Excellent. Let's continue the descent.
---
Kaelen followed like a ghost tethered to a moving tomb. His breath came in ragged hitches, his eyes darting from the looming, water-stained buildings to the broad, cloaked back of the man who had just killed two people with the casual brutality of someone swatting flies. The stone, the damnable stone, felt like a burning coal in his pocket. His mentor, old Arcturus, had whispered about "amplifiers" and "resonant truths." Kaelen now understood. The stone didn't just hold history; it attracted it. And it had attracted a force of nature wearing a man's ruined flesh.
Cassian led them not deeper into the human stench of the Sump, but toward its forgotten edge, where the city's foundations met the primordial marsh. The wooden walkways grew more precarious, the planks green with slime and soft with rot. The air grew colder, damper, carrying the deep, peat-and-decay smell of the bog that had existed long before Veridia was a dream in some architect's mind.
Their destination was a squat, round structure of moss-clad stone, half-sunk into the mire. It looked like a giant, petrified stump. A low, arched opening served as a door. A "weir-house," Kaelen's academic mind supplied, from the ancient flood-control systems, long since abandoned when the great canals were built.
"In," Cassian grunted, ducking inside.
Kaelen followed, expecting a den of filth. Instead, he found a space of stark, almost monastic order. A bedroll of faded wool. A small, meticulously banked fire in a pit lined with stones. Tools—a whetstone, a set of pliers, a roll of leather straps—laid out on a flat rock with geometric precision. And weapons. Not just the brutal ship's iron, Pilgrim, but a hatchet, a long dagger, and a heavy crossbow, all clean, functional, lethal. It was the lair of a creature that had pared its existence down to survival and purpose.
Cassian shrugged off his cloak and sat on a stool by the fire, extending his left arm toward the warmth. Kaelen couldn't help but stare. In the flickering light, the Brand was a horror. It wasn't just scar tissue; it was a void in the shape of a man's arm, a twisting, runic canyon of ruined flesh that seemed to drink the firelight rather than reflect it. A faint, sickly vapor, almost invisible, wafted from it.
"You see it," Cassian stated, not looking at him. "The bleeding."
"I… I see something," Kaelen whispered, his scholarly curiosity momentarily overwhelming his fear. "A metabolic exhalation? No… a spiritual effluvium. A byproduct of a… a sustained ontological wound."
Cassian's eyes, flat and reflective as river stones, locked onto his. "Say it in words that matter."
"It's a wound that shouldn't exist in a sane world. It's leaking pain. Literally." Kaelen took a hesitant step closer, his academic drive now a compulsion. "May I…?"
A long pause. Then a slow nod.
Kaelen approached, not as a physician, but as a man reading a forbidden text. He didn't touch. He observed. The runic patterns, though distorted by scarification, were achingly familiar. "This… this is a variant of the Sigil of Concord. But inverted. Corrupted. It was a binding mark, used by the Eclipse Legion. A symbol of ultimate brotherhood."
"It was," Cassian said, the words like stones dropped into a deep well.
"But this… it's been used against the binding. The energy flow is reversed. It wasn't meant to give, but to take. To siphon." Kaelen's mind raced, pieces of Arcturus's frantic, late-night lectures slotting together with the grisly reality before him. "The Golden Lie… it's not just propaganda. It's a metaphysical construct. Valerius didn't just rewrite history. He rewrote causality. He made himself the source of all light by… by stealing the darkness. The balance." He looked at Cassian, horrified awe dawning on his face. "And you… you were part of the Legion. You were at the center of it. You're not just a victim. You're a relic. A surviving piece of the ritual."
"I'm a mistake," Cassian corrected, his voice devoid of self-pity. "One that needs correcting. You said the old gods were drowned. Silenced. How?"
Kaelen backed away, needing space to think. He pulled the spiral stone from his pocket, its solidity a comfort. "The old faiths spoke of the Well of Moments. Not a physical place, but a… a confluence in the world's memory. A point where past, present, and the echoes of what could have been all pool together. It's where the Drowned Gods were anchored. The Unification wasn't just a military campaign. It was a ritual drowning. Valerius used the power of the Legion's concord—your bond—to pour a river of false light into that Well, to silence the old whispers."
"And now the Well is poisoned," Cassian deduced. "And the silence is screaming."
"Exactly! The Ethereals you mentioned… Arcturus called them 'Echo-Eaters.' They're drawn to unresolved trauma, to stolen history, to… to wounds like yours. They're the world's immune system trying to reject the lie, but they're mindless, destructive. A fever burning the patient."
Cassian stared into the fire. "So to kill the fever, you must cure the disease."
"To silence the screams, you must un-drown the gods," Kaelen breathed, the enormity of it crushing him. "It's impossible. The Well of Moments is a myth. Even if it's real, it would be guarded, hidden…"
"Where?"
"The texts… they're vague. 'Where the city's first stone drinks the last tear of the sky.' 'Beneath the foundation that knows no light.' Arcturus believed it was here. Somewhere in the original foundations of Veridia. Not the glorious canals and spires, but the old, drowned town that was built here first. The town that chose this bog for a reason."
A heavy silence filled the weir-house, broken only by the pop of the fire and the distant, lonely cry of a marsh bird.
"We need a guide," Cassian said finally. "Someone who knows the stones older than the city."
Kaelen shook his head. "The old families are gone. Purged or bought out after the Unification. Their knowledge is lost."
"Not all knowledge lives in books or bloodlines." Cassian stood, the movement fluid and predatory. He picked up his cloak. "Some lives in the dark, listening."
---
They went to the Maw.
If the Sump was Veridia's bile-duct, the Maw was its infected tooth—a vast, collapsed sinkhole at the marsh's edge where the city dumped what even it didn't want to look at. Refuse, broken machinery, and unnamed things sluiced down into a permanent twilight of mist and buzzing flies. A shantytown of the truly desperate clung to its upper slopes, built from the city's waste.
Here, Cassian was not a ghost. He was a known quantity. Gaunt faces watched from doorways of sod and scrap wood, eyes reflecting a wary understanding. He walked with a purpose that carved a path through the squalor.
He stopped before a shack that was more a pile of waterlogged timber and torn sailcloth. A smell of mildew, stale herbs, and something coppery hung around it.
"Mire-talker," Cassian called, his voice low.
The sailcloth twitched. An old woman emerged, bent double, her back a twisted hump. Her skin was the color and texture of bog leather, her hair a nest of grey and green reeds. But her eyes, when she looked up, were a shockingly clear and sharp blue.
"Black Dog," she hissed, a grin revealing a few blackened teeth. "Still bleeding, I see. Smell it on the wind."
"I need a whisper, grandmother."
"My whispers have prices. Not your coppers. They're shit here. Something real."
Cassian didn't hesitate. He drew his long dagger and sliced a lock of his own dark, matted hair. He held it out.
The Mire-talker's eyes gleamed. She snatched it, bringing it to her nose, inhaling deeply. "Ohhh. Yes. Pain. Betrayal. Legion-stink. Good." She tucked it into her rags. "What whisper?"
"The first stone. The one that drinks the sky's last tear. Where is it?"
The old woman went still. The sharp blue eyes clouded with something like fear. "You poke at roots that go deep, Black Dog. Deep into bad water. The Quiet Ones don't like their sleep disturbed."
"The Quiet Ones?"
"What you call Drowned. What the Gold-Man tried to kill. They ain't dead. They're listening. Always listening." She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a wet whisper. "Below the Guttering Candle. Where the pious light shines weakest. There's a crack. A mouth. It leads down to where the first prayer was choked. But the guardians are there. Not men. The things that grow in the silence."
The Guttering Candle. Kaelen knew it. A minor, crumbling temple to a forgotten hearth-god, in a forgotten corner of the old town, now surrounded by newer construction. A perfect hiding place.
Cassian gave a single, sharp nod. "My thanks."
As they turned to leave, the Mire-talker croaked after them. "Black Dog! A free whisper, for the taste of your pain. The thing that follows you… it's growing hungrier. It's learning your shape. Soon, it won't just skitter. It'll wear."
A fresh chill, deeper than the marsh fog, settled in Cassian's bones. He didn't look back.
As they climbed out of the Maw, Kaelen finally found his voice. "She could be mad. A charlatan."
"She knew what the Brand was without seeing it," Cassian said. "She smells the truth. We go to the Guttering Candle. Tonight."
"Why tonight?"
Cassian looked up at the sky, where the moon was a pale smudge behind the perpetual haze. "Because the pain is worse at the moon's zenith. The Bleeding is stronger. If there's a crack that leads to silence… maybe the noise will show us the way."
He didn't say the rest. And if the thing that follows me is learning, I'd rather meet it in the dark I choose, not the dark that chooses me.
Kaelen looked at the man, a monolith of grim purpose against the weeping landscape. He wasn't following a scholar's quest for truth anymore. He was following a doomed man into the throat of the world's oldest wound. He clutched the spiral stone, its cool solidity the only thing that felt real.
The hunt was no longer for direction. It had found a destination.