The Echo of Gold

The air in the deep dungeon was heavy, a suffocating blanket of moisture and stone dust, but around Kaelen, it smelled of fresh lavender and morning rain. Elara breathed it in greedily, letting the scent anchor her shaking hands.

“Hold still,” she whispered, her fingers hovering over the gash on his forearm. It was a nasty cut, jagged and deep, earned from a goblin scimitar.

Kaelen obeyed perfectly. He did not flinch. He sat as still as a statue in a temple, his profile etched in the golden light of the campfire. The wound was not bleeding. The edges of the flesh were gray, the texture of wet clay, and there was no heat radiating from the skin.

Elara rubbed her left arm, a nervous tic she’d developed since entering the crypts. Across the fire, Kaelen raised his right hand and rubbed his left arm in the exact same motion.

Elara frowned, pushing the thought away. Sympathetic pain, she told herself. A warrior’s bond. She summoned the light—Refresh, Purify, Preserve—and the golden glow washed over him. The gray flesh didn’t knit together so much as it smoothed over, like wax melting to seal a crack.

“Better,” she said, her voice tight.

Kaelen turned to her. His eyes were a piercing, heroic blue, though the film over them was thick, like milk beginning to curdle. “Do you remember the garden, Elara?”

His voice was a rich baritone, warm and comforting. But beneath the timber, there was a wetness, a bubbling sound in the throat that shouldn’t be there.

Elara paused, wiping her hands on her robe. “Which garden?”

“The one with the star-blooms. The little blue ones that only opened at twilight. We used to watch them.”

A cold spike drove itself through Elara’s chest. She knew that garden. It was behind the temple where she had trained as an acolyte. She had spent hours there, hiding from the High Priestess.

But Kaelen was from the sun-scorched wastes of the Southern expanse. He had never seen a star-bloom in his life.

“Yes,” she said, her throat clicking dryly. “It was beautiful.”

She looked at him, really looked at him, and for a second the golden light flickered. She saw the slackness of his jaw, the way his skin pulled too tight against his cheekbones. Then she blinked, and he was the Hero again, strong and stoic.

“We should rest,” Kaelen said. He didn’t move to lie down. He simply ceased moving, like a clockwork toy that had run out of spring.

The skirmish the next day was trivial. Just a pack of skeletal rats and a few wandering ghouls. Bram, the tank, laughed loudly as he swung his hammer, his voice echoing a little too frantically off the damp walls. He stayed upwind of Kaelen. He always stayed upwind.

Sari, the rogue, was beside him, dabbing oil of cloves onto her upper lip with a trembling finger.

“Kaelen, flank!” Bram shouted, though he didn’t look at the Hero.

Kaelen moved with the fluid grace of a dancer, though his left knee bent backward with a sickening pop before snapping into place. He intercepted a ghoul, taking a rusted dagger straight to the gut.

He didn’t grunt. He didn’t stumble. The blade sank into him with the sound of a knife hitting a sack of wet sand.

Elara raised her staff, ready to cast a healing word, but the spell died on her lips. Kaelen turned his head slowly. The ghoul clawed at his face, tearing a strip of skin from his cheek. Beneath it, there was no red muscle, only black, coagulated jelly.

“I am afraid of the dark,” Kaelen whispered.

The combat ended. The ghoul fell. But the words hung in the silence, louder than the clash of steel.

Elara froze. I am afraid of the dark.

She had never told anyone that. Not even him. It was her deepest, most shameful secret, the reason she kept a light cantrip burning by her bedroll every night.

Kaelen stood amidst the carnage, the dagger still buried to the hilt in his stomach. He looked at her, and his expression was a perfect mirror of the terror she felt in her own heart.

They made camp in a dead-end corridor. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and… something else. Something sweet and cloying, like lilies left too long on a grave.

Elara pulled Kaelen aside, guiding him by the elbow. His arm felt wrong through the chainmail—too hard, like bone wrapped in cold leather. As she squeezed his elbow, he squeezed his own other elbow, mimicking the pressure.

“Kaelen,” she said softly. “Tell me about your mother.”

He stared at her. His blink was slow, the eyelids sticking slightly before peeling open. “My mother.”

“Yes. What did she do?”

Silence stretched. The lavender scent wavered, and the smell of stagnant water and old meat crept in.

Elara closed her eyes. She pictured a bakery. She imagined the smell of yeast and warm flour. She projected the image with all the desperate force of her mind.

Kaelen smiled instantly. The skin of his lip split, revealing a gray gum line. “My mother baked the best bread. She always gave me the crusts.”

Elara stepped back, nausea rolling in her gut. Kaelen’s mother had been a chieftess. She hunted drakes. She had never baked a loaf of bread in her life.

She walked back to the fire, her legs numb. Bram was polishing his shield, scrubbing the same spot over and over until the metal shrieked. Sari was sitting with her back to the group, applying more perfume, the bottle clicking against her teeth.

“He’s not right,” Elara said. Her voice was small, swallowed by the dark.

Bram didn’t look up. He scrubbed harder. “It’s the poison from the spiders on level four,” he said, the words tumbling out too fast. “Paralytic neurotoxin. Lingers in the system. Makes the blood sluggish. That’s why he’s pale.”

“Bram, he doesn’t bleed. He doesn’t remember.”

“It’s a stasis trance!” Bram snapped, his eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on his reflection in the shield. “Paladin technique. Slows the heart rate to preserve energy. He’s just… deep in the meditation. He’s focusing. That’s all.”

“Sari?” Elara asked, turning to the rogue.

Sari made a sound that might have been a laugh or a retch. “It’s just the sewer gas,” she muttered into her scarf. “Makes you see things. Makes you hear things. Just the gas.”

They weren’t blind. They were rewriting reality because the alternative was a tomb without a champion.

The Lich’s chamber was a cathedral of bone and green fire. The necromancer floated above a dais, his laughter scraping against the stone like rusted iron.

“You challenge me?” the Lich hissed. “You bring a puppet to my theater?”

Elara felt the drain on her mana, a physical ache in her marrow. She was holding Kaelen upright with her mind, knitting his muscles with her will. Every step he took was a step she forced him to take.

“Strike him down, Kaelen!” Bram yelled, cowering behind his shield. “Use the Holy Smite! The Light preserves!”

Kaelen stepped forward. “I will strike him down,” he said. It was Elara’s intonation. Elara’s cadence. He raised his sword, and Elara felt her own arm tremble with the phantom weight of it.

The Lich raised a skeletal hand. “Let us see what lies beneath the mask.”

He spoke a word of power. It wasn’t an attack. It was a Dispel.

The world seemed to stutter. The lavender vanished, replaced instantly by the overwhelming stench of advanced decay—putrid meat, burst bowels, and ancient dust. It hit them like a physical blow.

The golden glow faded. Kaelen’s armor, once gleaming, was dull and rusted, fused to his body by dried ichor. His skin was not fair; it was green and sloughing off in wet sheets. The “wounds” Elara had tended were gaping holes filled with maggots that writhed in the sudden exposure to the air.

Without Elara’s magic to bind the ligaments, the physics of death took over.

Kaelen collapsed. He didn’t fall like a man; he crumpled like a pile of wet laundry. His head hit the stone with a hollow thud, and his jaw unhinged, rolling away across the floor.

“Oh gods,” Sari gagged, scrambling backward on her hands and knees. She vomited, the sound echoing wetly in the silent chamber.

Bram dropped his shield. He stared at the thing on the floor—the heap of meat that had been their hope. “No,” he whimpered. “No, he’s just… he’s just winded. Get up, Kaelen. Get up!”

The Lich descended slowly, his robes trailing over the stone. “Pathetic,” he rasped. “You drag this carrion through my halls and call it a hero? You reanimate a husk with nothing but fear and cheap parlor tricks? I am insulted.”

The Lich pointed a withered finger at Elara. “You are no cleric. You are a child playing with dolls.”

Elara stared at the corpse. She saw the maggots spilling from the stomach wound. She saw the empty, milky eyes staring at nothing. She felt the massive reservoir of magic she had been using to pump his lungs, to twitch his fingers, to make him smile. It was a lake of power, deep and untouched, kept behind a dam of denial.

She had been carrying him. She had been carrying all of them.

“Fix him!” Bram screamed, tearing at his hair. “Elara, cast Revivify! Cast something! Make him stand up!”

Elara looked at Bram, weeping in his delusion. She looked at the Lich, arrogant in his undeath.

“No,” she whispered.

“Elara!” Sari shrieked as the Lich began to charge a spell of green death.

Elara let the connection snap. The weight in her mind vanished. The constant, draining effort to maintain the lie evaporated, leaving her light. Terrifyingly light.

She raised her hand. She didn’t cast Refresh. She didn’t cast Preserve.

She grabbed the raw, burning energy she had been wasting on a corpse and thrust it forward. It wasn’t a spell she had prepared. It was a scream given form.

“Banished,” she commanded.

A pillar of blinding white light erupted from her palm. It wasn’t the soft glow of healing; it was the searing, purifying fire of the sun. It engulfed the Lich, incinerating bone and shadow in a heartbeat. The scream was cut short as the enemy turned to ash. The force of it blew the green fires out, leaving the room plunged in sudden, ringing silence.

Elara stood tall, her hand still smoking. She felt empty, but it was a clean emptiness.

Bram lowered his hands slowly. He looked at the pile of remains on the floor. The jawbone sat a few feet away, grinning toothlessly at the ceiling. The smell was still there, but the lavender was gone. There was only the honest stench of death.

“He’s not getting up,” Bram whispered. It wasn’t a question anymore.

Elara walked past him. She didn’t look down. She stepped over the remains of the Hero and stopped at the heavy iron doors on the far side of the room.

“We leave him,” she said. Her voice was steady. It was her own voice.

“Sari, check the door for traps. Bram, rear guard.”

Bram hesitated, looking one last time at the corpse, then at Elara’s straight back. He nodded, a sharp, jerky motion. “Right. Rear guard.”

She pushed the door open, stepping into the dark. She didn’t cast a light. She wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

“Move out.”