Sahrye

Nightmare Sahrye Mahlored, Shield Warden

Sahrye Mahlored
Status	Active
Race	Gnome
Gender	Female
Guild	Necromancer
Instance	Prime

The Amber-Eyed Heretic, the Shadow-Daughter of the Forgotten H’Mrazh Line

They say the Hounds of Rutilor are hunting me. Good. Let them. I have spent my life running from silence — from unanswered questions, from priests who hide behind sanctimony, from a world that flinched every time I tried to understand its most fragile truths. But I have never run from men. Not from zealots gripping torches, not from paladins who confuse fear for purity, and certainly not from those who believe righteousness will shield them from consequences.

The Hounds whisper my features across Elanthia now: amber eyes, freckled skin, a slight gnome girl marked with a square of starfallen obsidian. They clutch their prophecy about the “Shadow-Daughter” as though reciting it will save them, too foolish to realize they became part of that prophecy the moment they chose ignorance over understanding. They call me an abomination, but they created me long before they ever learned my name. What they hunt is not wickedness — it is clarity. It is the sharpened point of grief. It is the ember of a child who asked “why?” and was met only with fear.

I feel them sometimes on the edge of my path: the tremor of boots on soil, breath held in the dark, a muttered prayer meant to shield them from what they believe I’ve become. They think they hunt a curious girl who strayed too close to forbidden knowledge, but I left her behind the day the Arcane opened my senses and the Great Work welcomed me into its depths. What walks the forests now is something they are wholly unprepared to face.

I do not hide. I wait. And if the Hounds corner me with holy steel and trembling conviction, I will meet their gaze and let them witness the truth they feared into existence. I am not a heretic, nor a prophecy, nor a mistake carved by fate. I am the answer to the question they never had the courage to ask. I am the return of a lineage they believed the Immortals themselves erased. I am H’Mrazh reborn, hearing the hollow where others hear only silence, feeling the Veil breathe where others beg their gods for assurance.

So let the Hounds come. Let them brandish their sanctity, cling to their doctrines, call me monster or shadow-child or death’s favored. I will show them how the dead whisper, how the Arcane bends, how the earth rises at my command. And when understanding finally dawns in their eyes — when they realize too late that they should have feared their ignorance more than they feared me — I will be the last thing they see before the world grows quiet.

A Gnome of No Importance

Few in Elanthia remember the Mahlored name, and fewer still ever recall it kindly. The Mahloreds were a small gnomish family in the foothills near Shard—quiet, unremarkable people who prided themselves on humility and honest work. Sahrye Mahlored was born near Shard, a small gnome girl with amber eyes too perceptive for her community’s comfort. While other children tinkered with toys or gears, Sahrye’s curiosity took her beneath the skin: dissecting river fish, tracing bone structures, listening to the quiet machinery of the body. Her parents whispered, her neighbors avoided her, but Sahrye simply wanted answers—especially after her only friend, a human girl named Talia, died suddenly and inexplicably.

When priests and healers dismissed her questions with empty platitudes, Sahrye left home in grief and anger. For years she traveled across Elanthia seeking understanding wherever the dead and dying taught more honestly than the living: the morgue on Aesry Surlaenis’a, the plague houses of Mer’Kresh, the battlefield triages near the Crossing. She learned the body’s secrets through cold precision and quiet determination, yet the truth behind death remained just out of reach. Everything changed on her seventeenth birthday.

Everything changed on her seventeenth birthday.

While camping alone in a northern forest, Sahrye was approached by an old gnome woman—ragged, cloud-eyed, bearing a presence older than any necromancer’s spell. The woman named herself one of the H’Mrazh, the “shadow-daughters” born from an ancient starfall long before necromancy existed. Their gift was not power, but perception: an instinctive sensitivity to the echo left by dying things.

She told Sahrye that she, too, possessed this dormant talent.

Before Sahrye could speak, the woman pressed a polished square of star-touched obsidian onto her forehead. It fused instantly—an artifact of a lost discipline, not a symbol of the Necromancer Guild. The stone did not bestow magic; it recognized the shape of Sahrye’s mind.

Then the woman vanished without a trace.

In the days that followed, the obsidian pulsed like a quiet presence, guiding Sahrye deeper into the wilderness—until the shadows bent toward her fire and a human man stepped into view. Stout, dark-skinned, grey-eyed, with worn clothing and reading spectacles, he introduced himself with gentle precision:

“I am Zamidren Book.”

The anti-necromancy scholar.

The exile.

The Triumphant of the Philosophers of the Knife. He told her the truth others had buried: that the path she walked would not disappear, and that only among the Philosophers would her questions find answers instead of fear. He offered no threats, no promises—only knowledge.

He told her the truth others had buried: that the path she walked would not disappear, and that only among the Philosophers would her questions find answers instead of fear. He offered no threats, no promises—only knowledge.

Sahrye took his hand.

When she joined the Necromancer Guild, the Arcane surged through her like a second pulse. For the first time, she felt the undercurrent of creation and decay woven through the world. Her training accelerated at a frightening pace—Thanatology, the Arcane, even her first crude shaping of earth through Quicken Earth—and with every lesson, the girl she once was slipped further behind.

The obsidian hummed as if in approval.

Zamidren told her this shedding was necessary.

The Great Work demanded transformation.

Sahrye did not resist. She became what the H’Mrazh had foreseen, what Zamidren recognized, what the Arcane welcomed.

She became what the H’Mrazh had foreseen, what Zamidren recognized, what the Arcane welcomed.

No ordinary necromancer.

No mere Philosopher of the Knife.

Sahrye Mahlored is the first new H’Mrazh in centuries—

a shadow-daughter reborn in a world that thought her lineage extinct.

And Elanthia has not yet grasped what that means.

Sahrye’s Journal

“Clawing at Death without Tools”

Written at dusk on the 23rd day of the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

Today was my seventeenth birthday.

Not that anyone remembered. Not that anyone ever has. If this entry ends in blotched ink, it’s because my fingers are still trembling from the cold. Or perhaps from what she told me.

If this entry ends in blotched ink, it’s because my fingers are still trembling from the cold. Or perhaps from what she told me.

I do not know her name.

I doubt she had one to offer.

But she found me—half-conscious, half-starved, and entirely defeated—curled beneath a cedar like a wounded animal. I remember the crunch of her steps through needles, the clack of bone charms against her cloak. Thought she was a hallucination at first. Perhaps she was. “Child,” she said, which irritated me. I have not been a child for a long time. “You claw at death without tools. No wonder it tears you apart.”

“Child,” she said, which irritated me. I have not been a child for a long time. “You claw at death without tools. No wonder it tears you apart.”

I tried to rise. Failed.

“You want to know why the body fails,” she murmured. “Why a heart stops. Why a friend doesn’t wake.”

Talia’s name clawed its way up my throat, but I couldn’t speak.

Her thumb pressed something cold against my forehead — a square of obsidian. Polished smooth.

And old. Older than she was. Older than me.

Cold flooded my skull. Not chilling...hollowing. As if my thoughts were being scraped clean, leaving only space for something older, heavier. “You will not find your answers from priests, child. Nor from healers. But there are others who know the shape of death. Who have peeled back the veil with their own hands.” Her smile widened. “You have the hunger they require. When you are ready,” the woman murmured, “the Great Work will find you. And there will be those who recognize this mark, even if they do not understand it. Follow the calling, or don’t. Either way, the Work will find you.”

“You will not find your answers from priests, child. Nor from healers. But there are others who know the shape of death. Who have peeled back the veil with their own hands.” Her smile widened. “You have the hunger they require. When you are ready,” the woman murmured, “the Great Work will find you. And there will be those who recognize this mark, even if they do not understand it. Follow the calling, or don’t. Either way, the Work will find you.”

The obsidian burned—not hot, but cold, as though winter itself had found an anchor beneath my skin. I couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.

“You may yet be one of ours, Sahrye.” she whispered. “If you survive what comes next.” And then she was gone.

And then she was gone.

No footprints. No broken branches. No sign she had ever existed.

But the obsidian?

It will not come off.

I’ve tried.

It feels like it has always been there.

It hums at night.

It resonates when I think of Talia.

It sings when I practice my dissections.

I am not fool enough to mistake this for blessing.

If anything, it is a summons. The world cast me aside.

The world cast me aside.

The ignorant pushed me away.

The fearful shunned me.

But perhaps—finally—something has whispered back.

And I will follow that voice. I will learn what lies beyond the veil.

I will learn what lies beyond the veil.

I will not stop.

Not until I understand what took her from me.

Not until I can take it back.

Happy birthday to me, I suppose.

— S. Mahlored

---

“The Morning After”

Written the morning of the 24th day of the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

I barely slept.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her — the old woman, her clouded eyes cutting through me like she could read each thought as it formed. I tried to convince myself she was a hallucination brought on by hunger or exhaustion.

But the obsidian is still there.

It rests just above my eyes, fused to my skin like a third, silent witness to everything I think. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. But it presses. As if it’s listening. Or waiting.

I woke before dawn and checked the clearing where I collapsed. No tracks. No broken branches. No imprint in the needles where she knelt. As though the forest itself swallowed any evidence she’d passed through.

The only sign she existed at all is the square of stone embedded in my forehead.

And the faint hum behind my thoughts. I walked for hours today, trying to steady myself, but the stone reacts to things. More than once it pulsed faintly as I passed a dead log or the bleached bones of some woodland creature. Not light. Not exactly. More like a subtle shift in the air, as though something inside it recognized something inside them.

I walked for hours today, trying to steady myself, but the stone reacts to things. More than once it pulsed faintly as I passed a dead log or the bleached bones of some woodland creature. Not light. Not exactly. More like a subtle shift in the air, as though something inside it recognized something inside them.

I do not know what that means.

But I know this:

I am not imagining it. When I stopped to eat (the little left of what those thieves didn’t steal), a raven landed a few feet away and stared at me so intently I dropped my food. Its head tilted. Its gaze flicked to the obsidian. Then it let out a sound… nothing like a normal call. Almost like laughter.

When I stopped to eat (the little left of what those thieves didn’t steal), a raven landed a few feet away and stared at me so intently I dropped my food. Its head tilted. Its gaze flicked to the obsidian. Then it let out a sound… nothing like a normal call. Almost like laughter.

I threw a stick at it. It did not move. It waited until I gathered my pack before taking off with a flap that felt deliberately theatrical.

If the world is sending me a message, I’d prefer something less condescending than a pompous bird.

Still…

I feel different today.

Not better. Not worse.

Just… deviated. As though the path I slept on is not the same one I woke on. I keep thinking about her last words:

I keep thinking about her last words:

“Either way, the Work will find you.”

I don’t know if I fear that, or if I’ve been waiting for it all these years.

Maybe both.

— S. Mahlored

---

“The Immovable Obsidian”

Written the evening of the 24th day of the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

I spent the afternoon trying to remove it.

I thought perhaps a few minutes with a blade would reveal a seam or some sign it was only adhered superficially. Foolish of me. Even as I write this, my hands are still shaking — not from pain, but from what didn’t happen.

First, I used a mirror in a small pond to see it properly. The stone casts no reflection. My face, my skin, the freckles around it — all reflected clearly. But the obsidian? Nothing. Only a small, perfect void, a hole where the light refuses to land.

That alone should have stopped me. But curiosity has always outweighed caution.

But curiosity has always outweighed caution.

I tried:

– My belt knife — the moment the metal touched the stone, the blade vibrated violently and nearly flew from my hand.

– My nails — nothing. I couldn’t get under the edge; it’s as though my skin grew over it overnight.

– Heating tongs in a small fire — when the metal neared the stone, the flame bent sideways. Sideways. Fire does not do that. Finally, I pressed the tongs against it anyway.

Finally, I pressed the tongs against it anyway.

I braced for pain.

No pain came.

Instead, I heard something.

A whisper. Not a voice. More like a memory of a voice. Like breath behind a closed door. It wasn’t speaking to me — more like speaking through me, using my mind to echo something ancient, something that has been waiting far longer than I’ve been alive.

I dropped the tongs instantly and vomited in the ferns.

Once I steadied myself, I noticed something worse:

My forehead wasn’t burned. The metal left no heat, no mark. But the obsidian pulsed afterward — a soft, rhythmic throb, like a heartbeat.

Not mine.

I stopped after that. It is clear this object cannot be removed by hands or tools. I don’t know if that means I’m cursed or chosen or simply in far deeper than I understand.

It is clear this object cannot be removed by hands or tools. I don’t know if that means I’m cursed or chosen or simply in far deeper than I understand.

But I know one thing with certainty:

Whatever this stone is —

whatever the old woman awakened —

it does not intend to let me walk away unchanged.

And despite everything…I don’t think I want to.

— S. Mahlored

---

“The Knife's Shadow”

Written the evening of the 30th day of the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

I have rewritten this entry six times. My hand still shakes.

I was not followed.

I checked the mud along the riverbank, the underbrush, the patterns of broken twigs. Nothing. No footprints but my own. No breath but the night wind.

And yet… he found me.

I had set camp beside the southern fork of the Theren River, hoping the sound of rushing water might drown out the obsidian’s low hum. It didn’t. If anything, the stone vibrated louder — responding to something unseen, like a tuning fork struck at a distance.

I was eating when the firelight shifted, shadows tilting where they should have fallen straight. Not away from the flame, but toward it. “You’ve been carrying questions for a very long time, haven’t you?”

“You’ve been carrying questions for a very long time, haven’t you?”

I turned so quickly I nearly lost my footing. Three figures stood just beyond the fire’s edge — cloaked, hooded, their faces submerged in shadow. They moved like they weighed nothing at all. A human man stood just beyond the firelight — mature, stout, dark-skinned, with thin white hair pulled back neatly and storm-grey eyes that saw far too much. His cloak parted enough to reveal a sliver of metal at his hip — a ceremonial knife, blade curved like a crescent moon dipped in ink. A scholar’s reading spectacles perched on his nose.

A human man stood just beyond the firelight — mature, stout, dark-skinned, with thin white hair pulled back neatly and storm-grey eyes that saw far too much. His cloak parted enough to reveal a sliver of metal at his hip — a ceremonial knife, blade curved like a crescent moon dipped in ink. A scholar’s reading spectacles perched on his nose.

Nothing extraordinary.

Nothing incredibly threatening.

And yet every part of me understood that he was neither lost nor harmless. I knew, instantly, what they were.

I knew, instantly, what they were.

Philosophers.

The followers of the Great Work.

The heretics mothers warn their children about.

“When a mind burns as brightly as yours,” the man continued, adjusting his spectacles, “it is only a matter of time before someone notices the smoke.”

I hadn’t told him my name. Nor my age. Nor why I wandered alone.

But he knew. He moved around the fire with the steady rhythm of someone accustomed to study, not violence. When he reached me, he examined the obsidian on my brow as if it were a fascinating footnote in a manuscript.

He moved around the fire with the steady rhythm of someone accustomed to study, not violence. When he reached me, he examined the obsidian on my brow as if it were a fascinating footnote in a manuscript.

“It accepted you,” he murmured. “Interesting.”

My voice scraped out of me. “Who are you?”

“A researcher. A writer. An exile.” He smiled faintly. “And, once upon a time, a man the world mistook for a righteous scholar.”

His eyes held mine with unsettling gentleness.

“I am here to offer you a choice, Sahrye Mahlored.”

My breath caught.

His tone shifted — softer, heavier.

“You stand at the threshold of truths most will never touch. The questions you carry, the obsidian you bear — they will not fade. They will grow. You must decide whether you walk blind, afraid of your own curiosity…”

He extended a hand — open, empty. Not coercive. Inviting.

“...Or choose to walk with those who understand what it means to seek beyond life and death.”

I stared at him. At his calm. At his certainty. At the shadows that bent toward him like old companions. “Why me?” I whispered.

“Why me?” I whispered.

“Because you have already begun,” he said simply. “And because the world will not love you for the things you wish to know — but we will not abandon you for them.”

A pause.

“You asked my name.”

He stepped fully into the firelight, and his face resolved with terrible clarity.

“I am Zamidren Book.”

The name struck me like a blow.

The author.

The anti-necromancy researcher.

The ghost.

The heretic.

The Triumphant. “I lead those who pursue the Great Work,” he said. “I will guide you. If you choose it.”

“I lead those who pursue the Great Work,” he said. “I will guide you. If you choose it.”

My heartbeat was thunder.

My thoughts raced.

Everything inside me screamed that this was a turning point — a fracture line in the shape of my life.

But the world had offered me only silence.

Only shame.

Only rejection.

He was the first to offer understanding.

I took his hand.

The moment flesh touched flesh, something inside me snapped awake. A cold breath spilled across my mind. The world shifted. Sharpened. As though a veil had torn.

I felt mana.

Not Life. Not Lunar. Not Elemental. Not Holy.

Something else.

Something impossible.

Something that wanted.

My knees buckled. Zamidren held me steady.

“Easy,” he murmured. “Your senses will adjust. The Arcane is overwhelming when first perceived.”

I could hear it — the awful, beautiful hum of a power that recognized me as its own.

I am terrified.

I am exhilarated.

I have joined the Necromancer Guild.

There is no turning back.

— S. Mahlored

---

“When the Mana Answered Back”

Written the evening of the 38th day of the 5th month of Uthmor the Giant in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

I was prepared for the Arcane.

I thought I understood it — the way it hums through the air like a low vibration, the strange, thrumming cadence that settles behind the bones of the skull once you join the Guild. Zamidren calls it “the second heartbeat,” an attunement that only reveals itself when the mind is reshaped enough to perceive the impossible.

I have lived with that heartbeat for days now.

But today… something else stirred.

Something deeper.

I had gone into the woods to practice the first principles of Thanatology, as Zamidren instructed:

Do not just look at the body.

Listen to it.

Memory lingers where flesh has cooled.

Knowledge clings to bone.

I killed a badger near a hollow root, to further understand the machinations of death. It was still warm, and as I knelt, placing my hands gently along its ribs, trying to feel the impression — the echo — the signature that death leaves behind, I felt the Arcane stir, cautious and curious, as it always does.

I reached down to the ground, grasping a handful of dirt, and then something foreign descended upon me.

Not a hum.

Not a whisper.

A pull.

Like a hook sinking into my ribcage and yanking forward.

My breath hitched. I tried to pull away, but the mana lines tightened around me, thick as rope. My vision sharpened to pinpoints. Soil shifted under my knees. The dirt in my hand appeared to congeal and solidify.

I quickly released it unto the ground. The mound of dirt began moving and shifting, and then rose beside me, lifting like a creature waking from sleep. Pebbles rolled into its shape. Roots twisted inward like tendons knitting into place. Soil compressed into something with weight and form.

The mound of dirt began moving and shifting, and then rose beside me, lifting like a creature waking from sleep. Pebbles rolled into its shape. Roots twisted inward like tendons knitting into place. Soil compressed into something with weight and form.

I screamed.

The construct responded.

It lurched upright — crude, uneven, its “face” little more than a suggestion of hollows and ridges. But it looked at me. The mana tether between us pulsed like a living nerve.

I scrambled backward, tripping over a root. The construct staggered forward, reaching toward me with an arm that shed clumps of earth with every movement.

I tried to sever the connection.

I couldn’t.

The Arcane was in control — not me.

The air thickened. The earth beneath us trembled, answering some instinctual command I had never given. I could feel the mana lines threading through the soil, binding it, shaping it, forcing structure into formlessness, and manifestation of the Arcane power coursing through me.

Raw.

Unbidden.

Uncontrolled.

“Stop!” I shouted — at myself, at the construct, at the mana itself.

And miraculously… it did.

The connection collapsed, as though the mana suddenly lost interest. The construct sagged. Its spine of packed dirt crumbled. Pebbles fell from its limbs. Within seconds, it collapsed into an inert mound.

The dirt was once again unmoving and was silent.

I sat there shaking, covered in dirt and sweat and my own fear. My hands tingled with the aftershock of mana that was never mine to command.

This was not Thanatology.

Not study.

Not understanding.

This was creation.

Synthetic.

Instinctive.

Uncontrolled.

Zamidren warned that the mana would test me. That the Arcane is clever, mischievous even — a current that will carry you away if you do not learn to swim with intention.

Today, it nearly drowned me.

And yet…

When the construct looked at me —

really looked at me —

a part of me felt something frightening.

Recognition.

Not of the construct, but of myself.

What am I becoming?

And why does a small, terrible piece of me want to feel that power again?

— S. Mahlored

---

“The Edges of Myself”

Written the morning of the 1st day of the 6th month of Arhat the Fire Lion in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

Something is wrong.

Not with the stone — I’ve come to accept its presence, its humming, the subtle vertigo that comes when it pulses. Not even with the way animals watch me differently now. Not fear… not curiosity… something assessing.

What’s wrong is me.

Today, I forgot Talia’s face.

Not all of it. Not forever. But I was boiling water for tea — the bitter herbs I found near a stream — and I looked at the rippling reflection. I thought of her, as I do every day. But the image that came to mind wasn’t quite right. Her eyes were the wrong color. Her smile too wide. I corrected it, but the mistake lingers like a bruise on my memory.

She was the reason for all of this.

How can I forget even a thread of her?

I tried to recite the sound of her laugh. I can picture her leaning back on the bridge near the Shard river, sunlight in her hair. But the sound — the warmth behind it — felt distant, like something I borrowed instead of lived.

The obsidian pulsed then.

I don’t think that was coincidence.I’ve also noticed a new sensation: my reactions come a fraction of a second too late, as though my thoughts have to pass through some unseen filter before reaching my limbs. Earlier, I cut my thumb while trimming a branch for a walking stick. I watched the blood bead — bright, familiar, comforting — but I felt the pain in a slow bloom, almost detached, like it belonged to someone else. My body is still mine.

I’ve also noticed a new sensation: my reactions come a fraction of a second too late, as though my thoughts have to pass through some unseen filter before reaching my limbs. Earlier, I cut my thumb while trimming a branch for a walking stick. I watched the blood bead — bright, familiar, comforting — but I felt the pain in a slow bloom, almost detached, like it belonged to someone else.

My body is still mine.

My mind is still… mostly mine.

But the edges are softening.

I worry that the stone is not simply sitting on my skin; but sinking into me. Replacing something. Overwriting something.

Tonight, as I ate, I realized I’d been sitting in the same position for nearly an hour, staring at nothing. The fire burned low. The night creatures had gone quiet, watching me with those reflective eyes from between the trees.

When I finally moved, it felt like waking from someone else’s dream.

And gods help me… there was a moment I felt whole in that stillness.

As though the quiet inside my head was not absence, but alignment.

What am I aligning with?

Who am I becoming? The old woman said the Work would find me.

The old woman said the Work would find me.

She never said the Work wouldn’t take something in return.

I used to fear death.

Then I feared being forgotten.

Now I fear something far worse:

Being rewritten.

If I lose Talia’s face again — if I lose the memory of why I seek the truth — then what remains of me?

And whose thoughts will be left in the spaces I forget?

— S. Mahlored

---

“Becoming”

Written the afternoon of the 32nd day of the 8th month of Skullcleaver the Dwarven Axe in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

---

It has been two months since I stepped through the doors of the Necromancer Guild as a trembling novice.

Two months since Zamidren Book extended his hand and told me the world would not understand me — but he would.

Two months since the Arcane wrapped itself around my thoughts like a second skin.

Time has begun losing its edges.

I train every day. Thanatology has become as natural as breathing; the impressions left in the dead speak to me more clearly now, like echoes becoming words. My mind slips between layers of sensation with less strain. My hands steady without thought.

And the mana…

By the Immortals — the mana feels like water now. Cool. Responsive. Familiar. A river that bends when I ask, sometimes even before I do.

Zamidren calls that “resonance.”

I call it something closer to seduction. I am learning quickly. Faster, Zamidren says, than most. He watches me closely during lessons, his storm-grey eyes tracking not only the spells I cast, but the thoughts I try — poorly — to hide behind them.

I am learning quickly. Faster, Zamidren says, than most. He watches me closely during lessons, his storm-grey eyes tracking not only the spells I cast, but the thoughts I try — poorly — to hide behind them.

It was today, during a test of focus, that he finally spoke the thing I have felt creeping in my bones.

I had just finished channeling a delicate thread of Arcane through a cadaver’s sternum to read its lingering impressions. The world around me had gone soft, blurred, replaced by the crystalline clarity of the signature left behind by its last moments. When I returned to myself, the candlelight seemed dimmer, farther away. “You didn’t blink for nearly a minute,” Zamidren said, voice quiet, almost fatherly.

“You didn’t blink for nearly a minute,” Zamidren said, voice quiet, almost fatherly.

“I didn’t realize,” I murmured.

“Of course you didn’t.” He closed the distance and gently adjusted my stance, as though correcting a student’s posture. “Your old instincts are fading.”

He said it as one might comment on the weather.

“I feel like I’m losing something,” I admitted before I could swallow the thought.

“Good,” he replied without hesitation.

I looked at him then. Truly looked. The man who once fooled the world into thinking he hated necromancy now stood inches from me, spectacles reflecting the glow of the candles, expression soft and sharp all at once.

“This path requires a shedding,” he said. “The girl you were — the one who asked questions the world refused to answer — she served her purpose. But she cannot walk the Great Work.”

His hand hovered near my forehead, near the obsidian the old woman pressed onto me months ago.

“That girl found the door,” he said. “But you… you are the one stepping through.”

Zamidren asked about the old woman again today.

He has become increasingly troubled by the obsidian on my brow, not with fear, but with the uneasy fascination of a scholar encountering a phenomenon that does not belong in the era he understands.

He told me something he had not admitted before:

“There are whispers,” he said, “of practitioners who walked the boundary long before the Philosophers — before Lyras, before the modern spellbooks, before necromancy had a name. Tell me more of her appearance, my dear Sahrye.” I told him what the woman looked like. Her clouded eyes. Her grave-flower scent. Her ragged cloak, woven with threads that glinted like lunar shardlight.

Zamidren went still. He searched the shelves behind him, passing scrolls older than the Barrier itself.

“The oldest texts speak of H’Mrazh, from an extinct Velakan root roughly translated to mean she who listens to the echo of dying things. The shadow-daughters of the starfall,” he continued. “Healers, midwives, wise-women of disparate tribes who bound themselves not to mana as we know it, but to the residue of death that existed before Elanthia’s first weave of spells. They saw the veil as a membrane, not a barrier. Unlike necromancers, they did not manipulate death. They listened to it.”

He then whispered, "That lineage should not exist."

But it did.

She did.

And she found me on my seventeenth birthday.

Not by accident. He believes — hesitantly, reluctantly — that the obsidian she pressed onto my brow is not simply a relic. It may be a binding stone, used by the H’Mrazh to mark those who possessed an innate gift: the ability to sense the shape of death even before touching Arcane mana.

He believes — hesitantly, reluctantly — that the obsidian she pressed onto my brow is not simply a relic. It may be a binding stone, used by the H’Mrazh to mark those who possessed an innate gift: the ability to sense the shape of death even before touching Arcane mana.

A precursor to Thanatology.

An instinctive art.

Older than necromancy.

Forgotten for good reason.

And now it sits on my forehead, humming like a second mind.

Zamidren's voice lowered:

“If the H’Mrazh marked you, Sahrye… then we did not choose you for the Work. You were chosen long before any of us were born.”

Something inside me cracked at his words. Not broken — released.

“I don’t know who I’m becoming,” I whispered.

“Good,” he said again. “Becoming is the Work. You are not meant to remain what you were. You are meant to grow into the truth that has always lived inside you.”

He stepped back, studying me the way one studies a rare artifact.

“Let the old self fall away,” he said. “She is an anchor. You are meant to rise.”

And the worst part?

The part that frightens me more than the depth of the mana, more than the mana, more than the construct that stood on unsteady limbs two months ago?

A part of me believes him.

I am losing pieces of myself.

And something else is growing in the spaces left behind.

And it feels right.

It feels inevitable.

It feels like becoming.

— S. Mahlored

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“Goodbye to Who I Was”

Written the afternoon of the 44th day of the 8th month of Skullcleaver the Dwarven Axe, in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 355 years after the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

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Tonight, I say goodbye.

Not to the world. Not yet.

To myself.

The part of me that clung to the girl who kept asking “why” until the world stopped answering.

I feel her slipping.

Not ripped away. Nothing so violent. But dissolving, like pigment washed from a page. A slow, inevitable unmaking.

Zamidren warned me this day would come.

He said it gently, almost kindly: “There is no becoming without shedding.”

I thought I could keep her. The girl from the foothills near Shard. The child who walked riverbanks with Talia. The student who begged the healers for answers. The one who believed death had a reason, that someone simply needed to ask the right questions.

But the Great Work does not tolerate divided selves.

It pulls toward wholeness — not the wholeness of the person I was, but the wholeness of what I must become.

And I feel it now…I am no longer two people.

Just one, emerging.

I write this so the memory of her does not vanish unmarked.

I should be terrified. But instead, I feel something like… acceptance.

But instead, I feel something like… acceptance.

Like a door whose handle I have already touched, now swinging open.

So tonight, with my path clearly laid out in front of me, I say goodbye to the girl who walked into the forest alone and met a woman who should not exist.

Goodbye to the child who begged for answers.

Goodbye to the student who hoped to understand death without becoming part of its story.

Goodbye to Sahrye Mahlored, daughter of quiet gnomes, companion of a girl named Talia, little figure hunched over borrowed medical texts, chasing what the gods refused to explain.

She brought me here.

She led me to the Great Work.

She earned this transformation.

But she cannot take the next step.

Zamidren says this is right—that I am becoming what the obsidian recognized in me long before I knew my own nature.

The mana thrums inside me now, eager, responsive, alive.

Not a river anymore.

A pulse.

My pulse.

When I finish writing this, I will close the journal.

I will place it on the shelf.

And I will leave that life and that girl behind.

This is my becoming. This is my Work.

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I am Sahrye Mahlored. Shadow-Daughter reborn, Bearer of the Starfallen Obsidian, Last Heir of the H’Mrazh Listening Line, Adept of the Great Work and Chosen of the Arcane Veil.

Wrought by questions the world feared to answer, Forged in silence the gods refused to break, Student of Zamidren Book, And the coming shape of knowledge the Hounds cannot kill.

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