The Birth of a Hunter

The Present Day

In the Shattered Dominion, where the bones of dead empires lay half-swallowed by mist and rot, there existed an order spoken of only in half-whispered oaths and fevered prayers: the Silent Veil. They did not sit in gilded halls or ride beneath banners in the open light. Their sanctums were carved into the hidden underbelly of Alyndor—the once-great capital whose shining spires masked a labyrinth of tunnels, ossuaries, and forgotten vaults beneath. Down there, beneath the cobblestones and marble plazas, the air tasted of dust, candle smoke, and old blood. That was where the Veil watched the world from the shadows, waiting for the dead to stir.

The Silent Veil were Soul Hunters—elite, relentless, and utterly unmoored from the comforts of ordinary life. Where other orders dealt in laws, treaties, or coin, the Veil trafficked in something far more dangerous: anguished spirits twisted by grief, vengeance, and the residue of old gods. These were not the gentle dead remembered in prayers and songs. These were souls that had clung too long to the world, festering in the dark corners of ruined battlefields, plague-struck cities, and cursed shrines. Left unchecked, they birthed horrors—wraiths that ate memory, phantoms that hollowed men from within, revenants that dragged entire villages into madness. The Silent Veil’s creed was simple: no such soul may wander free.

Among these hunters there was one name the others did not care to speak after dusk, a name that echoed through tavern rumors and frightened campfire tales: Gideon Thorne—called by some the Cursed Hunter, by others the Lantern-Bearer, and by a few who knew what his eyes had seen, the Man Who Does Not Sleep.

Gideon’s story—as it is told in this age—did not begin in Alyndor, nor in any place touched by comfort or certainty. It began in Blightmoor Marsh, where the land itself lay in a permanent state of slow, ugly decay. The soil there was black and slick, choked with pallid reeds and the sunken remains of forgotten roads. The sky rarely knew true daylight—only a bruised crimson that bled along the horizon, as though the heavens themselves carried an old wound that wouldn’t close. The air reeked of stagnant water and something older beneath it, a sour tang of long-rotted things. Children in safer lands were warned that if they misbehaved, they’d be sent to Blightmoor; the truth was, most who stepped into that mire never returned at all.

Gideon had come to that place as a hunter of the Silent Veil, not as a son of its mud and ruin. Whatever nameless village or forgotten quarter had birthed him lay far behind, swallowed by years and distance. What mattered now was the work—the long, lonely crossing of the Dominion as a Soul Hunter, following rumors of hauntings the way other men followed trade routes. In an age when his kind had once been near-immortal warriors and were now little more than shadows in old stories, he remained stubbornly, brutally alive. Fever, hunger, blight-sickness, the cold—none of it took him. The marsh tried to swallow him, like it did everything else, and he refused to be swallowed.

As he grew, Gideon wandered the Dominion as a blade for hire, a lone hunter walking roads no sane men traveled. The world he crossed was one where the light of the Astral Tree could still be glimpsed on clear nights, but felt more like an accusation than a blessing. Ruined shrines lay overturned, old pilgrimage routes lay buried beneath ash and moss, and whole regions spoke the names of the gods only to curse them. Gideon moved through it all with the flat, patient focus of a man who had already seen too much and expected worse to come.

The Silent Veil found him rather than the other way around. They watched him survive hunts that should have killed him, watched him stagger back from ruins where the dead shrieked like broken instruments, watched him stand alone in places where spirit storms tore men to screaming shreds. They saw something in the way he stared into the dark—unflinching, tired, and utterly stubborn. When they finally approached him, it was not with pomp or ceremony. A figure cloaked in shadow simply stepped from a fog-drenched alley in a border town and said, “You hear them too, don’t you?” And Gideon, who had never told anyone about the voices that brushed against his thoughts at night, about the cold fingers that seemed to graze the back of his mind whenever he stepped near an unmarked grave, realized that the worst thing he had ever feared about himself was true.

For Gideon Thorne possessed a gift that was no gift at all: he could commune with the spirits of the dead. Not just sense them, as some priests claimed, but truly hear them—ragged whispers, fractured memories, pleas, curses, and the echo of dying breaths. He could feel where they clung to the world, where they refused to let go, where their pain had curdled into something predatory. It was an ability that wore at a man’s sanity like the tide against stone, grinding day after day, year after year. The Silent Veil looked upon that torment and saw power. They did not ask if he wished to wield it. They simply showed him how.

Within the hidden chambers beneath Alyndor, where walls were inscribed with binding sigils and old wards hummed like the buzzing of unseen insects, they taught Gideon to harness his curse. They taught him how to call a spirit by name and chain it with words older than any kingdom. They taught him how to focus its rage, how to bottle its sorrow, how to force it into containment when it refused to pass beyond. And at the center of all this work stood the Veil’s most sacred relic—the Lantern of Arawn.

The Lantern was not some quaint, metal cage for a candle. It was a relic born of darker, earlier ages, when Arawn—Shadow’s Architect, Starborne Wanderer, Patron of Thresholds—had walked beneath a sky not yet cracked by the Shattering of First Flame. Its frame was wrought from a metal that did not rust and bore strange, fine etchings that shifted beneath the eye like constellations rearranging themselves in the night. Its panes were not glass but something like crystallized shadow, shot through with veins of faint, molten orange. When dormant, it hung heavy and cold at Gideon’s hip. When awakened, it radiated a sickly, ethereal glow that painted the world in the colors of old embers and dying stars.

The story told in the deepest vaults whispered that Arawn himself had forged the first lantern with a fragment of the broken Crucible of Fate—a shard of the very engine that once bound destiny into a single coherent stream. That fragment still pulsed at the Lantern’s heart, a splinter of divine machinery trapped in a cage of mortal intent. When souls were drawn into the Lantern of Arawn, they were not merely contained; they were threaded, one by one, into the quiet gravity of that fragment, their howls muffled, their forms dissolved into currents of pale, shivering light. Gideon sometimes felt those currents under his fingers when he gripped the Lantern too tightly, like the pulse of a heart that should not exist.

In the hands of the Silent Veil, the Lantern was both weapon and prison, a portable oubliette for the worst the dead could become. In Gideon’s hands, it became something slightly different. He did not merely capture. He listened. He bargained, in his own grim way, promising restless spirits a place where they could finally stop tearing themselves apart, even if that place was inside a relic that hummed with the residue of a god’s defiance.

But Gideon’s path within the Veil did not end with obedience. He walked their corridors and carried out their work, yes, yet always with a quiet, private purpose smoldering beneath the surface. There was still something he sought, something that had haunted the edges of his thoughts since before the Veil ever found him: Umbra’s Grasp.

Umbra’s Grasp was more myth than steel, a weapon spoken of in the same breath as the Astral Tree and the Crucible of Fate. Some called it the Last Shadowblade, others the Night-Forged Relic. The oldest scraps of lore claimed it had been wrought in the twilight of the First Age, when magic and metal were not separate crafts but a single art—when sorcerer-smiths sang incantations into molten ore and hammered starlight into the folds of their blades. Umbra’s Grasp was said to be one of the last of those creations, tempered in the light of a dying star and cooled in the ink-black blood of something that had never been human.

Its edge, they whispered, could channel the very essence of mana. Not just draw upon it, as lesser artifacts did, but bend it, fracture it, force it to obey. Wielded properly, the sword could silence a spirit with a single cut, cleave through the tether between soul and body, or carve doorways through places where reality thinned. In the wrong hands, it could just as easily unmake. Few agreed on the details, but all the legends held one point in common: no mortal had lifted Umbra’s Grasp in an age. The blade lay sealed, locked behind wards and bindings that required a toll older than coin.

That toll was paid in runes.

Runes, in the Shattered Dominion, were older than currency. They were the residue of power itself—symbols pressed by ancient hands into stone, bone, and metal, each one containing the memory of a pact, a law, or a sacrifice. Over ages, the old meanings had eroded, but the value remained. Some runes were traded like relics, bought and sold by occult collectors. Others were jealously guarded, passed from master to apprentice in hidden cabals. The rarest kind, however, were not carved by any living hand. They were born when a bound soul surrendered its last vestige of resistance and yielded to its imprisonment.

The Lantern of Arawn could make such runes.

When the most potent, most corrupted spirits were dragged screaming into its glow and slowly unraveled by the shard of the Crucible inside, something remained—a mark, burned into the fabric of unseen space. The Silent Veil had long ago learned how to coax those marks into being, how to anchor them into physical form. When the ritual completed, a rune would lie radiating faint heat in the ashes of a consumed haunting—a shard of condensed will, pain, and power. To most of the Veil, they were tools to strengthen wards, reinforce prisons, or fuel rituals of protection.

To Gideon, they were keys.

Every soul he captured, every nightmare entity he forced into the Lantern’s indifferent maw, brought him a step closer to that forbidden blade. The order believed he collected runes to serve their cause, to fortify their hidden halls and keep the Dominion from collapsing entirely under the weight of its own dead. Some part of him almost wished that were all it was.

But as the Lantern of Arawn swung heavy at his side, filled with muffled voices and dim, circling light, Gideon Thorne walked the narrow path between duty and obsession—each bound spirit another turn of the unseen lock that might one day free the sword capable of rewriting the fate of souls themselves.

His journey took him to the outskirts of the Weeping Vale, where even the wind seemed exhausted from mourning. The Silent Veil had marked this place on a brittle, ink-stained map and pressed it into his hand with few words: Griefspire Keep. Grief Wraith. Bind or die. Beyond that, the order had offered only a warning spoken in an old hunter’s cracked voice—It feeds on sorrow, not flesh. Don’t give it yours.

Griefspire Keep rose from the marshland like a broken tooth, its towers collapsed inward, its walls half-swallowed by black water and strangling roots. Once, it had been a border fortress for a long-dead kingdom, its banners visible from miles away. Now, no banner flew. The stone was slick with moss and something darker, and the sky over it sagged in a permanent bruise, lit now and then by pulses of distant, sourceless lightning.

Gideon approached as night leaned fully in, the world around him reduced to silhouettes and the thin, sickly wash of starless gloom. Only one true light cut the dark—the Lantern of Arawn at his side. It swung from his belt with a slow, deliberate weight, its interior glow a pallid, unnatural silver-white that seemed to drink in shadows instead of pushing them away. Each step he took toward the ruined gate made the Lantern’s glow sharpen, thin voices hissing just below the level of hearing. They knew what waited ahead. They always knew.

The outer gate had long ago collapsed, leaving a jagged mouth of stone and iron teeth. He passed beneath it and into a courtyard drowned in silence. Broken statues leaned at strange angles, their features eroded into faceless sorrow. A well at the center yawned open, ringed in faint, blue-laced stone where celestium veins had once been mined and stripped, leaving behind nothing but hollow scars.

He paused, letting his eyes adjust to the rhythm of the Lantern’s glow. The air here was heavier, thick with the rot of old battlefields and the cloying taste of grief. It wasn’t just a smell—it pressed against his lungs, made his chest feel tighter with each breath.

The whispers began as a distant murmur. At first, they sounded like echoes of rain on stone. Then the shapes of words formed—names, pleas, regrets whispered in a dozen tongues. Gideon closed his fingers more tightly around the Lantern’s handle, jaw clenching as one of the voices hissed his name in a tone that did not belong to any living thing.

The Grief Wraith was near.

He crossed the courtyard in measured strides, boots squelching in patches of old mud and ash. The inner doors of the keep had collapsed inward, leaving only a gaping maw of splintered wood and fractured stone. Beyond it, the grand hall waited—a skeleton of its former glory, ribs of broken beams arching overhead.

Inside, darkness was almost complete. Only strands of ghost-light drifted from the high, shattered windows like faded memories. Gideon stepped through, every sense wired sharp. His free hand rested on the hilt of his sword—a long, darkened blade etched with Veil sigils along the fuller, tempered for both steel and spirit.

The sound reached him first.

Not a scream. Not a cry.

Weeping.

Distant at first—a man’s grief, ragged and relentless, echoing off the old stone. It rose and fell without pattern, a wounded sound that seemed to seep from the walls themselves. As Gideon advanced, it grew clearer, more immediate, until the weeping warped into something that sat somewhere between a sob and a growl.

By the time he reached the center of the great hall, the Lantern of Arawn was burning hot in his palm.

There, amid the ruin, it waited.

The Grief Wraith stood with its back turned at the far end of the hall, facing a shattered throne. It was shaped like a man, but wrong in every detail. Rusted armor clung to it in pieces—breastplate collapsed inward like something had punched straight through it, pauldrons bent at grotesque angles, a tattered cloak fused to the metal as though it had grown out of it. Mist bled from the gaps in its armor, pooling around its boots like fog stained with shadow. Its helm, once ornate, was warped and slashed, the visor half-torn away to reveal only darkness beneath.

In its right hand, it held a sword.

The blade was wickedly long and narrow, made of steel so dark it reflected no light. Runes crawled along it in dead languages, dimly pulsing with a faint, malign glow that reminded Gideon of blight-spores and poison clouds. Every time the blade twitched, the Lantern hissed in answer.

Gideon drew his own sword with a quiet rasp, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the vast, empty chamber. A dozen pairs of invisible hands seemed to pull at his thoughts, whispering to him—Turn back. Kneel. Join us. Remember what you have lost. He pushed them aside with practiced brutality. This was what Soul Hunters were trained for: to face sorrow until it broke its teeth on them.

The Wraith turned.

It did not move like a living thing. It pivoted slowly, joints grinding, mist coiling around it like smoke being pulled through water. Where a face should have been, there was only a hollow void within the helm, and deep within that void burned two pinpricks of unnatural light—a pale, washed-out blue that held no warmth, no mercy.

The weeping stopped.

The silence that followed didn’t comfort. It threatened.

The Lantern flared in his hand, the imprisoned souls clawing at the glass, reacting to the proximity of something ancient and twisted. A thin, high whine escaped its seams, like metal under strain.

“Sir Althren of Griefspire,” Gideon said, voice low but steady, recalling the name the Veil’s scrolls had given this creature. “You were once a sworn sword. A guardian. I’m here to end what was done to you.”

The Wraith’s helm tilted, as though hearing a child speak from a great distance.

When it answered, the sound came from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating through the stone, through Gideon’s teeth, through the bones of his forearms.

“There is… no ending,” it said, voice layered with a thousand echoes of its own grief. “Only return. Only remembering.”

The last word stretched out, warping, and as it did, the air in the hall rippled.

The Wraith moved.

One moment it stood at the far end of the chamber. The next, it was half the distance away, crossing the intervening space with a lurching, unnatural slide, cloak snapping in invisible wind. Its sword came up in a low, predatory line.

Gideon reacted on instinct.

He dropped into a forward stance, weight over his front leg, bringing his own blade up in a tight guard. When the Wraith’s sword came down in a diagonal cut meant to split him from shoulder to hip, he pivoted, letting the blow slide off his steel, sparks spraying in a sharp, white arc. The impact shuddered all the way through his arms; the Wraith’s strength was immense, unreal.

He stepped inside the follow-through, twisting his hips and bringing his pommel around in a crushing strike aimed at the Wraith’s helm. The blow connected with a sound like stone cracking underwater. The helm jerked sideways, mist spewing from the gap, but the creature did not stumble. Instead, it turned the movement into a spinning slash, blade singing low across the stones where his legs had been a heartbeat before.

Gideon vaulted back, boots skidding on loose rubble. Every motion was practiced—Silent Veil training made flesh—but this opponent did not adhere to the rules of weight, momentum, flesh. Its movements bent those rules, forcing him to adjust, to adapt mid-strike.

They crashed through the hall in a storm of steel.

Gideon circled, always seeking the flank, using broken pillars as cover, forcing the Wraith to reorient, to expose openings. The Wraith’s strikes were heavy, brutal, born of pure emotion rather than technique—but somewhere beneath that rage, traces of the knight it once had been showed in flashes: a textbook feint, an elegant riposte turned savage, a shield maneuver executed as though the shield were still strapped to its arm.

He ducked beneath a wide horizontal cut that cleaved a stone balustrade in half. Shards exploded around him. Using the debris, he drove forward, boot slamming into a fallen chunk of masonry and sending it crashing toward the Wraith’s knees. It hit, staggered the creature for a breath.

In that moment, he stepped in, sword held in both hands, and drove the point of his blade up beneath the Wraith’s breastplate, aiming for the hollow where a heart might have once beaten.

The steel struck home.

There was a sound like glass cracking under tremendous pressure. Mist exploded outward. The Wraith stiffened, its head snapping back, the ghost-light in its hollow sockets flaring white-hot.

For a heartbeat, Gideon thought he’d done it.

Then the Wraith screamed.

The sound was not human. It wasn’t animal, either. It was the raw, unfiltered wail of an entire kingdom dying at once—children choking on smoke, mothers calling names that would never be answered again, soldiers realizing with sudden clarity that no reinforcements were coming. It blasted through Gideon’s mind, tore at his memories, tried to drag him back into every loss he’d ever endured.

His grip faltered.

The Wraith seized the opening.

Its free hand snapped up with horrifying speed, gauntleted fingers clamping around his sword blade. The metal hissed as the dark runes along the Wraith’s arm burned against it. With an unnatural wrench, it tore the sword out of his hands and flung it aside; the weapon skated across the stone, vanishing into the gloom.

The creature stepped in close, too close.

Gideon went for the dagger at his belt, but the Wraith was faster—its black blade drove forward in a tight thrust, too precise to be random.

He twisted, but not fast enough.

The sword punched clean through his left forearm, midway between wrist and elbow.

For an instant, there was only impact, the shock of metal meeting bone. Then the pain arrived—bright, white, blooming outward in jagged petals. His breath tore from his lungs in a harsh snarl as he stumbled back, impaled arm held aloft by the Wraith’s blade.

Black lines burst from the wound immediately, spiderwebbing up his arm like ink poured into veins. They crawled beneath his skin, branching, splitting, racing toward his shoulder. The flesh around the wound went cold, then burning hot, then numb again in sickening waves.

Blight.

He’d seen it before in others—turned limbs to dead bark, turned minds to ash.

He refused to let it take him.

Gideon used the momentum of his retreat. He threw his weight backward and twisted his body, dragging his pierced arm along the sword’s length. Flesh tore. Blood sprayed, dark and hot, spattering both of them and the stone beneath. With a brutal jerk, he tore himself free, stumbling back and landing hard on one knee.

His left hand was nearly useless now—fingers spasming, forearm a lattice of black veins pulsing beneath the skin. The Lantern at his belt wailed at the scent of his blood, the trapped souls clawing at their prison, sensing weakness, sensing a chance.

The Wraith advanced, slow and inevitable, its blade slick with his blood, the runes along it now glowing a little brighter, as though they’d been fed.

Gideon’s vision flickered at the edges, buzzing with static. Heat crawled up his arm toward his chest, a sick, invasive warmth.

He forced his right hand down to his belt, fingers fumbling past pouches, flint, binding cord—until they found glass.

The vial was small and shaped like a tear, its contents faintly luminous: a swirling, pale liquid that smelled faintly of burnt herbs and starlight. A Silent Veil concoction—anti-blight draught, brewed from the distilled sap of mana-touched roots, powdered celestium glass, and the ashes of a sanctified corpse. They called it Nightstar Tincture. Most hunters only ever drank it once in their lives. Some didn’t live long enough to regret it.

He pulled the cork with his teeth and swallowed the draught in one burning mouthful.

It hit him like a fall from a great height.

His heart slammed against his ribs so hard he thought it might crack bone. Cold fire raced down his throat, spearing into his gut, then surging outward along his veins. For one terrifying instant, it seemed to collide with the spreading blight, and the pain doubled—like the inside of his arm was being ripped apart by two warring storms.

He screamed this time.

Not in fear.

In fury.

The Lantern of Arawn flared, its glass flooding with silver light, voices rising into a ragged chorus as if answering the pain with their own.

The black lines in his arm shuddered, flared, then slowly began to recede, forced back toward the bleeding wound by the invading star-fire. Flesh around the injury knitted just enough to keep his blood inside him. The arm still shook, still burned, but it was his again. His fingers flexed, clumsy but responsive.

The Wraith lunged.

Gideon rolled, snatched up a chunk of broken stone with his good hand, and hurled it into the creature’s helm with brutal force. The rock shattered, but the impact snapped the Wraith’s head aside, buying him a heartbeat.

He used it.

He surged to his feet, legs coiling, body moving on training and fury alone. He dashed toward where his sword had fallen, boots pounding over cracked flagstones. The Wraith followed, gliding in near-silence, blade dragging along the ground, leaving a trail of dead, blackened stone in its wake.

Gideon dropped low, sliding the last few feet, fingers closing around his sword’s hilt. He rolled onto his side just as the Wraith’s blade came down, cleaving through empty air where his skull had been. The stone beneath him split with a thunderous crack, a gouge opening in the floor.

He came up on one knee, turned the motion into an upward cut.

The dark steel of his blade screamed as it met the Wraith’s midsection, slicing through corroded plates and the mist within. The creature staggered back a step, its form flickering, edges blurring as though its grip on reality faltered.

Gideon didn’t let it recover.

He pressed in, sword a relentless blur despite the throbbing in his wounded arm. He aimed for joints, for seams in the armor—throat, underarm, groin—each strike driving more of that strange, star-fed vigor through his limbs. The Wraith countered with wild yet devastating blows, each parry rattling his bones, each close miss sending a chill through his spine, as if the air itself froze around the passing blade.

The fight turned into a vicious, circling duel among the ruins—shards of stone shattering underfoot, twisted banners whispering from above, sparks flying where steel met steel in arcs of silver and black. The Grief Wraith’s howl rose and fell, carrying echoes of every life it had lost, every oath it had broken. It wasn’t just attacking him—it was trying to break his mind, to make him crumble under the weight of its despair.

Gideon refused to carry it.

At last, he found his opening.

The Wraith overextended on a downward strike, its sword slamming into a half-toppled pillar and lodging there for a fraction of a heartbeat. It was enough.

Gideon stepped in past the trapped blade. With a savage, two-handed arc, he brought his sword down on the arm that held it. The cut was clean and brutal. Rusted metal and mist-seared bone parted. The Wraith’s sword arm fell away, dissolving into black vapor before it even hit the floor.

The creature reeled, mist pouring from the open socket of its shoulder. Its remaining hand clawed at him, fingers stretching like shadowy talons, but the movement was slower now, faltering.

Gideon stepped back, breathing hard, chest heaving. His left arm throbbed in time with his heartbeat, but he ignored it.

He dropped his sword point-first into a crack in the floor, freeing his right hand to seize the Lantern of Arawn.

The souls inside it were practically screaming now, their voices like shards of ice in his skull. The glass blazed with silver light, veins of darker power crawling through the glow like ink in milk.

He raised it toward the maimed Wraith.

“Sir Althren of Griefspire,” he said, voice rough but steady. “Your watch is over.”

The Wraith staggered forward, one arm outstretched, helm tilted as if trying to see him more clearly through the fog of its madness. For a fraction of a moment, Gideon saw something in its posture—not rage, not hatred.

Just exhaustion.

He spoke the binding words of the Silent Veil, old phrases carved into his bones during initiation, syllables that tasted like iron and ash on his tongue.

The Lantern answered.

Its light shot out in tendrils—thin, whip-like threads of pale radiance that lashed around the Wraith, wrapping its body in a constricting net. The creature jerked, mist boiling, helm thrown back as another horrible sound tore from its hollow chest—not rage this time, but something closer to a final, broken plea.

The light tightened.

The mist that composed most of its form began to unravel, drawn through the runic filigree of the Lantern’s frame. Armor collapsed inward as though something invisible were devouring it from within. Those pale blue points of light in its helm flared once, twice, then were dragged out in a narrow beam and sucked into the Lantern’s heart.

A final rush of cold swept through the hall, extinguishing every lingering echo.

Then it was done.

Where the Grief Wraith had stood, only a scatter of rusted metal remained, crumbling into dust. The Lantern of Arawn throbbed with new weight in Gideon’s hand, its glow dimming to a steady, haunted pulse. Inside, shadows moved—one more voice adding itself to the chorus, one more torment folded into the Lantern’s insatiable hunger.

Gideon stood there for a long moment, sword still wedged in the stone, breath coming shallow and uneven. His wounded arm ached dully, the black veins now faded to faint, sickly traces beneath the skin. The taste of the tincture lingered in the back of his throat, bitter and metallic.

The keep was silent.

Not peaceful.

Just… empty.

He retrieved his sword, wiped it clean on the tattered remains of a banner, and sheathed it with a quiet, practiced motion. The Lantern hung heavier at his side than it had that morning, every step reminding him of the soul he’d ripped from the ruins.

Outside, beyond Griefspire’s broken walls, the world waited—vast, wounded, filled with horrors that had not yet learned how to lie still.

Somewhere out there, Umbra’s Grasp remained only a shadow in his thoughts—a promise of a power sharp enough to carve paths through gods and ghosts alike.

He adjusted his cloak, tightened the strap of the Lantern at his hip, and walked out of the keep without looking back.