Kael's grip on the amulet tightened, its erratic pulse searing his palm as he faced the impossible door in the fog-choked alley, where the city's cobblestones whispered forgotten gods and hungry shadows coiled. His blade, forged from something older than steel, hummed at his hip, its song sharpening as he pushed the sighing door, exhaling a gust of rust-scented cold. Beyond, a stairwell spiraled into a darkness that devoured the amulet's faint glow, the walls throbbing with black ichor veins that wept at his touch. Each step down echoed like a heartbeat, his own pulse betraying him, syncing with the amulet's rhythm as it guided him to a debt he didn't ask for.
At the stairwell's end, a vast chamber opened, its bone pillars stretching into a shadowed ceiling, and at its heart stood a figure cloaked in tattered starlight, its void-face voice clawing into Kael's skull: "You carry my debt. Pay it, or be unmade." His blade screamed in his hand, drawn faster than thought, as the amulet split his skin, blood dripping onto the floor, swallowed by the chamber's groaning pillars. "What are you?" Kael spat, fear gnawing his spine but his voice steady. The figure tilted its head, amused. "I am what waits. And you, Kael, are late."
The air thickened, heavy with the stench of iron and something older—regret, maybe, or the weight of a thousand stolen lives. Kael's blood-slick hand steadied the blade, its song now a wail that drowned the chamber's pulse. The figure didn't move, but the shadows did, peeling from the pillars like ink spilling upward. They weren't formless anymore—claws, eyes, teeth, all wrong, all *knowing*. "You took it," the figure said, its voice a knife twisting in Kael's mind. "In the Undergraves, when you clawed free. You thought it was salvation. It was mine."
Kael's memory flickered—dirt in his lungs, a coffin's weight, the amulet pressed into his hand by something he couldn't see. He'd thought it was his, a spark to keep him alive. Now it burned, a chain pulling him deeper. "I didn't ask for this," he growled, stepping forward, blade angled to strike. The shadows lunged, not at him but at the blood pooling at his feet, lapping it like starved dogs. The figure laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "No one asks. You take, and you pay."
The chamber shuddered, bone pillars cracking as the shadows swelled, forming a cage around Kael. His amulet flared, its light carving brief, blinding sigils in the air—symbols like those on the door, screaming of debts and gods and things that never died. He swung his blade, not at the figure but at the shadows, and where it cut, they *screamed*, splitting apart like torn flesh. But they kept coming, endless, their eyes whispering his name. "What do you want?" he roared, blood dripping faster, the amulet's heat now a fire in his chest.
"Your choice," the figure said, stepping closer, its cloak trailing starlight that burned the floor. "Give me the amulet, and walk free. Keep it, and face what you owe." Kael's vision swam, the chamber tilting as memories that weren't his flooded in—cities falling, skies bleeding, a hand not his own forging the amulet in a fire that ate time itself. He staggered, blade dipping, the shadows closing in. He didn't know what the amulet was, not truly, but he knew it was all that kept him from being nothing.