The Whisper Beneath Stone
Rain fell soft upon Emberhelm not in sheets, but in threads, weaving through the night like strands of memory. Each drop whispered against the walls, tracing paths down stone carved before empires rose. The air smelt of iron, damp moss, and prophecy.
Lore moved through the Hall of Echoes with deliberate silence. The torches burned low, their flames bending in strange rhythm, as though swayed by unseen breath. Beneath the central arch lay the dais of oath and upon it, the gold ring.
It shimmered faintly in the half-light, a pulse of life within metal. Not the glow of firelight, but of something older.
Lore hesitated before it. His reflection warped in its surface his eyes darker, sharper, his face marked by the faint runes of bloodline and burden. “The ring of storm and oath,” he murmured. “The bond of the five.”
He reached out. The moment his fingers brushed it, the hall sighed.
A low hum filled the air not from stone or wind, but from within.
Then came the voice.
“Brother…”
The word was barely sound more vibration, more memory. It coiled through him like smoke through glass.
“Taranis…” Lore whispered, his voice trembling. The name itself seemed to awaken something. The torches guttered. The shadows around the walls began to move not randomly, but with purpose, forming the faint outlines of chained figures, of men bowed beneath lightning.
The ring pulsed again, once, twice. Gold bled to storm-grey.
“Show me,” Lore said. “Show me where he walks.”
The pulse deepened and suddenly, the hall was gone.
He stood in mist. Iron gates loomed before him, slick with rain. Beyond them, sand bloodstained and torn an arena. He heard the roars of lions, the clash of blades, the chanting of a foreign crowd. And there, in the centre, Taranis bare-armed, chained, and unbroken. His eyes like stormlight.
“Still he stands,” Lore breathed.
The vision shattered like glass beneath a hammer. He was back in the hall, gasping, knees to the stone floor. The ring still glowed in his palm, its pulse slowing to match his heartbeat.
He knew then: his brother lived but the bond between them had stirred something greater. The old powers beneath the land the ones the druids had whispered of were waking again.
A new sound reached him. A voice, aged as winter bark.
“The ring calls the storm again,” said Maeve, the seer. She stepped from the shadowed archway, her staff crowned with raven feathers and iron charms. “You’ve felt it too the pulse of the deep earth, the cry of the stones.”
Lore rose slowly. “He lives. I saw him. Rome cannot hold him.”
Maeve’s gaze was sharp, knowing. “No but when the storm returns, it will not come gently. Bonds such as yours were not forged for peace. The land remembers its oaths, Lore Stormborne. The blood remembers. And blood always calls for blood.”
He turned toward the open window, where thunder rolled faintly beyond the hills. The storm clouds were gathering again not yet upon them, but coming.
“Then let it come,” he said softly. “We are Stormborne. We do not kneel to the Empire. We endure… and when the sky breaks, we rise.”
The gold ring flared once more, bright as lightning and somewhere far to the south, in a Roman cell slick with rain, Taranis felt it too.
StormborneLore 