Read Chapter 3: The Locket

The chapel smelled of candlewax and stale incense. Elara’s boots echoed off the stone floor as she crossed to the alcove where Brother Aldric lay on a simple cot, arms folded over his chest. He looked peaceful. Too peaceful. His face held none of the tension of sleep, none of the twitch of dream.

She pressed two fingers to his wrist. The pulse was there, steady and strong. But when she let her awareness sink into him, searching for the familiar texture of pain, she found nothing. Not the dull ache of a strained back. Not the whisper of old scars. Not even the faint thrum of a headache. Aldric was a hollowed gourd, and she could feel the walls of him, smooth and empty.

“He doesn’t dream,” Dain said from the doorway. He hadn’t entered. He leaned against the frame, arms crossed, watching her with an expression she couldn’t read. “We checked. Three days now, he lies like that. Breathing. Heart beating. No pain, no feeling, no—” He gestured vaguely at his own head. “Nothing inside.”

Elara pulled her hand back. The cold in the chapel had nothing to do with the weather. “You said four were drained. Counting him.”

“Counting him,” Dain confirmed. “The other three, the city guard found them in their beds. Same way. But Aldric’s the outlier—he was in prayer when it took him. Couldn’t have been targeted. Unless the thing doesn’t care where you are.”

“Or it knew he’d be alone.” Elara touched the hollow of her own throat. The silver locket rested there beneath her robes, warm against her skin. Her mother had given it to her the night she’d left for the abbey, and Elara had never taken it off. Not once. Now, under Dain’s watchful gaze, she felt its weight more than usual.

He was looking at her. Not the face, but the spot where her hand had touched. His eyes were pale gray, like river stones, and they noticed too much.

She tucked the locket beneath her collar. “You said you had a plan.”

“I said I had a theory.” Dain pushed off the doorframe and walked past her to stand over Aldric. He studied the healer’s face for a long moment. “The creature feeds on feeling. Pain, fear, grief—whatever you’ve got. It’s not killing them. It’s just… drinking until the cup’s dry.”

“And healers are full cups,” Elara said. “We carry more pain than most.”

“You carry more than anyone I’ve met.” He turned to face her. The candlelight carved shadows into his jaw. “That’s why it wants you. You’re not just a cup, Voss. You’re a well.”

Something cold traced her spine. “You’ve been watching me.”

“I’ve been reading the trail.” He pulled a folded paper from his coat and handed it to her. She opened it—a map, marked with charcoal crosses. Four in the city. One farther north, past the forest. “Every drain has happened within a day’s walk of the old aqueduct. The creature moves through water. Or along it. Hard to say which.”

“And me as bait,” she said flatly.

“Not bait.” He took the map back, folding it with deliberate care. “A lure. If you stand near the water, it will come to you. That’s when I cut its throat.”

“And what happens to me while you’re cutting its throat?”

Dain’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “That’s the part I need to tell you about.”

He reached into his coat again, and this time brought out a small glass vial. The liquid inside was colorless, but it caught the candlelight in a way water shouldn’t—refracting a faint prism of rainbows that seemed to shift as she watched.

“What is that?”

“Something you need.” He held it out to her. “Your healing isn’t what it was yesterday. You can feel it—every ache, every fever you’ve taken sinking deeper. You’re not bouncing back the way you used to.”

She didn’t take the vial. She couldn’t stop looking at it. “How do you know that?”

“Because I saw you stumble on the stairs yesterday. Because you’ve been favoring your left hand since you healed the boy with the broken wrist, and you haven’t healed that scratch on your own forearm yet.” He nodded at her sleeve. “You’re leaking, Voss. Slower to recover every day.”

Elara’s jaw tightened. He was right. She’d known it for weeks, hidden it from the other healers, told herself it was just fatigue, just the plague ward’s constant demand. But the scratch on her arm had been there for six days. Six days, and it hadn’t closed more than halfway.

“What does it have to do with the creature?” she asked.

“It’s a tincture.” He rolled the vial between his fingers. “Ground silverweed, nightshade leaf, and a few things I won’t name. It’ll take the accumulated sickness out of your blood and give you a day—maybe two—of clear strength. Enough to do what needs doing.”

“And the cost?”

Dain’s eyes flicked to her throat. To the locket hidden beneath her robe. “The cost is you forget something. The tincture burns memory to feed the body. A day’s worth, maybe more. You wake up with a hole where a piece of you used to be.”

Elara’s hand went to the locket again, almost without thinking. Her mother’s face, faded but still vivid—the curve of her smile, the way she’d pressed the silver into Elara’s palm and said, *Keep it close. It’ll remind you who you are when you forget.*

“I’d rather keep my memories.”

“They’re not yours anymore,” Dain said. He set the vial on the chapel railing between them. “You took on those fevers, those wounds, those breakages. They’re living in your flesh now. You can keep them, and they’ll keep draining you until you’re as hollow as Aldric. Or you can let them go. Let me cut them out of you. The creature’s not the only thing that feeds on pain, Voss. You’ve been eating it for years.”

The words hit harder than she expected. She looked at Aldric again—his empty face, his folded hands. In a year, would she look like that? Would some other healer stand over her cot and feel for a pulse that was still beating and find nothing else left?

“If I help you,” she said slowly, “I want something in return.”

Dain raised an eyebrow.

“I want whatever you know about my mother.”

Something shifted in his face—too quick to read, but not quick enough to hide. “Your mother?”

“The locket.” She pulled it out, let the silver catch the light. It was a simple thing: an oval pendant on a worn chain, its surface etched with a pattern of interlocking circles. “She gave it to me the night I left. Told me to trust it. You recognized it when I walked into the ward yesterday—don’t bother denying it. I saw you look at it before you even spoke to me.”

Dain was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower. “That emblem—the interlocked circles. It’s a ward against the hollowing. Against what the creature does.” He met her eyes. “Your mother knew about it. Knew about it well enough to protect you from it, which means she knew about the creature before I did.”

Elara’s chest tightened. “She was a healer.”

“She was more than that.” He looked at the locket again, then at the vial still resting on the railing. “Take the cure. Come with me. And when we’re done—when that thing is dead—I’ll tell you everything I’ve found about the woman who made that charm and why she gave it to a child destined to drain herself dry.”

Elara looked at the vial. At Aldric. At the locket warm against her palm.

She reached for the glass.