The Bones Debt - Part 1 & 2

Two thieves flee through a weird landscape with a grimoire that demands more than blood. The shadow behind them is patient to claim its prize.

Thanks Siobhan Gallagher for the challenge and the story: Red Nails.

The Bones Debt - Part 1

“Quickly.” Corin reached for Rina, who was gagging behind him, without looking back. “We must reach the shrine before sunset.”

“I can’t.” Her exhale became a series of coughs. She missed his hand.

Corin pivoted, rushing to her side. “Come on. Just one more hill.” He tapped her back gently while bracing her arm around his neck. Her hand hooked before his sight—blood had seeped through the cloth, dyeing it red. A price already paid for their greed, but if they stalled here, dire debt would catch up to them.

Rina shook her head. “Just a moment. Please.”

“Alright,” he whispered, dragging her to the nearest vantage point of the warrens. He left her sitting on a rock and scouted the routes before them. The dirt trail wound through the rolling lands before disappearing into the wilted wood, then reappeared again on the far horizon, where a stone bridge split the trails into two directions leading to a hamlet and another wood. Good. They could refill their waterskin. Deep in the second woodland, a tiny sparkle reflected the orange sun hanging just atop the mountain behind it. Soon, the jagged rock would claim the light.

Behind him—he couldn’t dare look back. The thing that had been following them always appeared in a sliver of darkness whenever he looked back, like a black maw catching up from behind, demanding the debt be paid. It understood the geometry of the dark, a nocturnal predator that haunted his mind when rest found him.

Chasing was loud; this thing was intimate, like a ghost in stagnant air.

The warrens’ air grew suddenly wet, and he heard the rhythmic drag of a single palm against the slick stones around them—a sound that possessed the texture of rot and the intent of a closing tomb. The air tasted of brine, cold rust, and the sickening, cloying sweetness of old incense—a smell that had no place deep beneath the earth. Corin shuddered. “We need to move. Now!”

Corin navigated by a desperate instinct imprinted on him lately. He traced old markers—a chalked hand on a rotting signpost, a scratched arrow on a tree trunk—many of which had been deliberately smeared by something that wanted them lost in this rolling expanse before entering the wood. Rina, untutored in this landscape’s cruel geography, kept stumbling. She hit her shoulder against low-hanging branches and plunged her boots into unseen, mud-slicked hollows that hid the path.

The dark claimed their sight as they reached under the canopy of the trees. He could feel her heat burning through her palm and into his. “Wet your mouth.” He gave her his waterskin. “Don’t drink too much.”

“Leave me,” she said between heavy puffs. “I can feel the infection wriggling inside the cut.”

Corin knew it was just the fever imposing weird sensations into her mind, but what they had witnessed two days back denied his logical thinking. “Stop talking nonsense. Water your head,” he commanded, disregarding the sensation twirling inside his own stomach.

At the wood clearing, where the trees formed a wall in a circle and the cloud was red on the rim, the ground sunk beneath his feet. “Do you feel it?” He spread his arms wide, pulling Rina to his left.

“The grimoire!” she shouted. “Get rid of it.”

Absentmindedly, his hand touched the slick leather of the book, tracing the embossing that was both sharp and smooth. The image of a skeletal hand with three fingers emerged in his mind—crooked, twisted, with nails long and pointed. “No! It’s the only way we can get rid of our master.”

Rina dragged him now, taking the lead. He could feel her missing finger and the wriggling bone inside. They circled around the rim of the clearing, stopping beneath a withered oak. “Look!” She pointed at a crude symbol carved into the bark—a hand with only a thumb, index, and middle finger.

He shook his head, mumbling. “Impossible. Another trick.” His fingers hovered over the rough wood, his jaw set in a line of hardened resolve. “It wants to scare us into looking back. That’s how it keeps lingering in our minds.”

She splashed the rest of the water on his face. “Stay awake, brother.”

He nodded, licking his sweat and the droplets of water streaming down the crinkles of his mouth. The wood stood in silence, blanketed by a heavier air of damp, as he found the trail again. “Quickly, we must reach the shrine before sunset,” he said, realizing he had said this before.

This time Rina nodded, as if she had found a second wind, and somehow lent it to him. In that flicker of a moment when he looked back at her, the corner of his eye registered a white flash of movement. He forcibly closed his eyes. “It’s here.”

A rhythmic, sympathetic beat to the tapping of footsteps closed in behind them. He braced himself, his grip iron-hard, pulling her to his speed. As they reached the stone bridge, Rina stumbled. Her hand slipped away and slapped the cobblestone. She screamed; he bit his knuckles, shuddering at the pain he imagined she would feel. Her sound hit the distant hills, spiraled upward, and then abruptly vanished. It was swallowed.

Corin yanked her up. The force tore the cloth off her hand, revealing the raw, blunt stump of a missing finger.

She gritted her teeth in agony and could do nothing but punch his chest twice with her good hand. “You stupid oaf.”

“Shh!” He raised a finger. “The voice is gone. The presence… I feel it no more.”

Rina frowned but didn’t dare look around. She closed her eyes, letting her other senses take charge. “You’re right. But why?”

Corin scanned the stone bridge and the water. Nothing suspicious. Nothing strange. Just the sparkling of the lowering sun and the rustling of fresh water. “We cross and refill.”

On the other side, the dirt trail split, but Corin already knew there was only one way. The presence might have left them for a moment, but it would come back. It always came back. After filling his empty stomach with fresh water, he tore a piece of his shirt for Rina’s wound. Then something glowed under the riverbed—bioluminescent moss that shimmered in the twilight like spilled oil, reflecting a dim, sickly green glow. “Get away from the water!”

Rina tilted her head toward him. Her eyes showed confusion, as if she hadn’t seen the light.

“What?” she asked innocently, her voice thin against the whistling wind.

He yanked her up again. The stream changed before his eyes, forming a water serpent of iridescent color. He bashed his arm in an arc when the serpent struck, but felt nothing.

“Brother!” Rina slapped the back of his head. “Let me carry the grimoire.”

“No!” He jerked back, then realized his actions lately. He could barely separate reality from whatever haunted his head anymore. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s my burden.”

Rina shook her head. “You almost knocked me off the bridge. Share the curse.” She pointed at the leather-bound book. “I need your strength to carry me, not to kill me.”

Corin did not answer. He only stared at the spark of the shrine. The leather-bound cover pulsed beneath his fingertips. He stepped closer to her, wrapping her hand with the fresh cloth. The infection had gotten worse. Red flesh had blackened, leaking thick yellow pus as he pressed it firm. She had a fever. Her mind couldn’t take the grimoire’s power. That he knew. That he was certain of. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”

Rina nodded. Then in her eyes, he saw fear.

He knew what it meant. “Run,” he hissed, his voice a blade in the open air.

They bolted toward the forest edge. Its jagged canopy rose and rose until its entire surrounding became an indigo weld. He kept sprinting, one hand tightly wrenching Rina, the other shoving the book ahead of him. He watched, horrified, as the heavy tome slid through the thick, sucking mud on its own—as if it had an appointment with the thing waiting at the end of the line.

They scrambled into a narrow gap between two monoliths, a space so tight that only one could slide through at a time. The pillars were not stone alone. They were tangled with a mass of blackened vines and pulsating, resinous wood that felt unnervingly warm. Behind them, the tapping pursued. Bone on bone—fingertips clicking against a skull—growing louder with every stride.

They emerged into a clearing where the air felt dead, as if the landscape itself were starving. A triangular structure that should have been the shrine stood solitary amidst the ruins, covered in melted handprints—some whole, some missing fingers, all of them impressions of hands that had stopped living long ago.

Behind them, the tapping grew deafening, rhythmic, and final.

He looked at the dark path they had carved through the woods, then at the shrine’s bronze door. The grimoire came alive. Three fingers grabbed his hand, holding both aloft. The tome snapped open, pages fluttering in an unfelt wind. A voice came, hiding under the rustling of leaves.

The debt that walks must be paid in the chamber that waits.

“Brother!” Rina screamed, pointing at the door. It creaked slowly, heavily, then swung open with a sharp echo—like a lock finally finding its key after centuries of waiting.

The clicking of bones had stopped.
Behind the door, lay darkness.
The grimoire urged them to cross.
Their debt must be paid.

The bones debt - Part 2

The bronze door sealed behind them with a finality that vibrated in their marrow. There was no latch, no lock—only the crushing realization that the door was finished with them. The shadow was gone, bled out into the Warrens, replaced by a darkness so absolute it felt physical. It was not the hollow, damp gloom of the sewers; it was a static, heavy void. Their breaths were the only proof they still occupied space.

Corin struck his flint. The spark hung in the air for a single, agonizing second. In that fleeting flash, the shrine revealed its teeth: a circular chamber, cavernous and cold, with walls lined by rows of empty, yawning niches that once held stone idols. In the center, a slab of rough-hewn basalt stood like an altar, its surface carved with long, finger-sized grooves. One wall was obscured by faded, cracked frescoes depicting hands offering coins—hundreds of hands, all missing a finger.

Then the spark died. The darkness slammed back into place, a weight upon their chests.

“Where did it go?” Rina whispered. Her voice was thin, brittle.

“It doesn’t need to follow anymore,” Corin replied, his voice devoid of hope. “We’re already inside.”

The air tasted of ancient iron and cold, stagnant ash. The floor was dry, yet beneath their boots, they felt patches of something tacky and dried—a residue of long-past payments. Their heartbeats were erratic, mismatched rhythms ticking away in the silence. When he blinked, the darkness seemed to blink back, a phantom delay that defied the logic of the light.

Corin stepped to the stone table and set the book down. He didn’t open it. He stepped back as if it were a coiled viper.

The brass clasp, fashioned into the likeness of two shaking hands, unsnapped with the sharp, sickening sound of a knuckle breaking. The pages didn’t rustle; they turned one by one, like ice cracking on a winter river, deliberate and rhythmic. A faint, sickening luminescence bled from the parchment—the pale, cold light of old bone.

The book settled on a spread. On the left, Corin. On the right, Rina. Beneath the names, a ledger of sins—fingerprints, smudged and whorled, each representing a time they had bent the world to their will using the book’s forbidden magic. There were dozens. For Corin, the first entry, a merchant’s shadow stolen to mask his retreat, paid with a thumb. For Rina, the last, the heat stripped from a candle flame to hide their silhouettes, paid with a pinky.

The god was done with interest. It wanted the principal. Written in a language that burned the back of their retinas, the demand was clear. For every theft the book enabled, one joint of one finger. The left hand for Corin. The right for Rina. The book chooses. The god takes.

Rina slapped the book closed. It sprang open wider, the pages multiplying, growing like leathery, skeletal wings until they spilled over the table’s edge.

“We didn’t know,” Rina gasped, her denial sharp. “The drops were the price. That’s what master told us.”

“Our master was just another thief who bought a few more years,” Corin said. He was counting his fingers, his eyes distant. “He had nine digits for a reason, Rina. He didn’t tell us because he was saving his own neck.”

“We can run,” she insisted, turning toward the bronze door. “It opened once.”

“If we run, the shadow returns,” Corin said, his voice flat. “And next time, it won’t take fingers. It will take hands.”

Rina lunged for the book, her fingers curling to tear the pages, but the parchment was hard as cured leather. Her nail split down the center. She didn’t bleed immediately; the pain arrived three seconds later, a delayed, unnatural throb. Her blood rose from the wound, a thin red thread floating against gravity, and drifted toward the stone table to pool in the grooves.

“We can choose who goes first,” Corin said, the weight of a thousand years in his tone. “I’ll go first. I’ve owed this longer.”

He removed his gloves, revealing the blunt, scarred stump of the finger he’d lost in a mundane accident years ago. He pressed his palms to the stone.

“Don’t close your eyes,” he whispered. “Watching is part of the price.”

The grooves began to glow a violent, feverish red. Corin’s own shadow—cast by no light—peeled off the floor like a second, darker skin. It walked to the fresco, placing its hand against the wall. The stone trembled. The shadow pulled back, leaving a fresh print of a hand with four fingers, matching the one he had lost long ago. The shadow returned to his feet and dissolved back into the floor. Corin looked at his hands—still nine, for now.

“Tomorrow,” he murmured. “The ritual happens at dawn.”

“We’re underground,” Rina whispered, her voice breaking. “How do you know?”

Corin pointed to the bronze door. A pale, sickly glow seeped beneath the threshold, the color of a dead man’s bone.

“Because the door just told me.”

Rina stared at her own hands, nine fingers still attached, and at the impossible, necrotic light beneath the door. For the first time, she wished for the patient, wet sound of the shadow in the tunnels. At least then, there had been room to run.

---

The hours before dawn were a slow, suffocating exercise in mortality. Corin sat with his back to the stone table, his hands resting on his knees, incessantly counting his fingers—nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—as if tactile repetition could anchor his anatomy to his spirit. Rina paced the cramped circumference of the shrine—seven steps to the bronze door, seven steps back. On the seventh, her heel found a loose stone that clicked with a wet, rhythmic cadence. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t.

The pale light beneath the door did not brighten; it pulsed, a sickly curdled-milk flicker that mimicked a dying heartbeat. The air felt heavy, and the silence was punctuated only by a low, sub-audible hum that they felt in their jawbones—a vibration that coated their tongues in the sharp, metallic tang of copper.

Rina stopped her pacing, her gaze fixed on the wall. “Does it hurt?”

Corin didn’t look up. “I don’t know. The ones who paid never spoke of the moment. The ones who ran... I never saw them again.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

The frescoes had shifted again. The hands holding coins were fewer, their fingers migrating across the stone surface like ants when they were not directly observed.

Then, the light surged. Not a gradual dawn, but a violent, curtain-tearing brilliance. The bronze door swung inward without a whisper.

Corin stood, his knees cracking in the stillness. “It’s time.”

“The door is open,” Rina said, her voice a desperate spark. “We can...”

“No.” Corin pointed. A shadow waited at the threshold—not the frantic shadow of the sewers, but a static, solid occupant of the doorway. It was defined by a single, pale, four-fingered hand, the nails long and stained with the yellow-red hue of ancient, dried debts.

Rina lunged toward the light, but the air thickened, turning from gas to a viscous, suffocating gel. She gagged, stumbling back as the pressure vanished.

“The door is open because we accepted,” Corin said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “The moment we run, it closes. And the next time it opens... we won’t be the ones walking out.”

He knelt at the table. “Rina. The book. Read it.”

She picked up the tome. It felt heavier, its leather cover pulse-warm. She read aloud:

“When the thief takes, the hand remembers. When the hand remembers, the finger pays. Three joints for three decades. Three nails for three thieves. Two thieves stand at the table. One debt remains. The third will be named when the third nail falls.”

Rina’s breath hitched. “The third? There’s only two of us.”

“Keep reading.”

“Corin of the Warrens. Left hand. The finger that pointed at locked doors. The finger that turned pages. The finger that will point no more. Rina of the Silk Tunic. Right hand. The finger that slipped between purse and purse. The finger that snapped clasps. The finger that will close nothing again.”

Corin placed his left hand on the stone. The groove beneath his ring finger erupted in a white-hot glow that felt, paradoxically, like ice. The shadow-hand reached out, pressing into the table.

Pop. It was the dry, clean sound of a wishbone snapping. Corin’s finger lay on the basalt—pale, motionless, and alien. He didn’t scream, but his tears dropped on the stump. Only then did the blood well up, dark and slow, dripping into the grooves to strike the stone with the clarity of a silver bell.

Rina knelt, her shaking right hand mirroring his. She watched her own ring finger detach with the same bloodless precision. She screamed, and the stone swallowed the blood all the same.

The book turned to a final, blank page. Hammer. Nail. Witness.

Three iron nails lay on the table—rusted, cold, and heavy with history. Corin drove the first through his severed finger into the stone; the blood turned the metal crimson instantly. Rina followed, her first strike trembling, her second sinking home. Two red nails. Two severed fingers.

He picked up the third. “It’s not for us,” he whispered, sliding it into his pocket. A cold, leaden weight settled against his thigh. “The book always finds another thief.”

They stood, their hands now permanently altered, the stumps already smooth and healed. They walked through the threshold, and the shadow retreated into the gloom. The shrine ceased to exist, dissolving into the salt-air of dawn.

They stood leaning on each other, looking at their hands, then at the three red nails tucked away.

“What do we do now?” Rina asked.

Corin looked at the sky, vast, indifferent, and blue. “We learn to live with empty spaces.”

Thank you for reading.

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Photo by Parth Mishra on Unsplash