by Deaviant
Some people hear a hum beneath the world and think it's tinnitus. Keldric has heard it his whole life. It isn't a hum, it's voices. The dead, persisting in a layer beneath the ground, in a world that something is eating one cycle at a time. He has never told anyone what he really hears. He has never told anyone about the fire, either. The fire that lives behind his ribs and grows when he is afraid, the fire that burned someone he loved once and could again. So when he leaves his village with the only two people who know what he is, he signs with a guild that asks no questions and takes the contracts other companies don't come back from. They call themselves the Ember Watch — five of them, a family with no blood between them, they are good at the work, and they are reaching, every job, toward the one big contract that will buy them the future they have started to believe they're allowed to want. Against everything Keldric thinks he deserves, for a few years, they are happy. This is the story of how that ends, and of the man the frightened boy becomes when it does.
