Chapter 5: Where the Tongue Was Torn
The drowned tower waited.
West of Alderidge, where the Black Brine licked the edges of broken stone and shipwreck bones, the ocean pulled with a hunger deeper than tide or time. There was no map to this place, only the memory of loss—and Adam had that in abundance.
They made the crossing by night.
Adam and Tallis boarded a deadman's barge—a flat-bottomed vessel left abandoned in the reed-slick shallows of Guttercross Wharf. The sky hung low with bruised clouds. No stars. No moon. Just the breathless dark. Tallis rowed in silence, his hands blistering on the salt-rotted oars. Adam stood at the prow, the pendant at his neck hidden beneath his collar, its weight undeniable.
Behind them, Alderidge slept like a city that feared its dreams.
Ahead, the tower rose.
Not high. Not proud. It leaned, listing like a half-drowned monument, its upper levels long collapsed into the sea. Barnacles crowned its sides. Seaweed draped its broken parapets. And around its base, the tide circled like a dog that hadn't eaten in weeks.
"There's no door," Tallis muttered.
Adam didn't answer. He stepped off the boat and into the Brine.
The water recoiled—not violently, but with awareness. A pull, then a pause. As if the sea recognized him. Accepted his trespass.
Tallis scrambled after, teeth chattering. "You never said how we get in—"
"We don't." Adam placed a hand to the wall of the tower. "We're let in."
And the stone—ancient, drowned, silent—shifted.
A seam appeared. Vertical. Clean.
A mouth.
The wall split, groaning open to reveal a narrow passage sloping downward into the flooded dark.
Tallis stared, breath caught. "What is this place?"
"A wound," Adam said. "Sealed with silence. Torn open by memory."
They entered.
---
Beneath the Black Brine
The tunnel sloped for what felt like miles.
Water dripped from the ceiling in slow, deliberate rhythms, each droplet echoing like a forgotten thought. Moss clung to every surface, glowing faintly—enough to see but not to feel safe. Bones surfaced beneath their feet—human, animal, unguessable.
And then the slope stopped.
They entered a chamber submerged in shadow and hush.
The floor was etched with spiraling sigils, each one overlapping the next, forming a chaos of language. Runes in Verdant, in Ash-Script, in Dead Fen-Tongue. Some glowed faintly. Others bled vapor. At the chamber's center stood a single, headless statue—its hands outstretched as if offering something once sacred, now taken.
Adam knelt before it.
Tallis stood behind him, trying not to breathe too loudly. "This is the place the whispers spoke of. The place where the First Tongue was torn out."
Adam nodded. "The Pale God's first lie. The one that became a name."
He reached into his coat.
Drew a knife—not steel, but memory-forged, the kind that sliced not flesh but recollection.
Tallis stiffened. "Adam, what are you—"
But Adam didn't hesitate.
He cut his own palm.
Blood welled, black in the dim mosslight, and as it hit the floor, the runes trembled—responding like nerves touched by flame.
The statue's hands cracked.
Its chest split open.
Inside, a mouth—literal, vast, inhuman—gaped wide.
No tongue. Only absence.
Only the place where language used to live.
And it spoke.
Not in sound.
But in forgetting.
Tallis gasped as names bled from his mind—his sister, his old mentor, the taste of spring pears, the way his father used to say his name. Gone. Erased.
He staggered. "It's eating me—"
"No," Adam said, standing tall. "It's unmaking what isn't true."
He stepped into the mouth.
And vanished.
---
The First Tongue
Adam stood on nothing.
Not darkness. Not void.
Memory.
A field of unraveling stories. Echoes trying to stitch themselves together into a shape. And above all of it, a sound—not of music, but of intention. The weight of meaning trying to return.
He saw them:
The Nine.
Masks shattered. Faces turned. Each sitting again in their thrones. And at the center—not the bowl.
A mirror.
Cracked.
Bleeding light.
And from it, a voice he hadn't heard in this life, but recognized like marrow.
> "You are not Adam."
> "You were Azrael."
> "You were the one who turned the name into a knife."
Adam did not speak.
The voice continued:
> "You fell to forget."
> "You chose to bleed."
> "Now you bleed to remember."
The mirror shook.
> "So speak. Say His name."
Adam stepped forward.
Looked into his reflection—shifting, a face between selves.
And whispered:
> "Elaris."
The mirror shattered.
And everything remembered.
---
He awoke on the chamber floor, breath ragged.
The statue had crumbled.
Tallis knelt beside him, pale, nose bleeding. "You were gone for—gods, I don't know how long."
Adam sat up. "I wasn't gone. I was below forgetting."
He looked to the crumbled ruins where the statue once stood.
In the rubble, something gleamed.
A tooth.
No, a fragment of a tongue—calcified, obsidian-black, etched with tiny marks.
The first glyph.
He picked it up.
Felt it hum.
"Another mask has turned," he said quietly.
Tallis blinked. "What does that mean?"
Adam stood.
"It means we keep going."
He turned toward the exit—stone now parted again like the sea had opened a vein.
Far above, Alderidge would soon waken to another day.
But Adam knew the dark was deepening.
The Nine were not waiting.
They were stirring.
And soon, they would speak back.
---
The climb back through the sloped passage was not like the descent.
The walls pulsed now—slowly, faintly—as if the tower itself had drawn breath. Fissures wept brine. The moss that lit their way no longer glowed green but dull crimson, casting everything in the hush of old blood. Something behind them whispered in a voice shaped like absence, though neither Adam nor Tallis looked back.
Not now.
Not when the tower had already remembered them.
They reached the surface as the sky cracked into the first ribs of dawn.
Low tide had dragged the Black Brine back from its throne. Seaweed clung to the stones like the remnants of flayed skin. The deadman's barge waited exactly where they'd left it, though it was not quite as they'd left it. The wood bore new carvings—shallow, chaotic, as if scratched by a dreaming hand: spirals, runes, teeth.
Tallis hesitated. "Those weren't there before."
Adam stepped aboard. "Neither were we."
The return journey was quiet. Not with peace, but with aftermath.
Tallis rowed.
And Adam listened.
To the tongue fragment tucked into the fold of his coat.
To the faint hum of its glyph—like a memory trying to claw its way out of language.
They reached Guttercross Wharf by midmorning. Fog had rolled in over the slums and smoke-thick rooftops of Alderidge, as if the city itself had tried to pull a blanket over its eyes. Only a few dockworkers moved about, faces gaunt and eyes downcast. No one noticed the two who returned from the sea.
They walked in silence through the skeletal streets, past broken chapels and iron-grated alley mouths. The fog thinned by the time they reached the worn threshold of Orwin Marn's crooked bookshop.
The bell above the door did not ring when they entered.
Inside, the air smelled of damp paper and bitter ink. Orwin wasn't in sight. The shop's oil lamps were unlit, and in their stead—on the counter—burned a small bowl of black flame, steady and silent.
Tallis stopped. "That… wasn't here before."
"No," Adam said. "It wasn't."
He stepped forward.
The flame pulsed in response. Not like fire, but like something breathing through the wrong shape. It bent toward Adam's presence. Then, as if deciding something, it winked out.
In its place, a slip of parchment.
Adam took it, unfolded it, read. Just two lines in jagged script:
> You opened the wound.
Now others will try to bleed it dry.
Adam crumpled the note.
Behind them, the door swung shut on its own.
-—
Later, in the cramped cellar beneath the shop, Adam traced the glyph fragment's edge with a gloved finger.
He had cleared a circle on the dirt floor—chalk lines drawn not in modern script but in Fen-Root Bindings, an old warding language that Tallis didn't recognize. He had been ordered not to speak. Not yet.
The glyph fragment pulsed.
And with it, Adam felt something move in the air above the circle. A thread being pulled. A veil being tested.
He began to whisper—not in words, but in names.
Forgotten ones.
Ashen ones.
And with each, the chalk glowed colder, until frost rimed the cellar walls.
Then—
A voice.
Not in the air. Not in his ear.
In the blood.
> "Azrael…"
A different voice than before.
This one older. Closer. Almost loving.
> "Do you remember the Threshold?"
Adam's breath caught.
Yes.
He did.
Not as Adam.
As the one who had walked the lands of dying gods.
As the one who broke the Fifth Seal with only a word.
Azrael Blackthorn.
A man. A monster. A myth.
He touched the glyph.
And something clicked in the world—quiet, soft, yet final.
The glyph burned itself into his palm. Not flesh-deep.
Deeper. Into soul.
He did not scream.
But Tallis, watching from the stairwell, did.
Because in that instant, Adam's shadow did not match him.
It grew longer. Thinner.
And it turned to look at Tallis.
---
That night, in the Scriptorium's highest vaults, bells rang.
But no one had touched them.
Archivist Ceren awoke screaming, her skin marked with glyphs she did not know and could not scrub clean.
In the sealed ward of the Cathedral, a choirboy began to hum in a tongue that hadn't been spoken in seven hundred years.
And in the sewers beneath Marrowhill, where stone met rot and silence once ruled, a voice croaked one name from a split-throated mouth:
> "Azrael…"
---
Above ground, the fog never lifted.
And somewhere deep beneath the old drowned tower, the sea began to whisper back.