The heat was a physical enemy. It beat down on Sir Kaelan’s helm, turning the air inside to a suffocating soup of sweat and iron. For three days, his small company had ridden through the ochre-dusted hills of the Levant, the landscape shimmering and unreal. The Holy Land, he mused grimly, felt profoundly unholy. It was a land of thirst, grit, and a sun that aimed to kill.
His destination was a place most had forgotten: the Citadel of Akras, a solitary watchtower built to guard a trade route that had long since fallen into disuse. It was a posting for the disgraced, the weary, or the mad. Kaelan felt he was a bit of all three. After the disastrous siege of Ascalon, where his own desperate command had led to the slaughter of a dozen good men, he had craved silence. His superiors had been only too happy to grant it.
“There,” a voice rasped beside him. It was Gideon, his second-in-command, a man whose faith was as hard and unforgiving as the land itself. He pointed with a gauntleted finger.
On the horizon, a jagged black tooth bit into the pale blue sky. The Citadel of Akras. Even from this distance, it looked wrong. Not ruined, but… sullen. It crouched on the clifftop like a vulture waiting for a meal to die.
As they drew closer, the details sharpened into unsettling focus. The fortress was built of a dark, almost black, basalt that seemed to drink the light. A single, massive cross had been painted in crimson on the stone above the gate, but the sun and wind had scoured it, making it look less like a holy symbol and more like a weeping wound.
The twenty men in Kaelan’s retinue murmured amongst themselves. They were veterans, men who had seen the horrors of battle, yet an unnerved silence fell over them as they approached the gate. There were no sentries. No welcoming banner. The only sound was the hot wind whistling through the arrow slits, sounding like a mournful sigh.
“Hails the tower!” Gideon bellowed, his voice echoing unnaturally against the stone.
Silence.
Kaelan dismounted, his joints aching. The ground felt strangely hard, as if the very rock were dead. He ran a hand over the stone of the wall. It was cold, despite the blistering sun. Carved into the basalt, almost hidden by shadow, were symbols he did not recognize. They were not Latin, nor Greek, nor Arabic. They were fluid, spiraling things, like worms burrowing into the rock.
“Rhys,” Kaelan said, his voice low. “You and Tommen, find the well. Check the water.”
Rhys, a boy of seventeen with more courage than sense, nodded eagerly and hurried off. Kaelan pushed against the heavy iron-banded doors of the gate. They groaned open with a shudder that vibrated through the soles of his boots.
The courtyard within was empty. Dust lay thick and undisturbed. A forge stood cold, its anvil rusted. The barracks were empty, the chapel door slightly ajar. It was as if the previous garrison had simply vanished.
“By the saints,” Gideon whispered, crossing himself. “It’s a tomb.”
Kaelan’s eyes were drawn to the center of the courtyard. There, a deep well was covered by a heavy wooden lid. He strode towards it just as Rhys and Tommen arrived from the other side.
“The water, sir,” Rhys said, his face pale. “In the cisterns. It’s… brackish. Barely fit to drink.”
Kaelan gestured to the well. “What of this one?”
Tommen, a burly man-at-arms, spat to the side. “Smells like a privy, sir. Stagnant.”
Ignoring him, Kaelan heaved the lid off the well. A wave of stench billowed out—the smell of rot, of deep, wet earth, and something else… something metallic and sickly sweet. He peered over the edge. The shaft was deep, its stonework slick with a dark, algae-like slime. He could not see the water, only a profound, impenetrable blackness. But he could hear it. A faint, rhythmic plink… plink… plink… like a slow, patient heartbeat.
Suddenly, a sound shattered the silence. High above, in the bell tower, a single, resonant CLANG rang out. Every man flinched, hands flying to sword hilts. They all looked up. The bell rope, visible from the courtyard, hung perfectly still. The wind had died completely. There was nothing that could have made it ring.
Yet the sound hung in the air, a deep, brazen note that vibrated not in their ears, but in the bones of their skulls. It was not a call to prayer. It was a proclamation.
They had arrived. And something had been waiting.
Kaelan ordered the citadel secured. Men moved with a grim purpose, their earlier unease hardening into a soldier’s pragmatism. They swept the barracks, the mess hall, the armoury. They found signs of recent life—a half-eaten loaf of hard bread, a scattered game of knucklebones—but no people. Not a single soul, living or dead. It was Gideon who found the only clue in the commander’s quarters: a logbook, left open on a desk. The last few entries were nearly illegible, the script a frantic, spidery scrawl.
Day 47: The water from the well is sweet. A blessing in this forsaken land.
Day 51: God speaks to us in dreams. He has a new testament, written in the stone.
Day 56: The thirst is a holy thing. We see His true face in the dark.
Day 60: We open the way. We are the new apostles. The flesh is a cage. We must…
The entry ended there, the ink smudged as if the writer had been dragged away. Kaelan closed the book, a cold dread seeping into his bones. “Gideon, we post double sentries. No one drinks from the well. We use the cistern water, boiled, no matter how foul it tastes. And I want that well sealed. Board it up. Now.”
Gideon nodded, his face a grim mask. “And the chapel, sir?”
“I’ll see to it myself.”
The chapel was small, barely large enough for two dozen men. The air inside was thick and cloying. The stone altar at the front was bare, stripped of its crucifix and cloths. But the walls… the walls were covered in the same spiraling symbols Kaelan had seen outside, scratched deep into the plaster. They converged on the wall behind the altar, forming a great, hideous pattern that seemed to pulse in the torchlight. At its center, someone had used a nail or a knife to carve a single, guttural word in rough Latin: SATIABOR.
I will be satisfied.
Kaelan felt a wave of nausea. This was not a place of God. It was a place of desecration. That night, sleep offered no respite. The wind howled through the battlements, carrying on it what sounded like whispers, too faint to be understood but clear enough to unnerve. The men shifted restlessly in the barracks. Kaelan lay on his cot, staring into the darkness, the image of the carved word burned into his mind. The citadel was not empty. It was simply waiting to be filled.
