ISSUE #5 — “ASHES OF FAITH”

  A horror-action chapter

  The underground city had survived three generations beneath the stone.

  It would not survive the night.

  The first arm was not a bell or a shout—it was silence.

  The sentries at Tunnel Seven stopped responding. Then Tunnel Six. Then the air itself seemed to freeze, as if the stone walls were holding their breath.

  Elder Maerin felt it before he heard it.

  A presence.

  Not rage. Not hunger.

  Judgment.

  She tells lyra to take kael who was knocked out due to his injuries and run

  To save kael the elder and his people will hold the danger back

  Lyra is suprised why wouldn't they run too . But for them life underground is everything they knew ,believed that the sruface is cursed and they were chosen by the halo to stay down there and protecting kael is protecting the halo

  Their god

  Their salvation

  They take an old tunnel that leads back to the sruface

  The elder closes the tunnel

  Then the screams came.

  THE MONSTER ARRIVES

  Gravehound entered the city without announcement.

  His boots crushed prayer sigils etched into the floor, grinding faith into dust. The mask he wore—bone-white, animalistic, featureless except for narrow red slits—tilted as he surveyed the chamber.

  The first defender charged him with a spear.

  Gravehound caught the weapon mid-thrust.

  He pulled.

  The man was dragged forward, lifted off his feet, and smmed face-first into the stone pilr so hard the skull cracked like pottery. Blood sprayed across murals depicting the Halo as a sun-god.

  Gravehound didn’t look back.

  He moved forward, methodical.

  Efficient.

  THE SLAUGHTER

  The underground fighters rushed him in waves.

  They died in pieces.

  One was cleaved diagonally from shoulder to hip, organs spilling onto the floor before the body even colpsed. Another had his arm torn free by a hooked bde, screaming until Gravehound drove a knee into his throat and silenced him forever.

  Blood coated the stone. Steam rose from it.

  Gravehound waded through the defenders like a storm given shape.

  Children were pulled away by screaming parents, shoved into side tunnels, hidden behind colpsed walls. Gravehound saw them.

  He let them run.

  Not mercy.

  Message.

  ELDER MAERIN

  Maerin stood at the altar when Gravehound arrived.

  The old man held the Halo’s symbol close to his chest, trembling—not with fear, but defiance.

  “You will not erase us,” Maerin said. “We are remembered.”

  Gravehound tilted his head.

  “You mistake memory for relevance.”

  He crossed the distance in three steps.

  Maerin tried to speak again.

  Gravehound grabbed him by the face.

  Fingers dug into flesh. Bone cracked. The old man’s scream was cut short as Gravehound smashed his head against the altar, again and again, until the stone was slick and red and the Halo symbol was unrecognizable beneath the gore.

  When Gravehound finally let go, Maerin colpsed—face ruined, body limp, faith extinguished.

  The city wailed.

  THE FIRE

  Gravehound activated incendiaries throughout the chambers.

  Fmes roared through homes, libraries, shrines. The murals burned. The prayers burned. The history burned.

  Survivors fled into tunnels choked with smoke.

  Gravehound stood at the center of it all, fire reflecting in his mask.

  He raised a communicator.

  “Settlement neutralized,” he said calmly. “Symbol destroyed.”

  A pause.

  Then, almost thoughtfully:

  “Send the message north.”

  AFTERMATH

  Somewhere deep underground, a child cried—alive, hiding, broken.

  Gravehound had not wiped them out completely.

  He had left witnesses.