The Empty Cot

The night shift ended three hours past midnight. The scribes were herded down the spiraling stone staircases to the cramped, windowless servants' quarters in the lower levels of the monastery.

Elara had practically carried Rowan to his narrow cot. He was entirely unresponsive, his body limp and freezing. She had wrapped him in her own woolen blanket, sitting beside him until his erratic, shallow breathing finally leveled out into the steady rhythm of sleep. Only then did she allow her own exhaustion to pull her under, collapsing onto her own mattress just across the small cell.

When Elara woke, the meager sliver of moonlight creeping under the heavy oak door had shifted. It was the deepest, darkest hour of the night.

A terrible, instinctual dread gripped her chest before she even opened her eyes. The air in the room was heavy, suffocatingly damp, and thick with the scent of stagnant seawater.

Elara sat up and looked across the cramped space. Rowan’s blanket was cast aside on the stone floor. His cot was empty.

Panic, cold and sharp, flooded her veins. If an overseer caught a servant wandering the halls at this hour, the punishment would be a brutal lashing. For someone as frail as Rowan, it could be a death sentence.

She threw off her covers and slipped out of the cell, her bare feet silent on the freezing flagstones. The corridors were pitch black, but Elara knew the monastery’s layout by heart. She checked the latrines, the kitchens, and the lower stairwell leading back to the scriptorium. Empty.

Then, she noticed the moisture.

The stones beneath her feet were no longer just cold; they were slick. A thin film of dark, oily water coated the floor, reflecting the faint ambient light like a mirror. Elara knelt, pressing her fingers to the moisture, and brought them to her nose.

Salt. Rot. The crushing abyss.

The trail of black water led away from the main thoroughfares, winding toward the oldest, most restricted section of the monastery: the iron-bound door of the Sub-Basement Archives. No scribe was permitted down there. It was a vault for heretical texts, a place the abbots only spoke of in hushed, fearful tones.

The heavy iron door stood ajar.

Elara did not hesitate. Her fear for her brother entirely eclipsed her fear of the monastery's rules. She squeezed through the heavy doorway and began the long descent down the spiraling, lightless steps.