Flicker in the Dark
Time in the tunnels twisted and stretched until it lost all meaning. There was no sun, no moon—only the faint red glow of molten stone and the ceaseless clatter of labor. The air was heavy with soot and sweat, each breath like swallowing cinders. Eliana no longer counted days. She counted bruises. She counted the number of times her ribs ached when she drew breath, the meals she forced down to quiet the gnawing hunger, the lashes endured without a cry.
Pain was no longer new. It had become a constant, an old lover curled against her spine.
But pain wasn't what haunted her.
It was the change.
It began as a murmur—an alien sensation like a forgotten name whispered just behind her ear. She had felt it after a beating. Vorn, with his usual cruelty, had backhanded her into the stone. Her lip had split open. Blood pooled in her mouth. Her head spun.
But beneath the agony… something stirred.
A pulse. Slow, heavy, rhythmic. As if her heart had a twin—buried deep, deeper than bone, deeper than thought.
That night, while the others collapsed into exhausted sleep around her, Eliana sat alone in the corner of the cavern they called the Nest. Her breath came in shallow gasps, her limbs trembling from overwork and cold. The others muttered in sleep—some with hunger, some with nightmares.
She stared down at her hands.
They were no longer the hands of Eliana Rooin Valerius, noble-born daughter of a once-great house. They were things—tools. Thickened skin, nails broken and packed with blood and filth, muscles wiry with forced labor. Yet as she stared, a subtle shimmer caught her eye.
A flicker.
Just beneath the grime—beneath her skin—something pulsed faintly. Like an ember still breathing in the ashes.
For a brief second, she swore her fingertips glowed. Not bright, not warm. Cold. Like the sickly red light of a dying coal. Something unnatural. Something wrong.
She clenched her fist.
The light vanished.
But the feeling remained.
A low thrum under her skin, like something waking up inside her. Something watching.
She couldn't sleep. Not with the hum in her chest growing louder. Not with that memory of the glow dancing behind her eyes, refusing to fade.
She pressed her palm against the stone floor, searching for grounding, but the stone felt... different now. Like it was breathing. Like it noticed her.
Her fingers recoiled.
All around her, goblins snored and muttered. One nearby twitched in his sleep, murmuring in the guttural tongue of their kind. She listened, eyes wide, as he whispered words that chilled her blood.
"Fire in the bones. Fire that speaks. Fire that eats."
The sleeper whimpered and turned away, curling into a ball like a child hiding from a nightmare.
Eliana blinked rapidly, bile rising in her throat. She told herself it was just her imagination. A coincidence. He couldn't know what she had seen, what she had felt.
Could he?
A sudden noise snapped her attention to the far end of the chamber.
Drip.
A wet drip echoed from the shadows—thick, rhythmic, wrong.
She rose, barefoot and cautious, drawn to the sound despite herself. Her instincts screamed to stop, to turn back, but her body moved of its own accord.
The shadows clung to the walls like rot. Every step felt like sinking deeper into something ancient. Something forgotten.
She turned a corner and froze.
The drip came from the ceiling—blood. It slid in thin strands down the wall, too dark, too thick. There was no wound, no corpse.
Just the blood. And beneath it, etched into the stone, a symbol she didn't remember being there before.
A circle. Inside it, a hand. A twisted parody of her own.
The thrum in her chest intensified.
Suddenly, the blood began to sizzle where it touched the stone, steam rising with a smell like scorched hair. The symbol glowed faintly.
And she understood.
It was not just power awakening within her.
It was calling something.
Or something was calling her.
She backed away, her breath catching in her throat. The glow in her chest matched the pulse of the mark. Perfect sync. Her body shook.
This was no gift.
This was no accident.
It was a birthright. Or a curse.
Whatever stirred inside her—whatever flickered beneath her skin—wasn't hers alone.
It was something ancient. Something buried. Something hungry.
The Watcher in the Shadows
"You trying to call the stars, little wretch?"
The voice slithered through the air like a cold breeze through a graveyard, snapping Eliana from her trance. She hadn't heard anyone approach.
Karsh.
He stepped out from the black edges of the chamber like he'd been poured from the shadows themselves—thin and wiry, yet hunched and twitching like a scavenger beast on the hunt. His eyes glowed faintly in the red haze of the resting chamber, not with firelight, but something more primal. Something that didn't belong in any goblin's skull.
He clicked his tongue as he approached, each sound sharp and unnatural, like bone tapping against stone.
Eliana didn't speak. Didn't move. Her breath was shallow, pulse threading tight through her veins like wire. She wasn't afraid—no, not this time. But something about Karsh felt wrong tonight. Like the shadows followed him too closely. Like the air chilled where he walked.
"Staring at your hands like they'll sprout wings and carry you out of here," he muttered, his voice low and wet, like something rotting. "But they won't, girl. Not here. Not in the mountain."
He crouched low, too close now, the smell of old blood and mold crawling from his skin. His breath rattled against her cheek, and when he grinned, his teeth were far too long.
"Magic doesn't belong to worms like you," he hissed, the word magic curdling on his tongue like spoiled milk. "It chews you. Turns your bones inside out, spills you like soup across the rocks."
Then, he sniffed her.
Long. Deep.
Not like a curious creature.
Like a predator.
She didn't flinch. Not even when his lips peeled back wider, amused.
"You've got something… different," he said, voice almost reverent now. "Smells like roots cracked open in winter. Like ash in your blood." His fingers danced toward her shoulder—slow, deliberate.
When he touched her, Eliana didn't gasp. But her body screamed in silence.
His claws dug into her shoulder—not deep, but precise. Like he knew exactly where to press to find the pain beneath the flesh. Her muscles tensed, instinct screaming to strike, but she held still.
Still as stone.
Still as death.
Karsh's grin widened until it touched the corners of his cheeks. His voice dropped, so low it was almost beneath hearing.
"Watch yourself," he whispered. "The mountain watches back. It sees things like you. Touched ones. It doesn't like them."
His breath carried something sharp and sweet—like copper and decay.
"The mountain has a way of taking gifts like yours…" His eyes gleamed with something fevered. "…and turning them inside out."
His claws retracted.
He didn't leave so much as fade—melting back into the wall of darkness with a shiver of movement that barely stirred the air. One moment he was there. The next, he wasn't.
And for a long, long time, Eliana sat frozen.
The stone felt colder beneath her. The ember in her chest had dimmed, not from fear, but as if hiding. Cowering.
She glanced down at her hands again.
They didn't glow.
But the skin beneath her fingernails had turned ever so slightly grey—like frostbite. Like death blooming from the tips.
And yet, she did not tremble.
Because she finally understood.
It wasn't just Karsh watching her.
It wasn't just the goblins.
Something in the mountain knew her now.
Had seen her.
Had marked her.
And it was only just beginning.
Lightning and Ash
It happened during a punishment shift.
The air was heavy with smoke, sweat, and molten metal. Chains clinked in rhythm with hammers. The furnace roared, a beast that never slept, belching fire into the stone-thick belly of the mountain. Sparks danced like fireflies, fleeting, harmless.
But not all sparks die gently.
Vorn, bloated on his daily dose of rot-gut and power, had seized on Eliana again. This time, it was over a misaligned rivet—something she hadn't even touched. That never mattered. What mattered was that she was easy. Small. Quiet. Different.
He struck her across the face, his thick hand cracking against her jaw with a sound like wet wood snapping. Blood bloomed in her mouth, metallic and warm.
Another blow. Her knees buckled.
Another. Her back hit the stone.
Vorn's rage was drunk and unmeasured, fed by the frustration that she still didn't scream. That her eyes still held something that wouldn't yield. It made his blows crueler, more frenzied. A beast punishing a mirror for its own ugliness.
"You broken yet, freak?" he growled, fist raised again.
And then—
Something inside her snapped.
But it didn't break like a bone or a spirit.
It tore—a violent, internal lurch. Like some lock deep in her ribs had burst open.
The next blow landed.
But her body didn't fall.
She didn't feel pain.
She felt heat.
Raw and wrong and ravenous.
Her hand rose. Slowly. Trembling. Not from fear—but from charge. From something ancient unraveling through her veins like waking venom.
The forge dimmed.
The air warped.
Then came the sound—a crack, sharp and absolute, as if the world itself had just fractured.
It wasn't lightning as mortals knew it. It wasn't blue. It wasn't white.
It was black—a jagged, living thread of night threaded with veins of silver and red, like blood vessels stretched across the void. It arced from her fingertips with a screeching hiss, then slammed into Vorn's chest.
He didn't scream.
He didn't even blink.
He was airborne—launched backward like a rag doll, spine folding unnaturally before he crashed into the stone wall with a sound like meat dropped from a height. His body twitched once, then went still.
Smoke curled from his armor.
The room went silent.
Utterly, horrifically silent.
The other goblins froze. Hammers held mid-swing. Mouths agape. Eyes wide.
Even the fire, greedy and wild, seemed to recoil. Its roar softened. Its light dimmed. It was as though the very forge recognized something wrong had entered its domain.
Eliana stood, body trembling. Her chest heaved, lungs trying to catch up with the thunder still ringing in her bones.
And her hands—her hands—still sparked.
Tiny black filaments of energy crackled across her fingertips, worming under her nails, painting ghost veins along her forearms. They burned cold, like frostbite given life. She could feel them—alive, squirming, not quite hers.
She stared down at Vorn's body. Smoke leaked from his mouth. His eyes were wide, glassy, staring up at the ceiling in eternal surprise. Something inside him still sizzled.
She had done that.
The realization didn't bring pride.
It brought a wave of cold that settled in her spine, because something inside her wanted to do it again.
Something deeper than thought—darker than rage—had liked it.
A growl echoed from the deeper forge tunnels.
Low. Guttural.
Not goblin.
Then another sound followed it.
Laughter.
Not loud. Not amused.
It was dry. Hungry.
And it came from nowhere—and everywhere.
Something had felt her spark.
And now it was watching.
The Eyes That Follow
Word spread like wildfire through the tunnels.
Not loudly—not with shouts or boasts. It was the kind of wildfire that smoldered in silence, moving through cracks and whispers, curling beneath breath. The kind that didn't light the world, but hollowed it out.
Eliana had struck Vorn down.
Not with a blade. Not with poison.
With power.
And not the kind gifted by goblin shamans or stolen from dead mages. This was older. Stranger. A thing without name or form.
Now, the other goblins wouldn't meet her eyes. They avoided her in the mess lines, letting her pass without a word. Others followed her at a distance, always just far enough to vanish around a corner the moment she turned to look. Their presence was a constant murmur in her bones.
Sometimes, she heard breathing in empty hallways.
Sometimes, she smelled singed blood and burnt stone even when no forge was nearby.
Vorn lived, but just barely.
His chest bore a gnarled scar now, blackened and red-rimmed like cooled lava. The lightning had twisted something in him. Bent him inward. His voice stuttered when he barked orders now. His fists hesitated.
His eyes—they never stopped watching her.
But it was no longer the look of a bully hunting prey.
It was the look of a cornered beast watching fire.
Dangerous. Unpredictable. Untouchable.
The overseers noticed too.
They dragged her aside under the pretense of "inspection." The hollow-eyed shamans and iron-masked guards brought her to a chamber slick with condensation and carved with symbols older than goblinkind. She stood beneath flickering torchlight while pale goblin priests studied her, their fingers twitching just above her skin, lips murmuring incantations she couldn't understand.
One of them placed a clawed hand over her heart and froze. His eyes widened.
He pulled away like he'd touched boiling oil.
But she gave them nothing.
Not a word.
She didn't need to speak. Her silence had grown fangs.
That night, in the hour where even the deepest forge fires went dim and the tunnels exhaled cold, sour breath, Karsh returned.
He didn't approach like before. He appeared—one moment not there, the next, too close.
The shadows clung to him like rotted flesh. His grin split his face with too many teeth.
"You've tasted it now," he whispered, circling her like a vulture circling something still twitching. "The mountain's voice. The Black Vein. It sings to you."
She didn't respond.
But the way her fingers curled into her palm made his grin widen.
"You don't even know what you are."
Eliana turned, meeting his gaze without flinching. "I know what I'm not."
"Oh?" His head tilted. "And what's that?"
"Helpless."
Karsh barked a laugh. But it was jagged. Ugly. The kind of laugh that broke instead of soothed. "Good. That means you'll last longer. Because if you want to live, little spark, you'll have to become a monster they fear." His voice dropped, gravel underfoot. "Or you'll be torn apart by the ones who envy you."
His breath stank of sulfur and secrets.
"I already see them. Watching. Waiting. The others. Not goblin. Not flesh." He leaned close. "You've opened a door. They want through. And now they know your name."
Her jaw clenched. "Let them try."
Karsh's grin flickered. He stepped back—not afraid, but amused. "Careful, girl. The mountain listens. And when you challenge it..." His voice turned to a rasp. "It answers."
The torches guttered behind him.
For a heartbeat, his shadow was not his own.
It stretched too far. Too high. Its shape twisted—more antlers than bone, more eyes than sense.
Then it was gone.
And Karsh with it.
Alone again, Eliana sat with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, her hands still prickling with that lingering hum—like something crawling beneath her skin, whispering in a language her blood wanted to obey.
The forge walls trembled.
Far beneath the stone and ash, something watched.
And waited.
The Path of the Hollow Flame
Later, when sleep did not come—as it rarely did anymore—Eliana rose from the cold stone like a shadow peeling away from the wall.
The others muttered in their dreams. Some whimpered. A few curled tighter when she passed, as if her presence brought a chill the forges couldn't warm. No one followed. No one dared.
Her steps took her downward.
Not toward her cell, nor the overseer halls, but deeper—to the old tunnels, the ones the others never entered. Carvings older than goblin memory marked the walls here, symbols etched not with tools, but with claws. The air was thick with iron and centuries of silence.
Each step echoed.
And beneath that echo… was something else.
A sound beneath sound. The pulse of the mountain.
It wasn't just in the air. It was inside her. A rhythm just out of sync with her own heartbeat—slow, thundering, eternal. Like some massive thing had once slumbered here, and even in death, its heart kept beating.
Eliana walked in silence, guided only by the faint glow pulsing beneath her skin. It had grown stronger these past days, flickering like coals in her veins. The tunnel should have been lightless, but her body painted the stone in an eerie hue—red-gold edged in shadow, like a lantern burning at the edge of hell.
Then the corridor opened.
A chamber, circular and vast, carved with jagged edges and hollow depressions. At the center, an altar of black glass stood like a broken tooth, surrounded by scorch marks and dead dust.
No torches. No warmth.
But here, the hum was strongest.
Her legs gave out.
She dropped to her knees without understanding why. Not out of pain. Not fear.
Reverence.
The taste of ash thickened on her tongue. It coated her teeth. Her breath came shallow. Something deep beneath this chamber had noticed her.
The whispers returned.
Not voices, but a voice—singular and vast, like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together beneath the world. It was not male. Nor female. It simply was—and had been, for longer than time.
It didn't call her name.
It asked a question, without sound, without air—only a pressure inside her skull that felt like it might split her open.
"What will you become?"
The language was older than thought, yet she understood it. Or rather, her bones did. Her blood trembled in recognition.
Her lips parted, but no answer came. Only a breath of smoke.
She clutched her chest.
It was there—that second heart. A hollow space behind her ribs that pulsed in harmony with the thing beneath her. It was not made of flesh or blood. It was made of will. A burning core shaped from rage, loss, and the violence of survival.
It beat once, and the floor trembled.
Images raced behind her eyes—not memories, but visions. A throne of bones wreathed in black flame. A chain of dead gods. A girl, her mouth full of ash, speaking the names of the forgotten.
And a mirror that showed not her face, but a thing made of flame and void, crowned in ruin.
Eliana gasped and fell forward, her hands catching the stone altar. It burned cold beneath her palms.
The voice whispered again—closer this time.
"What will you become…?"
She had no answer.
Not yet.
But something inside her stirred—something hungry.
Behind her, the entrance to the chamber sealed itself with a soft, grinding click. The sound of stone locking into place.
She did not turn.
The darkness was alive now. It leaned closer.
Watching. Listening.
The glow beneath her skin flickered like a dying ember. Then surged—violent and radiant—for one terrible second.
The chamber lit with shadows that should not have shapes.
And then—
Silence.
Eliana stood slowly, her fingers leaving small scorch marks on the altar.
She didn't know what she was becoming.
But she would.
And so would everyone else.
The First Kill
It wasn't premeditated.
Not a decision, not a thought. Just a snap—an instinct sharper than reason, older than fear.
Eliana crouched by the cistern, letting the cold trickle of metallic water rinse the ash from her throat. The chamber was quiet, save for the distant groan of stone and the forge-breath of the mountain far above. She should have felt at peace here. Alone. Forgotten.
But she wasn't alone.
A soft scrape.
Just behind her.
A whisper of breath, teeth clenched tight. The scent of iron. And hate.
She turned.
Too quickly.
Her hand rose—not in defense, but reaction. Something inside her reached outward, faster than thought.
A spark.
Then a sound—wet, violent, final.
The young goblin froze in place, eyes wide, blade still clenched in one hand. His chest had opened—not torn, not pierced, but unmade, a jagged void ringed in seared flesh. Smoke leaked from the wound like breath in winter.
The black light still glowed on Eliana's palm.
The boy staggered.
Then crumpled.
No scream. No curse. Not even a gasp. Just the soft thud of flesh against stone, and the faint hiss of steam from the smoldering corpse.
Eliana stared.
Her breathing came slow, even. Her body was still tense, coiled like a predator unsure if the kill had landed.
But there was no movement. No twitch. No sound.
Only death.
The moment stretched—too long.
And then her hand began to tremble.
Not from fear.
From clarity.
Something inside her was awake now, fully and completely.
It wasn't rage that fueled her. It wasn't even self-defense. She hadn't chosen to kill. The power had done it for her.
She looked down at the boy—young, smaller than her, eyes still glassy with shock.
Just a tool. A scared thing told to carve out a rising threat in the dark.
He hadn't even been evil.
And now he was just... gone.
Eliana's knees touched stone. She hovered over the body like a mourner who couldn't remember the face of the dead.
But no tears came.
Because something was wrong with her now.
The air around her felt heavy, warped. Her skin still crackled with a residual hum—power that didn't dissipate, just coiled, waiting.
Behind her, shadows stretched the wrong way. Her own silhouette flickered, the outline of her form shifting, glitching, like it no longer obeyed the same laws of light.
She closed her eyes.
But that only made it worse.
Behind her lids, the darkness pulsed with memories not her own—killings from ages past, each one echoing through her bones like a forgotten song.
"This is survival," the voice inside whispered."This is becoming."
She rose to her feet slowly, fingers flexing.
There was blood on her hand.
No—not blood. It was darker. Slicker. Something else. Something that hissed when it touched stone, that crawled away like it had a will of its own.
Eliana wiped her hand on the dead goblin's tunic.
He twitched.
Her breath caught.
But it wasn't life.
It was her energy, burrowed deep. Still crackling in his ribcage. Feeding on what little heat remained.
With a sickening crack, the boy's body folded inward, like paper collapsing around fire. Flesh burned, bones warped, and then—nothing. Just a black stain that smelled of thunder and rot.
Gone.
Like he'd never existed.
Eliana stood in the echoing silence, the weight of what she had done—and what she could now do—pressing against her ribs.
She had crossed a line.
Not in the world.
In herself.
There was no going back. No reclaiming innocence.
She didn't flinch. Didn't sob.
She only turned and walked away, the echo of her steps chased by the faint whisper of something far darker following behind her.
It had seen what she'd done.
And it was pleased.