The attack didn’t begin with steel or flame. It began with a shaking in the bedrock.
Through the red granite floor of the Vault of Founders, a deep, sub-heard pulse shivered upward. It shook at exactly four cycles per second. The dust on the sarcophagi danced in nested rings. The small puddles of stone salt water in the drainage channels rippled like oil in a frying pan.
Then, Cardinal Vane-Krell struck the door with his voice.
“BY THE DECREE OF THE Total GRAVE,” the Cardinal’s spectral deep roared through the iron plates, magnified tenfold by the sound wards of his three-tiered papal mitre. “I SUMMON THE SOULS OF THE UNPAID! I Wake up THE ANCESTRAL MORTGAGE! LET THE CREDITORS ENTER THE VESSEL OF THE SCRIBE!”
A high-pitched, screeching whistle erupted from the keyways and seams of the barred hatch.
And inside Ren Vale’s skull, the world exploded into madness.
The Phantom Murmurs didn’t merely whisper. They shrieked.
REN VALE!
