𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙛𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙮 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙙𝙚

Prologue

     My fingertips grazed the silver surface of the coin I held in my palm.

It had lost its shine long ago, even before it had come into my possession, but if I closed my eyes I could still sense the dull power that was left. I enjoyed the soft drum of it, like it sang to me, one ancient voice to another.

I had always been drawn to pretty, strange artifacts. If I had my heart's desire, I'd fill caves with them. I would make a fine treasurer. I might have been one, in another lifetime, another world. In this one, I hadn't gotten quite as lucky.

      I opened my eyes, the absence of light no trouble at all. The concrete prison remained unchanged. As did I.

My ears picked up the sound of the ocean raging behind the stone walls, the angry waves slamming against the very foundation of this place.

Sometimes I caught myself wishing for the depths to devour us all and be done with it.

The stench of salt clung permantly to my waxen skin. I couldn't even recall what my scent had been before. Now there was only seawater and brimstone and iron. The bones I wore became a cold, forgotten shadow in the windowless tower, trapped on the banished isle they called Daesmire: a cursed heap of rocks not even the Devil himself would set foot on.

Nothing that did had ever made it out, he'd be wise to stay away. 

There were things in here much older, much more wicked than I, and I paid attention to their lulling voices, the echoes of their wails, the unnerving noise of their primal wrath as they dwelled past my cell. 

They are the creatures of nightmares, even stripped from their power and exhausted with decades of loneliness, damned to exist until the end of time. It was a sentence we shared, solitarily. 

     I pressed my lips to the coin, forming my name with them - the only reminder of who I once had been - before I curled my fingers around it and laid my head down.