The echoes of Gunnar Frostfang's rage had barely faded from the Great Hall before the real work began. For Hanna, who had felt like a small, terrified mouse in a den of lions, the shift was a dizzying one. The powerful, intimidating leaders who had been arguing over the fate of the world now approached her and Praxus not with suspicion, but with a desperate, hungry curiosity.
Later that evening, in a private chamber, their small Company gathered for the first time since their return. The mood was one of profound, weary relief.
"You did it, Hanna," Finnian said, his voice filled with a quiet awe. "Your story… it was the thing that turned the tide."
"My story was only a part of it," Hanna replied, her innate humility still struggling with the scale of the events. "It was Lady Astrid's courage, and the Matriarch's wisdom. And the King's faith in us."
"It was the Chorus," Praxus said, his gaze distant. "A harmony of different voices speaking the same truth. It is the only thing that will save us."
The next day, that abstract philosophy was put into concrete practice. Praxus and Hanna held the first official meeting for the Lyceum of Human Resilience. They stood in the grand, repurposed guildhall that now served as their headquarters, and for the first time, it was not just filled with the scholars of Aethel. As part of the new pact, the other nations had sent their first representatives.
It was a strange and wonderful assembly. A stoic, bearded lore-keeper from Karak, sent by Astrid, who carried ancient tablets detailing the geological weaknesses of the northern mountains. A sharp-eyed alchemist from a Zahramite city-state, a master of distilling desert minerals into potent compounds. And a quiet, weathered herbalist from a Verdane tribe, a woman whose knowledge of forest plants was a living library. For the first time in known history, the disparate streams of human knowledge were beginning to flow into a single river.
Praxus, in his element, began the monumental task of organizing their work. He was the mind of the operation, creating a grand strategy to codify all of human knowledge. He gave Finnian's new Naval College their first assignment: to create a comprehensive atlas of Aethelgard's new, treacherous coastlines. He tasked the Karak lore-keeper with working alongside Aethel's engineers to design new fortifications based on Progenitor-era principles.
Then, he turned to Hanna. "Master Healer," he said, the formal title still sounding strange to her ears. "Your knowledge of the Kingsblood was a singular victory. But we cannot build a war strategy on a single, mythical herb. The Alliance is now a body, and it is sick. Your task is to become its physician. Work with the healer from Verdane and the alchemist from Zahram. Create a new, unified pharmacopoeia. A master guide to healing that combines the knowledge of all our peoples. Find us a cure for the Tyrant's poison."
Hanna accepted the immense task with a quiet nod. For weeks, she and her new, foreign colleagues worked, their days a flurry of translation, experimentation, and shared discovery. It was during one of these sessions that the first, true breakthrough occurred.
She was reviewing a text brought by the Verdane herbalist, a catalog of plants from the deep woods. She saw a drawing of a pale, luminous mushroom, remarkably similar in structure to the Kingsblood moss.
"This mushroom," Hanna asked. "The text says it is used for… 'calming troubled spirits'?"
"Yes," the Verdane woman replied. "Our shamans use it in rituals to soothe the grief-stricken, or to quiet the minds of warriors who have seen too much battle. It does not heal the body, but the soul."
Later that day, the alchemist from Zahram was showing Hanna a set of crystalline salts, recovered from the deep desert. "We call these 'Aether-salts'," he explained. "They do little for a wound, but when ground into a powder and burned as incense, they produce a resonance, a vibration that brings a strange sense of clarity and peace."
A pattern began to form in Hanna's intuitive, healer's mind. Kingsblood from the mountains. Spirit-mushrooms from the forest. Resonant salts from the desert. All different cultures, all different remedies, but all aimed at the same, intangible target: the human spirit.
She remembered the feeling of Ghra'thul's presence at the crossroads, a metaphysical assault of pure despair. She remembered the Ashen's bite on Malik's leg, a poison that seemed to attack his will to live as much as his flesh.
With a dawning, electrifying clarity, she understood.
She found Praxus late that night, hunched over his maps. "Magister," she said, her voice filled with a new urgency. "We have been looking for a cure for the body. We are wrong. The Ashen, the Covenanters, the Reaping… their poison is not of the flesh. It is a spiritual corruption. A disease of the soul."
Praxus looked up, his tired eyes widening as he grasped the implication of her words. All his research had been focused on history, on physical threats. Hanna, the practical healer, had just diagnosed the true nature of their enemy.
"The Chorus…" he whispered. "Of course. Ghra'thul is the Carver of Silence. He cannot destroy us with force alone, so he attacks the song itself. He attacks our hope, our will, our very spirit."
He looked at Hanna, his expression one of profound respect. "Then the Lyceum has its true purpose. It is not just to collect skills. It is to forge a new kind of armor. An armor for the soul."
Hanna returned to her workshop, her spirit alight with a purpose she had never imagined. She was no longer just a mender of broken bones and a healer of fevers. She was now a physician to a dying world's broken heart, and her work had just truly begun.
---
The Chronicle of the Fallen
Time Period Covered: Approximately Day 401 through 410 of the Age of Fear
Victims of The Reaping: 3
Victims of the Covenant: 28
Deaths from Ashen Attacks: 41
Deaths from Civil Unrest: 11 (Political instability in the Sunstone March and the Karak schism continue to claim lives)
Total Lives Lost: 83
Of Note Among the Fallen:
— A famous playwright in Aethel, known for his comedies that brought laughter to the grim city, reaped.
— The lead negotiator for a peace treaty between two warring tribes in Verdane, killed by an Ashen ambush.