The Vault of Vanishing Souls
Chapter 1: The Gasping Fang
There’s a tavern that shows up only when you’ve got nowhere left to go.
No road leads to it. No sign ever points the way. You don’t find The Gasping Fang so much as it finds you—usually when your knuckles are bloodied, your coin purse is light, and your soul’s just heavy enough to sink the floorboards.
Tonight, it found three Bastards.
Lightning scratched the sky outside like a thief testing a lock. The door creaked open, dragging a hiss of rain behind it, and Hanh stepped through—soaked, scowling, and smiling all at once.
He didn’t belong anywhere. That was the whole point.
The warlock peeled off his hood, rainwater dripping onto the floor, and dropped into a booth like a man who’d been chased through three planes of existence just to sit down.
He had.
On the table, he slapped a wrapped bundle. It squelched.
Behind the bar, the barkeep—a blindfolded old elf with scars like topographical maps—grunted and went back to stirring a cup of something that steamed too loudly.
Hanh paid him no mind. His eyes were on the bundle.
And when he unwrapped it, even the shadows leaned closer.
A map. Or something trying to be one. The parchment was tanned, stitched together from pieces that didn’t quite match—some of it was paper, some of it was skin, and one corner seemed to be made of dried leaves that twitched when no one was looking.
It pulsed faintly, like a thing trying not to breathe.
Hanh smiled.
“There you are.”
She Arrives Like Regret
Ten minutes later, the door opened again, and a tall figure entered without ceremony.
Deth didn’t walk like a hero. She walked like a hunter who’d already killed something important and hadn’t yet decided if she regretted it.
Her bow was strapped to her back, her staff carried low, and her long dark hair was tied in a knot that had clearly been redone three times in a row before she gave up and let it be messy.
She slid into the booth across from Hanh, her eyes already on the map.
“You stole that from someone important.”
“Incorrect,” Hanh said, without looking up. “I stole it from someone formerly important.”
“Does it bleed?”
“Only if you doubt it.”
She didn’t smile, not fully, but the corner of her mouth twitched. That was enough.
“So. What’s this one?”
“The Vault of Vanishing Souls.”
That earned a pause.
“I thought that was a myth.”
“It was. Until I myth’d it off a lich accountant in the Whispering Bank.”
He rubbed his temple. “Gods, I hate undead tax collectors.”“And what’s inside?”
“Things the world forgot. Or was made to forget. Treasures, secrets, artifacts… souls.”
“That’s why it’s dangerous,” she said, voice flat.
“That’s why it’s ours,” Hanh replied.
The Third Seat
The booth groaned in protest as a mountain sat down.
Pig Knight Bastard didn’t enter so much as appear—either he’d been lurking at the bar or phased in through sheer willpower. His armor was a patchwork of boiled leather, rusted iron, and something that may have once been ceremonial pork loin.
His helm—tusked, dented, and painted with crude runes—rested on the table beside a massive mug of something that smoked slightly.
He eyed the map, then Hanh.
“It cursed?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Pig Knight grunted with approval and took a long, growling drink.
Deth watched him.
“You know you don’t have to join every doomed expedition we whisper about.”
“Aye,” he rumbled. “But this sound like one worth dying for.”
That silenced the table for a beat too long.
Hanh cleared his throat.
“It’s a heist,” he said. “Clean in, cleaner out. No ancient dragons this time. No collapsing temples. No eldritch riddles written in blood and regret.”
“So… just theft and possibly time-based soul curses.”
“Exactly.”
Why This Vault?
“Why do it?” Deth asked eventually, her voice quieter now. “What are we trying to steal?”
Hanh didn’t answer immediately. His gaze dropped to the map. It wasn’t pulsing anymore. Now it shivered—faintly, like something sensing it was being discussed.
He tapped a point marked in curling silver script.
“There’s something inside with my name on it. Not metaphorically. Literally.”
“I don’t remember what it is. That’s the point.”
“It’s something I gave up. Or had taken.”“And you’re sure it’s… worth remembering?”
“That’s the bastard of it,” he said. “I’ll never know unless I take it back.”
Deth sighed. She looked at Pig Knight, who gave her a slow nod—his way of saying We’re already doing this, might as well do it right.
She nodded.
“Alright. But we don’t kill unless we have to. And if this Mourner thing is real…”
“We’ll cross that time bridge when we come to it,” Hanh said.
“Time bridge?”
“Yeah, uh—entry to the vault is through something called The Wound Between Moments.”
Pig Knight burped. “Sound painful.”
“Worse,” Hanh said. “It’s poetic.”
The Barkeep Speaks
As they stood to leave, the blindfolded barkeep finally stirred.
“You walk toward a place that undoes meaning,” he rasped. “Some things vanish for a reason.”
Hanh tossed a coin onto the counter.
“So did we.”
The barkeep caught the coin without turning, sniffed it, and tossed it into a fire that hadn’t been lit before now.
The coin screamed as it burned.
Last Light Before the Wound
Outside, the rain had stopped. The sky cracked open into stars the wrong color—too purple, too sharp.
They walked into the darkness like they’d done a hundred times before: not because they were brave, but because it was harder not to.
“This time,” Hanh muttered, almost to himself, “maybe we bring something back.”
Deth didn’t answer. She just adjusted the bow on her back and started walking faster.
Pig Knight crunched down on something that used to be alive.
And somewhere, far ahead, the Wound Between Moments began to open.
Waiting.
Chapter 2: The Wound Between Moments
There was no sky above them.
No stars. No wind. No noise, save the gentle hiss of something far away… and falling.
The world had ended a few steps back, sometime after the last tree died and the road turned to ash. The Gasping Fang was gone behind them—like a bad memory blurred by drink. Now there was only the Wound.
It stretched out ahead, impossible and straight. A bridge of glass and darkness, suspended over nothing. It shimmered not with light, but with time—fragmented moments flickering across its surface like reflections caught in broken water.
Hanh stepped forward and his boot echoed too late.
“Okay,” he muttered. “This is already going better than the last time we crossed a temporal fracture.”
Deth’s voice came quiet behind him.
“The last one tried to age me to death.”
“Yes, but you looked incredible at eighty.”
She rolled her eyes, but not before a smile escaped.
Pig Knight said nothing. His gaze was fixed on the bridge—his hand resting on the hilt of the cleaver he’d named Sorry.
He didn’t like places that made your memories feel like they had weight.
The Toll
The Wound Between Moments wasn’t made to be crossed. It was made to be respected. No god built it. No kingdom claimed it. It had simply appeared, long ago, when time itself cracked from grief too large to contain.
And like all grief, it charged a toll.
Each step forward required you to leave something behind—something remembered, or something you didn’t know you’d miss until it was gone.
“Don’t think about anything you care about,” Hanh warned. “The bridge listens.”
Pig Knight took the first step.
A ripple passed beneath him, and for an instant—just a flicker—he slowed. Something in his shoulders dropped. He didn’t speak. But Deth saw it.
“What did it take?”
“…a song.”
“What kind of song?”
“One I only whistled when no one could hear.”
No one said anything for a long moment.
Then Deth stepped forward too. She closed her eyes. Her foot touched the bridge—and something sharp danced behind her eyes.
A memory—her grandmother’s voice, humming an old Galeen lullaby.
Gone.
She opened her mouth. No tune came.
She bit her lip and kept walking.
“This is stupid,” she muttered.
“And unnatural,” Hanh agreed.
Then he grinned.
“Let’s keep going.”
Moments on the Wound
Halfway across, they began to see them—the echoes.
Flickers of their own lives. Deth saw herself in a hundred different poses: hunting wolves, healing villagers, dancing barefoot in a glade that no longer existed.
“It’s showing me choices,” she whispered. “Ones I could’ve made.”
“Be careful,” Hanh warned. “They’re bait.”
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t want to look away.”
Hanh saw other things.
He saw himself younger, angrier. He saw himself crowned in shadows, standing alone atop a tower made of bones and teeth. He saw Lyra—his tiger, his soulbound familiar—caged, snarling, burning.
He winced. The images vanished like smoke.
Pig Knight simply walked on.
When asked later what he saw, he said:
“Nothin’. Don’t remember. Might’ve been better that way.”
The Memory That Fights Back
Three-quarters across, the Wound pushed harder.
A moment shimmered in front of Deth—brighter, sharper than the others.
She saw a child. Small. Hurt. Holding a broken toy. Her own voice echoed: “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” Then the sound of screams. Fire. Footsteps never returning.
She froze.
“No,” she whispered.
The memory advanced like a ghost.
“You left me.”
“It’s not real,” Hanh called. “That moment isn’t here!”
But Deth didn’t answer. Her hands shook.
Then she whispered a spell.
“Purifying Light.”
A pulse of magic burst from her chest—golden and fierce. The illusion shattered like glass.
She staggered back, pale and furious.
“Don’t ever use that voice against me again,” she snarled—to the Wound, to herself, to the past.
Hanh stepped up beside her.
“You okay?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
A Warning from the Edge
At the end of the bridge, the glass turned to stone. A flat island surrounded by the nothing of un-time. There stood a chapel—cracked, leaning, impossibly tall. Its stained glass shimmered between centuries, each window cycling between scenes: joy, grief, war, birth, nothingness.
In front of it stood a statue.
Or what seemed to be one.
A woman carved in marble, her eyes closed, her hands folded over her chest. But her mouth was slightly open—as if caught mid-sob.
And tears ran down her face.
Real ones.
“Is that the Mourner?” Deth asked.
“No,” Hanh said. “That’s the warning.”
Pig Knight shifted.
“From who?”
“From her.”
Chapter 3: The Clockwork Mourner
The chapel had no door.
Only a jagged mouth of stone where one might’ve been, long ago, when the world still cared about manners. Wind hissed through the opening, dragging dust across the threshold like a warning in a dead language.
The Bastards paused.
“We’re not welcome,” Deth said, hand on her staff.
“Didn’t think we would be,” Hanh replied. “We’re not the sort of people you welcome into sacred places.”
Pig Knight grunted in agreement. His helm shifted ever so slightly—scanning shadows, sniffing the stone for traps or blood.
They stepped inside.
The Inside of Sorrow
The air changed the moment they crossed.
Thicker. Heavier. Like wading into grief with your mouth open.
Inside, the chapel was vast. Vaulted ceilings stretched impossibly high, choked in shadow. The stained-glass windows warped and twitched, their scenes changing with each blink—now a family embracing, now a funeral pyre, now an empty cradle. The pews were broken, stacked haphazardly like barricades against the past.
The altar was cracked straight through.
And floating just above it—arms crossed over her chest, veil trailing like spilled ink—was her.
The Clockwork Mourner.
A woman once, maybe. Now something more. Something bound and broken and remade by time’s cruel hands.
Her dress shimmered like aged silk. Her mask was porcelain and cracked, painted with gold filigree. And from her back, a lattice of bronze gears ticked slowly—pushing time forward with every sigh she didn’t take.
She opened her eyes.
They weren’t eyes.
They were hourglasses turned on their side.
The Warning
“You stand in the Vault of Vanishing Souls,” the Mourner said, voice like a music box dying mid-song.
“You may take what you can carry. But the moment you hold it—you will forget why you came.”“We’ll risk it,” said Hanh.
“Of course you will,” she said. “You are still young enough to think loss is optional.”
She Attacks
No movement. No spell. Just—
Time broke.
The air shimmered and fractured. Suddenly the room was filled with versions of the Mourner—past selves, future selves, grieving selves with weeping mouths and burning hands. They flickered in and out of existence, striking without warning.
Pig Knight roared and swung Sorry in a wide arc. He cleaved through two illusions—only to be stabbed in the back by a third.
He grunted and turned. Nothing was there.
“She’s fighting across seconds,” Hanh growled, flinging a sigil into the air. Purple runes burst in midair, forming a shield around Deth just in time to deflect a blade of frozen time.
Deth dropped to one knee.
“I need a moment—”
“That’s what she’s stealing!” Hanh shouted.
Deth’s Spell
Deth’s hands glowed.
“Radiant Burst!”
A column of golden light exploded from her chest, radiating outward in waves. Not fire. Not force.
Healing.
The kind of healing that didn’t just seal wounds—it reclaimed time.
Pig Knight stood straighter. Hanh’s cracked staff mended. Even the room held still for a breath.
And in that breath, they saw the real Mourner.
Floating. Crying. Alone.
A glowing locket pulsed at her throat.
The Soul in the Locket
“Her daughter,” Deth said, quietly. “That’s what she’s guarding.”
The locket was old and worn—its glow soft and warm, like a campfire inside a storm.
Hanh narrowed his eyes.
“She bound the soul to herself. Refused to grieve. So time bent to her will.”
“Can you get it off her?” Deth asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
The Final Push
Pig Knight charged.
He didn’t care about time. Never had. He existed in the now—muscle and instinct and pure, violent loyalty.
“S’not right to keep the dead.” he muttered as he ran. “Not like this.”
He leapt.
The Mourner screamed.
And for a moment—just a moment—she was only a mother trying to hold on.
Too late.
Pig Knight brought his cleaver down—not on her—
—on the locket.
It shattered.
Silence
Everything stopped.
The illusions faded.
The chapel groaned, as if letting out a breath it had been holding for a century.
The Mourner fell to her knees.
No magic. No mask. Just a woman now.
In the air above her, a shimmer of light appeared.
A child. Eyes closed. Peaceful. Smiling.
“Thank you,” the soul whispered.
And vanished.
The Collapse
The chapel began to crack.
Stone peeled away into dust. Glass exploded into clouds of forgotten names. The Bastards ran—not out of fear, but because they’d seen enough collapsing temples to know when a good exit beat a heroic death.
They crossed the threshold just as the Vault fell behind them—its entrance erased like it had never been.
The Cost
They stood in silence at the edge of the Wound.
The bridge was gone.
The world was quiet.
“What do you remember?” Deth asked.
Pig Knight frowned.
“There was a song. I don’t… know the words.”
“There was a soul,” Hanh said. “Someone’s daughter. I… think I loved her. Or maybe mourned her.”
“There was a vault,” Deth whispered. “But not anymore.”
Hanh looked down.
On his palm was a scar—in the shape of a broken hourglass.
The Calling Card
They didn’t speak again until night.
Back at the Gasping Fang—rebuilt now, somehow different—they carved a message into the wall near their old booth.
A simple sigil. Their mark.
“A Bastard Was Here.
The world’s a bit safer.
But also slightly not.”
The Vault of Vanishing Souls
Chapter 4: We Were Never Here
The chapel was gone.
Not destroyed—erased. As if it had never been built. As if no stone had ever touched that patch of earth. As if the vault, the mourning, the soul, the battle, and the pain… were all just a dream folded between seconds.
Only the three Bastards remained.
And a scar on Hanh’s palm.
What’s Left Behind
They stood at the edge of where the Wound had been.
Now there was nothing. Not even sky. Just the memory of something once real—like the scent of fire after it’s gone out.
Pig Knight scratched his helm.
“Where we go now?”
“Good question,” Hanh murmured.
“Do you remember what we did?” Deth asked.
“Not all of it,” Hanh admitted. “Fragments. Feelings. There was… someone in pain. Someone we helped. I think.”
“I remember swinging hard at something that cried like a clock,” Pig Knight offered. “And then something smiled.”
“Could’ve been you,” Hanh said.
Pig Knight didn’t laugh. But he looked like he almost did.
The Price of Undoing
They walked.
The world stitched itself slowly back together around them—stars returning like they’d forgotten their place, winds beginning to whisper again. But everything felt… a little off.
Like reality had hiccuped.
At a fork in the road, they passed a weathered signpost. It bore three names:
– Clovenroot
– Scarn Hollow
– Velthorn’s Gate
Hanh frowned.
“Those names weren’t here before.”
“How do you know?” Deth asked.
“Because Velthorn is the name I forgot,” he said quietly. “I think that’s what I took from the Vault.”
She looked at him.
“You brought back a name?”
“Mine,” he said. “Or someone else’s. I’m not sure yet.”
He didn’t touch the sign. Just stared at it for a long while.
The Fang Again
Eventually, as things always do, the Bastards found themselves back at The Gasping Fang.
Except it wasn’t.
Same bones. Same crooked wood. But the bar was newer. Cleaner. The air less haunted. The blindfolded barkeep was gone, replaced by a silent woman with one eye and three shadows.
They took their old booth.
The table was different. Untouched. Like they’d never sat there at all.
No scratches. No stains. No signs of a cursed, bleeding map ever having pulsed in that corner.
Deth tapped her knuckle on the wood.
“Feels wrong.”
“Because it is,” Hanh said.
He pulled a knife from his belt—short, sharp, enchanted with forget-me-not runes—and carved their mark into the table:
A Bastard Was Here.
The world’s a bit safer.
But also slightly not.
The Final Scar
As they drank—silently, slowly—Hanh studied his palm again.
The scar had changed.
Now it wasn’t just an hourglass.
It was open.
Like time wasn’t sealed anymore.
Like it could be walked through.
“You okay?” Deth asked.
“No,” Hanh said.
Then he smiled.
“But I feel more real than I did yesterday.”
Pig Knight downed his mug in one go.
“So. What next?”
Deth stretched.
“We sleep. We breathe. Then we find the next impossible thing and try to make it slightly worse by helping.”
“Aye,” Pig Knight nodded. “That’s the Bastard way.”
Epilogue: The Forgotten Smile
Somewhere—nowhere—the soul of a girl once trapped in a locket drifts through the seams of the universe.
She hums.
And somewhere nearby, a tree blooms early.
A mother dreams of peace.
A coin lands on its edge.
And no one knows why.
