Farcastles

FARCASTLES: CHAPTER TWELVE – THE TREMOR BENEATH

The memory still clung to Ern like smoke.

He staggered back from the basin, the final whisper still ringing in his bones. The chamber shuddered—not from memory, but from pressure, as if the truths they had unearthed had cracked something deeper.

The basin’s surface rippled. Hairline fractures webbed across the black glass beneath their feet.

“It’s shifting,” Myrr said, voice tight. “This place won’t hold.”

Sarra didn’t hesitate. “We move. Now.”

The stairway behind them trembled underfoot. Runes along the walls flickered and dimmed like dying stars. Ern took one last look at the basin—at the vision still burning behind his eyes—and followed the others upward into a world already beginning to tear.

Probably sitting on a stool | Shower thinker | Collaborative Worldbuilding | Community Games

/farcastles /brians-rescue

A low vibration, barely felt at first.

Then stronger. Stones jittered. Dust rose from cracks that widened underfoot.

The seal hadn’t just unlocked memory.

It had broken something deeper.

A figure stepped forward from the enemy ranks. Their cloak was stitched with Red and Blue patches—both faded to gray. Their voice carried across the broken square:

“Hand over the flame and the map. You don’t know what you carry.”

Sarra didn’t move.

“We know enough,” she said.

“You know fragments. Bones. You carry fire into a room soaked in oil.”

Ern’s hand hovered near the pendant at Sarra’s chest. The divided flame.

The ground shuddered again. A crack split the earth between the two groups, racing outward in jagged patterns. From the chasm rose heat—not fire, but something older, sourceless, wrong.

A sound followed.

Not a roar.

A cry.

Something vast and forgotten, calling out from the wound in the world.

The deserters faltered—but only for a heartbeat. Their leader’s hand flicked up, and weapons bared in the thickening gloom.

Steel.

Chain.

Bone.

Sarra drew her blade without flourish. A simple act, final as a tolling bell.

Torv shifted his stance, covering Ern with a movement smooth as breathing.

Gellon grinned, but his eyes were sharp, sober.

Myrr pressed a palm to the ground, and faint glyphs spiraled out from their hand—sigils of binding, of resistance. The stones responded with a low hum.

The crack widened. From its depths came something worse than heat—a pressure. A knowing. The sense that something below was aware of them, and curious.

The deserters advanced.

Sarra’s voice cut the air, low and fierce.

“Stay tight. Watch each other. Remember why we’re here.”

Ern tightened his grip on the pole he'd fashioned into a staff.

He thought of the vision in the basin.

Of standing alone.

Of staying.

The tremor surged into a full quake. Stones danced. The basin behind them cracked down the center. The world shuddered under an unseen breath.

The deserters charged.

Steel met stone.

Memory met blood.

And Ern moved forward—not because he was brave, but because he refused to leave them behind.

The first blow fell.

And the war beneath the war began.

When they reached the surface, the sky had shifted. Not the gentle dim of evening, but a bruised, low ceiling of cloud, thick enough to press the world inward. The air tasted metallic, like old coin and rain.

None of them spoke at first.

Sarra was the first to break the silence.

“We’re not alone.”

They turned. Across the broken stones near the sealed site, figures gathered—dozens, cloaked in ragged colors, faces hidden behind cloth and cracked helmets. Some bore weapons scavenged from too many fields. Others bore nothing but their silence.

Marauders. Deserters. Or worse—those who had glimpsed what slept in the Hollow and chosen to serve it.

“Weapons,” Torv said, voice steady.

Gellon cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. “Finally. Something I understand.”

But it wasn’t simple.

Because behind the deserters, the earth trembled.