Beneath the newborn daylight they fall,

Stone titans, sleeping, breathless all.

With moss for cloaks and steel for veins,

They slumber still, yet stir old pains.

They dream of who knows what remains.

Why Skoe Scana for their pall of grain

Sand and sorrow, all we pray not to become,

A quiet graveyard plain of golems, never gone.

—Berdorf, E. Poems of a Wingless Princess. Unpublished manuscript, Summer.

"Be careful! You Leafbone arse!"

Ludo looked around, but that voice was already lost to the crowd. His eyes surveyed the horizon—jagged silhouettes like mountains split the golden haze, but they weren't mountains—No. They breathed.

Vast, dormant golems slouched along the skyline with bodies made of stone, tangled with moss and scaffolding metal.

Skoe Scana. He'd forgotten for a moment. This was the land of the Dwarfs.

He glanced down, half-expecting to find the source of the insult still glaring up at him—but the dwarf or who it was, gone.

Ludo shifted his weight, boots scraping against the rust-veined stone. Around him, the settlement clung to the shadow of the golem's heel. Tents stitched with academic sigils, steam-driven equipment whirring loudly, and scholars too absorbed in their notes to notice the young elf standing there alone.

He craned his neck. The golem's knee disappeared into the low-hanging clouds above. Its fingers curled like the remnants of a dying creature. It could've cradled an entire watchtower.

Ludo adjusted the strap across his chest, the bow at his back far too light to matter here. Among dwarves and the occasional fae, they barely reached his shoulders. No one looked twice at him, and that absence felt louder than any insult.

Somewhere in the maze of tents and gravel paths, Tariq Keplan was supposed to meet him and a Magi, an emissary from Ormgrund. Ludo had no idea what Tariq looked like. No formal introduction. No crest or code.

Only the missive from the Book Club, etched in cold, bureaucratic ink: "Retrieve whatever you find inside the golem."

He glanced back up at the towering construct, its chest sealed shut like a tomb. Whatever, it's better to be worth it.

He didn't have much to carry, but his grip tightened on the strap anyway—more out of habit than necessity. The longer he stood there, the more his shoulders itched to turn south, back to Sorgenstein. If he were honest, he couldn't even picture his home anymore. It has been too long since he has seen his brother, at least since the Elven War.

Around him, the world clanged with noise and motion. The men sported beards like banners—braided, looped, ornamented in ways that defied logic and good taste.

The women wore sun on their skin with equal pride, their broad cheeks flushed, their hands calloused, and their laughter louder than any other male dwarf.

It was a place that belonged to itself. Built hard, lived loud.

And Ludo was the only thing that didn't fit.

"Down here."

Ludo didn't register it at first. The voice drowned in the clang and chatter around him.

"Down here!"

He turned—more puzzled than startled—and found himself staring straight ahead at empty air. Then, logically, down.

A dwarf stood in front of him. No beard. No armour. Just a tousled mop of ash-blond hair and a face so young it almost looked unfinished. Not the sort of dwarf Ludo had expected to meet.

"You're…"

"Tariq Keplan," the dwarf said flatly, hands already stuffed into the pockets of his long coat. "Who were you expecting? Her?"

Ludo spun on instinct—and nearly shouted.

The figure before him stood unnervingly still, draped in a black robe that swallowed the light. A mask covered her face, crafted in harsh lines of ivory and obsidian, like something etched in mourning.

From beneath the hood, antlers curled outward—long, twisted things that cast claw-like shadows on the tent walls behind. At her wrists, chains clinked softly—each one anchored to a sheathed sword at her hips, one on each side.

Magi, no doubt. But fae.

Something about that combination twisted in his stomach. He wasn't sure if it was awe or something colder.

"Don't mind, Kaela," Tariq said, already walking ahead without looking back. "She doesn't talk much."

He waved them forward like this was all perfectly normal—an elf, a fae, and a dwarf stepping into the gut of a dead god.

"We'll need two days to reach the top of the mountain," Tariq said, his pace unbothered.

"Summit? I thought that was a golem." Ludo quickened his stride to catch up.

Tariq didn't slow. "How do you think mountains are born?" he replied with a sly, dry amusement.

Ludo kept walking, but his eyes drifted upward.

Stone faces stared back at him—some cracked, others half-buried beneath moss and sandstone, expressions frozen mid-thought or mid-scream. The sky itself seemed stitched to their crowns. They didn't move. At least, not yet, he hoped.

But they were there. Dozens. Maybe more. Just sitting. The stories he heard said Skoe Scana was being swallowed by mountains. He thought it was a figure of speech.

It wasn't.

They reached the tent just as the wind shifted, carrying the dry, metallic scent of old stone and something faintly burned. The canvas flapped against its stakes, worn thin in places, patched with pieces of different colours—like it had seen too many journeys and too few repairs.

Inside, crates of supplies were stacked haphazardly beside a roll of canvas maps and a scattering of yellowed papers pinned directly into the tent walls. Diagrams spiralled across them—jagged, unlabeled, and contradicting each other.

Notes scrawled in three different hands argued margins about "oscillations", "resonant pulses", and "implanted interfaces."

Ludo ducked inside, immediately regretting the motion. The tent's ceiling barely cleared his head. He slid his bow from his back and leaned it gently against a crate, rubbing the back of his neck as he squinted at one of the notes.

"What exactly are we looking for?" he asked, the question more instinct than thought.

Tariq didn't answer right away. He was already digging through a satchel, unbothered by the strange tension stitched into the fabric of the place.

"That," Tariq muttered, stuffing steel canisters and strips of jerky into a weathered satchel, "is a very good question."

He moved too calmly for someone preparing to climb the bones of a golem.

Ludo watched as the dwarf tucked in a folded blanket, a compass, and a vial that shimmered oddly in the light—something blue that moved too slow for water.

"I haven't been up there," Tariq continued, cinching the bag shut. "But the ones who have... they come back different. Quiet. Or loud in the wrong places." He shrugged the satchel over his shoulder and finally met Ludo's eyes. "Nothing they say adds up. It's like each one of them saw something... different inside the same golem."

He pointed a thumb toward the looming silhouette outside the tent.

"That's why you and Kaela are here. We don't know what it is." A pause. Then, a crooked grin. "But everyone agrees—it stinks of foul magic, alchemy."

"Alchemy was banned."

It was the first time Ludo had heard her speak.

Tariq let out a dry snort, already ducking through the tent flap. "Using the word ban doesn't do Scheida around here."

The dwarf paused outside, squinting up at the hazy sun. "You moving, or just standing there like a pair of rocks?" he called over his shoulder. "The Sun is up for all the world to see but still goes down… and we have all the sheida back until dawn."

Nobody had forgotten the scars left by the Long Night.

The sun was low enough for the light to fade, leaving only a poor shimmer along the stones. They had been climbing rocks for hours, but Ludo paused now, drawn to the view that unfolded below.

From this height, the horizon stretched in golds and deep reds, broken only by the shapes he'd once mistaken for mountains. Now he could see them clearly—dozens of them, maybe more. Golems. Curled, slouched, embedded into the land like forgotten kings.

And between them, life thrived. Dwarven cities didn't sprawl—they clung. Built into the sides of the giants' limbs and backs, latticed in stone and steel, they looked less like architecture and more like growths. Bridges arched from collarbones to shoulders. Towers spiralled up from kneecaps and elbows. Scaffolding ran like veins.

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They weren't just living beside the golems. They were living on them.

Ludo's breath caught. He couldn't help the thought. What happens when they wake up?

"It's something, isn't it?" Tariq said, pausing for a sip from his canteen before handing it off to Ludo.

The elf took it, eyes still fixed on the horizon. "It's daunting."

Tariq snorted. "You worried they'll wake up?"

Ludo didn't answer right away. The silence was enough.

"Our land's a graveyard," Tariq continued, stretching his arms. "Golems, come here to die. Always have. The problem is, they are still coming, and we're starting to build our homes between their bones. Not much choice has been left."

"They all gather here?" Ludo asked. "Why?"

"Who doesn't want to die at home?" Tariq shrugged. "I can't blame them. Though I'd prefer they picked another spot a little less... here."

He turned just as Kaela emerged from the path behind them.

"Maybe when the holy, radiant, all-knowing Summerdame finally wakes up from her beauty nap, she can sort it out," Tariq added, coated with sarcasm.

Kaela said nothing. She didn't need to.

"We just need to give her time," Ludo said. "She might grow into a good Dame."

"If she's anything like her mother," Tariq muttered, "then the only difference is we'll die crisped instead of frozen. Choose your best scheida..."

He kicked a loose stone off the path, watching it tumble down the slope.

"Dame, no Dame. Kings, queens... it's all the same old scheida."

Ludo paused for a second and then turned to Kaela. "He keeps saying that word. Scheida. What does it mean?"

"You don't speak Menschen?"

"Just... a little."

"It means shit," she said, already following after Tariq.

Ludo sighed. "Of course it does."

They pressed on, the banter fading with the sun. Ludo's legs burned with every step. Just when he was sure his knees would betray him, Tariq halted, raising his hand.

All of them stopped.

Before them, the mountainside yawned open. A crude, gaping wound in the rock, like something had clawed its way inward instead of out. The edges were jagged and blackened. No tools had carved this.

"We're here," Tariq said, then turned to Kaela, brow raised and finger pointed. "Alright, do your thing. You know... the thing."

"Wait—hold on," Ludo said, stopping at the entrance. "You said two days. We've already been walking for half a day. What is this—?" He gestured at the hole like it might respond.

Tariq didn't stop moving. He adjusted the strap of his satchel with a grunt and nodded toward the darkness. "I said two days, and it'll be two days. We just need to go inside first." He didn't look back, but his voice lacked its usual bite. The edge of exhaustion hung on his words like yellow dust on his boots.

Ludo stared at the opening. It didn't look like something anyone should enter. And definitely not climb.

"I'm not crawling into that," Ludo muttered, eyeing the tunnel like it might breathe. "There could be anything in there."

Tariq turned around, facing the elf with a shrug. "Which is why we brought a Magi."

"Then why not bring two?"

"You've got a bow, don't you?"

"A bow against a Nightmare is like—like tickling a troll and hoping it dies laughing."

Tariq grinned. "Love your optimism."

While the others bickered, Kaela stepped forward—silent. Her boots made no sound against the stone. With two swift motions of her hands, she traced the shape of a triangle in the air. Lines of fire snapped to life, racing along the walls in perfect geometry, igniting the tunnel in a sudden, searing glow.

Ludo blinked, stunned. Tariq's mouth shut mid-sentence.

The light spilt forward, and for the first time, they could see what lay beyond the mouth of the tunnel. It wasn't just narrow.

Ludo squinted at the wallpaper glued to the walls—arches, alcoves, and fractured symmetry. Not natural. Not dwarven.

"Is that… human architecture?" he muttered.

"In the belly of a scheida golem?" Tariq finished for him.

Kaela stepped past them both, and her robe brushed against the stone. "I hope it is," she said, disappearing into the glow. "Humans make great beds!"

Ludo fell into step between Tariq and Kaela, the path too narrow to allow anything but a single-file line. The walls pressed close, slick with dampness and streaked in patches of dark mould. The air clung to his skin.

It carried the sour stench of rotting wood. With every step, the temperature dropped, a slow, creeping cold that seeped through boots and collars. It clawed to him, dragging Ludo back to the bitter cold of four Winters ago when the sun was still gone, and every breath had tasted of ice.

No light reached this deep. The entrails of the golem swallowed them whole. "How's everyone doing back there? Still alive?" Tariq turned his head over his shoulder.

"Yeah, still breathing," Ludo muttered. He pressed a hand against the wall—slick, stubborn, and cold as bone. "But it stinks in here."

Kaela's fire clung low to the stone, barely enough to beat back the dampness.

Tariq chuckled. "Reminds me of the stories my dad used to tell. Cities full of towering houses, stacked like barrels and crates, with tunnels running underneath them like veins. All of it reaching for the sky... and rotting from the inside."

"He knows humans?" Ludo asked.

"Knows them? He lived among them." Tariq shrugged. "He and my mum. He was a blacksmith, I mean, he still is. My mum… well, my mum left us when I was born."

Ludo's hand paused on the wall, tracing the outline of some drawing on a loose paper wall.

"I was born here, far away from humans," Tariq added. "But my Mum is buried among them."

"I'm sorry."

Tariq laughed. "No, you're not. You just don't know what else to say when someone spills a little sad story. Don't bother." He tapped the side of his head with two fingers. "He survived. I survived. And now here we are—walking through the guts of a dead god."

He pointed ahead to a narrow set of stairs spiralling downward into a wider corridor, swallowed in shadow.

"What do you want, Leafbone?" Tariq said, flashing a crooked grin. "Climb higher or camp here for the night? I'm good either way."

"Any idea what's upstairs?"

"No clue," Tariq said, shifting his weight. "But might have some other checkpoints to rest... or not. No guarantees. Who the fuck knows? What do you think, Kaela?"

The Magi was already settling on the floor, crouched low as she arranged a handful of wood cut and split from furniture and abandoned trinkets into a small pyramid.

Sparks from her fingers flickered briefly, casting thin shadows against the walls. "We're closer to the entrance here," she said. "If there's danger, we have a better chance of getting out. The higher we go, the fewer ways back."

Tariq gave a slow nod, surveying the cracked walls around them. Then he shrugged off his satchel, letting it drop with a soft thud onto the floor. "Wise decision," he said, with a rare note of real approval. "Who wants jerky?"

None of them slept.

Ludo shifted in his bedroll, the rough fabric scraping against the cold ground, and sleep was simply out of reach. Across the small camp, Tariq sat hunched near the fire with a piece of wood in one hand and a dagger in the other.

The blade flashed now and then, catching the light of the flames, but whatever he was carving stayed hidden in shadow and half-light.

Kaela knelt a few paces away, hands resting lightly on her thighs. It looked almost like prayer—or maybe meditation. It was hard to tell with her.

Ludo finally pushed himself upright, the fire throwing faint gold across his face. He glanced between them. "Is nobody sleepy?"

"You can't hear it?" Tariq asked, half-accusation, half-disbelief.

Ludo stilled, straining his ears.

The crackle of the fire. The distant drip of water. The musky scent of damp wood pressed against his nose.

But nothing else.

"What am I supposed to hear?" he asked.

Kaela turned toward him. Her mask caught the firelight, expressionless and unreadable. "You've never met a Nightmare before?"

The mention of the word sent a cold thread winding through Ludo's chest. He pressed his palms into the stone, to ground himself, trying to force him to hear something—anything—but the darkness gave nothing back.

"No," he admitted. "I don't think I have."

Tariq chuckled without humour. "Lucky bastard."

Kaela rose without a word and crossed the short distance between them.

She knelt beside Ludo, close enough that he caught a faint scent rising from her—fresh, wet grass. It stirred something in him, a strange calm he couldn't explain.

Without speaking, she lifted her hand and gently placed it over his eyes. Her touch was lighter than he expected—delicate.

"What do you hear?" she whispered so close to his heart that he could feel her breath against his skin.

Ludo swallowed. "The fire... the water dripping... random echoes, I guess, and—"

"Focus," she murmured. "Separate them. Strip them away. What's left?"

"Tariq's knife scraping wood," Ludo said. "Your breathing... the fire crackling."

He paused, frowning. His heart stuttered once in his chest.

"No... not the fire," he corrected, the realisation clawing its way up from somewhere deeper. "It's... a click. Like... something clicking its tongue."

The last words barely made it out, as if speaking them somehow made the sound more real.

"Like... an Opossums?"

Kaela pulled her hand away, and Ludo blinked. When he looked up at her, Kaela didn't move.

But she didn't have to.

"A very big one?"

He saw it in her—reflected back through the hollow stillness of her mask—and in the tightness gripping his own chest: pure, raw fear.

"What the fuck is that?"

"Well, scholars call it a Lamia," Tariq said, tossing another small piece of wood into the fire. "Common folk? They just call it Nightmare."

He shifted his dagger idly between his fingers. "Truth is, we've got no idea how close it is."

Ludo turned to Kaela, searching her masked face. "How do you beat them?"

"We don't," she said simply. Her voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "The only thing that can kill a Nightmare is the Sun. Or a spell of Ra."

Ludo tried for a shaky smile. "Well... we have you."

But Kaela said nothing. "I can't do that sort of magic."

Tariq barked a short laugh, sharp as the snap of old wood. "Not every Magi gets that spell, Leafbone. You know how many solar mages still roam the Map?"

"How many?"

"That's the fucking point," Tariq spat. He jabbed the dagger into the dirt beside him. "Either we turn back, or we move forward and pray we're not what it's hunting."

"Usually, if they're not provoked, they keep their distance," Kaela said.

"Unless what?"

"Unless we bleed," Tariq answered for her, tossing another splinter of wood into the fire. "Those things can smell blood from miles away."

He turned toward Kaela, his eyes narrowing slightly. "We good?"

Kaela didn't move at first. She sat perfectly still, the firelight brushing against the sharp lines of her mask. It was impossible to read her face—but the air around her tightened.

"I beg your pardon?" she said, flat.

"You know..." Tariq muttered, waving a vague hand in the air. "That time of the moon. Are you bleeding?"

For a heartbeat, nothing moved. Even with the mask, Ludo felt the tension spike—the way Kaela's fingers twitched slightly as if she was weighing the pleasure of slapping him against the risk of drawing even one drop of blood. But after a long, pondered wait, she exhaled. "We're good."

"So, hear me out, my brain says we should head up," Tariq spoke, turning the bit of wood over in his hands. "Something in me burns at the idea—like maybe it's worth it. Big game, really big game. Some big damn adventure."

He paused, blade scratching lightly across the surface. "But my gut?" He tapped his chest. "It's screaming this ends badly. Really badly. No clue which one I should trust."

He glanced at Ludo over the firelight, the flames catching the tired lines around his eyes. "What about you, Leafbone?"

Ludo shifted, uncomfortable under the weight of the question. "I... I don't know. But I need something. If I want to go home."

"That bad?" Tariq asked, eyebrows lifting. "What the fuck did you do to your Green Mother to end up here?"

Ludo shrugged in a small, helpless motion. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

He scratched the back of his neck. "Where I come from... doing nothing is bad... enough."

Tariq barked a humourless laugh and went back to carving, shaking his head. "Never understood Leafbones."

"Neither do I," Ludo said.

Across the fire, Kaela rose. "You two should try to sleep," she said. "I'll keep watch."

"You don't sleep?" Ludo asked.

Kaela turned, the fire catching the edge of her mask. "I have my own Nightmares to keep me awake."

No one knows how Golems appeared.

There are many theories—some elegant, some wildly intoxicated—but if you've followed my life's work (or had the misfortune of being trapped in a lecture hall with me), you might have noticed how rarely I mention them. That omission is not accidental. It's caution. Golems do not like to be known. And scholars who poke too hard into their beginnings tend to vanish—quietly, inconveniently, and often just after securing funding.

They are seen most often in Skoe Scana and the broken rims of Aspana, though they curiously avoid the literal waters of the Red Sea. A pattern? Perhaps. I've mapped the avoidance zones. Make of that what you will.

Now—death. That I can speak on.

Golems do not shatter. They do not burn. They do not rust. They outgrow. That is to say, they expand so massively, so relentlessly, that their own weight anchors them into stillness. Their bones fuse to the bedrock. Their joints calcify into landmasses. What once walked becomes what we now call a mountain. The transformation is neither tragic nor majestic. It is inevitable.

And yes, they are not seen much these days. One might say they are in decline. One might also say the sun used to be punctual—so take that however you like.

Around the first Summers, I began receiving reports. Odd ones. About the contents of Golems. Tunnels. Caverns. Artifacts. Architecture that shouldn't exist. Scholars went inside and came back... wrong. Quiet in all the wrong ways. Loud in all the rest.

I would've published, of course. I had expeditions planned. Notes prepared. I even taught a student named Ludo how to pronounce "Wie eu mir whoher es?" without spitting.

But every attempt I made to access a Golem—every dig, every permit, every crack of a crowbar—was quietly sabotaged.

By whom?

Well, if you find them, do let them know I haven't forgotten.

And that I'm still waiting for my tools. And Ludo.

He never came back. The last time they saw him, I gave him a key to my flat, but it seemed he had joined a Book Club. I can't trust anyone these days. ——The Hexe - Book Three by Professor Edgar O. Duvencrune, First Edition, 555th Summer

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