Talia's Ghost Haunts the Hunt

The chill that had settled into Bishop Dark’s bones wasn't from the damp, reeking alleyways of Tolvo Kettburgh; it was a cold that seeped from his very marrow, a constant companion for the past five years. Talia. The name was a phantom limb, an ache that never truly subsided. Five years. Five years since a ten-year-old girl, his little sister, had simply ceased to exist in the world he knew. Now, the whispers of a dark ritual, of ancient powers stirring, of a stolen Chalice at its heart, had twisted that ache into a gnawing dread.

He’d been a fool, he knew it. He’d thrown himself into the hunt for the Chalice with a ferocity that bordered on reckless, eager to prove himself, to earn his keep, to perhaps even earn a sliver of redemption in the Abbot’s weary eyes. But the deeper he dug, the more the tendrils of this particular evil seemed to coil around something achingly familiar. A sigil, crudely etched onto a discarded scrap of parchment he’d found near the ritual site, had sent a jolt through him, a cold shock that had nothing to do with the biting wind. It was a sigil he’d seen before, a childish scrawl of a symbol Talia used to draw, a haphazard star surrounded by what she’d called “happy little suns.”

“Happy little suns,” he muttered, the words tasting like ash. He leaned against the rough brick of a tenement building, the stench of stale ale and something far fouler clinging to the air. The Chalice was important, a sacred artifact of the Radiant Light, its recovery a paramount duty. But the thought of Talia, of her being anywhere near such darkness, of her being *used*… that was a different kind of hell.