Varsyx, the Warden of Whispered Accusations

The Summons

The brass streets of Malfeas's outer rings hummed with their usual discordant rhythm - the screams of tortured metal, the babbling prayers of demon-cults, the wet tearing sounds of things being born in the fleshworks. Stelsor walked among them, his caste mark still an unfamiliar weight on his brow even after months of bearing it.

The message had come through official channels - a First Circle courier demon with a voice like grinding glass: "The Warden of Whispered Accusations requests your presence. Come to the edge where brass meets sand. Come alone."

No mention of Wadine. No indication she'd be there. That itself was unusual - his mentor typically accompanied him to any official meetings with Cecelyne's hierarchy.

The transition was abrupt, as all things were in Hell. One moment: towers of green-black brass spiraling into the sulfurous sky, their surfaces carved with screaming faces. The next: nothing. The Endless Desert stretched before him, silver sands reflecting Ligier's green radiance in a way that made his eyes water. The silence was worse than the noise - Cecelyne's domain swallowed sound like a throat swallowing water.

He stood at the boundary, one foot on brass, one hovering over sand, unsure if crossing constituted some formal declaration.

The sand moved first. Not wind-driven, but deliberately. Grains flowing upward in defiance of gravity, forming a column, a pillar, a shape that hurt to perceive directly. The pillar became a mouth - vast, lightless, ringed with crystallized salt like teeth. The mouth breathed, and the exhalation carried the scent of buried things, forgotten things, things that should have stayed hidden.

Mohl did not so much appear as disclose himself. The cavern had always been there, Stelsor realized with creeping horror. He had been standing at its entrance all along, only now permitted to see it.

The darkness within was not absence of light but presence of concealment - an active, hungry thing that existed to hide. Stelsor understood with sick certainty that this was where secrets came to be stored. This was where authentic things were cataloged and claimed. This was the treasury of erosion itself.

The mouth spoke, and its voice was the whisper of sand through cracks, the slow forgetting of principles once held dear:

"The newest blade. So certain of your edge. So sure of your loyalties. We shall see what remains when the wind has had its years with you." Stelsor felt his throat go dust-dry. He wanted to respond but found no words.

"My Warden comes. She who accounts for ingress and egress, she who catalogs what enters. She who remembers what all others forget. You will answer her questions, little blade. You will answer them truly. We always know when you lie - we taste the difference."

From the cavern's throat, something emerged. Not walking, but manifesting - as if she had always been there in the space between seeing and understanding, and only now chose to be perceived.

Varsyx, the Warden of Whispered Accusations was tall in the way that distance is tall - you could not quite judge her scale. She seemed to recede as you looked at her, always slightly further than your eyes reported. Her form was wrapped in tattered blindfolds, layer upon layer of filthy silk that had once been white, now stained with rust and salt and things that might have been tears. They trailed behind her like the trains of execution shrouds, dragging through the sand with a sound like fingernails on paper.

Her ears were wrong - grotesquely oversized, with too many curves and whorls, like nautilus shells grown from malfean brassy flesh. They swiveled independently, tracking sounds that didn't exist yet, listening to confessions not yet spoken.

She moved with the careful precision of someone navigating by senses other than sight, her blindfolded head cocked at an angle that suggested she was listening to something inside Stelsor rather than around him. The trailing blindfolds moved of their own accord, their tattered ends lifting and tasting the air like serpents' tongues.

When she spoke, her voice had the quality of a confession extracted after three days without sleep - quiet, resigned, devastatingly honest:

"Stelsor. Called the Bladed Tornado. Nadir Caste. Exalted seventeen months ago. You wonder why I have summoned you. You wonder if you have done something wrong. You wonder where your mentor is."

Each statement fell like a stone into still water. She knew his thoughts. She had always known.

"Your mentor. Wadine. The Ascendant. Cecelyne's 'faithful' servant." The blindfolded head tilted slightly. "When did you last see her?"

Stelsor's mind raced. Two weeks? Three? Time moved strangely in Malfeas, and Wadine often had business that took her away. "I... perhaps two weeks ago. She said she had matters to attend to in—"

"Forty-seven days." Varsyx's voice cut through his estimation like a blade through silk. "Forty-seven days since she provided a report to the Endless Desert's archives. Sixty-three days since her last meaningful contribution. Her patterns have... changed."

The trailing blindfolds lifted higher, their tips writing in the sand around Stelsor's feet. Cuneiform script appeared, writing itself in languages he half-recognized:

"You are her student," Varsyx continued. "You know her movements. Her habits. Her associates. Her hiding places." A pause, the oversized ears swiveling to catch his heartbeat's acceleration. "You will find her. You will learn where she has been. You will discover why she has become... unreliable."

"I don't understand," Stelsor managed. "Wadine serves Cecelyne faithfully. She's been my mentor, she—"

"She has been many things." The blindfolds rustled like dry leaves. "What she is now remains to be determined. That is why you will find her. That is why you will bring us answers."

Behind Varsyx, Mohl's vast cavern-mouth breathed again. The exhalation carried images - fragments of Wadine's face, her voice, her words, all cataloged and stored in that lightless treasury. Stelsor saw glimpses of reports he'd never read, conversations he'd never heard, a vast intelligence apparatus he'd never imagined.

"I listen," Varsyx said, her blindfolded face turning fully toward him now. "Everything speaks, if you know how to hear it. The sand remembers footsteps. The brass recalls blood. The air tastes fears and whispers them to me. But your mentor..." The head tilted again, ears straining as if listening to something very far away. "Your mentor has learned to be quiet. Too quiet. Suspiciously quiet."

"What if she's simply been busy? What if—"

"Then you will find her and she will explain." Varsyx took a step closer, and Stelsor saw now that the sand beneath her feet didn't settle normally - it crystallized where she walked, forming a momentary record of her passage before crumbling to dust. "This is not punishment, Bladed Tornado. This is opportunity. Prove your loyalty. Prove hers. Find Wadine. Learn her secrets. Report them faithfully."

The blindfolded head came very close now, and Stelsor could smell old silk and older secrets, the scent of confessions and betrayals cataloged over centuries.

"And if you cannot find her..." Varsyx's whisper was intimate, terrible. "Then perhaps we will need to ask your other associates. The Sidereal girl, for instance. Seline. Assistant Chief of the Division of Secrets. I wonder what she knows about your mentor's whereabouts. I wonder what she might tell us, if we asked... persistently."

The threat hung in the air like smoke.

"You have questions," Varsyx said, pulling back. "You have doubts. You wonder if you can refuse. Those thoughts are recorded now. Added to your file. Cross-referenced with your known associates." The trailing blindfolds wrote faster, script appearing and disappearing in the sand. "You will begin immediately. You will report progress weekly. You will not share this task with your Circle of Exalts - their involvement would complicate matters unnecessarily."

"And if I find her and there's nothing wrong? If she's been faithful all along?"

The blindfolded face turned away, as if losing interest. "Then we will celebrate her loyalty together. We will add that celebration to the archives. We will remember it forever." A pause. "But if she has been compromised... if she has forgotten her place... if she has betrayed the Endless Desert..."

The sentence hung unfinished, but Mohl's cavern-mouth breathed one more time, and in that exhalation Stelsor heard the sound of something being buried alive, something being forgotten deliberately, something being erased from all records except the ones kept in lightless places.

"You are dismissed," Varsyx said, already receding back toward the cavern. "Find her. Or we will find her for you, and you will not like how we ask our questions."

She vanished into Mohl's throat, the blindfolds trailing after her like accusatory fingers. The great mouth closed - or perhaps simply stopped disclosing itself. The desert was empty again, innocent and endless and patient.

Stelsor stood alone at the boundary between brass and sand, his heart hammering, his mind racing. He needed to find Wadine. He needed to warn her. He needed to tell someone - Seline, the Circle, anyone.

But the sand around his feet still bore the crystallized marks of Varsyx's writing, and he could read his own name there, cross-referenced with Seline's, with his Circle members', with everyone he loved. A catalog of leverage. A map of vulnerabilities.

Everything speaks, she had said. Everything is heard. Everything is remembered.

He was being watched. He had always been watched.

He stepped back onto the brass and began walking back toward the city, knowing that even now, even here, tiny demons with whisper-thin forms were tasting the air around him, cataloging his fear, reporting his thoughts to their mistress.

The hunt had begun. The hunt had never really ended, it was endless, unceasing, it was the hunt in his heart for the things he desired.