Chapter Two: The Night Watch
The old arena never truly fell silent at night. Raven had learned its sounds over the months since Lord Solomon’s bombs fell—the groan of settling stone, the whisper of sand against the outer walls, the creak of wooden supports salvaged from the wreckage. Tonight, though, something was different about the whispers.
She shifted in her perch above the eastern gate, trying to ignore the deep ache in her bad leg. The Baldagaar’s claws had shattered bone and severed muscle, but the healers had done what they could. Most nights, she managed. Tonight, the pain felt sharper, more insistent, as if the old wound was remembering something her mind wanted to forget.
A sound echoed from the arena floor below—not quite a voice, but something that wanted to be one. Raven nocked an arrow, more from habit than necessity. The sound came again, closer this time, like words spoken underwater.
“Show yourself,” she called, her voice steady despite the chill crawling up her spine.
Only silence answered. But when she turned her head, movement flickered at the edge of her blind side, always just out of sight.
In the lower levels, Koric checked the storage rooms methodically, counting water barrels and grain sacks by lamplight. The routine helped quiet his mind on nights when sleep proved elusive. But as he turned a corner in the narrow corridor, his lamp illuminated something that stopped him cold.
Fresh marks scored the wall at waist height—three parallel lines carved into the stone. They looked like the warning signs he and the other tunnel rats had used in the old days, marking dangerous passages or cave-ins. But these were different somehow. Deeper. As if whatever made them had pressed into the stone itself rather than scratching the surface.
He ran his fingers over the marks. The stone felt wrong—too warm, almost alive beneath his touch. And was that a vibration, thrumming up through the rock?
Koric yanked his hand back, heart pounding. For a moment, just a moment, he could have sworn he heard the roar of an arena crowd.
“You feel it too, don’t you?”
The voice made Raven spin, crossbow raised. Marcus stood in the shadows of her watchtower, hands raised to show he meant no threat. The old gladiator’s face was lined with exhaustion, his eyes sunken.
“The dreams are getting worse,” he said, moving to stand beside her. “But they’re different now. Not memories anymore. Something else.”
Raven lowered her weapon but kept it close. She’d fought alongside Marcus in the arena more times than she could count. They’d saved each other’s lives, shared the desperate brotherhood of the fighting pits. But tonight, something about him felt off.
“What do you mean, different?”
“In the dreams, I’m back in the arena,” Marcus said, his voice distant. “But the crowd… their faces are distorted. And below the sand, something’s moving. Something that wants to—” He broke off, shuddering.
The whispers rose again, seeming to come from the very stones around them. Marcus’s head snapped up, eyes wide.
“You hear them too?”
Raven nodded slowly. “How long?”
“Three nights now. Getting stronger. Like they’re trying to tell us something, but I can’t… I can’t quite…”
A scream cut through the night—high, terrified, and very young.
Koric was already running when he heard the scream. He took the stairs three at a time, lamp swinging wild shadows across the walls. More marks appeared as he climbed, fresh-carved and wrong, forming patterns that hurt his eyes to look at.
He burst out onto the second level’s residential section, nearly colliding with Raven as she rounded the corner from the opposite direction. They shared a wordless look, then moved together toward the sound.
They found Marcus kneeling beside young Tam, one of the market children. The boy was pressed against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, hands clapped over his ears.
“Make it stop,” Tam whimpered. “Make them stop talking.”
“Who’s talking?” Koric asked, keeping his voice gentle. “What did you hear?”
Tam’s eyes opened, and for a moment they looked wrong—too dark, too deep. “The ones below,” he whispered. “They’re waking up. They’re so hungry…”
Raven’s hand found Koric’s arm, gripping hard. Neither of them spoke of the marks in the tunnels below, or the whispers that seemed to echo through the stone. But they both felt it—the certainty that something had changed in their reclaimed home. Something fundamental.
“Get him to the infirmary,” Koric said finally. “I’ll check the other children.”
Raven nodded, then paused. “Koric? Be careful. This feels like…”
“Like the worst arena matches,” he finished. “When the crowd’s bloodlust felt like something alive. Something feeding.”
They parted ways, each trying to ignore the way the shadows seemed to move behind them, or how the stone itself seemed to pulse with a slow, steady rhythm like a massive heartbeat. Above them, the desert wind keened through Arcmire’s broken towers, carrying whispers that might have been words, might have been screams, might have been nothing at all.
But in the deepest tunnels, where even arena guards had feared to tread, the marks began to spread. And if anyone had been there to see it, they might have noticed how the patterns seemed to form images—faces twisted in ecstasy or agony, bodies writhing in combat, the eternal dance of violence that had fed the arena for so long.
The night was still young, and Arcmire was beginning to remember what it had once been. What it might become again.