The wagon trudged forward beneath a quilt of languid gray clouds, it pressing deep furrows into the damp, moss-laden earth. Luke sat high upon its broad neck, hands tightening on the reins — though reins were something of a ceremonial comfort by now; this beast moved by command more intimate than leather could channel. A humid breeze curled around them, carrying the scent of churned soil and the faint, metallic whisper of distant water.
Luke's eyes roved over the cracked, oil-stained map spread across his gloved hand. His brows furrowed, twitching with the small agitations that often betrayed his stoic mask. Each delicate line and inked boundary on the vellum seemed to twist under his scrutiny, taunting him with how thoroughly their ordeal in Bleakroot Fen had derailed everything.
"Since we didn't take the planned route… gods damn it all, we ended up far off the westbound safe path. I'm lucky we even found a way out — northeast instead of true north. That means Easthaven now… Easthaven, not Westhaven."
His breath fell out in a low, embittered hiss, lips drawing into a hard line. He swore under his breath, the words slipping out like small dark stones tumbling down a well. His gloved thumb rubbed a corner of the map raw, as though trying to smudge reality into a shape he preferred.
The Beast itself snorted, a tremor running along its thick neck, ears swiveling back in mild complaint at its rider's unease. Its massive lungs pushed out a warm exhale that fogged briefly in the cooler current drifting through the trees. The beast's strides were steady, slow enough now to keep from exhausting itself, yet firm — it carried with it a living gravity, and the ground seemed to acknowledge each footfall with a reluctant sigh.
Luke kept it at that deliberate pace. This was not the breakneck flight of survival any longer; it was the measured, grinding march of a trader who had narrowly survived catastrophe and needed to ensure he did not blunder into another. His eyes wandered back to the topographical lines etched onto the parchment.
"Westhaven would've been a straight shot north, exactly as planned — damn near a gift. Could've refilled our stocks there without dancing through more wilderness. But Easthaven… Easthaven is northeast. Twice the rough terrain, if I remember these hills right."
He exhaled slowly, a sound like wind pushing through old glass.
"Still… it's the closest village now. No sense cursing a horse for dying once it's already bones. Easthaven it is."
His mind tugged, bitterly amused, at the irony buried in the very history of these settlements.
Long before the two places became Easthaven and Westhaven, they were simply one — Lakehaven — a humble lattice of timber homes hugging the shore of a lake so glassy that elders swore it drank the sky whole. That lake still lay in the northeast, where the heart of Lakehaven once beat, but the village itself had split like a rotting log under the pressure of old human failings.
It was the Marrow family's undoing that had carved it apart. The old head of the Marrows, a merchant lord with far too much pride and far too little grace, had split from his wife over whispered matters that villagers would never entirely learn — affairs, debts, betrayals woven so thickly that even local bards tired of trying to untangle the yarn.
"Then the fool stomped off northwest, out of sheer spite, they say. Built Woodhaven just to poison the memory of the village he and his wife first raised together… and even named it so, twisting 'Lake' into 'Wood' as if to strike at her with the geography itself. Pettiness can outlive love, I suppose."
Luke's lip curled slightly, amusement tangled with disdain. His jaw clenched as the memory ran its course.
After the old man's death — no new wife nor fresh heirs in his ledger — the village of Woodhaven braced itself with a sort of wary anticipation.
Folk muttered in low, private conclaves over hearths and tankards, certain it would fall to some external council or be left rudderless, drifting under the tangled boughs and cold fogs that had always cloaked its borders.
Then came the young man.
Barely into his twenties, shoulders still finding their final breadth, hair a coarse spill of dark bronze. When he arrived in Woodhaven with nothing more than a weather-bitten pack and the declarative promise that he was the old bastard's blood, most villagers scoffed outright. Some even laughed, half out of nervousness, half out of old spite — it seemed impossible that the cantankerous old patriarch had left behind a son all this time, hidden from their collective eye.
But rumor collapsed beneath testimony. Letters produced from a stitched-leather satchel, bearing his mother's hand. Old traveling merchants from Lakehaven who recognized the boy's bearing, the curve of his brow so much like the dead man's. And, finally, confirmation from the village of his birth itself: Lakehaven, still then called by that name, where his mother dwelled.
The strangest part was his mother.
She did not welcome him with tearful embrace or even grim approval. Instead, she refused him outright — locking her door, sending him down the muddy lanes to sleep at the local inn as if he were any itinerant wanderer, not her own flesh. It was said that for a week he returned every dusk to stand upon her porch, voice low but persistent. They could see the silhouettes behind the windows — hers, rigid as an iron rod; his, hands half-raised in entreaty.
Only after a week of this quiet siege did she relent. Not with weeping or apology, merely a tired nod that unlocked a chain of possibilities. The boy — Bazel, as it turned out — left Lakehaven with a stride that suggested equal measures of sorrow and relief, and trekked northwest to Woodhaven.
There he stood before the council hall's long table and announced himself:
"My name is Bazel Marrow. I am the son of your late headman. I intend to take up his position — not to imitate his errors, but to ensure none of you must suffer them again."
It was enough. Reluctantly, with all the caution of deer approaching a new salt-lick, the villagers accepted him. Skepticism lingered, of course, but time — that slowest yet surest arbiter — began to leach it away. Bazel proved diligent, measured, surprisingly fair for one raised in the shadow of two warring parents.
Meanwhile, back in Lakehaven, his twin sister showed no interest in all this. Razel — bright as sun upon lake-water, sharp as a fishing hook — had no desire to chase after old Woodhaven's ghosts.
"Why should I hate my own brother?" she was once overheard to say, perched on a tavern bench with a half-finished tankard in hand, legs crossed like a cat ready to spring. "Because he didn't obey every breath of Mother's demands? Because he has goals that diverge from mine? Everyone must cleave to their own ambitions — it's the marrow of living. So long as he's done no evil, why should I find bitterness in my throat at the mention of his name?"
Her words traveled faster than horses, carried by merchants' gossip and echoed in alehouses across both settlements. And when she too, after three more years, took up the mantle of village head upon their mother's passing, there was no grim schism — only a cordial, almost jubilant linkage.
It was they who chose to rename their homes:Lakehaven was split no longer, but twinned in name — Westhaven and Easthaven. A subtle bond declared in ink and oath, a gesture to the world that these two children of a fractured marriage would not mirror that old acrimony.
Twenty years on, their kinship was legend.
with Bazel as head of Westhaven and Razel presiding over Easthaven, the bond between their villages had not merely endured — it had flourished into something almost mythic. Their alliance stood in stark, almost mocking contrast to the usual temper of neighboring settlements across this broad, grasping land.
For it was common — nearly tradition — that villages situated close by became sniping rivals. Merchants were precious veins of gold wandering on hooves or wheels, and each settlement hungrily sought to tap them first. They'd levy sly tolls, whisper rumors of banditry on a competitor's road, even outright sabotage waymarkers to redirect traffic. Such petty cruelties were stitched into the fabric of village life, the inevitable churn of small ambitions and fear of scarcity.
But Westhaven and Easthaven refused this dance of quiet knives. Their roads were kept smoother than any others in the region. Traders were guided gently by honest guides posted at forks with clear sigils denoting either village, not robbed by hidden tariffs or browbeaten into choosing one market over another.Traders were never waylaid by hidden fees. It made both villages quietly prosperous, a rare twin star of amicability in a world where settlements so often sought to undercut and gut their neighbors for stray coin. If anything, they found themselves courteously ushered onward, with gentle promises of fair measure at the next market.
Luke thought on all this as he guided the wagon's ponderous steps around a low rise scattered with birch. The map tucked safe inside his coat now seemed more like a tapestry of old human wounds — stitched and restitched, yet refusing to tear outright.
"Bazel, Razel… funny names to pin so much fate upon. Razel always spoke highly of him — like she was recounting an old, half-remembered poem. Suppose there's worse things to steer by."
He exhaled, lips tightening into a line. The breeze carried the cool scent of pine resin and damp leaf rot, overlayed by the faint animal musk of the wagon. Ahead, the trail dipped again, shadows pooling like dark water.
Still, for the first time since plunging into that monstrous fen, he felt the world begin to unfold — not as a trap snapping closed, but as a road bending patiently, if uncertainly, toward Easthaven. Toward rest, brief or otherwise.
And behind him, somewhere far off in the tangle of his memory, drifted those twin names — Bazel and Razel — like lanterns bobbing on the edge of night.
The wagon trudged along at its deliberate. The canopy above fractured the afternoon light into moving tessellations of gold and deep emerald, dappled shadows slipping across Luke's weathered features as he watched the road unfold ahead.
Yet after a quiet moment, he craned his neck back, peering over the broad, moss-patched hump of the beast's spine.
There — bundled against the side railings of the platform lashed across the wagon's back — lay the others. Liora's spear rested across her knees as she slept with her arms folded loosely, cheek nestled into her shoulder, brows still faintly knitted even in rest. Vivy had half-curled, her face buried into the crook of her arm, strands of hair falling in dusky waves over her mouth. Kairo, though — Luke's keen eyes caught the faint twitch of his eyelids. He was no more asleep than a hunting cat.
Luke let out a slender breath, a fragile, almost boyish smile ghosting over his mouth, before he turned back around, reins light but assured in his hand. The road was his to worry over. Let them rest.
Behind him, Kairo shifted ever so slightly, fingers drumming along the hilt of his dagger in a subtle cadence. Not the cadence of battle-readiness, but of communion. His head tilted back against the crate behind him, eyelids lowered — feigning slumber. Inside, the world was anything but dormant.
So you know nothing of Liora's book? he asked into the dim blood-hall that formed in his mind whenever he connected to Xuran.
There came a sound first, low and cavernous, like wind curling through old crypts:
"Oooogh…"
If the Abyssal Root had flesh, Kairo thought with a dry internal laugh, it would be an old man with a beard so long it pooled like ivory rope at his feet, stooping with joints that groaned like ancient doors.
After that slow, almost ceremonial sigh, Xuran's voice deepened, gathering texture — a bass rumble laden with crumbling time.
"Young man… I regret, I hold no verses of knowledge on the young woman's peculiar tome. But heed me, for I have other roots to unearth for you…"
Kairo's pulse quickened, a tiny spark igniting behind his sternum. Even the faint lines around his closed eyes tugged upward.
"Other knowledge is still knowledge. Speak."
His mind flickered backward — memory like shards of colored glass:That cluttered antique shop. The musty sweetness of aging paper. Rows upon rows of oddities that could as easily be fraud as fortune. They hadn't dared hope everything they gathered might actually function. Yes, artifacts existed in this wide, savage world — but rarely so neat, so unbound by monstrous prices. Most were burdens disguised as gifts, curses wearing crowns.
He remembered clearly, before they ever set foot in Bleakroot Fen, how they'd tested their odd treasures.
Liora first — cautious but curious. She had merely tried the simplest: a pen that wrote of its own accord once guided by thought, tracing elegant calligraphy in dark sapphire ink. And an apple that proved itself no illusion by sinking between her teeth, crisp and fragrant, juices running down her chin in startled delight.
As for him… Kairo looked at his finger. Even now, faint beneath grime and old blood, he could make out the pale line. That red needle — he had scored his flesh with his dagger's edge, and the blood had welled up at once, only to halt, stilled by the artifact's subtle compulsion. No mending. Merely arrested — a wound left naked to the air, a soft invitation to rot if not tended. Useful, certainly… but also a sly danger if one was careless.
They'd mused then on the other promises of the needle: calming delirium, mending disordered minds, steadying fractured memory. Yet how could one test such things without first courting madness?
Meanwhile, Vivy had pored over her peculiar encyclopedia with an initial sneer. It contained no grand histories, no neat lists of human dynasties or chronicles of the Faithrend Epoch, nothing of the great continental scalds that other scholars prized. She'd half-condemned it as worthless until her slim finger halted on a page whispering secrets of the Vel'kyren. That had been enough to still all their jests.
Kairo's thumb idly swept across the dagger's hilt now, feeling the grain of the inlaid wood, letting Xuran's old voice pour through the hollow places of his ribs.
Around them, the forest's language continued to change. Small birds flitted branch to branch, sending down little showers of needles and dust that caught in Kairo's hair. A warm updraft carried scents of damp moss, sun-warmed bark, faintly sweet rot. Somewhere ahead, the road seemed to rise into soft luminous mist, touched by hidden water.
He finally murmured aloud — so low only Xuran might truly hear it.
"Strange how a handful of old junk can decide whether we live or starve… or what devours us first."
A long silence answered him, threaded with the subtle susurration of sap moving through phantom roots. Then, almost tenderly:
"All things, young man… even weeds grown through skulls… are decided by smaller things still."
Kairo exhaled slowly, eyes still closed, the ghost of a rueful grin flickering across his lips.
Kairo's mind reeled in a delicate, fracturing whirl — like frost spreading spider-veins across glass — as he felt Xuran's somber consciousness swell deeper into the marrow of his bones. The voice of the Abyssal Root was velvet over stone, soft yet cavernous, resonating along the corridors of his ribcage.
"Even though I possess no threads of lore on the young girl Liora's volume…"
A faint, almost mischievous rumble — a chuckle in ruins — ghosted through Kairo's flesh.
"…I do, young man, know well what your other companion cradles."
Kairo's throat clicked dryly. His eyelids snapped open, irises catching pinpricks of light that broke through the trees like molten pins. His breath clouded slightly in the cooling undergrowth, and he clenched the dagger so tightly his knuckles paled.
"Then say it. All of it. No curtailments or riddles and no hidden rot beneath honeyed words. I'll have it straight, Xuran — as straight as your twisted tongue can manage."
The old root seemed to shiver inside him, as though curling talons deeper into his veins. A wry mirth welled up — it was a shudder he felt in his left leg, in the dark weft of flesh where Xuran's roots clung like an insidious lover.
"Ha… I have no inclination to deceive you, Kairo. It profits neither of us to cultivate lies. After all…"
There was a subtle sigh, thick as peat.
"…we all rather desperately require your continued respiration."
At that, Kairo's jaw flexed, teeth grinding down against some unseen confession. No retort crawled out. Instead there was only the faint tremor of his hand easing off the dagger's hilt, fingertips skating the iron in restless circles.
And then —
"Whose brilliant notion was it," came a dry, rasping drawl from his left arm, "to wedge me into this precarious fiasco to begin with?"
It was Lurue, the Nomadic Petal — his voice like cracked reeds in a breeze that carried sour mirth. The vines upon his arm twitched, unfurled tiny crimson sheaths that shivered as if sighing in theatrical disdain.
Meanwhile Lalula — the dancing vine at his waist — let out a lilting, breathy trill, half laughter, half mocking gasp, as though the entire sordid mystery was an absurd pantomime staged for her personal delight.
But Xuran spoke again, and his voice was different. Rich, almost lush with an ancient joy — a resonance that made Kairo's nerves tighten with some startled kinship to awe.
"Firstly… that slender child's book is something I never thought to glimpse again across the countless cloaks of centuries. It is as if fate itself gathered up its robes and swept us together for this singular page of time…"
Kairo felt the timbre. It was unmistakable now — praise, amusement, yes, but more than that: a terrible delight that threatened to flood over into reverence. Why should a root birthed in shadow and marrow sound elated by such a thing?
"Why?" Kairo murmured aloud, barely a croak, voice dry with dread. "What is it?"
Xuran's reply came soft, almost reverent, as though laying hands on sacred ruin.
"It is the Obliterate Codex."
The words struck Kairo like thrown stones. His entire body jolted — muscles knotting so sharply his leg nearly seized under Xuran's clutch. His skin crawled with a thousand phantom mites, sweat suddenly beading cold along his spine.
"Written by the Formless Seer, who bartered its own flesh for infinitesimal glimpses into the hollows of un-being — that grim tapestry beyond all realms. This tome consumes not merely the truths you dare to glean, but the very thirst that drove you to seek them."
Xuran's tone trembled on the cusp of longing, shadowed by a tragedy so wide it felt like falling backward off a cliff.
"What a lament that I sprouted too late, grown in loam unsung by the Seer's madness… They say the Obliterate Codex harbored revelations even god could not cradle, and so it was shattered by their petulant hands — lest its filth stain their celestial hems. The Formless Seer himself was obliterated alongside his profane manuscript, reduced to drifting particulates in the void — thus was the tome christened, not merely for its contents, but for the annihilation that claimed both it and its maker."
Kairo's breath broke apart. His chest heaved; he found he couldn't pull in enough air, as if his lungs rebelled against holding such blasphemy. The world quivered around him, tree trunks suddenly stark, cruel pillars. His pupils pinned wide.
"But… if that is so — if it's real — then why aren't we dead? How does that… book… survive the wrath of divinity?"
His voice cracked into strangled fragments, words seeping through a throat that felt flayed raw. A bright tinnitus sang in his ears.
And then, in a dark, uncanny unison, both Xuran and Lurue spoke — voices entwining around his mind like wet gravecloths:
"Perhaps the god have left us…"
It was said with a nonchalance so profound it carved a hollow inside his chest. As if it were the simplest observation in the world. As if the sun setting on an unburied corpse.
Kairo's head sagged forward. His eyes stared at the dirt-clotted boards of the wagon's platform, mouth hanging slightly agape, breath rolling out in uneven, rattling threads. In his belly, something cold coiled — something that felt far older than despair.