The Fallen Monastery

The Fallen Monastery

silence and ashes

The Fallen Monastery squats in the heart of the Queen of Ash’s domain, a ruin of soot-stained stone and collapsed cloisters buried under a constant drift of gray snow. Once it was a beacon of discipline and devotion, but its bells have not rung in an age, and the air itself seems to hold its breath. Every surface bears the blackened fingerprints of fire—walls melted into glass, icons erased to featureless slag.

Its halls are patrolled by the Ashen Veil, monk-assassins who move like smoke and strike like memory—silent, without heartbeat or heat. Their flesh is pale as dust and their eyes glow faintly with cinders when they hunt. They carry curved blades of burnt obsidian that drink sound instead of blood. When a trespasser falls, even the echo of their last breath is swallowed into the quiet.

At the monastery’s center lies the Ash Garden, a courtyard where the Queen of Ash once knelt amid the ruin of her faith. The ground there is still soft with the ashes of the monks who refused to kneel before her coronation. Beneath it all, whispered in the deep chambers where the fire never reached, something sleeps—a relic or a curse whose heartbeat is the only sound that stirs the dust.