The Wrym

Written for Sunday Whirl Wordle. Our host is
Brenda Warren; her words for this week are:

wave ~ turning ~ unholy ~ lips ~ swagger ~ lost
dead ~ rise ~ twist ~ blade ~ feast ~ edges

The dead don’t always stay dead in Wrenholt. Father Aldric Vane knew this better than most.

He stood at the edges of the Ashen Market, cloak drawn against a wind that smelled of old iron and burned offerings. The crowd rippled before him …. merchants, cutthroats, lords in borrowed faces. They barely noticed the thing slithering beneath the gallows platform: a Thornwyrm, ancient and patient, its scaled belly flush against the cobblestones.

Aldric smiled with very little warmth.

He’d been lost to the Church’s graces once before. A small matter of a Cardinal who found unholy company in the Bishop’s wine cellar …. company Aldric had arranged personally. Rome sent its investigators but Aldric sent them back with nothing to show from their mission. There was a certain swagger in surviving that, though he kept it pressed beneath his collar like a hidden blade.

“Rise,” he murmured …. not to the throng, but to the Wyrm.

It obeyed.

Pandemonium is a simple word for what followed. Lords and pickpockets alike scattered as ten feet of ancient horror uncoiled into the square, jaws cracking wide in a silent feast of terror. The crowd parted like a wave breaking on stone, and in the gap they left stood exactly who Aldric needed to see: Lord Harwick Crale, the man turning the city’s grain ledgers into a personal treasury, lips tight with a fear he could not yet explain.

Aldric crossed the square unhurried.

The twist came quietly, as it always did with him …. not a shout, but a whisper at Harwick’s ear.

“The Wyrm listens to me, my Lord. Does your confessor?”

NAR©2026
#Wordle

This is “The Serpent and the King” by Judas Priest

Wordle 762

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