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Oryn

1.1.1

Volume One: Kallista
West Belvane Arc

I. Foggy View

The rope should have held.

It was a simple three-loop knot; a standard anchor for a localised vibration dig. Oryn could tie it in his sleep.

It was the kind of knot that had defined the Trace Line since they were boys in the silt. But as the vibration pulsing from Tovan’s spell shook the earth, Oryn’s right hand – his working hand – was stiff and unresponsive. His thumb didn’t twitch. His fingers felt like pieces of wood. 

The knot slipped.

The relic hissed back into the dust.

Oryn sighed and kicked the rock in front of him. He regretted it instantly and swore loudly.

Tovan didn’t immediately react. He gave Oryn a moment to breathe.

Then he asked, “You alright, boss?”

His voice was distinguishably deep, and it still felt odd to hear the man ten years his senior call him boss.

Oryn looked up. Tovan was skinny and bald and his gear always looked two sizes too big for him, but Oryn had never seen a finer sifter.

“Fine, I just -”

Oryn struggled for the words to say. He remembered the flash, the shock, the dread.

He forced the memory down.

“Think I’ve caught a bug or something. Tell Koda I’m gonna head off and see Foggy.”

“Something you ate?” Tovan asked, curiously, probably because it was the first time Oryn had left a dig part-way due to sickness.

“Maybe,” Oryn grunted, and heaved himself up onto the lip of the hole and pulled himself out of it, his left arm doing most of the work.

“I’ll just carry on then – but it’ll take twice as long without you.” Tovan called from the pit.

“Do what you can.” Oryn mumbled as he walked away, cradling his hand.

It was fortunate, Oryn supposed, that Foggy just so happened to be home, because before his arrival back to the village last week, he hadn’t seen him for eight months. And he needed to deal with this now, because he could not pretend to Cassa for another night that nothing was wrong.

The village of Siv lay ahead, a smudge of grey and brown against the pale horizon of the Vanean scrub, hanging on to the edge of the continent. It was a place of high-piled stacks and deep-cut pits. 

The name of the village, named by some long forgotten ancestor, meant the Sieve—the place where the world’s secrets were shaken out of the dirt. To Oryn, it was just home: a collection of timber-framed hovels and stone-stacked huts that smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke. A humble living, but a comfortable one. Although he was indeed the modern day equivalent of the personification of the place.

He walked the narrow, rutted paths that served as streets. Siv wasn’t designed; it was accumulated. Houses were built on top of older foundations that Oryn’s grandfather had likely dug out himself. Children with dirt-streaked faces played by the small ponds skipping stones. They stopped to watch him, recognizing The Digging Man, but Oryn didn’t have a nod for them today.

The numbness in his hand had turned into a searing, internal fire. He was desperate to pull the glove off, but he kept his arm stiff at his side as he reached the outskirts of the village.

Foggy’s place sat on a ridge where the village began to fray into the forest. It was a lopsided structure of salvage and stone, looking more like a warehouse for junk than a home. It was the only house in Siv that didn’t have a porch for drying laundry; instead, the front yard was littered with rusted gears, shattered glass, and copper wire.

Oryn didn’t knock. 

The air was thick with the smell of old parchment and, bizarrely, vinegar. Oryn longed for the dusty breeze he was consuming outside.

Foggy was hunched over a workbench, a magnifying lens strapped to his head with a fraying leather cord. He wasn’t a “professor” in the way the academies in Kestos would define it—he didn’t wear robes, and his fingernails were permanently stained with ink and grease. But Foggy knew things most men didn’t even know they should know.

“You’re walking like a man carrying a live coal in his pocket, Oryn,” Foggy said without looking up. He was using a needle to clean a tiny, intricate relic. “I heard Tovan’s vibration-spells stop ten minutes ago. Either you found something big and couldn’t wait to tell me, or you’ve finally realized that hand is rotting.”

Oryn stopped in the doorway, his palm pooling with sweat inside the leather. 

“How did you—”

“I’ve spent too many months watching the way people try to hide their deaths in Kestos to miss the signs,” Foggy interrupted, finally pushing the lens up onto his forehead. His eyes were sharp, far too bright for a man of his age. “Close the door. Bolt it. And take off that damn glove.”

Oryn did as he was told. As he removed the glove, he sighed in relief as the cold air hit it, even if the blue glow was more prominent in this dimly lit room.

“So, I was right in thinking I am dying?”

Foggy took the lens off his head and placed it on his desk.

“Well, we’re all dying, my friend, at some rate or another. I must ask, if you did indeed think you were dying, why are you only coming to me now?”

Oryn sighed, “At first, I thought I could handle it. I’ve dealt with curses before as you know. But yesterday, something just felt off. And today… today I just knew something was wrong.”

Foggy nodded and grimaced apologetically.

“You have good instincts. Blue curses are never good. Blue curses, more often than not, mean death.”

© 2026 Rhys Clark. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, including scraping for AI training or large language models, without the prior written permission of the author.