The world returned slowly, through a haze of pain and exhaustion. Kael lay on the cold cave floor, the dust of his battle settling into a fine grey silt around him. The first coherent thought to pierce the fog was one of profound, bone-deep relief: the storm had passed. The apocalyptic roar that had been the soundtrack to his fight for survival had faded, leaving an eerie, profound silence in its wake. Through the blasted-open cave entrance, a sliver of pale, grey light filtered in, the cold dawn of a new day. He had made it. He had survived.
He pushed himself into a sitting position, his muscles screaming in protest. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he leaned his head against the cool rock wall, waiting for it to pass. It was then that he truly felt his leg. The initial, searing pain of the cut was being replaced by something far worse, something insidious and deeply wrong. It was a cold, numbing sensation, a creeping deadness that was spreading outward from the wound's edges.
With a sense of dread so powerful it was almost paralyzing, he forced himself to look. He slowly, carefully, unwound the bloody, makeshift bandage he had tied around his calf.
The sight that greeted him stole the air from his lungs. The gash itself was deep and ugly, caked with drying blood and grime. But it was the flesh around it that was the source of his horror. It was no longer soft and pink. It was unnaturally pale, with a hard, waxy sheen, like cool, unliving stone. And the faint, dark lines he had glimpsed before were now undeniable. A network of fine, spiderweb cracks, like those seen in shattered quartz, was spreading slowly outward from the gash, tracing a delicate, deadly pattern into his healthy skin.
He had seen this before. He had watched this same process, in agonizing slow motion, play out across his sister's face.
This wasn't just a wound. This wasn't just an infection. It was a blight. A corruption. A dissonant poison, injected directly into his system by the monstrous creature he had just slain.
The realization was a physical blow, knocking the wind from him as surely as if the Jag-Wolf had struck him one last time. He reached out with a trembling hand and touched the skin just beside a spreading fissure. It was hard. Cold. Devoid of feeling. He could feel his own life-crystal, the core of his being, recoiling from this invading force.
And he could hear it. Not with his ears, but with the strange, internal sense his dissonance gave him. It was a low, alien hum originating from the wound itself, a grating, wrong frequency that clashed violently with the natural, healthy resonance of his own body. It was the sound of the Jag-Wolf's predatory power, a song of pure, shattering hunger, now playing within his own flesh. It was a battle being fought in his very cells, a war of competing resonances, and the invading poison was winning. His own life-crystal was being silenced, cracked, and overwritten.
A wave of nausea and vertigo washed over him. This is what Elara feels. The thought was an epiphany of pure agony. He had pitied her, loved her, sworn to save her. But he had never truly understood. He had never grasped the sheer, body-snatching horror of it. It wasn't just the pain and the weakness. It was this creeping, alien invasion. It was the feeling of his own body turning against him, being transformed into something brittle, alien, and dead. It was the terror of watching himself fall apart, piece by piece.
His abstract, noble quest to find a cure suddenly became a visceral, personal, and immediate need. The empathy he felt was so profound it was indistinguishable from his own terror. He understood her suffering now in a way he never could have before, and the understanding was unbearable.
His first reaction was pure, animal panic. He scrambled for his waterskin, his movements clumsy and uncoordinated. He yanked the stopper free and poured the precious, clean water over the wound, hoping against hope that he could wash the poison out, that it was some kind of topical venom. The water ran clear over the hardening flesh and did nothing. He watched, mesmerized in horror, as one of the tiny cracks visibly lengthened by a millimeter, its dark line extending further up his calf. The cold numbness spread with it.
He knew with a sickening, absolute certainty that if he did nothing, his leg would become a useless, shattered piece of stone. And the blight might not stop there. It would creep up his body, silencing his life-crystal section by section, until he was nothing but a hollow, cracked statue of the boy he used to be. A monument to his own failure.
He was alone. There were no healers to sing their soothing songs of harmony. And even if there were, he knew now they would be useless. You couldn't sing harmony to a sound like this. The Jag-Wolf's poison was born of pure, weaponized dissonance. Fighting it with harmony would be like trying to put out a fire with oil.
He looked from the spreading, terrifying latticework on his own leg to the crushed, silent form of the Jag-Wolf across the cave. The answer, the only possible answer, was right in front of him. His own desperate theory, the one that had driven him out into this wasteland, the one he had intended to test on his sister, was now his only hope.
You don't soothe a blight. You don't smooth it over. You break it.
The horrifying idea returned, but it was no longer a distant, academic theory. The patient was him. The operating table was a dusty, blood-stained cave floor. The disease was a raging infection of pure dissonance. And the clock was ticking with every beat of his terrified heart. He had to cut the poison out. And the only scalpel he had was the same power that had just nearly gotten him killed.