thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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The Seventh Bell The fortress changed direction before anyone admitted it was alive. Mira Dain felt the turn through the soles of her boots. A tremor passed beneath the bronze floor of the royal observation deck, too slow for artillery and too deliberate for settling metal. On the horizon, the captured orc stronghold dragged its mountain-sized feet through the valley mud. Towers swayed on the back of the armored beast that carried them. Chains groaned beneath its belly. Every step should have taken it…-
23.4 K • Completed
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The heavy iron links of the auction chain hit the bronze cobblestone with a flat, final sound that silenced the square. Rain from the northern steppes had soaked the canvas awnings, and the air smelled of wet fur, singed charcoal, and the copper tang of old sieges. Mira Dain did not blink against the spray. Her leather engineering coat, stiff with dried mortar and machine grease, was the only clean line in a sea of ragged provincial uniforms. On the raised platform of the surrender court, General Tharos…
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23.4 K • Completed
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The dead ship rang its bell before I saw it. One note crossed the Nattr sea through fog so thick it erased the horizon. It was not loud. It did not need to be. The sound entered through my rib-gills and settled behind my lungs, cold as a hook. Every sailor on the Mercy of Salt froze. “Again,” I said. No one answered. The living knew better than to invite a second call from a bell that had no tower. I stood at the bow with snow gathering in my hair and watched the water. The fjord had narrowed…-
24.1 K • Completed
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The rigging strikes like a starved viper. A thick, tar-soaked halyard whips out of the black snowstorm, snapping around my left ankle. It yanks me backward, hauling my weight off the frozen timber of the galleon’s hull. The black, churning waters of the Nattr sea roar fifty feet below me, hungry for a body. I dig my claws into the frost-slicked wood of the gunwale, the keratin tearing against the ice. My muscles scream. The rope tightens, pulling with the mechanical, relentless force of a ship that…
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24.1 K • Completed
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I drag my body across the threshold. The heavy oak door slams shut behind me, severing the howl of the blizzard with the finality of a falling guillotine. The silence that replaces it is absolute, heavy, and ringing. I collapse onto the dry wooden floorboards, my chest heaving, my claws scraping against the grain. The cold does not follow me in. I lie there for a long moment, waiting for the ice to creep up my legs, for the rigging to shatter the door and drag me back into the frozen fjord. Nothing…
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24.1 K • Completed
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"I did," Soren whispers, the words tearing out of his newly mortal throat. "But not like this." The heavy parchment trembles in his hand. The blood-red wax of the seal seems to catch the dim, ambient light of the whale-bone chapel, glowing like a fresh wound. I stare at the jagged signature at the bottom of the sinking order. His signature. The man who just laid me bare on the floorboards, whose sweat is still drying on my skin, whose frantic, living heartbeat is still echoing in my…
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24.1 K • Completed
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My scream shatters the world. I do not use the soft, alluring melody of the surface myths. I weaponize the deepest, most violent frequency my biology can produce. The raw sonar blast tears out of my throat, a shockwave of concentrated, agonizing blue light that strikes the cavernous ring of muscle deep inside the leviathan’s gullet. The beast’s flesh ruptures. A deafening, unearthly shriek vibrates up the monster’s throat, hitting the galleon with the physical force of a cannon volley. The massive,…
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24.1 K • Completed
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Soren stares at his mortal hands. The flush of living blood beneath his skin, the frantic, heavy thud of his resurrected heart—moments ago, they were miracles. Now, they are a grotesque inheritance. The dust in the chapel has settled, erasing the phantom projection of the locked holds, but the horror remains suspended in the dead, stale air between us. He did not kill a tyrant. He drowned his own men alongside hundreds of refugees to cover a political lie. The silence stretches, taut and agonizing. I…
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24.1 K • Completed
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The ticking is not a sound. It is a biological tremor, sharp and frantic, vibrating through the heavy leather of the satchel at my hip. I stare up at the mountain of black ice, my vision blurring at the edges. Without the bioluminescent sacs in my throat, the Nattr sea is a suffocating, impenetrable void. The ambient, comforting map of silver soundwaves that used to guide my every step in the dark is gone. My throat feels like a hollowed-out cavern of scorched earth, the dead tissue throbbing with a dull,…
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24.1 K • Completed
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The silence inside the Cathedral Galleon is a crushing, physical weight. Thousands of shattered glass vials litter the frost-choked floorboards, gleaming like broken diamonds in the dim, bruised yellow light filtering through the stained glass above. The swirling crimson mist—the harvested hours of the tide—has vanished, entirely absorbed into the towering, broad-shouldered man standing in the center of the cargo hold. Soren Varg stares at his own hands. The heavy, living muscle of his forearms…
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24.1 K • Completed
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