for they have already begun to move against him. Before they reach it, locate the tomb situated at the Edge of Names. Your blood is the key. Your blood is the lock. The choice between the two is yours alone. Do not let it be in vain. 'V'."
The corpse ceased speaking.
The burn marks faded. They had not gone out, but rather had settled into a stillness, like smoldering embers. The blackness in the corpse's eyes receded, leaving behind the ordinary, pale brown of a dead man's pupils.
Slowly, and like an object propped upright by some external force, carefully giving way, he fell.
Elias caught him before he hit the ground. He didn't know why he did it. It just felt wrong to him to let him fall like that.
He laid him down gently and folded his hands over his chest, exactly as he had arranged dozens of corpses before. Then he stood up.
Mordecai was staring at him.
"You understood him," he said.
"I understood every single word," Elias replied.
"That language has been dead since the time of the Shattering, four hundred years ago." Mordecai's voice was steady, yet behind his eyes, something was racing furiously. "Within living memory, only one person spoke it fluently. He was a scholar and a researcher. He spent decades translating fragments, fragments that were fragments in name only."
He paused for a moment. "His name was Vael Mourne."
The name felt like a physical weight in Elias's chest.
"Mourne," he repeated.
"Yes," Mordecai confirmed.
"That is my name."
"I know."
He looked at Mordecai. The Seal Hunter's expression had now become guarded and watchful. It was the look a man gives when he is trying to give another man the time to grasp something, without applying any pressure.
"Vael Mourne was my father," Elias said.
"Yes."
The word felt like the opening of a door to a room that had remained shut his entire life.
"My father is dead," Elias said. "Everyone in Greyhollo will tell you that. My mother is dead, too, and I have no family. I am an orphan raised under the town's guardianship." He kept his voice steady—with the practiced composure of a man who, having endured much, had learned the necessity of keeping his voice in check. "That is the story."
"I know the story."
"Is any of it true?"
Mordecai remained silent for a few moments.
"Regarding your mother," he said, and then paused. He seemed to be choosing his words with the caution of someone who had learned that certain words, once spoken, can never be taken back.
"The question of your mother is far more complex than I am currently prepared to answer. What I can tell you is this."
He reached into his coat, on the side opposite the warrant, and withdrew an envelope. It was sealed with dark wax, and the impression of the seal was a shape Elias had never seen before.
"Your father sent this to me three months ago, along with instructions to seek you out once your seal had awakened."
"My seal hasn't awakened, I've already told you that," Elias protested.
"Elias," Mordecai said, his voice calm and clear. "You have just understood a language that has been extinct for four centuries. You are standing beside a corpse that delivered a message specifically to you. Surely, something has awakened." He held out the envelope. "Read the letter."
Elias took it.
Beneath his fingertips, the seal cracked open, the wax was still warm. It was warmer than usual, warmer, even, than any document ought to be after having been kept inside a coat for three months during the autumn season in Greyhollow.
He felt that warmth within his chest as well. It was a faint throb from that 'mark', the one he never spoke of, and which he always kept concealed.
It was the very thing that had remained cold and dormant his entire life. Without making any mention of it, he opened the letter.
The handwriting was precise and as steady as architecture. It was the kind of script that had not merely been learned but trained for, in which every letter was placed with the deliberate care of someone who understood that the written word is a form of permanence.
Elias read it once quickly, and then again slowly, which was his customary way of reading anything of significance.
Mordecai remained silent. For that, at least, he deserved a modicum of credit.
The letter was not long. It consisted of three paragraphs and a closing that bore no signature of a name, but only a single initial: 'V'.
Without any firm intention of doing so, he read the pertinent passages aloud, in the empty morgue, his voice sounded flat and steady.
"The seal upon your chest is no curse. It never was a curse. On the night of your birth, I placed it there myself, a Void Binding, a method of concealment so ancient that no living practitioner knows how to read it. It renders you a blank slate to any Seal Reader. It makes you appear dormant, unremarkable, and unworthy of being hunted. I applied it because they were already coming, and you were but a single night old, and it was the only protection I had available."
He paused and took a breath.
"The Ashen Court has been preparing for a rite for eleven years. The specific nature of that rite is recorded in the document I left for you at the grave by 'the edge of Names.' All I can tell you here is that it requires your blood, specifically, the blood of a Voidborn, which is what you are. You are not cursed. You are not empty. You are the rarest 'Awakening' to occur in four hundred years. Since the 'Shattering,' there have been three Voidborn. I was one. You are the second. The Court has already taken the third into its possession."
His hands were remarkably steady. He noted this fact with a detached admiration for his own nervous system.
"Creed, the town Warden, has been keeping an eye on you under my instructions. He knows the location of that tomb. He won't have written it down anywhere, as I forbade him from doing so, for things that are written can be discovered. Go to him. Go quickly. The letter that found Mordecai has likely found others as well."
He folded the letter.
"Voidborn," he said.
"Yes," Mordecai confirmed.
"Is that a genuine classification?"
"It is a theoretical classification," Mordecai replied.
"It is the sort of thing scholars debate in their academies. Or rather, the sort of thing they used to debate, before the Academy was shut down."
He was watching Elias with that same wary vigilance. "I have been a hunter for thirty years. I have heard that term perhaps four times."
"He claims he branded me with it. He called it the Void binding." Elias glanced down at his chest, at the three layers of clothing separating him from the mark beneath. "Is such a thing possible? Can one simply brand another person?"
"Typically, no." Mordecai paused to weigh his next words. "Your father was not ordinary. What he was is a subject for a long conversation. In short, he could do things that most 'awakened' people cannot."
"Could," Elias pointed out.
Mordecai said nothing.
"You keep using the past tense," Elias pointed out.
"The letter arrived three months ago. That is certainly all I know."
It was a guarded response. Elias added it to his mental list of questions to ask later and moved on.
"Warden," he said. "We need to see Creed."
"Do you know him?"
"Everyone knows the Warden." For as long as Elias could remember, Warden Creed had been the face of the local Meridian Authority in Greyhollow.
He was a lean, nondescript man in his fifties, possessing the professional detachment of someone who had built a career enforcing rules he personally cared nothing about.
He had never troubled Elias, but neither had he ever helped him. He was a man who maintained his equilibrium by deliberately keeping his distance from affairs.
"He's never said a word to me."
"He was keeping an eye on you."
"Obviously, he was," Elias said, heading toward the morgue door. "Let's go ask him what he knows, before anyone else gets to him."
"The letter warned us to be careful," Mordecai began.
"The letter told us to move fast," Elias interjected, pushing the door open. "We're moving fast."
Creed lived in the last respectable house at the end of the eastern road, beyond which the terrain began to shift into the kind of land that had no regard for respectability. The house was a single-story structure with stone walls.
It possessed a functional solidity that seemed to declare it wasn't trying to impress anyone, and, in truth, it wasn't.
The front door stood slightly ajar. Elias stopped, and Mordecai halted beside him.
"I wonder how wide that door is open," Mordecai remarked, a statement rather than a question.
"It's open about three inches." Elias scrutinized the gap, noting that no light spilled out from within. The afternoon was growing dim as the sun slipped behind the flat clouds that, on most evenings, drifted in from the direction of Ashwest; Creed's house stood cloaked in the deep shadow of the only large oak tree situated along the eastern road.
"He's not the sort of man to leave his door standing open."