The fire flickered weakly, its warmth barely pushing back the frozen air. Cael sat with arms wrapped around his knees, staring into the embers, letting the cold bite at his skin to keep his mind sharp.
He hadn't used the Tseron spell again. Not yet.
It hadn't just frozen the creature.
It had frozen something in himself.
Each time he reached for the Void, the shard stirred. It no longer whispered in words—but in feelings. Cravings. Urges.
And for the first time, Cael realized…
It wasn't the shard that was changing.
It was him.
Discovery in the Snow
He wandered farther than usual that day, drawn by a disturbance in the air—Essentia pulsing off-beat, like a warped heartbeat echoing underground.
It led him to a strange sight: a collapsed stone arch, half-swallowed by ice. But not just ruins.
There were footprints.
Fresh ones.
Human.
Cael tensed. Someone else was here.
He crept forward, conjuring a flicker of flame between his fingers. Around the bend, past a split ravine of glowing crystal, he found a crude shelter—stone slabs arranged into a dome, its entrance marked by bone-carved sigils.
This was no accident.
Someone lived here.
The Hermit
"Put that fire away, boy," came a voice from inside—calm, hoarse, and ancient. "Unless you want to wake something we can't put back to sleep."
Cael froze.
An old man stepped into the light. His face was half-covered by frost-bitten cloth, his beard thick with ice. His robes were patchworked leather and silk, covered in fading runes. But it was his eyes that held Cael.
Silver. Not reflective—radiant.
"I didn't think the Void would send another one so soon," the man said. "Still leaking mana like a cracked flask, too."
"…Who are you?" Cael asked.
The old man gave a crooked smile.
"They call me the Hermit of Ruinwake. But I was once called Varuun. Scholar. Survivor. And—briefly—a fool."
-
Over tea made from melted snow and dried crimson moss, Cael learned the basics:
Varuun had lived here for over forty years, ever since a ritual gone wrong tied him to this frozen land.
The Glacien Wastes were once part of an empire, long buried beneath ice and silence.
The Void wasn't an element—it was a reaction. The echo of a fracture in reality that had once torn through this land.
Cael's shard?
"An Aetherheart Fragment," Varuun whispered. "A piece of the seal. You poor, doomed child."
"You've already touched the truth, haven't you?"
"It touched me," Cael replied.
"That's worse."
Warning and Temptation
Varuun offered to teach him how to suppress the shard. To resist the Void's pull.
But in the same breath, he warned: "If you go deeper, there is no coming back. The knowledge down there doesn't make you wise—it makes you hollow."
Cael stared into the fire.
He thought of the creature. The vision. The hunger beneath the ice.
And he asked, quietly:
"Did you go deeper?"
Varuun's silence was answer enough.
An Invitation
Later that night, as Cael rested in the shelter for the first time in weeks, Varuun sat beside him.
"There's a temple buried beneath the Wastes," he said. "A place where knowledge was sealed and forgotten. I vowed never to return."
He looked at Cael.
"You will go there anyway. Won't you?"
Cael said nothing.
But his silence spoke the truth.