AshBorne: Forgotten Bones

The guards didn't speak when they arrived.

They moved in pairs, clad in newer, heavier armor than Dareth had seen before. Their bone-plated suits were smooth, burnished, and marked with the thorned spiral crest of Vireth's central command, not the simple rings used by containment units. Each one carried a short-barreled relic rifle with fossil veins along the grip.

When the door to his cell opened, Dareth was already standing. He didn't ask why. He had stopped asking things a while ago.

The one who stepped inside wasn't a handler. Not a scientist. The woman wore deep gray robes trimmed in black fossil thread. Her hair was pulled tight against her skull, and her expression was unreadable. She held a case in one hand.

"022. Step forward," she said. Her voice was not cruel. It was tired.

He did.

She opened the case.

Inside was a small metallic band, no wider than a thumb. It gleamed faintly, though it bore no decoration.

"This is your designation seal," she said. "It links your identity to your Sigil."

Dareth frowned.

"You are being reassigned."

The seal clicked open.

She pressed it to his wrist.

The moment metal touched skin, the mark beneath his chest reacted. A wave of cold shot through his spine. Not pain, but something just as invasive.

The mark dimmed. Not fully. Just enough to feel silent. Like it had gone to sleep.

"Why?" Dareth asked.

The woman stepped back. "You are being transferred to Spirehold. Your results place you within acceptable tolerances for integration into the Ascendant Program."

"I didn't agree to anything."

"You don't need to," she said.

She closed the case and turned. One of the guards handed her a slate. She signed it without pause.

"You'll be moved in a convoy. You will be placed with others marked for similar programs. Your seal will allow limited tracking and restraint override. If you remove it, the consequences will not be immediate. They will be permanent."

Dareth looked down at the band. It didn't feel heavy. It didn't even feel solid. Just present. Like a brand that hadn't finished burning.

"Who decides what happens at Spirehold?" he asked.

The woman paused at the threshold.

"Not you."

The door shut behind her.

The convoy rolled out before dawn, or whatever passed for dawn this deep below the surface.

Dareth sat in the reinforced transport compartment, wrists magnetically locked to the seat rail, his new seal faintly glowing against his skin. Across from him sat five others, all bound in similar fashion. A low red light bathed the interior, casting everything in a dull shimmer.

None of them spoke.

The girl to his left was familiar as she had her eyes closed and her mouth stitched shut, not with thread, but with thin fossil pins fused along the jawline. She didn't move, but every so often, a strange vibration hummed through the air around her, like she was singing without sound.

Next to her was a boy with no eyebrows and mismatched arms, one natural, the other plated with fossil bone. He stared straight ahead.

To Dareth's right, an older man breathed heavily through a scarred throat implant. His fingers twitched against the restraints in slow, repeating patterns, as if he was spelling something out for himself.

There was also a girl with white hair and eyes that didn't blink, and one more who hadn't moved since boarding. Small. Thin. Draped in a ragged, patch-sewn coat that still bore the insignia of some forgotten mining guild.

No names. No introductions.

The transport rocked gently as it moved through the deep rails, ancient tunnels carved long ago to connect lower Vireth holdings to the outer compounds. Fossil veins lined the walls here too, though they pulsed irregularly, as if the system itself was tired.

Above their heads, speakers crackled once.

"Transit Unit 9 en route to Spirehold Gate 2. Estimated arrival: six cycles. Remain restrained. Violation of restraint protocols will result in nullification."

Dareth didn't know what "nullification" meant in this context, but he didn't want to find out.

He glanced at the others again.

One of them was watching him.

The small one in the coat.

Her eyes were dark and wide, too steady for someone who hadn't moved. She didn't blink. She didn't look away.

Then she tilted her head, just a little.

And smiled.

Dareth looked away.

The seal on his wrist pulsed once, faintly, as if it had noticed something too.

The first sign was the light.

Faint at first, barely more than a flicker through the vents lining the ceiling of the convoy. But Dareth felt it. Not on his skin, under it. A subtle shift in the mark across his chest, like a finger tapping from the inside.

The others noticed too.

The girl with stitched jaws tensed. The boy with the fossil arm leaned forward slightly. Even the one with the throat implant stopped his rhythmic tapping.

The red interior lighting dimmed, then blinked twice. The floor hummed beneath their feet as the rail slowed. Not a full stop. Just hesitation.

The speaker crackled again.

"Attention: ashfall zone detected. Transitioning to reinforced protocol. Do not disengage restraints."

Ashfall.

Dareth had heard the word before, in murmurs back in the quarry. Not weather. Not storms. Something stranger. Residual memory storms, they were called, dead zones where old fossil energy bled into the world again. Places where things forgotten woke up briefly, dragged into the present by proximity alone.

The humming of the floor grew sharper.

Outside the narrow slats in the wall, Dareth glimpsed movement.

White flecks.

Not snow. Not dust. They drifted too slowly. Fell in spirals, glowing faintly before fading into the ground.

Then came the noise.

Not a sound, an absence. The transport's core drive whined, and then cut out entirely. The red lights vanished. In the dark, someone exhaled sharply.

A loud clang rang from the far end of the compartment.

Dareth looked.

The door had buckled. Bent inward.

Before anyone could react, it shattered. A mass of bone and black threads pushed through, limbs like fossil-laced spears, eyes glowing with pale fire. It screamed without a mouth.

Chaos erupted.

The stitched girl's body trembled violently. Her Sigil ignited in the air around her—concentric rings of pressure that cracked the floor. The boy with the fossil arm tore free of his restraint in one motion, bone grafts along his forearm splitting open like teeth.

Dareth's restraint hissed but didn't release. He jerked forward, felt it resist.

The mark under his chest burned hot.

One of the creatures tore a handler from the doorway. Another lunged at the girl in the patched coat.

She didn't scream.

She opened her mouth, and light poured out.

Everything turned white.

The mark in Dareth's chest surged, not in response to fear, but to recognition. The creatures hesitated.

And for the first time since he'd left the quarry, Dareth felt the Sigil pull him forward.

Not toward safety.

Toward something outside.

Toward memory.

The moment the light cleared, the world was still.

The creatures were gone.

At least, the ones Dareth could see. The rail car was cracked open at the rear, smoke drifting in slow curls. One of the guards was dead, half-pinned beneath twisted metal. Another had vanished entirely. The others in Transit Unit 9 lay slumped or still, some breathing, some not. The stitched girl was unconscious. The one with the coat knelt beside her, murmuring something Dareth couldn't hear.

Dareth pushed himself upright. His restraints had shattered during the blast, either from the surge in pressure or from his Sigil. He wasn't sure which.

The mark on his chest still burned. Not violently, but deeply. A steady heat behind his ribs.

He stepped toward the edge of the transport, passing the ruined doorway and stepping out into the ash.

The ground was slick with pale dust. Fragments of fossil bone jutted from the earth in crooked spirals. In the distance, the storm raged on, silent and glowing, a slow cascade of ash that fell without end.

He could feel something.

It wasn't emotion. It wasn't memory. It was deeper.

Movement inside the mark.

He dropped to one knee and touched the earth.

The vision hit immediately.

A field. A hundred voices screaming without breath. A tower of ribs burning in the dark. And beneath it, a figure, no face, no form, just presence, raising its hand as if to command.

Dareth gasped and pulled back. The image shattered.

He stood, unsteady.

That hadn't come from him.

That wasn't his past.

And yet the Sigil had shown it to him.

He looked around again.

Still no sign of the creatures. The air was wrong, but not hostile.

And still, no sign of the pale boy.

Dareth scanned the car's edge again.

But he hadn't been there since Checkpoint Ash.

Not once during the journey.

Not even during the storm.

Dareth stared into the ash.

And for the first time since meeting him, wondered if the boy had ever been there at all.

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

Dareth woke to the smell of stone.

Cold, clean, artificial. The kind of smell that meant filtered air and ground too deep to ever feel the sun. He was lying on a slab, not a cot, not a stretcher. Just flat, polished stone. No sheets. No restraints.

A soft blue light pulsed overhead, steady and slow.

His limbs felt heavy. Not injured, just dulled, like everything in him had been turned down for transport.

He sat up.

The room was small, but not like the others. The walls were smoother, embedded with faint fossil traces in thin, symmetrical lines. There was no window. No slot. No door he could see.

Across from the slab stood a chair.

And beside it, leaning on the far wall, was a mask. Bone-white. Carved in the shape of a closed eye.

A uniform hung beside it.

Gray fabric. Simple. Marked with the spiral crest of House Vireth and a second insignia, twin blades crossing through a circle of thorns. The academy mark.

Spirehold.

He was here.

He stood slowly, testing his balance. The mark on his chest was quiet now.

There was a faint hiss.

A section of the wall pulled back without sound.

A figure stepped through. Tall. Robed. They carried a narrow slate in one hand and moved with the calm efficiency of someone long used to observing things they did not understand.

They studied Dareth without greeting.

Then said, "Welcome to Spirehold's lower tier. You are officially designated Specimen-Applied Asset. Classification: Instable. Phase: Burning. Subject to instructor discretion."

Dareth stared.

The figure tapped the slate.

"Your orientation begins in twelve hours. Until then, remain within your assigned tier. Monitoring will be active."

They turned to leave.

Before the door closed, they paused.

"You were the only one from Transit Unit 9 marked for integration. The others were reclassified."

"Reclassified?"

"Invalidated."