Azria Evermoore's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Azria Evermoore had lived with a warning around her neck for twenty years, and tonight it would not shut up. The obsidian stone hummed against her chest without pause. She knew what that meant. Something dead was close, and it was coming closer. She had spent her whole life chasing one question about this necklace: who made it, and why did it wake whenever death drew near. Now the answer felt less important than surviving the night. She crouched behind a rotting fence and stared at the run-down cottage across the yard. Vines choked its dark wood walls. Broken glass caught the moonlight. She had tracked the hum here, room by room, mile by mile. The stone burned hotter the nearer she came to that sagging door. The humming turned to a whine. Azria pressed the stone flat with her palm to muffle it. Too late. Something inside the cottage shifted. A shape passed one broken window. It moved wrong, too slow, joints stiff. Her mouth went dry. "You'll get us both killed standing there." The voice came from behind her. She spun, knife drawn. A man leaned against a dead tree, arms folded, calm as if he'd been waiting hours. White hair, dark eyes, a worn black jacket. He looked at her necklace, not her blade. "That stone's screaming," he said. "Mine went quiet years ago. I learned to listen instead." He pushed off the tree. "Name's Ash. You want inside that house. So do I." Azria kept the knife up. "You know what this is." She lifted the stone an inch. "I know who cut it," Ash said. "Which means I know what's waiting in there for you." Her heart slammed. For twenty years no one had known a single true thing about the necklace. She lowered the knife. The cottage door groaned open on its own. The dead thing stood in the frame, gray and hollow-eyed, dragging one foot across the sill. The stone shrieked so loud it hurt her teeth. "Now," Ash said. "Not the door. The window on the left. It can't turn fast." Azria didn't wait to trust him. She ran. She hit the broken window, hauled herself through, and rolled onto splintered boards inside. The corpse lurched after her, but Ash was already behind it, driving a rusted iron bar through its back. It dropped. The humming stopped. Silence pressed on her ears. She lay panting among the vines and dust. Ash stepped over the still body. He crouched and pulled something from a shelf: a black book, sewn shut with red cord, foreign words bleeding across its edge. "The one who made your necklace made this too," he said. He held it out. "And he's still alive. If you want him, we open this first." Azria took the sealed book. It was warm, like the stone. Her long hunt had a direction now, and a stranger she couldn't yet trust.