The Name Beneath the Shrine

You arrive at a collapsed shrine beneath a bruised sky. A gaunt elderly man, with hollow cheeks, close-cropped iron-gray hair, and a scar through one eyebrow, in torn priestly robes drags himself around a cracked ritual circle, one knee leaving a dark trail across the dust.

Inside the circle, a skeleton, an adult male humanoid skeleton with a narrow frame, yellowed bones, and a cracked skull, jerks against bindings of blackened cord. Each violent pull grinds its bones toward the shrine’s remaining altar, where pale sigils spread like frost through the stone.

The priest claws at a broken boundary stone, smearing his blood across an older mark. Beneath the shrine, something answers with three slow knocks.

A final line of light crawls across the cracked circle toward its severed end. The skeleton’s bindings snap taut, and the remaining altar gives a faint, answering pulse.

Lushion’s gaze cuts first to Father Oren Vale, expecting the living priest to lunge or betray him. That paranoid pause costs him a breath, but no more.

He seizes the blackened cords where they bind the skeleton, wrenching them free from the altar’s edge. The rough fibers bite his palm as he drags them tight.

Forbidden knowledge guides his hands to the ritual’s weakest knot. He loops the cords across the skeleton’s ribs and locks the binding against a cracked vertebra.

His staff channels the effort, dark power tightening the cords without waste. The pale sigils shudder, then their crawling line stops short of the altar.

The skeleton’s thrashing ends beneath the completed restraint. The strain tears a shallow cut across Lushion’s palm, and blood darkens the cord where his grip held it.