It should have been a treasure trove. The discovery of generations, even by the Isharann’s hale measure of such things. To the low-born of Priom, this place of death had promised life for untold thousands. Longevity as they’d never known before. Instead, Lotann, Warden of the Soul Ledgers, found himself lost in a sea bobbing with shadeglass like so much flotsam. And he was not alone.

Gravesand shifted beneath his feet, revealing old structures like sunken ships emerging at low tide. It filled his boots and invaded his inkwell. Entire districts had been swallowed by it for leagues in every direction. He knew this because he had walked them, his quill never stopping for more than a moment in his attempts to map them, his breath steady, focus sharp as he plunged deeper into the maze of streets. Truly, the city was everything he had hoped it would be — and everything he had suspected. More souls than he could ever hope to count — but all of them beyond his reach, bound to the shards winking at him from the ruins and, perhaps, to the great shadow that would periodically flit across them.

“YOUR INK RUNS DRY.”

The same could be said of everything in this halfway place. It was a desert, but bereft of the light and warmth that saturated every drop of Ghyran’s seas. Shadows pooled beneath lintels and in the corners of crumbling alleyways, not the absolute blackness in which so many of his kind dwelled but a watery twilight, as if more than just life had been sucked from this place but also colour, heat; the vitality inherent to all things, unliving or not. Behind his eyes, Namarti flashed, hollow-skulled and ashen-skinned, limbs that should have been long and beautiful curled in on themselves like the shrunken tails of desiccated seahorses. It was not strictly for them that he mourned – grief, like all highs and lows, was best left to rot on the shores, in the past – but the people that they represented. His people. He continued writing, his bone quill a flicker of movement across the page, pausing only when a sudden breeze took said pages and rifled through them.

“VERMIN.”

The voice came again, at once a whisper and a boom, not unlike the sound of thunder heard from a great depth. Lotann faltered, unable to resist looking around, but all he saw was the desert and the ruins and himself, staring back from a dozen mirrors, half-buried in the sands. He thought the presence felt closer now, or at least colder. Around him, twelve other Lotanns shivered and shrugged. He was still staring when one of them began to smile.

Despite himself, he took a step back. The figure standing before him looked utterly alien; as far removed from him as he was from the low-born, and yet there was no denying it wore his robes, cast his shadow, clutched his ledger with the grip of one who has lived so long in sheer, numb horror that he no longer recognises any other state, and it occurred to him that he could not recall the last time he’d allowed himself reprieve to really smile. Joy, as dangerous to them as grief.

When it opened the ledger and held up the page for him, he could not help but cry out; a single scream, like that of a startled gull. For the name it showed him, written there in his hand, tallied up and struck through like any of the countless other souls he’d catalogued over the long centuries of his tenure as warden, was his own.