Azria Evermoore's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

The gravedigger blocked the gate, shovel across his chest. His name, he said, was Mortimer Graves, and he'd tended this ground longer than he could count. Azria pulled the old letter from the sealed book and held it up. "The maker sent me here," she said. "His directions point inside. But your graves have no names." Mortimer squinted at the faded paper. His tired eyes moved over the lines the craftsman had written. "Rows and turns," he grunted. "That'll get you lost. Half these stones sank years ago." He wouldn't move aside. "You dig where you shouldn't, you'll wake what sleeps there." Azria studied the letter again. The words counted paces, not markers. She read them cold and made no sense of them. Then her necklace stirred against her chest. Not the shriek of the undead. A hum, steady, growing warmer as she faced the slope beyond the bars. She took a step left. The hum faded. She stepped right, toward a cluster of leaning stones deep in the yard. The stone burned hotter. Azria understood then. The maker hadn't marked the grave for her eyes. He'd marked it for the necklace he built. "Ash," she said. "Yours went quiet. Mine didn't." She pressed the obsidian flat and turned slow, reading its heat like a compass. Ash watched, his own dull chip hanging useless at his throat. His jaw tightened. He said nothing, but he moved to her shoulder, close, wanting the thing he'd lost. Mortimer's grip loosened on the shovel. "That stone knows the ground," he muttered. "I've seen it once before. A man came years back wearing the same black rock." His voice dropped. "He buried something here himself." Azria's chest went cold. "The maker was here." "Long ago." The old man finally stepped aside. "Follow your stone, then. But be quick. This ground doesn't hold past dusk." She passed through the gate. Ash followed. The hum pulled her between the rows, past sunken markers and cracked slabs, to a single flat stone half-swallowed by grass. No name. Just a worn skull carved deep. Her necklace throbbed hard against her ribs, almost painful. Azria knelt and brushed the grass away. Beneath the carving, scratched small, she found a symbol. The same mark stamped inside the sealed book's cover. The maker's sign. "This is it," she said. "He left something under here." Ash crouched beside her. "Then we dig." But as her fingers found the stone's edge, the necklace changed. The steady hum broke into a rising cry. The old warning. Undead, and close. Azria's head snapped up. Across the yard, dirt shifted. A grave breathed out loose soil. Then another. Mortimer backed toward the gate, shovel raised, his face gray. "Told you," he said. "Nothing here stays buried." The ground she needed to open was surrounded now by the ground that was opening on its own.