The silence left in the Sorrow-Eater's wake was more profound than the one that had preceded it. It was a clean silence, stripped of the oppressive weight of despair. Elias knelt beside the unconscious drifter, his fingers gently probing the man's neck for a pulse. It was thready, but steady. He was alive.
Anya approached slowly, her footsteps unnaturally loud in the quiet cavern. She kept her distance, her crossbow held loosely at her side as if she'd forgotten it was there. She wasn't looking at the unconscious man. She was looking at Elias. Her face, usually a mask of hardened pragmatism, was a canvas of shock and disbelief.
"That light… The creature was afraid of it," she stated, her voice barely a whisper. It wasn't a question. It was a dawning, terrifying realization. "It wasn't just a trick. You hurt it."
"I don't believe it can be hurt in a conventional sense," Elias said, pulling a waterskin from his satchel. "I think it was… repulsed. Like casting a bright light into a deep shadow. The shadow isn't destroyed, it just… recedes." He gently lifted the man's head, trying to trickle a few drops of water past his cracked lips.
"No beast in the Verse recedes," Anya insisted, taking a step closer. "They fight until they die or their prey does. What are you, Healer?"
The question hung in the air, genuine and laced with a fear she rarely showed. He wasn't just a curiosity anymore. He was an anomaly that broke the fundamental rules of her world.
Elias met her gaze, his own eyes showing the deep fatigue the last encounter had cost him. "I am a man who believes that integrity is a force of nature, just like gravity or decay. The creature feeds on brokenness. I offered wholeness. They cannot exist in the same space."
Before Anya could process this, the man on the floor groaned, his eyelids fluttering. Elias immediately turned his full attention to him, his expression softening with professional compassion.
"Easy now," he murmured. "You're safe."
The man's eyes opened. They were bloodshot and filled with a deep, haunting confusion. He flinched away from Elias's touch, scrambling backwards until his back hit the cavern wall. "The song… it was so sad…" he stammered, his memory fragmented. He looked around the cavern, at the bodies of the Grave-Lice near the entrance. "What happened?"
"You were attacked. You've been unconscious for a short while," Elias explained, keeping his voice even and calm. "My name is Elias. This is Anya. What's yours?"
"Loric," the man rasped, his throat dry. "My name is Loric." He drank greedily from the waterskin Elias offered. As the water cleared some of the fog from his mind, a new panic entered his eyes. "My group! Are they here? Did you see them?"
"We've seen no one else," Anya stated, her tone flat and factual.
Loric's face fell. "We were separated. A Stalker ambush, two days ago. I ran… I got lost…" He looked between the two of them, his expression pleading. "We have to find them. They were headed for the Sunken Chapel. A safe place. Clean water, they said. It's supposed to be close."
Anya's posture stiffened. She crossed her arms, her brief moment of awe replaced by a familiar, hard-edged pragmatism. "There are a hundred myths like that in the Verse, Loric. 'Safe places' are usually just clever traps or graveyards for fools who believed in them."
"But it's real!" Loric insisted, his voice cracking. "An old-world church that sank into the Gloomwood. The priests blessed the well, and the water still runs pure. It keeps the worst of the Verse away."
"A lovely story," Anya said dismissively. She turned to Elias. "He's a liability. He's weak, he'll slow us down, and he's chasing a ghost story. We have a goal: Deep-Well. We can't afford a detour for every lost soul we find."
Elias listened patiently before responding. "We saved his life, Anya. What does that act mean if we leave him here to die of starvation or stumble into the next predator's territory?"
"It means we're not the ones who killed him!" she shot back, exasperated. "We fulfilled the bargain. You proved your point. Your… hope-magic… it worked. But there's a price for every principle, Healer. The price for this one is our time, our food, and our safety."
"It's a price I'm willing to pay," Elias said simply. His gaze shifted to Loric, who was watching their exchange with the wide, terrified eyes of a man whose fate was being decided. "Saving a life isn't a single act. It's a commitment. We will take him to this chapel."
Anya threw her hands up in frustration. It was the same argument as before, but this time it felt different. She had seen his principle made manifest. She had seen it do something her crossbow and her cynicism never could. To argue against it now felt like arguing against a fundamental, albeit inconvenient, truth.
"Fine," she ground out, the word costing her. "Fine. We look for this Sunken Chapel. One day. We give it one day. If we don't find it, or if it's a trap, we are done. We leave him, and we head for Deep-Well. That's my price. No arguments."
Elias looked at Loric, who nodded weakly, accepting the sliver of hope he'd been given. Then he looked back at Anya. "Agreed."
The bargain was struck. Their party had grown to three: a steadfast healer bound by his code, a broken survivor clinging to a myth, and a reluctant pragmatist who was beginning to suspect that the rules she had lived by for fifteen years were, perhaps, incomplete.
Anya sighed, running a hand over her face. "Alright, Loric," she said, her voice filled with a weary resignation. "Tell us everything you know about this chapel. If we're going on a fool's errand, we might as well do it with a map."