Read Chapter 22: The Raid

The cave smelled of damp earth and something older, something that made Callum’s teeth ache at the roots. Ishbel held the torch high, its flame guttering against a draft that shouldn’t exist this deep underground. The walls glistened, slick with moisture, and the passage narrowed until they had to turn sideways to squeeze through.

“You’re sure about this?” Ishbel’s voice echoed strangely, as if the cave were swallowing her words.

Callum didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The silence here was too thick, too watchful, like the forest above had pressed its ear to the stone and was listening.

The passage opened into a chamber that stole his breath. It was vast, cathedral-like, its ceiling lost in shadow. And everywhere—everywhere—there was light. Soft, pulsing, pearlescent orbs nestled in alcoves carved into the rock, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, each one casting a faint glow that painted the chamber in shifting hues of silver and gold and something that was neither.

Callum’s hand went to his chest, where the memory of his mother’s face used to live. There was only a hollow there now, a void that ached like a phantom limb.

“Jesus,” Ishbel whispered. “It’s a library. A library of lives.”

She moved toward the nearest alcove, her fingers hovering over an orb the color of bruised twilight. Inside it, shadows moved—flickering images too fast to catch. A child’s laugh. The smell of baking bread. The weight of a hand in yours.

“Don’t,” Callum said, his voice rough. “If we touch them, we might——”

“We have to destroy them.” Ishbel’s jaw was set. “That’s the plan. Smash them. Free the memories.”

“Free them to where? That’s what we don’t know.”

But Ishbel was already reaching for a second orb, a small one, pale gold, no bigger than a robin’s egg. She brought her walking stick down on it.

The sound was nothing like glass breaking. It was a sigh, a release of breath, and the orb burst into motes of light that swirled upward, dancing around Ishbel’s face before dissipating into the darkness. For a moment, her expression went slack, unfocused, and she swayed on her feet.

“Ishbel?”

“I saw—I saw a man. A fisherman. He was thinking about his daughter’s wedding.” She blinked, shaking her head. “It was so clear. Like I was him.”

Callum stared at the remaining orbs with new eyes. They weren’t just trophies. They were prisons. And every one of them held a life.

“We can’t destroy them all,” he said. “There must be hundreds. The Ur will sense us.”

“Then we do as many as we can, fast as we can.”

She moved to the next orb, and Callum did the same, selecting one that glowed a deep moss green. He raised his own walking stick, the wood familiar and worn in his grip, and brought it down.

The explosion of light was different. It was cold, bitter, and it hit him like a wave of sea water in winter. A man’s face swam before him—weathered, bearded, eyes the color of peat smoke. The man was standing on a shore, looking out at a gray sea, and he was thinking about his brother. The brother he’d lost to the forest. The brother whose face he could no longer remember.

The memory faded, and Callum staggered.

“They’re not all happy, are they?” Ishbel said quietly.

“No.” Callum’s throat was tight. “They’re not all happy.”

They worked in silence after that, smashing orb after orb. Each one released a fragment of someone else’s life—washday in a croft, the sting of a wasp, the first kiss behind a haystack, the crushing weight of grief. The memories swirled around them like snow, collecting in their hair, their clothes, their lungs. Callum felt himself becoming crowded, the edges of his own identity blurring under the weight of so many borrowed lives.

“Wait.” Ishbel froze, her arm raised. “I found something.”

She was standing before an alcove set higher than the others, almost out of reach. Inside was an orb that was different from the rest. It was larger, darker, its glow a sullen red like the last embers of a dying fire. And unlike the others, it seemed to resist the light, pulling it inward instead of radiating outward.

Callum reached for it, and Ishbel grabbed his wrist.

“Be careful.”

He nodded, but his fingers were already closing around the orb. The moment he touched it, the cave disappeared.

He was standing in the kitchen of his childhood home. The sun was low through the window, casting long shadows across the worn stone floor. His father was at the table, younger than Callum had ever known him, his hair still dark, his hands still steady. He was staring at something in his palm—a small stone, carved with symbols that Callum recognized from the witness circle.

“I know what you are,” Callum’s father muttered. “I know what you took from my grandfather. And I know what you’ll take from my son unless I find another way.”

He looked up, and his eyes met Callum’s directly. For a moment, Callum thought his father could see him, could see through time itself. But then the man’s gaze shifted, focusing on something beyond, and he whispered, “I’ll make you a deal instead. My memories. All of them. Take mine and leave the boy untouched.”

The kitchen blurred, and Callum was back in the cave, gasping, the red orb clutched in his trembling hands.

“Callum?” Ishbel was shaking his shoulder. “Callum, what did you see?”

“My father.” His voice cracked. “He tried to bargain with it. Before I was born. He offered his own memories to spare me.”

The orb felt heavy, accusatory, in his grasp. This was his father’s life—the whole of it, stored like wine in a cellar. His father had known about the curse. He had tried to break it from the inside.

“We need to take this one,” Callum said. “We need to——”

The ground shook.

It was subtle at first, a tremor like distant thunder. But then the orbs in the alcoves began to pulse in unison, their light flickering faster, more frantic. And from the darkness at the far end of the chamber came a sound that Callum had heard before—a sound that made his blood run cold.

The Ur was coming.

“Run,” Ishbel said.

They ran. The chamber shuddered around them, stones raining from the ceiling, and behind them the orbs began to shatter in waves, not releasing their memories but screaming, a high-pitched wail that drilled into Callum’s skull. He clutched his father’s orb to his chest and ran, Ishbel at his side, the torch forgotten behind them as the darkness swelled and pursued.

They burst into the narrow passage, and the walls squeezed against them, trying to crush them. Callum shoved Ishbel ahead, felt the rock scrape his shoulders, his back, and then they were tumbling out into the rain-soaked night, gasping for air as the forest roared around them.

Ishbel hauled him to his feet. “Did we get others?”

Callum looked at his hands. He had his father’s orb, dark and heavy. And in his other fist, clenched so tight his nails had drawn blood, he held something else—a small orb, pale and flickering, its light weak as a dying candle.

Ishbel peered at it. “What is that one?”

Callum didn’t know. But as he held it, he felt a warmth spread through his chest, a familiar warmth, like the ghost of a memory trying to surface. It was his. He knew it with a certainty that defied logic.

His mother’s face was in there. He could feel it.

“What did we do?” Ishbel whispered, staring back at the cave entrance, where the darkness had begun to seep out like ink into water. “What did we just do?”

Callum looked at his father’s orb, then at the one in his other hand. Somewhere in the distance, the forest was changing, its rhythm shifting, and he realized with dawning horror that the Ur was no longer just hunting them.

It was going to the village.