Absolute Cheater

The disciples' chant thinned like the dying breath of a storm, leaving the chamber raw and humming. Asher stayed low, letting Raymam's borrowed gait carry him among the throng as they dispersed—some stumbling, some being helped, all hollowed by what they'd given. He let them pass, let the crowd smear over him like water, and when the last of the changed staggered away he drew one careful step closer to the dais.

He did not rush. The sanctum had teeth; haste would get them caught. Instead he moved with the same measured grace he used in combat: patient, economical, every motion rehearsed until surprise became inevitable. His ears catalogued the soft creak of chains, the whisper of robes, the distant drip of blood into unseen basins. His fingers brushed the inside of his cloak where the scythe rested—an old weight, a familiar hunger—but he kept it still. For now, knowledge mattered more than bloodshed.

Beneath the dais the grooves throbbed like living arteries. He let his fingertips hover near the stone, feeling the cadence of the pulse. It was not a single frequency—layers overlapped, like a chorus of grief: the foundational thrum of the Maw's seed, a higher keening from the sigils, and an irregular tremor that he traced to three anchors buried deeper in the rock—the disciples' nodes. If he severed those? The thought unfurled like a blade in his mind. Sever the anchors, the seed would not end—nothing so easy—but its reach would flinch. The rituals would waver.

He crouched, lowering his breath to a ghost. From the edge of the dais he pulled, with the gentlest of wills, at the echoes of the chanting. Not to join, but to sample the pattern: tiny threads of sound that tied rune to rune, line to line. He drew them out, rolling them like a thief with coin. The pattern was precise—each chant sequence bore a counterpoint, a phrase that reinforced another line of sigils. Break the counterpoint, and the weave unraveled.

Asher's mind tasted the first incision. He could cut the pattern at its throat—subtle, surgical. He could unthread a phrase from the chain, and the rune would blink, falter; the binding that relied on stolen blood would hiccup. Blood magic, he thought, was greedy for rhythm. Disrupt the rhythm and you force it to find a new beat. That search was confusion. Confusion bred cracks.

But he did not want merely to fracture ritual. He wanted to see the seed, to learn how its hunger nested into stone and flesh. The grooves converged into a narrow stair that plunged beneath the dais—an old service way meant for nothing more than moving sacrificial remnants. The stair's mouth was guarded by two cultists half-turned to sleep, but rushed as they were, their attention was dulled by the aftershocks of the ritual. He could move while they slumbered with drink or blood-miasma. He could—

A soft snap to his left—too small for most to notice—made him still as night. A courier, no more than a whisper, slithered across the chamber and dipped behind a brazier. The man carried a tray and a folded strip of iron. He turned, and the light caught the edge of a tattoo beneath his sleeve: a spiral that matched the second Disciple's mask. A message. The courier pressed the iron under his arm and vanished down a side passage. He'd slipped a node-report—likely the disciples accounting for losses, for strength. Someone in the shadows wanted to keep the ritual pristine.

Asher let the courier's movement fall into his pattern. He trailed at a distance like smoke, keeping to the shadow of braziers and bodies, following the man until the side passage narrowed into a corridor of brittle carved bone. There the courier paused, pressed his back to the wall, and spoke in a low, clipped voice that carried just enough to catch a nearby ear—Asher's.

"—three lost at the south pit. One with teeth grown wrong. Master wants another seed fed tonight. The third Disciple says patience, yet the chain-bearer calls for more. If the Maw eyes us, we cannot stall."

A hand closed around Asher's jaw for an instant. Cold, iron-laced fingers. He had been too close. The courier's eyes widened; the man expected violence and had already flinched to flee. Asher smiled under the mask, a motion like frost.

"Patience," Asher said softly, using Raymam's voice—low, tired, the voice of someone who'd seen too many winters. "We have patience. The seed will not run. Only those who feed it run out."

The courier blinked, confusion overriding fear. A lull in the conversation. He nodded, too quickly. "Aye. The Masters... they—"

Asher let the man go. The courier hurried on, leaving behind a scrap of knowledge and a pathway. He could have struck the man dumb, or torn him open to find the inked scrolls, but every death here came with a shadow that fed the Maw. He needed living strands to pull apart.

He returned to the sanctum via a different route, slipping between kneeling cultists and past the chained corpses. The sunless air pressed in as he descended the stair beneath the dais. The walls tightened; the pulse grew louder, resident and intimate, like the echo of a distant drum pressed close to the eardrum. The grooves on the stone burned faintly beneath his fingertips as he passed. He carried on until the stair opened into a cramped cavern where the veins of crimson lit the walls like exposed muscle.

At the cavern's center sat the seed.

It was smaller than the column in the chamber above had suggested—more a shard than a pillar—but its intensity made up for size. Black crystal, slick as obsidian, threaded with a living red that moved beneath the surface as though blood with teeth. It hummed with a promise and a threat. Around it, three iron altars held the remains of recent offerings: bone-splinters, bowls that still dripped, and strips of skin marred by sigil-burns. The altars were anchored with iron bolts driven deep into the stone—three anchors that fed the seed its reach.

The anchors. He had guessed correctly.

Two cultists slept nearby, curled around rusted pots. The third—a gaunt woman with white lashes—sat propped against the wall, eyes open but unfocused, humming the same phrase Asher had unpicked above. She threaded a thin, silver needle through her palm as she hummed, letting a bead of blood fall into a bowl. Ritual and habit and addiction. She felt the seed's song and answered with her own.