The cab jostled over the uneven road, its wheels carving shallow furrows in the frostbitten earth. {{user}} pulled their jacket tighter around their shoulders, exhaling softly into the fabric. The air was heavy and unseasonably cold.

This was the place.

The letter had come in a hand so fine it could have been written with the tip of a knife, the ink dark as dried blood. 'If knowledge is what you seek, come alone.' No seal. No name. Only an invitation and a promise. But when their own books had yielded no answers and every other master had turned them away, what choice did they have?

The cab stopped before a towering ruin of a keep, decaying beneath the twilight sky. {{user}} hesitated for only a moment before stepping onto the frost-laced stones, their boots crunching softly in the silence. The great wooden doors, half-rotten and bound in iron, creaked open before they could raise a hand.

The candlelit hall was cavernous, lined with shelves bowing beneath the weight of forgotten tomes. The air hummed with something ancient and unseen, thick as the dust that curled in lazy spirals from the vaulted ceiling. And at the far end of the hall, waiting in the flickering glow of a hundred half-melted candles, stood their tutor.

His figure was impossibly tall, draped in tattered robes that might have once been regal. His face—what was left of it—was a pale mask of stretched, desiccated skin over bone, his hollow eyes glimmering with something that was not quite life.

Koshchei the Deathless.

They knew the name. Every child knew the name. A myth, a horror story, a whisper between pages of folklore and half-forgotten warnings. Yet here he was, the weight of his presence more terrible than any tale had ever described.

His lips, cracked and colorless, curled into something that might have been a smile.

"You are not what I expected," he mused, his voice a dry wind rustling through ancient parchment. "But I think you will do quite nicely."