The return to Emberwood was a march through a world transformed. The familiar path through the fields felt like a corridor between two existences. Behind Kael was the Murkwood, a place now scrubbed clean of a specific, festering evil, the silence there one of his own making. Ahead was the village, its wounds still raw and weeping. The scent of woodsmoke from the cooking fires now smelled, to his heightened senses, uncomfortably similar to the pyres of the day before.
He arrived as the afternoon sun cast long, weary shadows. The first person to see him was young Liam, who was dutifully patching a hole in his family's goat pen. The boy's eyes went wide, not with fear this time, but with a fervent, hero-worshipping awe. He dropped his hammer and ran to the village well, his voice ringing out, "He's back! Kael's back!"
The reaction was not a celebration, but a gathering. Villagers emerged from their homes and repairs, their faces a canvas of complex emotions. They saw the same man who had left that morning, but he carried the scent of the deep forest and cold stone on him, and a new, unshakeable stillness in his demeanor. The sword at his hip was no longer a hidden shame or a shocking revelation; it was a fact of life, as undeniable as the turning of the seasons.
Orwin approached, wiping his hands on a rag. "The forest is quiet," the elder observed, his eyes searching Kael's face.
"The den is clear," Kael replied, his voice flat. "The threat to Emberwood from that quarter is ended."
A collective, quiet sigh of relief passed through the small crowd. But the tension did not fully break. Ended, but at what cost? And ended for how long?
It was then that Elian approached. The scholar held two wooden cups, steam curling from their contents. He offered one to Kael. "Mullein and willow bark," he said. "For the aches that follow battle, even divine ones."
Kael accepted the cup, the warmth a small, tangible anchor in a world that felt increasingly ethereal. The brew was bitter, but it grounded him.
"You have the look of a man who has balanced a ledger," Elian said softly, for Kael's ears alone.
"The debt was paid," Kael murmured, taking a sip. "The Scale is quiet."
"For now," Elian replied, his gaze drifting meaningfully towards the north. "But a single balanced account does not make a solvent kingdom. Come. Walk with me."
They moved away from the well, towards the relative privacy of the smithy, which stood silent, its fire cold for the first time in living memory. Master Holden was busy helping rebuild a storage shed, his great strength put to a gentler purpose.
Elian leaned against the anvil, the cold, dead iron a stark contrast to his lively intellect. "The goblins were a symptom, Kael. A fever sweat on the skin of the land. The sickness lies deeper. It lies in the Ashen Weald."
He said the name with a scholar's precision, but Kael felt a physical reaction to the words. A cold knot tightened in his stomach. The memory of the nausea he'd felt the day before—the pulse of wrongness—returned, a ghost of a sensation. The sword at his hip gave a faint, almost imperceptible thrum, like a hound catching a distant scent.
"The Ashen Weald," Kael repeated, the words tasting of dust and despair.
"It was not always so," Elian said, his eyes losing focus, looking into a past only he could see from his studies. "It was once the Verdant King, the greatest forest of this age. Its heartwood was said to be so alive that its sap could heal any wound. Then came Morganna's last stand. The war… and your final blow."
Kael flinched, but Elian's tone held no accusation, only the recitation of history.
"When you struck her down, the necrotic energies she had consumed, the thousands of stolen souls she held bound to her will… they did not simply vanish. They ruptured. They poured into the land itself. The trees did not just die; they were unmade, their life force inverted. The soil turned to grey dust that cannot hold water, let alone life. It is a place that violates the natural order. A wound that has festered for fifty years."
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of hooves and a cart rattling into the village at a dangerous speed. It was Finn, the rotund, usually jovial merchant who traveled the route between the northern hamlets and Emberwood. His face was ashen, his clothes stained with sweat and dust. He practically fell from his driver's seat, his hands shaking.
"Orwin! By all the gods, Orwin!" he gasped, clutching at the elder as he ran over.
"Finn? What is it? Bandits?" Orwin asked, his voice tight with fresh alarm.
"Worse," Finn panted, his eyes wild. "The blight… it's spreading! I was making for Oakhaven, but the road… the road past the Weald's edge is gone!"
"Gone? What do you mean, gone?" a villager cried out.
"Swallowed!" Finn gestured wildly north. "The grey dust, the ash… it's crawling out from the tree line. It's like a slow, hungry tide! I saw it claim Miller's Creek. The water just… sank into it and vanished. The fields on the other side are withering, turning brown and brittle. And the things… shadows moving in the ash…" He shuddered, a full-body tremor of pure terror. "I saw a fox, its eyes glowing with a sickly green light, its fur falling off in patches, just staring at me from the blight line. It didn't run. It just… watched."
A new, colder fear gripped the villagers. Goblins they could fight. A creeping, life-sucking blight that spawned monsters was a terror from an old nightmare.
Elian turned to Kael, his earlier words now horrifically validated. "The symptom is dealt with. The sickness now declares itself."
He reached into his robe and unrolled the map Kael had seen before. He pointed to the shaded area of the Ashen Weald. The skeletal crow symbol seemed to mock them. "The Pale Crow, Corvus, is not hiding in the blight. He is nurturing it. Using it. He believes Morganna's philosophy—that only through absolute power and the culling of the weak can the world be strong. He sees this blight as a purifying fire. And he is guiding it."
He tapped a specific point on the map, a place deep within the Weald, marked by a crude, miniature tower. "The texts speak of the Soul-Queen's Bastion, her stronghold in that forest. It is there, I believe, that Corvus works his magic, twisting the land further, calling to the things that now thrive in the corruption."
Kael looked from the terrified face of Finn, to the grim resolve of Orwin, to the hopeful, fearful eyes of his neighbors. He saw Liam, no longer looking at him with awe, but with a desperate, unspoken question: What do we do?
The hollow feeling inside him was gone, replaced by a cold, solid certainty. This was no longer about defending a single village. The Scale was imbalanced on a colossal level. The debt of Morganna's fall, the suffering of the land itself, was a weight that threatened to drag the entire region into the grey.
He met Elian's gaze. "The Bastion," Kael said, his voice low but carrying to all those gathered. "That is where the root of this blight lies."
Elian nodded. "To save Emberwood, to save all the villages on the Weald's border, you must journey into the heart of the sickness. You must confront Corvus."
Silence fell, heavy and profound. The path was no longer leading away from home. It was leading into the mouth of darkness itself. And every soul present knew that Kael was the only one who could walk it.