The waterlogged corridor breathed like a dying man — long, rattling exhales of cold air that carried the smell of rot and old iron. Kaelen pressed his back against the crumbling archway, his bronze fingers instinctively tightening around his longbow. The flooded elven ruin stretched before them in the torchlight: knee-deep black water reflecting the flames, pale columns reaching toward a collapsed ceiling, moss hanging in grey curtains between the pillars.
“I don’t like how quiet it is,” Zael murmured beside him, her twin daggers already drawn. The human rogue’s dark complexion glistened with sweat despite the chill, her eyes moving fast and low — a habit honed by years in the Underbelly markets of Thornhaven. “Ruins like this don’t go quiet unless something made them quiet.” Behind them, Mira — the stocky dwarf cleric in moon-silver chain mail with short red braids tucked behind her ears — was muttering under her breath. Not a prayer, Kaelen realized. A counting rhyme. She did that when she was afraid. At her shoulder, Draxis ran a thumb along the edge of his obsidian-black staff, violet light pulsing at the tip as the tiefling’s dark purple skin and curved horns gleamed in the torchlight.
“The harp is in the central chamber,” Draxis said, his voice barely above the sound of dripping water. “I can feel it pulling. Whatever enchantment was placed on it is still active. Very much still active.” The Lute of Eternal Sorrows — a fabled artefact said to unmake curses and restore the dead to life — was why they had come. A dying bard in Velgrath’s Last Cup tavern had pressed a crumpled map into Kaelen’s hand three nights ago, whispering the harp’s name with his final breath. They had tracked it here, to these half-submerged ruins that the locals called the Weeping Courts.
They heard her before they saw her. The sound began as a vibration in the sternum — low, sourceless, almost musical. Then it rose, fractured, became something between a scream and a lullaby. Mira’s counting stopped. Draxis went rigid. Zael whispered something that would have earned her a bar of soap in polite company. She came through the far archway as light through broken glass — radiant and wrong, her form flickering between solid and transparent. The Banshee had once been beautiful, that much was clear in the architecture of her grief. Her white hair streamed behind her in a wind that touched nothing else. Her eyes were hollow silver flames. Her mouth was open in that endless, fractured wail — and yet somehow, impossibly, she was looking directly at Kaelen.
“Stop.” The word cut through the wailing like a blade. Kaelen’s hand froze on his bowstring. Draxis lowered his staff a fraction. The Banshee — the spirit that had kept this ruin emptied of the living for eighty years — was not attacking. She was pointing. At the far wall. At the central chamber. At something behind the door. “It waits,” the spirit whispered, and the wailing dropped to a moan that pressed against their ears. “In the harp. It has always waited. For someone like you. For someone who wants.”
Zael moved first, because Zael always moved first. The rogue was halfway to the chamber door before the Banshee’s scream returned — not from anger, Kaelen realized with cold certainty, but from terror. The ancient spirit was afraid. Of the room behind that door. Of what they were about to open. “Zael — stop!” Mira’s warhammer rose. Draxis was already speaking words in Deep Speech, his patron’s power flooding the room with violet shadow. Kaelen nocked an arrow by reflex, tracking the Banshee — but the spirit wasn’t moving toward them. She was retreating. Shrinking back. Gesturing. Pleading. “Don’t free it. I am not your enemy. I never was. I am the lock.”
What followed was not a fight — it was a negotiation at knifepoint, with the negotiator being eighty years of regret trapped in a dead woman’s scream. Draxis translated the fractured ghost-speech as Mira kept her hammer raised and Kaelen’s arrow tracked the sealed door. The Banshee’s name had been Seraphine, court sorceress to the last elven king of these halls. She had died chained to the harp — not by the king’s cruelty, but by her own design. Because inside the harp, coiled around the heart-strings, was something older than the ruin: a Vampire Spawn bound into the instrument by the archmage who had gifted it to the court as a poisoned tribute. Seraphine had discovered the truth too late. Her wail had been a warning — and for eighty years, no one had waited long enough to hear it.
In the end, they did not take the harp. They brought the chamber walls down on it with Draxis’s eldritch fire, Mira’s faith, and Kaelen’s last explosive arrow. Seraphine watched from the corridor, her wailing finally, mercifully, beginning to quiet. When the dust settled and the rumble faded and the water stopped rippling, the Banshee looked smaller than before — not diminished, but relieved. A white flame guttering toward rest. “Thank you,” she said — and this time, her voice held no echo at all. Only tired, ordinary grief. She was gone before the word finished forming. The four of them stood in the settling dust of the Weeping Courts, knee-deep in black water that now, inexplicably, smelled of old wildflowers.
💬 If you’d been in Zael’s place — would you have opened the chamber door? And would you have believed the Banshee before she spoke — or only too late? Tell us below! 👇