Preview of The Monk of Thanatos

Well, I’m still sick and trying to catch up on my real job, so I will need to be lazy once again. I should have some time on Friday to write about my trip, but for today, it is another sample. Seeing that I am working on two books at once, I thought I should also send along the first chapter of The Monk of Thanatos, the sequel to The Novice of Thanatos. I’ve come back from vacation with the will (if not the energy, at the moment) to write, and I want to dive full in on one of these projects. I just can’t decide which, I’ve been going back and forth. Here is the sample for Sylvanus from my last post in case you missed it. Suggestions on which book you think I should focus on first would be much appreciated!

Cheers!

The Monk of Thanatos

By Scott Austin Tirrell

Chapter 1

My first taste of Thanatos was pain. It bloomed behind my eyes like rot swelling in the marrow. Each pulse flared to the rhythm of a slow, methodical drip somewhere in the dark—water, or something heavier. I breathed shallow and wet, nostrils sharp with the tang of iron. The air felt old. Not stale, but ancient. Saturated with prayers that had gone unanswered. I don’t know how I could sense such things, but I did, and it was terrifying.

A flicker broke the dark—a candle sputtered at the edge of vision, its weak flame trembling in the void. It cast long, twitching shadows along the damp stone walls. The kind of shadows that didn’t wait to be born from light—they moved with a life of their own. Silent. Curious. Cruel.

My wrists burned.

I tugged. Rope bit deep—coarse, salted twine, knotted tight to the arms of a chair that groaned under the strain. The wood was raw, still smelling of sap. Assembled hastily, not for comfort but containment. A chair meant to break posture, to shame the spine.

I drew breath again past dried blood. Mold filled my lungs. Mold and toil. That smell—not sweat, not filth, but the ghost of it. The scent of fear soaked into stone.

My thoughts reeled, untethered, spinning through shards of memory. Ghost—my horse—charging between headstones in the overcast light, hooves hammering the dead to silence. Brother Throst rising from the mist, arms raised, his voice a rasp of old language that churned the wind. A hand—no, a presence—gripped my chest like frostbitten fingers pulling me back. I hadn’t fallen. I’d been dragged. Suspended. Then dropped. Not to kill, but to incapacitate.

After that, blackness.

I clenched my hands. The rope ground fresh fire into the wounds at my wrists, but I welcomed the sting. Pain proved I was still stitched together. I drew in a steadier breath, let it rattle free. Calm, Mishal. Panic’s a hungry dog—it’ll gnaw the flesh right off your bones if you feed it. Words of wisdom from a friend. What was his name? Damek… Prior Damek.

Something shifted beyond the dark.

A door scraped open. Stone grinding on stone.

My heart caught mid-beat as footsteps—slow, deliberate—echoed toward me from behind. One pair. The sound of authority. Not the kind earned but claimed. The kind that went where the stepper wanted to go.

Then came the robes: a rustling whisper, soft as the dead turning in their crypts. A figure stepped into the candle’s frail light. He was tall, cut sharp from discipline and fasting. His hooded face was half-swallowed in shadow, but what I could see was cruelly angular—cheekbones like razors, a mouth that had forgotten how to soften.

Black robes, rimmed in thread the color of old gold, clung to him like dust to stone. Upon his chest, an inverted torch embroidered in ochre—a symbol I had once longed for but now feared.

“You’re awake,” the man rasped. His voice was a file drawn slowly across steel. “You took quite the fall. Our guardians were eager to collect your soul.” He stepped closer. “But Brother Throst, poor fool, believes in mercy. So, you’re here. Breathing. For now.”

I tried to swallow, but my throat had shriveled in the damp.

He held a leather-bound ledger in one hand, the spine cracked from decades of grim purpose. In the other—a bottle of ink and a quill, thin and cruel like a scalpel. He sat across from me without hurry, opened the book, and dipped the nib.

“I am Inquisitor Malrik.” The title was a blow. “We are here to determine the truth. If I find it—then this will be rather mundane. If I do not…” He looked up, the candlelight catching in his sunken eyes. “Well. We are deep beneath the earth, in a place well accustomed to screams.”

He scraped a flake of dried ink from the nib with a fingernail.

“What is your name?”

I hesitated, tasting dust and dried blood. “Mishal.”

The quill moved in slow, deliberate strokes. He didn’t look down. He wrote while watching me—as though my face might shift, might betray my mouth.

“Origin?”

I blinked. “Gaven Hill… outside Newpost.”

His mouth curled slightly—not a smile, but a fault line in the stillness. “You must know Abbot Sigric, then.”

“Yes.”

“And Prior Damek?”

“He brought me here.”

“And where is he now?”

“Dead.”

“Dead?”

“He fell at the hands of some bandits in the outskirts of Skelside… in the Devilwood.”

“A pity,” Malrik muttered, though he sounded untroubled. “And what brings you to Thanatos, Mishal of Gaven Hill?”

I swallowed. The question was a hammer disguised as a feather. After my experiences at Skelside, I didn’t know who I could trust. I searched for something that wasn’t a lie but wouldn’t damn me either. Something to buy me time.

“I came for sanctuary,” I said. “For training. I have abilities the Order might refine.”

Malrik tilted his head, a breath of amusement escaping him—dry as parchment. “Sanctuary,” he echoed. The word sour on his tongue. “Yet you do not wear our robes. Brown is the color of earth, of humility. You arrive in this—” he gestured, candlelight grazing the red of my sleeves—“color of pomp. The color of kings. And blood. All a warning.”

“It’s what they gave me at Skelside,” I said. “My previous robes were brown, but were rags, torn and soiled in our journey through the Devilwood.”

His voice dropped, slow and deliberate. “Is that right?”

He retrieved something from his sleeve and laid two objects on the table. One clinked metallically—the medallion. The other, dead weight—the cinnabar talisman. Both gleamed in the candle’s reach, and for a moment, the air thickened and I flinched.

The medallion still carried the presence of my friend. Caleb. My shame. My promise. The cursed weight of everything I failed to prevent.

“These were in your possession,” Malrik said. “You brought them into Thanatos. You admit this?”

I nodded slowly. “Yes. But not for harm. I brought them because I needed help.”

He tapped the nib against the ledger. “Explain.”

“The medallion belonged to a monk named Brother Gillis.” The name scraped my tongue raw. “He used it to trap the spirits of novices who died at Skelside. Caleb—my friend—was one of them. I couldn’t leave him there. I promised I’d bring him to Thanatos. I made a vow.”

Malrik’s eyes didn’t blink. “A noble vow, wrapped in sacrilege.” His finger brushed the talisman. “And this?”

“Given to me by a novice named Finley. I thought it was a gift. It wasn’t. He wanted me to use it to force Caleb over the threshold, as a test. I never used it—except in the cemetery, but that was to defend myself. I didn’t realize the path to Thanatos would be guarded by the dead.”

The inquisitor leaned forward, his shadow stretching across the stone table like a second set of robes. “A spirit trap. A talisman for vanquishing the dead. And red-stained robes. These are not tokens of a lost boy, Mishal. The scream of blasphemy.”

My mouth moved before my caution could catch it. “You mean they scream of the Red Cloths, I know.”

Malrik’s gaze cut sharp as glass. “What did you say?”

I knew I had erred, but my damn mouth continued to move. “I’m not one of them. I ran from them. Skelside is—” I forced the words out. “It’s been taken. They’re there. Gillis. Finley. Abbot Reynold. They’re all part of it.”

Silence followed—pregnant, unnatural. Even the candle seemed to pause.

“You claim the monastery at Skelside is compromised?” Malrik’s voice turned low, a blade unsheathed beneath velvet. “That the Red Cloths operate within its walls?”

“It’s the truth. Brother Gillis trapped over twenty spirits in that medallion using the craft he learned from them. And there was someone else—a priest. A Red Cloth priest. He commanded them all, even the abbot.”

Malrik’s quill snapped between his fingers. Something shifted behind his eyes. Doubt. Or memory. Or fear dressed up as anger. He leaned in, his voice a whisper. “A Red Cloth priest? At Skelside?”

“Yes. I saw him. He was as close to me as you are now. He came to inspect me.”

“They step into the light…”

Malrik stood so fast his chair fell. He stalked to the door and cracked it open, hissing to some unseen figure beyond. Another voice, deeper and even harder to decipher in a whisper, responded. Malrik turned to me, jaw tight, perhaps questioning whether he should believe my tale. “You will wait here. Do not speak. Do not move. I’ll be a moment.” He left.

The quickness of the door put out the candle, and I sat alone in the dark for what felt like an hour—no sound but the slow drip of water. I thought of the medallion, its silver veins catching the light like fresh wounds. Caleb. His name pressed like a thumbprint against my ribs.

Then the door opened again.

Malrik lit a reed on the torch in the hall and entered, this time flanked by another man. Older. Broader. A face carved from granite and crowned with silence. His robes were heavier, their embroidery glinting. Authority wreathed him like smoke—quiet, suffocating, impossible to escape.

Malrik spoke first as he relit the candle. “Repeat your story for Grand Inquisitor Tharwin.”

The man said nothing at first. He circled the table, fingers steepled behind his back. When he righted the chair and sat, it was not with the weight of flesh but of judgment.

His voice, when it came, was quiet. Measured. Like a judge reading a sentence already decided.

“Begin.”

I swallowed. “I arrived at Skelside after the Devilwood. Prior Damek died at the hands of bandits a few days’ walk from the walls. My other companion, Caleb, froze in a storm outside the gate, but he did not cross.” I looked down. “I know I should have helped him through the threshold, but I was weak… I was scared to be alone.”

“The dead should never be companions of the living. They will cheat you to ruin.”

I nodded.

“Hmm. Continue.”

“The monks at Skelside took me in. I thought they would help me. Heal me. Send me on to Thanatos. But they didn’t. They said my place was now with them. They said Thanatos had lost its way and that the real truth would be found with them. They locked me in a cell, and then… then they made me study forbidden texts. Varioso, Cabal of Madhorn, Zelig the Seer, and… Ethilopius the Wise.”

Tharwin did not move.

I tried to look him in the eye but couldn’t. “They weren’t loyal to the Order.”

“You speak of them in the past tense,” he said.

“There was a fire. A brother named Simone set it to help me escape. Most, if not all of them, must be dead.”

“Continue. Speak plainly.”

“They kept me confined. I wasn’t allowed to explore, but they tortured the dead. I’m sure of it. They twisted them somehow. Use them for something—I don’t know what. I only survived because Simone betrayed them to save me.”

Malrik stepped closer, but it was Tharwin’s voice that followed.

“This Red Cloth priest. Describe him.”

I shut my eyes. The image came too easily. “Bald. Red robes, darker than blood. A brand on his forehead—the sigil of Eosphorus. His eyes… they were like pits filled with fire. He didn’t speak, but you could feel him—like the weight of a thunderstorm. They all feared him, even Abbot Reynold.”

Malrik glanced at Tharwin. They didn’t speak, but something passed between them.

“Are you certain?” the Grand Inquisitor asked.

“Yes.”

Tharwin rose slowly, as if testing the weight of the truth. “If what you say is accurate, the implications are vast. Skelside is one of our oldest and most prominent monasteries.”

“And close,” added Malrik

Tharwin nodded. “Right under our noses. It would be a wound. A breach. A desecration.”

Malrik folded his arms. “And yet, he came bearing relics, uninvited. Stolen artifacts. He claims too much.”

“I had no choice,” I said. “The medallion… it was Caleb. I couldn’t leave him behind.”

Tharwin’s eyes pierced through me. “Send someone to Skelside, Brother Kelce, perhaps. Quietly. I want this fire verified. I want names. Survivors. Evidence.”

Malrik nodded.

Tharwin turned back to me. “And the Red Cloth priest? What of him?”

“I don’t know if he lived. But something tells me a little fire wouldn’t harm a man like that.’

“No,” Tharwin muttered. “Men like that survive everything but truth.”

He studied me then, as one might a broken blade, wondering if it could still cut.

“You have brought us something dangerous, Mishal. If you speak the truth, you may have saved lives, maybe all of Thanatos. But if you lie, you have buried yourself in a tomb of your own making.” He folded his hands. “Tell me—what are you to us? Asset? Or threat?”

Malrik cleared his throat. “A psychopomp is not so easily discarded.”

Tharwin’s eyes creased. “If we can believe anything that spills from his lips.”

“Then we test him. Let the boy prove his worth. If he fails, we lose nothing. If he survives…”  Malrik didn’t finish the thought.

Tharwin nodded once. “Chamber Thirty-Two should be a worthy test.”

Malrik eyebrows arched. “More like a death sentence.”

“Not for a Psychopomp.” Tharwin turned to Malrik. “We must be sure, no?”

Malrik thought for a moment and nodded.

“If he is who he claims, we will know by dawn. No one has survived longer than that.” Tharwin left without a further word.

Malrik clapped a hand on my shoulder. “On your feet, boy. Time to earn your place in the dark. Oran and Vaylen,” he called. 

Two novices entered the room.

“Bring Mishal to chamber thirty-two. I will be with you momentarily.”