Korveth Durnmar: The Steady Heart
He did not remember when the stone first began to listen to him.
Korveth Durnmar only knew that it had.
He grew beneath the rib-arches of Khor’Mhalok, where the skeletal remains of a fallen Titan curved across the horizon like the bones of a forgotten god. Wind moved through hollowed vertebrae and turned the city into an instrument. Bone-dust storms rolled in slow spirals across the White Dunes. The Ghulvorn Vigil marched in disciplined silence along the ridgelines.
Most who lived on Vael’Thera felt the weight of death in the land.
Korveth felt something else.
Pressure.
Not above him.
Below.
As a child, he would slip from his clan’s quarters and lie flat against the ribbed streets, ear pressed to fossilized ivory. Others heard wind. He heard rhythm.
Three slow beats.
Pause.
Three slow beats again.
He told no one.
The Ossuary Triune did not tolerate rumors of stirring Titans. The Maw Devout whispered of resurrection in ash-lit corners, and that alone had earned exiles.
Korveth kept the rhythm to himself.
Until the bone-quake.
It struck at dusk without warning. Not violent enough to collapse the Bastion towers, but wrong enough to send cracks spidering through lesser districts. Hollowforged sentinels froze mid-step. The Choir of Hollow Voices faltered, their echo-chant slipping out of alignment.
Korveth staggered as the ground shifted.
The rhythm surged.
Not three beats.
Four.
He ran toward the outer rib-ridge where the crack had formed. Ash whipped across his face as citizens fled inward. Vigil guards shouted orders. A fissure yawned in the bone plain, pale light flickering within like a pulse seen through skin.
Korveth dropped into it before fear could catch him.
The air inside was cold and dry. Bone walls curved inward like the inside of a colossal ribcage. Runes etched along the interior flickered faintly, reacting to his proximity.
The rhythm grew louder.
He descended until the tunnel opened into a chamber shaped like a clenched fist.
At its center lay something that did not belong.
Iron.
Not forged.
Grown.
A heart-shaped mass embedded in fossilized bone, threaded with faint red veins that glowed and dimmed in uneven intervals.
The Titan’s heart.
Or what remained of it.
Korveth approached slowly.
The red veins brightened.
The rhythm aligned with his own pulse.
Three beats.
Pause.
Three beats.
He lifted a trembling hand.
“I hear you,” he whispered.
The chamber trembled in response.
Not in rage.
In strain.
Images pressed into his mind, not visions of conquest, not hunger. He felt a battlefield older than language. Chains of light binding something vast. A being torn apart mid-motion and anchored across layered realities to hold something worse at bay.
The Titan had not died.
It had been used.
And now the anchor was weakening.
The red veins flared violently.
Korveth’s instincts screamed to retreat.
Instead, he stepped forward and pressed his palm against the iron heart.
Pain flooded him, heavy, crushing, like gravity thickening around his bones. He felt the Titan’s incomplete rhythm, its attempt to beat against the lattice that pinned it in place.
“You’re not meant to wake,” Korveth gasped. “You’re meant to hold.”
The chamber shook harder.
Above, alarms would be sounding. The Vigil would be mobilizing. The Maw Devout would be whispering that prophecy had begun.
Korveth closed his eyes.
He did not try to silence the heart.
He matched it.
He slowed his breathing.
Three beats.
Pause.
Three beats.
The red veins flickered uncertainly.
He pressed harder, grounding his weight through bone and iron alike.
“Steady,” he murmured. “Not louder. Steady.”
The rhythm faltered.
Then shifted.
The red veins dimmed from frantic glow to deep ember. A faint silver hue threaded through the cracks in the iron mass, replacing chaotic flare with controlled light.
The tremors above lessened.
The chamber exhaled.
The heart did not awaken.
It tempered.
Korveth collapsed to one knee, breath ragged.
The iron beneath his palm cooled.
He felt something change inside him, not possession, not corruption. Alignment.
The rhythm remained, but softer now. Balanced.
When he withdrew his hand, faint filaments of silver traced along his forearm, sinking beneath skin like veins remembering a different song.
The fissure behind him began to seal, bone knitting slowly as if the wound had chosen to close.
Korveth climbed back to the surface.
The ash storm had stilled. Vigil guards stood rigid at the edge of the former crack. Hollowforged sentinels faced him, their rune-cores glowing faintly.
One stepped forward.
It bowed.
Not deeply.
Not ceremonially.
Recognition.
Korveth touched the iron ring at his throat, the heirloom he had always dismissed as superstition.
The rhythm beneath Vael’Thera had not ceased.
But it no longer strained.
The Titan’s heart still beat.
Not in hunger.
Not in resurrection.
In endurance.
And now, when Korveth stood upon the rib-arches at night, ear pressed to fossilized bone, he no longer heard a knock demanding release.
He heard a pulse that answered him back.
Three beats.
Pause.
Three beats.
Steady.
