Darkness pressed in, heavy and close, and the echo of the courtroom lingered just long enough to leave me irritated. The memory had ended too soon. I could still feel the blade stirring, as if it had been pulled away from something it wanted me to see.

  There was no time to dwell on it.

  Scratching echoed somewhere ahead.

  My heart thudded hard enough that I could hear it in my ears. Every sound felt sharper in the dark, stretched thin and twisted by the stone. Shadows filled in the gaps my eyes could not. I had no way of knowing how much of it was fear and how much was real.

  I tightened my grip on the sword and held it ready, bracing for the rush of claws and teeth.

  Nothing came.

  I shifted my stance and listened again. The sound was different from before. Lighter. Uneven. Not the frantic scuttle of a swarm. Maybe a smaller one. Or something clinging to the walls instead of the floor.

  I slowed my breathing and closed my eyes, letting the tunnel narrow down to sound alone.

  One beat passed.

  Then another.

  The scratching did not draw closer.

  Instead, a new sound carried through the stone.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  I froze. It was distant and soft, measured rather than frantic. Not claws. Not running.

  I waited, barely daring to breathe.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  The sound echoed deep through the stone, dull and measured. Not the scrape of claws. Not wood on rock. Whatever struck the tunnel did so with purpose, the noise carrying farther than it should have.

  My mind scrambled to make sense of it.

  Then I realised. Coming back to the stories Jerald and written. One of the oldest ones. Tales passed down by miners who swore the earth listened.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  A story came to me. A miner crushed by a fall. His wife following him underground when no one else would. Lost in the dark until the knocking began. Slow. Steady. Leading them together. Leading them out.

  I knew what it was.

  A Coblynau.

  The old name settled first, heavy with memory and stone. The English called it a knocker.

  A spirit of the mine. Watchers of worked stone and metal veins. Not creatures you hunted or bargained with, but something older that noticed when tunnels were broken or men went where they should not.

  I took a cautious step toward the sound, then another. The tunnel answered with silence between each knock, as if waiting to see what I would do.

  The sound came again, unchanged.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  They were not gentle. They were not cruel. The stone did not care who walked through it. Only how.

  I held my breath and followed.

  The knocking continued ahead, steady and patient, and with it came the faint return of the breeze I had felt earlier. Cold air brushed my face, thin but unmistakable. Fresh. Real. The tunnel opened its lungs again and I drank it in quietly.

  I moved by sound and touch alone, fingers skimming stone, boots testing each step before committing. Each knock pulled me farther forward. Time stretched and thinned until I could no longer tell how long I had been walking.

  Then the echoes stopped.

  I froze.

  Ahead, something faint glimmered in the dark. Pale. Blue. So, dim it might have been imagined, but it held steady when I blinked. Enough to know it was there.

  I waited for the knocking to return.

  It didn’t.

  I raised my hand and rapped my knuckles against the stone. Three soft strikes. The sound barely carried, swallowed by the tunnel almost at once. It was all I could offer.

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  I turned toward the light and left the darkness behind me.

  The air shifted as I moved, and with it came a new sound. A low shuffle echoed ahead and clattering. Uneven and quiet at first. Stone grinding against stone. Wood scraping across the floor. And metal. A lot of it. It grew louder with each step.

  That was what the Knocker had led me to.

  An opening. Or an end.

  The noise multiplied, overlapping, swelling until it filled the tunnel. I clenched my jaw and forced myself to keep going, fingers tightening around the hilt until my knuckles burned.

  The light strengthened as I advanced, enough now to pick out the tunnel walls. I moved carefully, the silence of my steps something learned through repetition rather than choice.

  When my eyes finally adjusted enough to see what waited ahead, I froze.

  My chest locked.

  I forgot to breathe.

  The tunnel spilled out into a wide chamber open to the sky.

  Moonlight poured down through a ragged hole above, cold and silver, washing over a vast heap of discarded metal below. Bronze plates. Bent blades. Cracked medallions. Silver fittings dulled with age. The pile rose like a midden, objects thrown together without care, as if stripped of meaning the moment they were dropped.

  They were not abandoned. They had purpose.

  Dozens upon dozens of spriggans swarmed the heap. Larger ones. Thick limbed and sharp eyed. They clawed and shoved, shrieking as they fought over the spoils, dragging pieces free and clutching them close. Every movement sent metal clattering through the chamber.

  I stayed still. They couldn’t hear me over the clatter.

  Most of the items looked old. Scarred. Forgotten. Just like the ones I had seen before. But I could feel it even from here. Each piece carried something etched into it. Runes. Faint. Dormant. Waiting.

  My hands trembled.

  This many spriggans would tear me apart.

  I lifted my gaze to the opening above. The only clear way out. The stone around the opening was broken and jagged, torn rather than cut. Earth scarred and blasted outward, not worked with care.

  Someone had done this on purpose.

  Only one kind of person came to mind. The sort who threw wealth into holes and called it strategy. Dig deep. Dump the lesser pieces. Let the monsters gather where they could be watched. Contained.

  Bait.

  My jaw tightened as I watched the spriggans claw over things that could have helped villages, armed guards, saved lives. All of it wasted to train the future nobility.

  I glanced up again.

  The hole above did not look like honest labour. Too rough. Too violent. As if the land itself had been struck. Explosive magic, maybe. Careless and fast.

  The moon still hung where it should not have been.

  I had entered the tunnels at midnight.

  It felt like far longer than a few hours had passed. My body ached with the weight of it. Hunger twisted low in my gut. The sense of time had slipped somewhere I could not reach.

  A cold thought settled in.

  They probably thought I was dead.

  And down here, surrounded by hoarded magic items and too many teeth, I was not sure they were wrong.

  I forced the thought aside and searched for another way out.

  The chamber walls were riddled with narrow tunnels, dozens of them, some barely wider than my arm. Too small for me. Perfect for spriggans. Dark mouths leading everywhere and nowhere.

  Which left only one path. Straight up. And no retreat.

  I slowed my breathing, trying to bring my pulse under control. My heart refused to listen. My legs felt unsteady, weak, like they might fold if I stood still too long.

  What do I do. What do I…

  The next thought that followed was crazy.

  Dangerous. Reckless.

  It lodged itself in my mind anyway.

  What other option do I have?

  I tensed my hand around the hilt and pictured the plan, every step of it. The risk. The certainty that it could end me here. Or change everything. The blade answered with a low, steady hum.

  Not warning. Not refusal.

  Affirmation.

  Of course it agreed.

  I drew in three slow breaths, careful and quiet, and made my choice.

  I crouched and felt along the stone until my fingers closed around a loose rock. I lifted it without a sound and shifted into position, keeping to the shadows.

  The spriggans were still fighting among themselves, shrieking and clawing over scraps of metal. None of them looked my way.

  Why would they.

  Who would be foolish enough to walk into a nest like this?

  I tightened my grip on the stone.

  And stepped forward.

  I hurled the stone with everything I had.

  It sailed over the chamber and smashed into the far wall. Rock cracked. Pebbles scattered across the floor.

  Every spriggan turned.

  They shrieked and clicked, heads snapping toward the sound, but I was already moving.

  The ceiling was far too high to reach. The walls were wrong. There was nowhere to climb and no space to fight. So, I ran.

  Not for the opening above.

  For the hoard.

  My boots pounded stone as I sprinted straight at the pile. The chamber erupted around me, dozens of bodies turned and surged all at once. I felt them coming, felt the weight of it, the certainty that I should have been cut down before I reached it.

  I did not raise the blade.

  I drove it down.

  The sword plunged into the mass of metal and stone. The impact sent a sharp hiss through the chamber, followed by a cascade of popping cracks. Objects snapped apart under the edge. Bronze split. Silver warped. Runes flared and failed all at once.

  The spriggans screamed.

  I dragged the blade forward, carving a path through the heap. Ash burst into the air as items collapsed into sparks, one after another. The pile convulsed, energy rippling outward as if something buried deep had finally broken loose.

  Heat rushed up my arms.

  The blade shifted in my grip. Lighter. Faster. The edge sang as it moved. My breath came easier. My vision sharpened, the chamber snapping into focus.

  The spriggans slowed.

  Their movements dragged, their lunges arriving a heartbeat late. I could see the paths they would take before they took them, and I moved.

  I lifted the blade from the smoking wreckage.

  And for the first time since entering the chamber, I smiled.

  Faster now, the blade slid through the hoard.

  Iron dissolved and steel rang once before collapsing. Practice swords, goblets, bracers, cufflinks, pieces meant for hands and necks and tables all came apart beneath the black edge. Each strike sent another shiver through the sword. Runes surfaced along the metal, some darkening, some flaring hotter, their colour deepening to a red like banked embers breathing again.

  I barely registered them.

  A rush of air brushed my ear.

  I moved without thinking, shifting my head just enough to feel claws miss my skin. The spriggan sailed past where my skull had been a moment earlier and smashed into the pile behind me.

  Another lunged in. I turned and drove the pommel into its chest. The impact collapsed it in on itself, the body breaking apart like dry bark.

  I kept cutting.

  Two more swings and a huge section of the hoard simply vanished. Metal gave way to sparks and ash, the air filling with grit that scraped my throat. I coughed once, hard, and forced myself to keep breathing as embers drifted down around me.

  The spriggans hesitated.

  One step back. Then another.

  The ring of bodies loosened as ash drifted down and settled across the stone. The spriggans did not flee. They watched. No shrieking now. No rush.

  Just bright, cautious eyes following the blade as it moved in my hands.

  The metal looked different.

  Not brighter. Deeper. The black surface seemed to pull at the light more than ever, the runes along its length glowing with a crimson hue so dark it bordered on the colour of blood.

  I set my feet and lifted the sword. The stance came without thought, my balance finding itself as if it had always known where to settle.

  I looked down at the blade and spoke softly, keeping my voice low. “Still hungry?”

  For a moment there was only the crackle of settling ash.

  Then the answer rose through the hilt and into my bones. Not loud. Not urgent. A deep, gravelled presence that carried no doubt at all.

  “Yes…”