AshBorne: Forgotten Bones

The next morning, if it was morning, began like every other.

A tray slid through the wall slot with a soft click. Nutrient gel. Thick water. No variation. Dareth didn't touch it.

He sat with his back to the wall, legs drawn up, staring at the place where the fossil shard had rested. It was gone now. Not moved. Not removed. Just gone. No sign it had ever existed. But he remembered it. The shape. The hum. The mark in his chest responding to it like recognition.

He rubbed his wrists absently. The mark still pulsed faintly beneath the skin, though it hadn't flared since the night before.

Then the thought came.

Not his.

Not words, exactly. More like a shape of intent. The pressure of something watching from inside rather than outside. It didn't speak, but it wanted. Urged.

Break.

Dareth's fingers twitched. His eyes snapped to the slot in the wall. A handler was just stepping away, checking something on a dataplate.

His body tensed. His hand moved before he meant it to, curling into a fist.

Break.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Focused on the cold of the floor. The stillness of the air. The way the light overhead made everything feel a little too far away.

The feeling passed.

His pulse was racing. But the mark was quiet again.

He let out a slow breath.

The handler didn't seem to notice. The panel blinked once, then dimmed. The slot closed.

Dareth slumped against the wall.

He wasn't afraid of the voice. Not exactly. It hadn't hurt him. It hadn't tried to take control.

But it hadn't come from him.

He glanced toward the corner where the pale boy usually sat.

Empty.

He wasn't there.

Dareth waited a long time before lying down again. Sleep didn't come, but silence did. And in that silence, the voice returned, not a thought this time, not a command.

Just a presence.

A second heartbeat beneath his own.

Waiting.

When they came for him again, Dareth was already standing.

The air outside his cell was colder than usual, or maybe it just felt that way. Two handlers in long bone-thread robes led him down a corridor he didn't recognize. The walls here were darker, made of layered fossil plates arranged in tight, angular patterns. Every few steps, a symbol flared in the floor, tracking his presence as he moved.

They stopped at a door marked with a symbol he hadn't seen before, a single closed eye wrapped in a jagged ring. One of the handlers tapped the seal. The door opened with a pressurized hiss.

The chamber beyond was circular, dim, and lined with pale, matte panels that drank the light instead of reflecting it. In the center stood a low platform surrounded by glass rods embedded with fossil fragments.

"Stand in the circle," one of them said.

Dareth obeyed.

The moment his feet crossed into the center, the rods hummed. A soft vibration passed through the floor, then climbed up into his chest. The mark under his skin stirred but didn't flare.

One of the handlers stepped forward, holding a small device shaped like a flattened disc. It glowed along its edges.

"This is a resonance reader," the handler said. "It will extract the first memory your Sigil absorbed. Do not resist."

Dareth frowned. "You mean the Pulse?"

The handler didn't answer.

The device activated.

The hum turned sharp. His vision blurred. Heat climbed the back of his neck.

Then it hit.

Not the Pulse.

Something else.

He stood on a field of cracked stone, blackened by heat and wind. Ash fell from a colorless sky. Around him, scattered across the earth, lay broken pieces of something massive—metal, bone, fossilized strands like nerves hardened into glass.

He wasn't himself. He could feel weight on his shoulders that didn't belong. Could feel thoughts behind his eyes that weren't shaped like thoughts at all.

In the distance, a shape moved.

Towering. Headless. Its body covered in sigils too vast to be read. It dragged something behind it, chains carved from ribs, still twitching.

Dareth's vision fractured.

The glass rods around him sparked, then cracked.

One of the handlers shouted. The reader device burned out, dropping from the handler's hand. Smoke rose from its seams.

Dareth fell to one knee.

His mark glowed faintly, pulsing in long, steady waves.

The other handler stepped back.

"That wasn't a memory," the first muttered. "That was a fragment. Something pre-contact."

They both turned to look at him. Not in anger. Not in fear.

In awe.

Dareth blinked hard. His body still trembled.

The shape was still in his head. Not speaking. Just walking.

Dragging the past behind it.

The mark didn't stop glowing.

Even after Dareth was returned to his cell, even after the handlers stopped watching him through the fossil-glass pane, the glow beneath his skin lingered. It wasn't bright. But it was constant.

He sat in the center of the room and pressed two fingers to the edge of the mark where it curved just beneath his ribs. The skin was warm. It pulsed once.

His hand jerked away.

A vision flashed across his sight, not full, not like before. Just an instant. A hand, dark-skinned and calloused, fingers wrapped in fossil-thread bandages. That hand was his. But it wasn't.

It crushed something. A mask made of bone and silver, shattered into flakes.

Then it was gone.

Dareth stared at his palm. No blood. No burn. Just his hand.

He stood slowly and walked to the nearest wall. The fossil script there had always been dim, muted by the containment weave. But now it flickered faintly, responding to something. His presence. Or the mark.

As he moved closer, the mark in his chest pulsed again, and this time, a thin red line formed around his right wrist. It wasn't ink. It was part of the Sigil, blooming outward like a vine.

He touched it.

Another flash.

He stood in a ring of stone, weapons scattered at his feet. Corpses of creatures he couldn't name lay in heaps. His arms were heavier. His back ached with the weight of armor that no longer existed. And beneath his feet, the ground shook—not from a quake, but from breath.

He opened his eyes.

The line around his wrist faded.

He staggered back from the wall and sank onto the cot, breathing hard. The cot's surface was damp. He didn't know if it was sweat or blood.

The pale boy appeared again, crouched near the corner.

Dareth didn't react. Not right away. He couldn't.

"They're just now realizing," the boy said, "that your Sigil isn't responding to the present."

Dareth looked up. "Then what is it responding to?"

The boy tilted his head.

"Memory," he said. "But not yours."

------------

The handlers changed their approach.

The next time they brought Dareth out, there were no restraints. No weapons drawn. Just one masked figure waiting with a scanner and a dataplate. The room they led him to was small, flat, and empty, except for a single chair bolted to the floor and a flickering overhead light that buzzed without rhythm.

The figure gestured for him to sit.

Dareth obeyed.

The walls here were dull white, the kind that blurred outlines and killed depth. A design meant to disorient. He recognized it from his first days in the facility. It was a conditioning space. A place to map reactions, stress, deviation.

The masked figure remained standing. They didn't introduce themselves, but Dareth recognized the shape of their movements. He'd seen this one before.

A researcher.

They tapped the dataplate once. Glyphs along the walls lit up. The mark beneath Dareth's skin reacted instantly, pulsing faintly in response.

"Baseline resonance is inconsistent," the researcher said. "Earlier patterns indicated a memory-tethered feedback loop. We will now attempt stimulus disruption."

Dareth didn't speak.

The lights overhead dimmed. A pulse of energy spread through the room. Dareth's Sigil flared once, but not outward, inward, like something bracing.

The glyphs on the walls shifted. Then again.

And nothing happened.

The dataplate blinked red. The researcher hesitated, then tried again.

Still nothing.

The mark didn't respond. Not the way it was supposed to. The usual flare or twitch or reaction was gone. Instead, Dareth just sat there, calm. Breathing.

The researcher lowered the device slowly.

"You should not be able to suppress your Sigil voluntarily."

"I'm not suppressing it," Dareth said.

"Then what are you doing?"

He looked up.

"I think it's watching you."

The silence that followed was thicker than the air. The researcher said nothing for several seconds.

Then they ended the sequence. The lights came back. The glyphs dimmed.

Dareth stood without being told.

As the handler approached to escort him out, the pale boy stood behind them, just outside the reach of the light. No shadow. No sound.

Dareth didn't look back.

But his mark pulsed again.

The dream came without warning.

There was no lead-up. No sleep. One blink, and Dareth was standing in a place he didn't recognize, breathing air that wasn't his.

He walked down a long stone corridor, its walls fractured with age and blackened by heat. Sigils burned softly on every surface, not drawn but carved, like they had grown out of the stone. Pale light filtered in through a ceiling cracked open to a sky that didn't match anything Dareth had seen before. It was bruised violet, with clouds that didn't move.

He didn't know where he was. But his body moved with purpose.

He passed murals that told stories he didn't understand. A man surrounded by wolves. A tower shattered by a hand of bone. A crowd of faceless people reaching toward a flame they couldn't hold.

The deeper he went, the more the ground beneath him changed. Fossil grew through the floor in spiral veins. Every time he stepped on one, his mark responded, not flaring, but acknowledging. Recognizing. Like something old was being called forward.

A whisper followed him.

Not a voice. Just a phrase, repeated over and over. He didn't understand the words, but the feeling stuck.

Obligation. Burden. Inheritance.

He reached a final chamber. At its center stood a monolith, tall, flat, smooth as obsidian. On it was carved a single glyph.

He stepped closer.

The moment he reached out to touch it, he woke.

His body was soaked in sweat. The cell lights were dim, but on. His chest heaved. His head pounded.

Then he saw it.

At the edge of the cot, burned into the metal, was the same glyph from the dream.

Perfect. Precise.

It hadn't been there before.

He moved toward it slowly, reaching out.

Before he touched it, he paused. Looked to the corner.

The pale boy sat with his back to the wall, knees up, arms around them. Quiet. Watching.

Dareth didn't speak.

He didn't need to.

Because this time, the boy looked nervous.