4345.97 · April 7, 2025 AD
Beneath The City's Bones
The stone slab seals behind them. Above, their home burns. Below, Edinburgh's forgotten arteries stretch into darkness—Jacobite passages carved for escape two centuries before the Campbells ever needed them. Then the grinding sound returns. Someone else knows the entrance. Douglas Thomson steps from shadow with a Portal Key and claims alliance, but trust is currency they cannot afford to spend carelessly. The tunnels don't care who survives. They only remember who passes through.
Torchlight catches on damp stone as the Campbells descend into passages older than modern Edinburgh. The air tastes of minerals and centuries. Water drips somewhere in the blackness, marking time in a place that has forgotten what clocks mean.
Behind them, the entrance grinds open again.
Douglas Thomson emerges—the man from the festival booth, the one who traced their family crest with unsettling familiarity. Nathan's blade appears before recognition does. Then Douglas produces something that changes everything: a Portal Key. Nathan's posture shifts from threat to grudging acknowledgment. "You're a Guardian."
No time for explanations. Footsteps echo from somewhere too close—metal scraping stone, boots on ancient floors, the coordinated sounds of pursuit. Douglas knows these tunnels. He leads them through passages that narrow until shoulders brush walls, past Jacobite symbols worn smooth by centuries of desperate hands, toward a false wall that opens at his touch and seals behind them just as torchlight flickers at the corridor's end.
They crouch in darkness, breathing shallow, listening to hunters pass metres away.
The tunnels have kept secrets before.
Tonight, they'll keep the Campbells—or deliver them to those who follow.
