Nightblade broken oaths.., p.1
Nightblade (Broken Oaths Book 1), page 1
Nightblade
Broken Oaths, Volume 1
RG Long
Published by Retrovert Books, 2025.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
NIGHTBLADE
First edition. July 11, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 RG Long.
Written by RG Long.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Elyndor
1: The Blood Elm
2: Ash on Her Blade
3: A Ghost’s Signature
4: The Child Witness
5: Silent Threads
6: Rootbound Secrets
7: Voices in the Leaves
8: Whispers Beneath Bark
9: Meeting the Seer
10: The Pact Remembered Act
11: Moss and Memory
12: The Hidden Path
13: City of Glass and Smoke
14: The Price of Shadows
15: A Familiar Coin
16: The Lockborn’s Message
17: Broken Chains
18: The Dreadthief Speaks
19: Dagger and Flame
20: The Dreamroot Accord
21: The Fellmage's Trace
22: The Echo Chamber
23: The Pact Revisited
24: Night and Flame
25: The Vault Opens
26: Serin’s Signal
27: The Poisoner’s Riddle
28: The Priest Who Wept
29: The Chain of Names
30: The Voice Below
31: Serin Arrives
32: The Glyph and the Vow
33: Unwanted Reunion
34: A Blade Remembered
35: The Seer’s Warning
36: Vael Strikes
37: The Mercy Duel
38: Karn’s Hollow Beckons
39: Ghostlight
40: The Chain Fractured
41: Bram’s Vision
42: Root and Shadow
43: The Blade’s True Form
44: The Voice Returns
45: The Oath of Karn
46: The Choice at Dawn
47: The Keeper Named
48: A Chain Reforged
49: The Whisper Stops
50: The First Spark
Dreadthief - Book II
1: Smoke in the Market
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Elyndor
The continent of Elyndor with its five kingdoms:
Vel’Thalas
Caerwyn
Almiras
Dur-Kazir
Stormscar
1: The Blood Elm
Arainless mist clung to the canopy like breath held too long. Above the sleeping forest of Vel’Thalas, Kaelyn perched on a twisted branch of a ghostwood tree, its pale bark slick beneath her boots. Her eyes, sharp as a falcon’s in moonlight, watched the manor below: a sprawl of silverleaf-tiled rooftops, guard towers tucked among flowering vines, and banners bearing the symbol of House Virell justice scales split by a dagger.
She remembered the irony.
The air up here was quiet, unnaturally so. Even the usual chorus of whisper-thrush and nightwings was absent, as though the forest itself held its breath. The Blade of Silence, strapped beneath her cloak, vibrated faintly against her back, as if remembering this place. She could almost hear it hum not in sound, but in her bones.
Her fingers flexed around the hilt of her shortblade, but her gaze was far away.
Below, the courtyard stirred. Two guards passed, boots muffled by moss-covered flagstones. The patrol was sloppy. They didn’t expect death tonight.
She moved.
A whisper through the branches, a pause beneath the hanging lanterns of the treetop walkways. She wore no armor, only layered silks dyed in midnight and coal, her face masked save for those watching eyes.
The manor’s upper balcony was unguarded. She slipped over the railing like fog through a cracked window. Inside, firelight flickered. A half-finished letter lay open on a polished desk, ink still wet.
Lord Elrik Virell. Oathbreaker.
Once a patron of sacred law, he had secretly trafficked relics stripped from forbidden temples. He had sold magic meant to be sealed runes etched in living bone, bottles humming with bound echoes. And now, he would die.
Her blade slid free.
She passed tapestries of justice gods weeping. Empty idols of gold lined the walls, their eyes gouged out. Hypocrisy rotted thick in this place. When she entered the bedchamber, Lord Virell was already awake, a goblet in his hand.
He did not cry out. Did not plead. Just stared.
“Nightblade,” he said, voice dulled by wine and age. “I always thought you were a myth.”
Kaelyn said nothing.
“I suppose I earned this.” He raised the goblet. “But tell me before you end it, does it matter that I begged forgiveness?”
She stepped forward. The Blade of Silence, still sheathed, pulsed against her spine. Her smaller dagger hovered at his throat.
“I only kill those who break their word,” she said.
“I did,” he admitted, and then, quietly, “but I broke it for my daughter. The relic bought her life. The temple magic cured her. What would you have done?”
The edge of her blade kissed his skin.
Then, he whispered something, a name.
A name she had not heard in ten years.
“By the Forgotten Flame, I beg for mercy.”
Her hand froze.
The Blade of Silence flared hot, burning like winter fire through her cloak. The world twisted. The chamber around her warped and stretched, its lines smearing like wet ink.
Suddenly, she stood not in the bedroom, but in a vision.
A crimson sky. A broken tower, spiraling into a pit of stars. Whispers slithered at the edges of her mind, voices not in any mortal tongue.
“The Chain shatters. The echo returns.”
Kaelyn fell to one knee. Pain lanced behind her eyes. The Blade screamed not in sound, but in memory.
And then it was over.
The chamber returned. Virell still sat, eyes wide. Her dagger hand trembled.
He had invoked an oath older than empires.
She stepped back.
“Go,” she said.
He blinked. “What?”
“Run. Hide. Pray she lives long enough to make it worth the cost.”
He scrambled to his feet. She didn’t watch him go. Her fingers closed around the Blade’s hilt instead, drawing it partway. It shimmered with dull runes that had not glowed in a decade.
Kaelyn exhaled sharply and sheathed it again.
A soft chime echoed from the hall beyond the chamber door. Not metal, not wind. A different sort of resonance. Hollow and impossibly old.
Kaelyn stilled, ears straining.
No footsteps followed. No voice called out. Yet something pulled at her senses, that same ripple she had felt in the blade like a bell tolling beneath a lake. Her boots made no sound as she crossed the chamber and slipped back into the hall, following the faint vibration through the manor’s sleeping corridors.
The passage narrowed, curling inward like a burrow, and the air grew cold. Faint carvings lined the walls, almost hidden beneath vines that had grown in through the canopy and cracked stone. They weren’t ornamental. They were glyphs, sealing marks, but warped, dulled with age.
She passed through a rusted archway and found herself in a forgotten shrine.
The room was round, overgrown, lit only by moonlight bleeding through a fractured dome overhead. A tree had grown into the chamber, roots splitting tiles and drinking from the sacred pool at its center. The pool’s surface was still, reflecting not the tree but the sky, though the angle should not have allowed it. No stars. No moon. Only endless red.
Kaelyn stood at its edge; breath caught in her throat.
This was not part of the known estate.
She glanced at the wall behind her. One of the ancient idols was intact here, a goddess with a face lost to erosion, arms outstretched in a gesture of both welcome and warning. Her chest bore a mark that was not worn away, but recently gouged: a spiral of flame, surrounded by an empty circle.
The Forgotten Flame.
Kaelyn stepped back from the pool. The runes on her blade stirred again beneath her cloak. Her pulse beat in time with them.
She had been here before. Not this room, not precisely, but its echo. A vision during the Shattering. Karn’s Hollow had been filled with these glyphs, these twisted sanctums where gods had once whispered their truths and their madness into the bones of the world.
The reflection shifted.
Instead of the tree, a figure now stood in the water’s mirror. A girl, no older than ten, with her hair in tangled braids. Her lips moved, but no sound came. Her eyes were glowing slivers, wide and far too old.
Kaelyn’s hand flew to the Blade’s hilt. The girl in the pool mouthed a final word.
“Keeper.”
Then the image shattered.
The water boiled outward in silence, but nothing touched her. No wetness, no heat. It was vision, not substance.
Still, she staggered back, heart pounding.
She needed to leave.
Kaelyn turned sharply and retraced her steps, moving faster now, more like a hunted thing than a hunter. The corridors felt longer, heavier,
She paused only once, to look over her shoulder.
The glyphs on the walls had begun to glow.
Not bright. Not yet. But enough.
Something was wrong. The Blade was awakening. That name, the Forgotten Flame, was not just a god long lost to prayer. It was tied to Karn’s Hollow, to the Chain, to the thing she and the others had tried to seal.
She had buried it. Moved on. Sworn never to return to that place.
But tonight, something had shifted.
The relic remembered.
And somewhere deep in the rootways of Vel’Thalas, a child began to whisper truths in their sleep. Truths only the Blade of Silence would understand.
Kaelyn stepped out onto the balcony. The mist hadn’t lifted. The forest still held its breath.
But the silence no longer comforted her.
It warned.
2: Ash on Her Blade
Mist curled low around the roots of the sky-trees, silver threads in a sea of green. Kaelyn moved through the fog like a wraith, each step silent on the moss-slick branches. The canopy above Vel’Thalas whispered with wind and birdsong, but beneath the woven arches of root and vine, the forest held its breath.
She had not come here to be found.
The prototype of the Blade of Silence was wrapped in silk-dampened canvas, hidden beneath a hollowed root near her shelter. She had not touched it since Karn’s Hollow. Even wrapped, even buried, it hummed in her bones.
Kaelyn crouched near the edge of the tree bough, eyes scanning the forest floor. Movement below an elk. No danger. Her fingers relaxed on the hilt of the curved dagger at her thigh.
She told herself this exile was safe and that the world had forgotten her. That the murders in Caerwyn of three noblemen, each with their tongues removed and bodies found in sanctified places, were not a summons.
But she had seen the pattern carved into the altar-stone beside the last corpse. A seven-pointed spiral. Her mark, once. And beneath it, a smear of ash too fine for fire.
No ordinary killer would know what that meant.
Kaelyn rose from her crouch and turned away from the edge. Her shelter was a low platform woven into the crook of two skybark limbs, cloaked in vines and old bird-nests. A bow leaned against the wall. A water jug sat half-full beside a pack she hadn’t touched in weeks.
And on the floor, dusted with petals and windblown dirt, was a single black feather. She hadn’t put it there.
Her dagger was out before the thought finished forming.
"Still quiet as snowfall," said a voice behind her. Deep. Familiar. Dangerous.
Kaelyn didn’t turn. "Vael."
He stepped from the shadows like he’d grown from them. Mute to the world, they had called him. But he had never been mute to her. Even now, his mask, obsidian black, carved like a bird’s beak, caught the light in slivers. His cloak stirred without wind.
"You shouldn’t be here," she said. Her voice was steady, but her heart thudded like it had in Karn’s Hollow when the seal cracked and the world screamed.
He said nothing. Only tilted his head, birdlike. Watching her.
"You tracked me. Through the mist, through the deadfall wards. You want the Blade."
He took a step forward.
Her blade flashed out, and suddenly they were motionless, silent, fluid, beautiful. A dance of death on the narrow platform, feet sure on creaking limbs, blades whispering through the air. His curved short sword met her dagger with a hiss. Sparks fell into the forest like fireflies.
Kaelyn twisted, feinted low, and he backed away. Not attacking. Not pressing.
"You're not trying to kill me," she said, breathing harder now. "Why?"
Still, he didn’t speak.
She held her stance, balanced, poised. "You're waiting for me to make a mistake. Or a choice."
From behind the mask, his voice came again, low and edged with something that could have been grief. "You left me there when the seal broke. When the Chain screamed. You left me in that hollow."
"And you lived," she said. "Better than most."
Silence stretched between them like drawn wire.
Vael looked toward the hollow root where the Blade was buried. Then back to her. "They say you’re killing again."
"They lie."
"But they use your mark."
"I never left it in blood."
Finally, he stepped back, sword lowering. He pulled something from his cloak, a slip of parchment. Tossed it at her feet. She picked it up.
It was a drawing. An old symbol, familiar in the way a scar is familiar: a spiral within a blade's edge. The sigil of the Blade of Silence.
Beneath it, a single line.
"Return to Karn’s Hollow. Or the next death is yours."
Her breath caught.
"They sent you to deliver this?" she asked.
Vael gave no answer. But in his stillness, she found the truth. He was not a messenger. He had come to see if she would answer the summons.
She stood over the parchment for a long while after he tossed it.
Its edges curled from damp, the ink already beginning to run where her fingers touched it. The spiral within the blade-edge was etched with elegant precision, too elegant. Whoever had drawn it knew what they were invoking.
She stared at it until her vision blurred, the rain-mist prickling against her cheeks like soft needles. Her grip tightened, then relaxed. She folded the page once, then again, and slid it inside the collar of her tunic.
"You remember the first time I used that mark?" she asked, still not looking at him.
Vael tilted his head. She could almost see the ghost of the boy beneath the mask, though it had been a long time since she allowed herself to remember him that way.
"It was in Thirell’s Hollow," she said. "A debt collector. Beaten too many girls, one too many times. They wanted his death to mean something. So, I carved the spiral into the door behind him. As a warning."
She turned then, studied him in the hush between the canopy winds.
"You said I was too poetic for an assassin."
"I said you were theatrical."
"And you were right." She smiled faintly, without warmth. "But it worked. For a while."
Silence fell again, though this one was less sharp, less heavy like the breath before a confession.
Kaelyn stepped back from the hollow root, her boot sinking slightly into soft moss. She gestured to a vine-wrapped branch that jutted out near the platform’s edge. Without speaking, Vael sat on it, balanced in that always-coiled way of his. Kaelyn sat opposite him, cross-legged on the wooden planks.
“I buried the blade for a reason,” she said, her voice softer now. “I wanted it to stop calling. I thought maybe if I stayed still long enough, it would forget me.”
Vael didn’t speak. But she felt his gaze like a knife through shadow.
“Instead,” she said, “it started to dream.”
She closed her eyes.
“They’re not like normal dreams. No colors. Just sound. Just... pressure. Like something behind a wall, humming. A song without words. Sometimes it echoes with Karn’s Hollow. Sometimes it’s just the scream, over and over. At that moment, the seal broke. That moment, it all came undone.”
A shudder passed through her shoulders, barely visible, but she didn’t try to hide it.
“I used to believe in lines,” she said. “Rules. Sacred contracts. The balance between silence and truth. But we were lied to, Vael. That’s the part I can’t forget. The gods who made those relics? They broke their own oaths. We finished what they didn’t have the courage to.”
He said nothing.
Kaelyn’s eyes opened slowly.
“You were a child when I found you,” she said. “Still bleeding from your rite. Barely knew how to hold a blade. But you listened. You watched. I never had to teach you twice.”
Vael shifted slightly, enough for his cloak to catch a breeze. Still no words.
“You’ve surpassed me. You know that. But you still follow. Why?”
Finally, he spoke. His voice was barely more than a rasp.
"Because you are the only one who left something behind worth protecting."
The words hung in the air between them, brittle and raw.
Kaelyn looked down at her hands. Thin scars crisscrossed the backs of her fingers, like pale runes etched by time. She flexed them slowly, remembering the grip of the Blade, the way its silence resonated through her bones like a heartbeat out of sync with the world.
