Oathkeeper

Oath. The word floated through her mind like driftwood on a dark sea, carrying weight she couldn't name.

Ser Athelyn found herself walking through woods where black-green mist hung between the skeletal trees. Her spectral form cast no shadow on a ground that wept something darker than blood, the earth itself seeming to mourn beneath her feet. The trees here were wrong. Twisted into shapes that hurt to look at directly, their bark bearing wounds that never healed. Dead branches reached toward a sun that gave light but no warmth, its pale rays filtered through the ever-present fog until everything took on the sickly hue of old bone.

She had no memory of entering this place. No recollection of how she'd died, though the hollowness in her chest spoke of violence recent and absolute. Only fragments remained: the taste of copper, the sound of something falling from a great height, wind that screamed with voices not quite human. The mist seemed to whisper as she passed, carrying half-heard words in languages that made her spectral flesh crawl with recognition.

Her hand gripped a spear that hummed with restless energy. The weapon felt familiar, though she couldn't recall forging it or claiming it. Its surface was etched with words in a script that shifted when she wasn't looking directly at it, always just beyond comprehension.

Something about protection. Something about souls.

The path wound between the bleeding trees, leading towards a castle of impossible architecture. Rising from cliffs that overlooked a shore where no waves broke. Built from what looked like compressed nightmares, its towers reached towards a sky torn asunder, revealing glimpses of worlds beyond this one. The mist swirled around its foundations like the breath of sleeping giants, occasionally forming shapes that might have been faces or might have been promises.

Or might have been lies.

Below, the beach stretched endlessly in both directions, its sand the colour of crushed pearls mixed with ash. No crashing tide touched this shore—instead, the sea was a mirror of perfect stillness, reflecting the castle's twisted spires. If she looked carefully, Athelyn could see shapes moving beneath the water's surface. Perhaps ships, or the sailors that drowned as the mist seeped outwards from the cursed isle.

As she approached, memories flickered like dying candles. A garden. Roses that bloomed black instead of red. A woman's voice, gentle as summer rain: Keep the darkness from my light. Whatever the cost.

The words echoed in her hollow chest, stirring something that might have been purpose but felt a lot closer to pain.

She walked under an archway bearing gates that swung freely at her touch, though she had no memory of ever passing here before. The courtyard beyond was a study in contradictions. Fountains that flowed upward, carrying screams instead of water; statues of forgotten gods whose eyes tracked her movement with something like recognition. The mist pooled here in eddies and currents, following patterns that spoke of rituals performed so many times they had worn grooves in reality itself. Ancient stones were stained with rust the colour of dried tears, the residue of ceremonies that had transformed love into hunger and duty into damnation.

You've been here before, whispered something in the back of her mind. You've done this before.

But the knowledge felt distant, unreachable, like trying to grasp smoke with slow fingers.

The great hall stretched before her, its walls lined with portraits of kings and queens whose faces shifted when she wasn't looking directly at them. Some wore crowns of gold, some wore crowns of thorns, some wore crowns of congealed shadow that dripped down their painted faces like melted wax.

At the hall's far end, a staircase spiralled upwards, its steps carved from what looked like compressed time—translucent and shifting, showing glimpses of moments that had been and might yet be. She climbed without conscious thought, her spectral feet finding purchase on memories that weren't quite her own.

A woman falling. A man weeping. A spear striking home.

Again. And again. And again.

The tower room at the top was both familiar and strange, as if she were seeing it through muddy water or hazy dream. Mist seeped through the windows, pooling in the corners whispering secrets in tongues that hurt her to hear. Tapestries hung from the walls, their threads spun from moonbeams and regret, depicting scenes that made her soul ache with recognition unnamed. Through the windows, she could see the eternal shore below, the motionless sea reflecting the pale sun that had never brought warmth to this cursed place.

A loom sat by the window, half-finished work stretched across its frame. The pattern showing a knight, a queen, and a king, locked in eternal dance around a weapon that pulsed with inner fire. The image moved as she watched it, the figures repeating their motions in endless, futile repetition while the mist swirled around them like the breath of watching gods.

"You've returned," said a voice soft as silk, sharp as broken glass.

Athelyn turned to find a woman watching her from beside the window. Golden hair catching the light of the cruel sun, framing a face that was beautiful and terrible and wrong. Her fingers were too long, her smile too wide, her eyes holding depths that spoke of drowning.

"I..." Athelyn began, then stopped. Words felt foreign on her lips, though she knew she must have spoken them before. "Who are you?"

"I am..." The woman paused, confusion flickering across her perfect features. "Irena. Queen Irena. I think. Sometimes I remember other names, but they taste like ash and forgetting." She looked down at her hands, watching them tremble with something that might have been memory or might have been fear. "You are the one who comes to kill me."

The words should have shocked her. Instead, they felt like recognition, the final piece of a puzzle she hadn't known she was solving.

"Kill you?" Athelyn's grip tightened on her spear, and the weapon sang in a discordant harmony that belonged to no earthly instrument. "Why would I—"

"Because you must." A man's voice, rich with harmonics that made the air vibrate. "Because that is what you are."

He emerged from shadows that seemed to part for him like curtains. Prince Tristan—the name came to her unbidden, along with fragments of memory that tasted of obsession and impossible love. Beautiful still, but his beauty was the beauty of winter storms and funeral pyres. His eyes held the same confusion that marked Irena's face, the same grasping after meaning in a world drained of context.

"I don't remember you," Athelyn paused, something in her hollow chest screamed recognition.

"Nor I you," Tristan replied, his voice carried the weight of infinite cycles. "Though I know what you are. What you do. You come, you kill her, I kill you. Then I bring her back, and you return. Always returning. Always killing. Always dying."

"Why?" The question tore from Athelyn's throat.

"Because you are bound," Irena said, her voice carrying the weight of truths half-remembered. "Soul to soul, death to death. While I suffer, you cannot rest. While I am trapped in this flesh that isn't mine anymore, your spirit cannot find peace."

Fragments of memory stirred like autumn leaves in a dead wind. A garden where roses bloomed red. Eyes the colour of a summer sky. A hand, warm and human, pressing something into her palm. Words spoken in sunlight: I will guard your soul, even past death.

"I swore an oath," Athelyn whispered.

"Yes." Irena's smile was infinite sadness wrapped in understanding. "And oaths, once sworn, become chains. Especially here, where love and duty have been twisted."

Athelyn looked around the chamber, seeing it clearly for the first time. This place existed outside normal time and space, a pocket of moments where the same tragedy played endlessly. The walls wept moisture that evaporated before it could reach the floor, becoming part of the mist that hung in the air like incense at a funeral that would never end. The air tasted sour and thick, forgotten prayers that hung with the weight of infinite repetition.

Even the light seemed tired, filtered through windows that looked out onto that black shore where the sun shone with the cold radiance of a dying star.

"How long?" she asked.

"We don't remember," Tristan said, and his voice carried the weight of eternity. "Time means nothing here. Only the pattern matters. Death, resurrection, return. Over and over, until the very concept of ending becomes meaningless."

"But you remember some things," Athelyn observed. "You know what I am."

"Fragments," Irena said, returning to her loom. Her fingers moved across the threads with practiced ease, weaving patterns that showed the same three figures locked in their eternal dance. "We remember the shape of things, if not their substance. The feeling of repetition, if not the count. The weight of purpose, if not its origin."

She looked up from her work, and Athelyn saw galaxies dying in her gaze. "I remember being someone else once. Someone who healed instead of harvested pain. But that woman is gone now, replaced by something that wears her face and speaks with her voice but serves a different master."

"What master?"

"The Shadetide," Tristan said, and the name made the air itself recoil. "The current that flows between life and death, feeding on the spaces between them. It grows stronger with each cycle, each resurrection, each death—and as it feeds, the boundaries between worlds grow thinner. We are its engine, its perfect perpetual motion machine of suffering, slowly unravelling reality one death at a time."

Athelyn felt the truth of it in her bones, in the hollow ache where her heart should be. They were all prisoners here—prisoners of their own devotion, their own inability to let go. Love and duty twisted into something that served neither lover nor beloved, but only the hungry dark that fed on their repetition.

"Then I will free you," she said, raising her spear.

"You will try," Tristan replied, though his voice held no anger, only the tired acceptance of one who had played this scene too many times to count. "As you always do. As you always will."

The spear moved without conscious thought, guided by purpose alone. It found Irena's heart with clincial precision, and golden light blazed through the cracks in her dissolving form. For one moment—just one—the woman's face showed peace instead of the fractured acceptance that marked her features.

"Thank you," Irena whispered as she crumbled to ash that swirled in patterns mapping the spaces between heartbeats. "Until next time, faithful knight."

The ash didn't scatter. Instead, it hung in the air—a constellation of grief, each mote pulsing with faint emerald light that spoke of trapped souls.

Tristan's roar shattered what remained of the windows, and his form expanded beyond comprehension. Limbs elongated and twisted. Horns tore asymmetrically from his skull. His skin stretching and tearing over sharp cheekbones, his lips pulled tight against teeth grown into fangs. Grief and rage wore this face like a mask, but beneath it was a creature older and hungrier—the Shadetide's touch made manifest in flesh that remembered how to love but had forgotten how to let go.

Athelyn tried to turn the spear toward him, trying to end the cycle at its source. But her arm wouldn't obey. The oath that bound her soul would only allow her to strike at Irena, only permit her to grant the death that would free them both—temporarily.

"You killed her," Tristan hissed, though his voice held no surprise. The words felt like ritual, like lines in a play performed so many times that even the actors had forgotten their original meaning.

"I freed her."

"Die now." His claws found her throat with casual efficiency. "As you always do. As you always will."

Pain lanced through her spectral form, not physical—the agony of existence being forcibly separated from purpose. She felt herself breaking apart, essence scattering into echoes of oblivion.

But even as darkness claimed her, she heard Tristan begin the resurrection ritual. Words from another realm of existence. Sounds that had no right to exist on the mortal plane, calling across the void between life and death. The Shadetide answered with hunger that had learned patience, pouring through the cracks carved in the foundation of reality.

Irena's ashes stirred, began to dance, began to remember the shape of flesh and the weight of consciousness. And somewhere in those spaces between moments, Athelyn felt her own spirit being dragged back from whatever rest she had been set upon, bound by oath and the terrible mathematics of impossible devotion.

The sensation of being thrown, cast out like refuse from a tower window.

Falling.

Wind that screamed unrecognisably.

Stone rushed up to meet her broken form.

Then nothing.

Athelyn woke in the woods, her spectral form slowly pulling itself together from mist and memory. The fog swirled around her like greeting an old friend, whispering welcome in voices she couldn't quite understand. She had no recollection of how she'd died, only the vague sense that she'd been somewhere high and had fallen very far, past windows that looked out onto an endless, lifeless shore.

Her chest ached with hollow pain. Something was missing—something important. Someone needed her help. The dead trees around her creaked in a wind that brought no relief from the oppressive glare of a sun that shone but never heated, their skeletal branches reaching toward light that offered illumination but no comfort.

The roses turned black at her approach, and she felt the familiar pull dragging her forward. Purpose without context. Need without understanding.

In her hand, a spear materialised like an old friend returning. It hummed with an unnamable energy, the surface etched with glowing words that shifted from her gaze when she tried to read them.

The path through the twisted woods felt familiar, though she had no memory of walking it before. The castle of compressed nightmares rose before her; a monument to sorrows too vast for comprehension, its silhouette menacing, as if it too sensed the approaching culmination.

Through the gates. Up the stairs. Past the portraits that seemed to watch her with great intensity, their painted eyes holding recognition instead of mere pity.

She paused before the chamber door, feeling the weight of infinite repetition pressing down on her like a physical thing. But there was a stirring beneath that weight, an understanding slowly blooming in her chest. Thorned, lightly scented and beautifully black.

The door swung open before she could knock.

"You've returned," said a golden-haired woman by the window, her voice carrying echoes of summer rain and winter storms in equal measure.

Athelyn felt her soul resonate with desperate recognition, though the woman's name escaped her like smoke through broken fingers. Standing there in the doorway, spear humming in her grip, Athelyn understood with crystal clarity what she was.

She was the instrument of their damnation, honed to perfection through endless repetition. She was the key that locked their prison and the guard that ensured it would never open. Every death she granted made the cycle stronger. Every mercy-killing fed the very force that imprisoned them on this forsaken island.

And knowing this changed nothing. The oath burned in her chest white-hot and branding. The Queen's soul still called for freedom. The man's love refused to let either of them go.

But now she understood the true horror: she was not salvation.

She was punishment.

The spear sang to her, a song of eagerness. A discordant tune that gave their existence meaning. The woman smiled with teeth that belonged to an entity vast and patient. The man prepared to begin again what had never truly ended.

And Athelyn, fully aware now of what she was and what she did and what she would always be, raised the spear and spoke the words that had become their eternal prayer, their infinite curse, their perfect and terrible oath.