The road westward was no longer marked by signposts or milestones.
Every village Caedren passed had stripped its symbols, its names, its loyalties.
Some had bent the knee to the cult in silence.
Others had simply vanished—whole hamlets swallowed by the forest, reclaimed by silence and overgrowth.
Not a war for territory.
A war for memory.
And memory was failing.
Trees leaned where they hadn't before. Roads bent. Rivers ran backward.
People forgot their own songs.
Names became smoke on the tongue.
Even Caedren, born of iron will, felt the edges of his past blurring.
Lysa limped at his side, her wound still raw but packed in crushed snowmoss and bound with faith. She had refused the litter. Refused to be carried. Her spine remained straight, her eyes fierce.
"If I'm not walking," she said, jaw tight, "then I'm dying. And we don't have time for either."
She walked with pain. But also with pride.
They rode with fewer men now—no banners, no horns, only purpose. Elite rangers, oathsworn from the north and east. The finest Caedren had ever known. Behind them, Galenhall's ashes whispered. The broken forges. The humming statues.
Some of the inert forms had begun to stir before being smashed. Their murmurs still echoed.
Whatever had inhabited them had not died.
It had retreated.
And it was learning.
Caedren knew their next step could not be brute force.
He needed knowledge deeper than scripture. Older than gods.
They turned their course toward the Chasm of Virelle—a wound in the world, a place feared even by the fearless.
Said to be bottomless. Said to whisper truths so old, they peeled back sanity.
There, in the deep, slept the Bone Oracle.
Not a seer.
A vessel.
A mouth through which forgotten truths spoke.
Half a day they descended.
Darkness closed around them like wet cloth.
The stone turned slick. The torches hissed against the damp. Shadows moved wrong.
Then the walls opened.
The chasm widened into a chamber of bones.
Colossal ribs. Giant femurs. Vertebrae like cracked wheels. The skeletons of things not recorded in any scholar's book.
And at its center—a throne not carved, but grown.
Roots of marrow-white twisted into a cruel seat.
And upon it sat the Bone Oracle.
It was not alive.
And yet, it saw.
Its eyes were hollow sockets, but Caedren felt their gaze pierce him.
Its limbs barely moved. Its skin stretched tight over a frame that was more root than bone.
And when it spoke, its voice came not from lips—but from the very earth.
"You wear the blood of a failed empire," it rasped.
"And yet you seek to stop the return of the first king."
Caedren stepped forward, sword sheathed but ready.
"Valedros is no king," he said. "He is rot dressed in fire."
The Oracle tilted its skull.
Creaking.
Groaning.
"Then what are you, child of Ivan's disciple?"
"A better rot?"
Cold swept through the chamber.
Caedren did not flinch.
"Tell me what they are building," he said.
"And how to stop it."
The Oracle's bony fingers twitched.
Roots pulsed beneath it.
"The cult does not seek conquest," it said. "They seek escape."
"From the cycle."
"Kings rise. Empires fall. Ash returns to ash."
"They seek to awaken what was never meant to sleep."
"A god that devours endings."
"A thought made flesh."
"They call it—"
A tremor shook the ground.
A blade of black light pierced the Oracle's chest.
Not light.
Shadow.
A tendril of un-being.
The Oracle convulsed.
It screamed—but no sound came.
Only despair.
A wave so deep and pure it knocked Caedren to his knees.
Lysa's blade was already out.
She moved to shield him.
But the shadow retreated—rising into the cracks above and vanishing into the stone.
Leaving the Oracle slumped.
Twitching.
"They're not summoning Valedros," it croaked.
Its final breath.
"He is the Herald."
"The god they call upon..."
"Has no name."
They burned the Oracle.
Not from anger.
But mercy.
The thing that had pierced it had burrowed deep.
Corrupted marrow.
Possessed memory.
Caedren could not risk it spreading.
The fire burned white.
Then blue.
Then black.
He watched until nothing but ash remained.
Lysa said nothing.
But her hands trembled.
Caedren stood with eyes locked on flame.
"We need to act faster," he said.
She nodded.
"Where to?"
He unfurled a map.
A city circled in old blood.
Veradin.
The capital of the western provinces.
Once a center of learning and debate.
Now, it served as the cult's heart.
Their ritual seat.
"The First Gate opens there," Caedren said.
Lysa's brow furrowed.
"And the second?"
He didn't answer.
Not yet.
That night, he dreamed.
Ivan stood at the edge of a lake of stars.
Younger than Caedren remembered.
Hands stained with ash and blood.
Weeping.
Not in despair.
But in hope.
"You were never meant to carry this alone," Ivan said.
Caedren stepped forward.
"Then help me."
Ivan smiled.
"I already am."
He turned.
Across the water stood Kael.
One thousand years removed.
Yet not gone.
His scar was raw.
But his eyes were calm.
As if to say:
I bled to buy you this chance.
Caedren woke with fire in his veins.
The path was set.
Next stop: Veradin.
Where the First Gate would open.
And the world would learn what it meant to pray—
And be heard.