Location: Velmar — Ashlands of the Old ArchenLand (Flashback) | Time: Year 8002 A.A.
Once, long ago—or perhaps not so long as it feels now when measured against the relentless march of sorrow—Velmar was a place of joy.
The memory clings stubbornly, like a fragrance that haunts an abandoned house, even when the doors have rotted and the beams have fallen. They used to say the rivers here sang to the moonlight, their clear waters chiming over smooth stones in a melody that echoed the stars themselves. The canopy above was so thick, so layered with endless shades of green, that one could forget the sky even existed. It was not a roof, but a cathedral. Branches were its pillars, leaves its stained glass, sunlight fractured into holy shafts that danced upon the forest floor like living prayers.
The jungle was not only alive—it was aware. To breathe Velmar's air was to breathe in harmony, to carry the pulse of something greater in your own chest. Every root was a thought. Every gust of wind, a memory whispered. Even the silence between bird calls had been a kind of speech—an intimate knowing that the land itself was listening.
But such memories are cruel things when weighed against what the present reveals.
For the songs have been silenced. The hymns scorched from the very air. The canopy torn and withered into a parody of itself. No beasts roam here anymore, no fiery-maned lions or ivory-horned gazelles, no watchful owls with wings as wide as sails. The great breathing thing that had been Velmar was murdered, not slain in combat, but tortured into a silence that does not heal.
Velmar had been turned into a graveyard.
And not even the kind that grants rest.
There were no stones here carved by loving hands. No flowers freshly placed in devotion. No names etched so that memory might keep vigil. This was the other kind of graveyard—the kind written in ash and absence, the kind that makes the heart recoil. Here, the ground itself became a tomb, the sky a headstone.
The trees that once embraced the heavens now stood like mourners frozen mid-cry, blackened skeletons petrified in their last agony. Their branches clawed upward at the smoke-stained sky, not in praise, but in accusation. Beneath them the earth had grown hard, gray, and bitter. With every step, the crust cracked like brittle bone, each crunch underfoot another reminder that life had not merely ended here—it had been desecrated.
And the air… oh, the air.
It reeked of something fouler than death. For death, at least, has a rhythm, a place in the eternal cycle. Death nourishes. It makes way for renewal. But this? This was void. It stank of severed hope. The way it clung to the back of the throat was like the choking aftermath of a scream cut off too suddenly, as though even despair itself had been silenced. The scent was not one of closure, but of interruption—like a story gutted halfway through its telling.
Then came the bodies.
Dozens upon dozens, strewn across the battlefield like forgotten offerings. Wolves, tigers, lions, panthers—the proud children of Narn who once bore themselves like kings and queens of freedom—now collapsed in the postures of desperate struggle. Their armor bore the sigils of a people defiant: the blue crescent, the tiger's sun-kissed claw, the marks of tribes and houses that had vowed never to bend.
Now they lay still.
But the horror was not in their stillness. It was in their emptiness.
Their eyes had not been hollowed by scavenger bird or creeping worm, but by something far more deliberate. Their souls—their radiant, brilliant essence—had not flown skyward in release, nor sunk gently into the roots of the earth to wait in the long silence of renewal. They had been pulled. Ripped. Stolen.
The husks that remained were not at rest. They were robbed. Like locks forced open and chests stripped bare, they lay not as testimonies of valor, but as evidence of plunder.
And so the silence here was not the silence of reverence. It was the silence of a vault emptied by thieves.
Generations would later say that this silence was worse than the screams of the battlefield itself. For screams, at least, testify to life still burning, however briefly. But silence such as this testified only to theft. It was the silence of a room where someone had once sung, and now no memory remained of the melody—only the emptiness where it should have been.
Even the wind dared not move too loudly through the skeletal trees. It seemed afraid to stir the ash, lest it reveal some deeper cruelty.
And in that terrible stillness, one could not help but think: This was once paradise. What hand could hate it so? What power could undo so thoroughly the work of centuries in mere hours?
The answer lingered, unspoken, but undeniable: a hand that steals not only life, but its very meaning.
And in the midst of this crushing, stolen silence, one figure still stood.
Not proudly, like some vain warlord basking in conquest. Not firmly, like a steadfast sentinel upon a wall. No—he stood only because the earth itself had not yet let him fall. His body leaned, quivering, against the shaft of a three-pronged spear—a corsuc, hewn not of steel but of radiant, sky-blue mana crystal. It hummed faintly in the void, like the dying chord of a harp struck long ago. A feeble protest, no more than a sigh, against the abyssal hush that swallowed all around it.
His every breath was ragged, torn from cracked ribs and lungs half-filled with ash. Each inhalation was a battle of its own, and each exhalation carried with it the taste of blood. His once-pristine fur, sky-blue like dawn's first promise, was smeared with soot, stiffened with gore. Once, that fur had marked him as a beacon among his people, a banner of regal grace. Now, its brilliance was extinguished, dulled beneath the grime of ruin.
A circlet—slender, golden, a mark of lineage and command—still clung stubbornly to his brow. But even that symbol of sovereignty was bent, dented, clinging at an angle like a crown that had slipped during a fall too hard to rise from. It was not majesty anymore. It was a reminder of fragility. He was a prince, yes, but a prince brought to the very edge of his ruin.
And across from him…
Across from him stood the other Tracient.
Barefoot. Serene. The quiet architect of this annihilation.
Where the prince's form was weary and broken, his enemy's was effortless. His fur was the color of gathering storms—an ominous grey, streaked with threads of bluish silver that shifted unnaturally, as though his very outline was uncertain, a mist made flesh. His form wavered in the eye, not from weakness but from the impossibility of pinning him down. He was a shadow sculpted by inevitability, a figure blurred by its own wrongness.
He wore no armor, bore no shield. Nothing to mark him as warrior or commander. Only a tattered black robe, threadbare and ancient, draped loosely around his lean, unsettling frame. It stirred gently, unnaturally, as if by a private wind that passed through him alone.
Across his arms and chest burned strange sigils—living glyphs, not painted by mortal hand but etched into his very being. They glowed faintly, pulsing with an internal rhythm. They were chains—linked, endless, oppressive. And they shone not with the warm fire of life, but with the eerie, sickly violet-blue of drowned stars. Their glow did not illuminate. It consumed. As though light itself bent inward, absorbed into that color until even brilliance seemed weary.
And at his throat, dangling from a simple cord, were three crystalline pendants. Their surfaces were perfect, too perfect—smooth, flawless, like drops of eternity captured in stone. Yet their beauty was monstrous. One glowed with a venomous green, another with a burning orange, the third with a mournful, suffocating purple. They pulsed faintly, each with its own rhythm, like three stolen heartbeats bound into servitude.
They were not jewels. They were tombs. Souls made into trinkets. Each flicker of light within them was a captive cry, a frozen hymn of lives interrupted. The pendants were his trophies, his proof of dominion—not over flesh, but over essence. Not over kingdoms, but over being itself.
Then there was his gaze.
His left eye was no eye at all, but a shard of crystalline blackness. Smooth, depthless, and utterly without reflection. It looked not at the wounded prince, but through him, as though he were a glass pane offering no resistance. It pierced past broken ribs, past weary sinew, past even the soul's armor of pride, and saw something rawer, older—the truth of despair that lay at the bottom of every being. It saw not what he was, but what he would become: a ruin, another pendant, another faint, captive flicker of stolen light.
His other eye, storm-grey, bore the opposite horror. It was not piercing, not burning, not even particularly attentive. Half-lidded, dull, disinterested. The eye of one for whom annihilation had become banal. He did not hunger for conquest. He did not exult in triumph. He regarded ruin the way a farmer regards a harvest already done—the field cleared, the labor complete. He was not a conqueror. He was a harvester.
"So," he said softly, the word a sigh that seemed to draw the very warmth from the air, "it comes to this, brother."
The syllables hung in the ash-choked air like falling embers, heavy and inevitable. They carried no triumph, no venom. No trace of rage or righteousness. They were the words of a man who had already accepted the outcome—like one who has seen the sun set so many times that he no longer waits for dawn. A weary, hollow inevitability.
The name came back to him in a broken cry, torn from a chest already bruised and failing:
"Why, Viran?"
The Blue Wolfe's voice cracked the silence. It was not the command of a king, nor the bark of a warrior. It was the cry of a brother, wounded not in flesh but in soul. The Corsuc trembled in his grip, its crystalline light flickering with his anguish, as though the weapon itself grieved with him.
His breath hitched. He took one faltering step forward—whether toward his brother or away from the truth, he could not tell. Ash stirred beneath his paws, puffing into the air like smoke from a pyre. His eyes swept the bodies scattered across the blackened soil, the broken emblems of kin and comrades, each a memory cut short.
"Look at them, Viran!" he cried, voice raw, pointing to the fallen. "Look at what you've done! Talun is dead. He… he raised you when Mother passed. He sang those hunting songs when the storms frightened us." His throat tightened, the words burning as they came, shards of memory too sharp to hold. His voice faltered into a whisper, soft and strangled: "You killed them all. Our brothers in arm. Our family. These were our people…"
The names rang in his mind like bells tolling over an empty church. Talun. Others he could not speak. Each syllable was a face, a laugh, a moment stolen forever. He could not reconcile them with the silence lying in the dust.
Viran did not flinch. His storm-grey fur shifted faintly with the phantom wind, his chained markings pulsing in their strange rhythm. He looked at the dead, but not as one who mourns. If there was grief, it lay buried too deep to find.
"I did what was necessary," he said, each word flat as stone. "They stood in the way."
"In the way of what?" He spat, his last threads of strength pouring into the accusation. It was not a question of strategy, nor of politics—it was the wounded howl of one betrayed.
Viran's expression shifted, faintly, cruelly. A shadow of their youth passed over his features—the exasperated look he had worn so often when his brother failed to understand a riddle, when their elder brother Luna corrected him at the hearth.
"Oh, Lona," he murmured, voice dipped in condescension. "You and elder brother Luna are ever so naïve." He used the old scolding name, the one reserved for childhood squabbles. The cruelty was in its familiarity. "You were always like Father. Believing loyalty and love could build a wall high enough to keep out the end. That virtue itself was a shield."
Then his crystalline-black eye gleamed, a shard of void that swallowed what little light remained.
"But I saw it," he said quietly. "Just like you did."
Lona froze. The Corsuc nearly slipped from his grasp. His blood ran cold with recognition.
"You saw it, didn't you?" Viran pressed, his tone softening into something far worse than fury: intimacy. A whisper meant only for brothers. "That thing beyond the veil. The final erasure. The End of All That Is. Not war. Not famine. Not plague. The destruction of the book itself."
And Lona remembered.
The memory surged like a tide, unbidden. That meditation years ago, when his mind had strayed too far from the safe currents of thought. He had stumbled into a place without form, a space without space. He had felt it—the unmaking presence. A tide of nothingness rolling forward without hunger, without will. Hunger implies want; this thing had no want. It was the undoing of want itself. No stars. No gods. No soil, no song, no soul. Not even silence, for silence implies a memory of sound. Only a forgetting so complete that the word was itself would be dissolved.
Oblivion.
His throat tightened. His knees weakened. He had locked that memory away, buried it like poison. And now Viran unearthed it, polished it, wielded it like a blade.
"You felt it too," Viran continued, his voice a hypnotic murmur. "That cold indifference. That nothing cares. Not the gods in their high halls. Not the Stars in their endless dance. Not the world itself. Not even the Light you cherish." He sneered. "All things end, Lona. Even the greatest stories are forgotten. Especially them."
He laughed, hollow and sharp. "Father knew. He saw it the same way you did. That's why he clung to this world. Why he bound his soul into you as an Arcem—to refuse the fading, to escape the erasure. Ha!"
For the first time, Viran looked not like the harvester, but like the boy Lona remembered. His voice broke, if only for a breath, with something like fear. His mask slipped, and behind it was not the void but the trembling pup who once huddled with them in the storms.
"But I won't," Viran whispered, and his voice hardened again. "I won't fade. I'll take every tool. Every cursed charm, every forbidden whisper. Even the Aryas themselves. Anything and everything." His hand brushed against the pendants, pulsing with their imprisoned souls. "If it means I can hold back that tide. If it means I won't be erased."
Then he stretched out his hand. Not the chained hand, but the free one—the one that once bound his brother's scraped paw with a strip of cloth, the one that had tugged him laughing through streams, the one that held shared secrets beneath the stars.
"Join me."
The words trembled in the air. "You carry Father's noble soul, his light. I am what he cast aside—his shadow, his pragmatism, his fear. A fragment. Together we are whole. Together, we can survive what's coming. There is nothing we cannot achieve. Nothing we cannot defy."
Lona's eyes filled. Hot tears carved clean trails through the soot on his cheeks. His grip on the Corsuc weakened. His whole body shook with the force of the choice tearing him apart.
Stand with the brother of his blood, the one who shared his childhood fears and laughter, the one who offered survival against the end of all things?
Or stand with the brothers of his heart, who now lay silent and still around him—slain by that very same hand?
The weight pressed upon him like the collapse of worlds. It was not a decision between two paths, but between two dooms: betrayal of the living, or betrayal of the blood that bound him.
And in that ash-strangled air, under the gaze of the void itself, Lona's spirit quaked.
And then… the wind shifted.
It was a small thing, a mere stirring of the ash. Yet in that desolate, lifeless basin, it felt as though the universe itself had exhaled. The very air thickened—older, heavier, steeped in a sorrow that did not belong to one man alone but seemed to have been waiting, patient and unseen, across centuries. The silence of death was suddenly filled by something more ancient: the voice of memory itself preparing to speak.
When next Lona's voice rose, it was not his own.
It carried depth, a resonance that hummed in the chest and bones of all who might have heard. It was not one voice but many, layered like chords struck upon the oldest of instruments. Each syllable bore weight—regret pressed into form, sorrow distilled into sound. It was the voice of Kurtcan, Father of Tracients.
"I failed you, Viran."
The words did not accuse. They did not condemn. They were not even lament. They were confession. And because of that, they cut deeper than any blade.
Viran—cold, detached, the embodiment of void-made-flesh—shivered almost imperceptibly. The angle of his head straightened; his storm-hued eye sharpened. For all the power pulsing through his chained body, for all the souls burning in the pendants at his chest, this was the last thing he expected: his father's voice, carried upon his brother's lips, declaring failure.
"I failed you… as a father."
The words settled upon the battlefield like falling stones, heavier than the silence of death. Lona's body trembled beneath the possession, but the voice that poured through him was steady, ancient, and unbearably tender.
"You were the only one of my sons born with your own Arcem," Kurtcan's spirit intoned. "A fragment of myself, a shard of the One given form. I saw its power… its terrible potential. I thought you strong enough to walk your path without my guiding hand. I believed your inner fire would be light enough to keep the shadows at bay. I believed you could master it alone."
The wind carried with it a faint memory—green scents, river-song, the canopy of Velmar before the ash. The battlefield seemed, for a moment, to remember its former life.
"But I see now, with a clarity that shames me…" The voice quavered, grief breaking through the ageless calm. "I left you in a darkness no child should face alone. And in my absence, the world whispered lies to you. And you… you listened."
A soft, blue radiance unfolded around Lona. Not the wild blaze of battle, but the steady glow of truth revealed. The Corsuc spear pulsed in his hands as though alive, its rhythm in time with the confession. Where Lona's tears touched the ground, crystalline mana unfurled in flawless, geometric patterns—shapes so precise they seemed etched from the fabric of eternity. Circles within circles, spirals within squares, the unbroken grammar of divine order. It was not attack but lament, a sacred geometry wrought from grief.
Lona stood straighter now. No longer bowed, no longer failing. He was lifted, upheld by the spirit of his father. His tears were still there, glistening—but now they spoke not of despair, but of a shared pain, ancient and inescapable.
Across from him, Viran's chains stirred. The glowing sigils writhed across his skin, straining against their host, then lifted from him entirely, solidifying in the air with a metallic rattle. They were serpents and shackles both, coils of violet-blue light that writhed with hunger. The air quivered with the promise of violence.
Viran's voice cut sharp through the heavy moment, bitterness cracking through his façade:
"I suppose I'll have to steal you from Lona as well, Father. I will have every piece of you. I will be whole, one way or another."
His words were not shouted, but hissed—each syllable a venomous promise. His eye glowed with feverish determination.
Then—
They moved.
No signal. No warning. The air simply shattered.
Spear met chain in a detonation of sparks—blue clashing against violet, order straining against void. Their strikes were not flailing. They were horrifyingly precise, each one bearing the intimacy of brothers who had sparred together as children, who knew the rhythm of the other's breath and the cadence of the other's heartbeat.
Chains lashed with a force that bent the fossilized trunks of Velmar's ruined giants. The Corsuc carved lines in the ashen earth, furrows glowing briefly with raw light before collapsing into blackness. With every strike, the sky seemed to groan, seams forming in its fabric as though it too might split under the weight of their grief.
They did not cry out. No war-shouts, no triumphant curses. Their battle was not theater but necessity. It was the language of grief too deep for words, spoken only through steel, crystal, and chain.
Each clash was the echo of love made ruin. Each deflection reopened an old wound that had never healed. They fought with the might of god-born sons, yet beneath their otherworldly ferocity there was something unmistakably human—something heartbreakingly familiar.
In the set of Lona's jaw before each thrust.
In the faint hesitation in Viran's eye before each finishing strike.
In the rhythm of the Corsuc answering the rhythm of the chains, as though both remembered another dance long ago.
Theirs was not merely a battle. It was a tragedy written in sparks and ash.
And beneath the spectacle, beneath the storm of power that threatened to tear apart what little remained of Velmar, lay a wound older than either could name: the wound of family.
The wound of sons who had once laughed together beneath a living canopy, who now sought to end each other beneath a sky of smoke.
___________________
Location: Ronin Encampment — Two Days Later
Time: Year 8002 A.A.
Adam awoke.
It was not the soft rising of a man from slumber but the violent tearing of a soul from depths it had no business plumbing. His body convulsed upright, a single jolt of pure terror carrying him from dream to waking as though some unseen hand had yanked him back into the mortal realm. His chest heaved. His breath tore ragged through his throat, each gasp like claws raking from the inside out. The rough-spun blanket slid from his shoulders, damp with sweat, leaving his fur exposed to the night chill. Gooseflesh rose in waves along his arms, and his heart thundered, wild and frantic, as though trying to escape the cage of his ribs.
But his flesh was not what had been truly shaken. That was only the surface-tremor of a greater quake.
It was his soul.
The dream—no, the memory—still clung to him, its residue seared into marrow and sinew. He had not merely seen Velmar. He had lived it. He had felt the grit of its ashen earth between his teeth, tasted the mingled copper tang of blood and smoke, inhaled the foul marriage of corrupted mana and hope turned sour. He had not been told of despair; he had worn it, breathed it, endured it.
And worse—he had known the voices.
The Corsuc spear had weighed heavy in his palm. The sting of betrayal had lodged itself in his chest, raw and personal. Kurtcan's confession, Lona's tears, Viran's hunger—all of it had poured through him as though his veins themselves were conduits of that ancient grief. The vision did not sit neatly in the past where it belonged. It had lodged itself in him, tangled around his ribs like the echo of a scream that would not release.
It was not a dream at all. It was inheritance.
Within him, the familiar resonance of Kurtcan stirred. The voice of the progenitor was a solemn chord in the chaos, steadying, unwavering.
'Easy, Young Lord,' Kurtcan intoned, each word heavy with command and comfort alike. 'Breathe. You are here. You are safe. You are Adam.'
The words struck through the storm like an anchor cast into black waters. Adam seized upon them instinctively, claws digging deep into the rough bedding beneath him as though he could tether himself to the world by sheer grip. He inhaled sharply, deliberately. The cold air of the tent filled his lungs—thin, harsh, yet real. He held it, clung to it, then exhaled in a long, unsteady shudder. His heart, though stubborn in its terror, began to bend to the rhythm.
But the rhythm could not erase what lingered.
Every blink brought Velmar back. Ash stretching endless under a bruised sky. The chains of Viran writhing like serpents, violet-blue against shadowed flesh. The Corsuc's glow, flickering as though it could feel its wielder's doubt. The terrible resonance of Kurtcan's regret, vibrating in Adam's bones as though it were his own.
He was not simply witness. He had participated.
"Just a dream," he whispered, his voice hoarse, the words catching on his tongue as though they did not belong to him. "It was just… a dream."
But the lie rang hollow. The weight pressing down on his chest was proof enough. It was no airy nightmare to dissolve with the morning sun. It was a stone, heavy and cold, placed there by bloodline and fate. It was grief handed down, sharp as a blade and impossible to ignore.
Adam knew—though he hated that he knew—that he had just carried in himself the failure of Kurtcan, the torment of Viran, the impossible choice of Lona. A father's absence, a son's betrayal, a brother's impossible loyalty—all of it lived now in him, as if his very veins were rivers carrying ancestral memory.
This was not story.
It was not warning.
It was legacy.
And it had been waiting for him.
Perhaps it had always been waiting—quiet in the marrow, dormant in the blood—until he was strong enough to bear it… or broken enough to carry it. Either way, it had found him. And with the marrow-deep certainty that only such visions bring, Adam knew this was but the first. The past had not finished with him. Its hand had reached across time, had gripped his heart in the dark, and it would not let go until its work was done.
_________________________
The tent was hushed, wrapped in the kind of stillness that felt less like silence and more like reverence. Bitter herbs smoldered in a small clay bowl, their acrid tang hanging in the air, tempered only by the faint, clean smell of damp earth beneath the canvas floor. The healer's space was plain—cot, stool, table—but it breathed an atmosphere of intentional care, of hands that had tended wounds long before Adam's arrival. Heavy flaps of canvas filtered the moonlight and what leaked through painted the air in muted bands of blue and grey.
Adam sat upright on the cot, his body still weary, though steadier now than when he'd first clawed his way back from that abyssal dream. His Sight, though dimmed and sluggish after its terrible expenditure, did not leave him. It was not the blinding torrent that had once threatened to drown his mind; now it was gentler, subtler. Threads of canvas, the heartbeat of flame in the herb-bowl, the steady weave of protective wards outside—all spoke themselves softly to him. The world around him, though veiled from ordinary eyes, stood to him as a map of presences and protections, each note carefully marked in a chorus of care.
Yet despite the peace of the room, a question, simple and primal, stirred from his depths.
'Where am I?'
Kurtcan's voice rose in answer, a steadying presence, rich with patience.
'You're in the Ronin camp, deep within the Ragged Valleys. Karadir carried you from the basin after your collapse. You've slept for two days. Your body needed to mend from the… expenditure.'
Two days. The words sank in his chest like a stone cast into a still pool, rippling outward with heavy consequence. Two days gone from the world. Two days absent, unguarded, while his choices—the resurrection of Garo, the revealing of the Shadow's hand, the terror of his unveiled Eyes—spread their waves outward into lives and hearts not his own.
His head bowed. His hands flexed weakly against his thighs. The weight of absence was itself a kind of guilt.
Closing his eyes, he leaned not into darkness, but into the inner sight that required no light. And at once, he felt them.
Two presences, bright as beacon-fires even through the haze of his weariness. Karadir—massive, immovable, golden-stone in his aura. And beside him, Garo—smaller, fierce, bluish-green, his spark no longer fractured but whole, vibrant, alive. Their mana signatures lingered just beyond the tent flap, not intruding, but standing vigil. Waiting. Watching. Protecting.
A warmth stirred in Adam's chest. 'They're still with me.'
'Of course,' Kurtcan answered, and even his ancient voice carried the tremor of awe. 'You did what even I never dared. You did not merely heal a wound. You rewove the very soul of a Tracient from essence long severed, and placed it back into its vessel. Such a feat… it would have drained the greatest among us. Even your mother, Amaia Kurt—whose mind was sharper than flame—would have trembled beneath the weight of it.'
Adam turned his head, blind eyes seeking, and found the table beside him. Resting there, folded with care, was his blindfold—the simple yellow cloth, worn, imperfect, unmistakably his.
He reached for it. His fingertips brushed its threads, feeling every weave, every fray. It was not power. It was not miracle. It was a tether—a reminder of the way he had once lived, and might live still.
With deliberate care, he tied it back on.
At once, the blinding radiance of truth dimmed. The torrent of endless knowing shrank back into a manageable murmur. The world softened into its familiar outlines—shapes, sounds, presences he knew not by sight but by trust. His thoughts slowed, gathering into rhythm. His heart, at last, began to beat in step with flesh and time again.
But peace… did not follow.
For though his outer vision dimmed, his inner memory did not relent. Lona's broken cry. Viran's hollow resolve. The ash of Velmar, thick in his throat, heavy in his chest. It clung, not like memory, but like haunting. It was no tale to be forgotten. It was legacy demanding to be carried.
'Do you want me to ask?' Adam's thought was quiet, respectful, almost tender. 'Do you want to tell me?'
Long silence followed. The only sound was his own slow breathing, and the muted stirrings of the camp outside—footsteps, low voices, the crackle of a distant fire. Time stretched until it seemed Kurtcan would not answer.
And then, softly, with a weight that bent every syllable:
'It was one of my greatest failures… one of my greatest regrets.'
Adam did not press. He did not ask again. He only leaned back onto the cot, arms crossed over his chest, the blindfold shielding his eyes from the world so he could give his full attention to the voice within.
Outside, the wind moved through the hardy valley trees, rustling their leaves as if the world had no idea gods were stirring in memory, nor that ancient wounds were reopening in the dark.
And within, Kurtcan—last father of that line—began to weave his tale of fractured sons.
And Adam, last of the blood, listened.