Chapter 4: The Thing in the Locket

The bell above the door of ‘Curios & Echoes’ chimed softly as Kaelen stepped back onto the neon-slicked street. The warning from the shop’s proprietor, E. Thorne, echoed in his mind, far louder than the city’s late-night hum. Some echoes don’t just carry a history. They are the history.

He walked half a block in a daze before the familiar, oppressive stillness settled beside him. Death had materialized out of the shadow of a bus stop advertisement, looking as out of place and as perfectly natural as ever.

“Your inquiries were… lengthy,” the cosmic entity stated, his voice a dry rustle of dead leaves. It wasn’t a question.

“Got a lead,” Kaelen said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. The faint silver sigil on his hand felt warm against his skin. “The Pembrooks were amateurs, just like the shop owner said. They found a haunted locket at a flea market and tried to cage it with a fancy box they bought from her. They were too late. The box wasn’t the anchor; it was a failed attempt at a solution.”

Death considered this for a long, silent moment. “A common mortal error,” he finally conceded. “Attempting to solve a fundamental problem with a superficial container. The universe is littered with such follies. It seems your intuition is not entirely useless.” Coming from Death, it was the closest thing to a compliment Kaelen figured he was ever going to get. “We are returning, then.”

Once again, Death found a suitable patch of darkness in a narrow alleyway, and Kaelen braced himself for the nauseating, timeless plunge. They emerged in the quiet of the Pembrooks’ street. The forensics van was gone, leaving only a single patrol car keeping a lonely vigil. The red and blue lights had been silenced, leaving the house cloaked in the quiet anonymity of the suburbs.

Getting back inside was just as unnervingly simple as the first time. The lone officer in the car was engrossed in his phone, his head nodding to music only he could hear. They slipped under the tape and through the front door, ghosts in their own world.

Inside, Kaelen switched on his Sigil-sight. The bruised, teal stain of the Stygian residue still saturated the room, but now he could see it with new understanding. The energy pouring from the silver casket on the mantelpiece was chaotic, a messy overflow like a pot boiling over. It was a shout of panic. But now that he knew what to look for, he could sense something else beneath it: a thin, steady, and far more potent thread of sorrow. A constant, weeping whisper.

He ignored the casket and followed the whisper. It led him away from the living room, down a short hallway lined with more photographs of the smiling family, and into what was clearly the master bedroom. The room was tidy, almost spartan, but the air here was colder, the spectral dampness more profound. The thread of energy led him to a large, mahogany vanity table. On its polished surface sat a beautiful, velvet-lined jewelry box.

Kaelen reached out and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled amongst pearl earrings and gold chains, lay a small, silver locket.

To his normal eyes, it was innocuous. Tarnished with age, it was heart-shaped, with a faded, intricate pattern of ivy leaves etched onto its surface. But to the sight granted by the Sigil, the locket was a vortex. It was a tiny, condensed black hole of misery, pulling the light and warmth from the room into itself. The Stygian residue wasn't just on it; it was emanating from it in slow, inexorable waves. This was the source. The weeping wound.

“This is it,” he breathed, the words forming puffs of condensation in the chilled air. He could feel Death’s presence behind him, a silent, expectant pressure. He was the agent. This was his job. He had to understand what this thing was.

With a shaking hand, he reached into the box. His fingertips brushed against the cold metal.

The moment he touched it, the world ended.

He wasn't in the bedroom anymore. He was standing on a weathered, splintered pier under a sky the color of slate. A relentless, grey wind whipped at his clothes, carrying the scent of salt and decay. Before him, a churning, iron-grey ocean stretched to an unbroken horizon. The waves crashed against the pier’s thick wooden legs with a sound that wasn’t a roar, but a deep, unending sigh of exhaustion.

At the far end of the pier stood a figure. A woman, her back to him, staring out at the endless water. She wore a dress that might have once been blue, now faded and heavy, its hem perpetually dripping into the churning sea below, though it left no ripples. Her dark hair was a tangled mess, plastered to her skin by a phantom dampness.

Kaelen knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that this wasn't a memory he was watching. It was a prison. This grey, sorrowful tableau was the entirety of this being’s existence, playing on a loop for what felt like centuries.

He felt a pang of empathy, a deep-seated ache for her loneliness. He could feel her grief rolling off her in waves, a force as real and powerful as the ocean itself. It was a grief born of waiting. Waiting for a ship that would never return, for a face she would never see again. The loss was so absolute, so all-consuming, that it had curdled, becoming something more than just an emotion. It had become a power. It had become her.

He had to get closer, to understand. He took a cautious step forward, the old wood groaning under his weight. The sound, the first sharp noise in this world of muted sighs, was a mistake.

The woman at the end of the pier went still.

Slowly, agonizingly, she turned. Her face was pale, her features blurred by time and sorrow, but her eyes were shockingly clear. They were the color of the storm-tossed sea, and they were filled with a grief so profound it was indistinguishable from rage. And those eyes, which had been staring at the empty horizon for a century, were now locked directly onto his.

She saw him.

The recognition was instantaneous and terrifying. He was an intruder in her sacred, lonely despair. The air grew impossibly heavy, thick with the pressure of the deep ocean. The sorrowful sigh of the waves deepened into a hungry growl. The woman’s expression shifted, the ancient grief hardening into a cold, possessive need. You are here, her gaze seemed to say. You will not leave me, too.

The phantom water around her began to rise. Not just the sea, but the very air itself grew liquid and heavy. Kaelen felt a crushing weight on his chest, his lungs suddenly fighting for air that wasn't there. The sensation was horribly, sickeningly familiar—it was the feeling of drowning. She wasn’t just grieving; she was a Griever, an entity that drowned the living in the phantom waters of its own bottomless despair.

The world of the pier dissolved into a maelstrom of cold, dark water and silent screaming. Kaelen was violently hurled backward, not through space, but through existence itself.

He landed hard on his back, gasping, his lungs burning as they greedily sucked in the dry, dusty air of the Pembrooks’ bedroom. He scrambled backward, crab-walking away until his back hit the wall. On the floor, where he had dropped it, lay the silver locket. It looked just as it had before—tarnished, old, and deceptively innocent.

But everything had changed. The ambient, sorrowful chill in the room was gone. In its place was a focused, malevolent cold that was aimed directly at him. He was no longer an investigator examining a curious artifact. He had looked into the abyss, and the thing that lived there had looked back.

The Griever now knew it was being hunted. And it knew his face.