The crack in the ice followed them.
Kaien didn't say it aloud, but he heard it—faint and constant—as if some hidden fracture inside the frozen grotto had decided to travel with him, echoing in his spine. Every footstep up the winding spiral of the Frostfall sounded hollow now. As though the ground beneath them was no longer stone, but memory.
They emerged into gray light.
The wind was still. Even the ever-present hiss of distant rain had dulled to a hush. Eris moved ahead without a word, her shoulders taut, her breath barely clouding in the morning air. Ilya waited where they'd left her, standing like a monument etched in flesh and charcoal.
The sketch she cradled had changed again.
Kaien saw it over her shoulder. Where once there had been a spire of swords, now the lines formed a circle—thorns, maybe, or teeth. And in the center, not a droplet, but a hand. Open. Empty. Waiting.
He didn't ask her what it meant. Ilya never answered directly.
"Did you feel it?" she asked instead.
Kaien nodded once.
Eris gave her a sideways glance. "Feel what, exactly?"
"The echo." Ilya blinked, slowly. "It's awake now."
They left the Frostfall valley in silence. Kaien hadn't touched the pendant in the ice, but he felt marked by it all the same. Something in his veins had shifted—subtly, coldly. When he gripped the sword at his hip, it no longer hummed. It listened.
They passed through the bones of a forgotten battlefield. Ash crusted the edges of old shields buried in the ground. Frost had etched spirals into the helms of long-dead soldiers. Some had no faces left—just sockets filled with black roots.
Eris stopped near one. A child's skeleton, arms still curled around a cracked clay whistle.
She didn't speak. But Kaien saw how her knuckles whitened on the hilt of her blade.
Farther along, the rain returned.
Not heavy—just a whisper, a mist of cold that clung to skin and silence. Kaien tilted his head to it. Once, the Garden's rain had been full of hunger and memory. This felt different. Empty.
"Does it remember us?" he asked, voice low.
Eris shook her head. "Or it's trying to forget."
They camped beneath the shattered bones of a colossus—a war machine from a forgotten age, now overgrown with silver moss and rusted chain.
The fire they built barely smoked. Ilya didn't sleep. She sat with her back to the ruined hull, sketching in silence, eyes half-lidded as if she was listening to something the others couldn't hear.
Kaien leaned against a broken spar of metal, watching Eris work a whetstone over her dagger. The sound was steady. Reassuring.
"We're walking into something worse than the Garden, aren't we?" she asked.
Kaien didn't answer at first. Then: "It's not worse. It's what the Garden left behind."
Eris paused. "And you?"
He met her eyes. "I'm still here."
She looked away. "That's not what I asked."
The next morning brought smoke.
Not their fire—something distant. Thick and oily, curling into the sky like a bruise. Kaien tasted salt on the wind. Not sea salt. Bloodsalt—burned roots.
They found the village around midday.
Or what was left of it.
Charred husks of homes slumped like broken teeth. The ground was blackened, and the air stank of melted bone. No bodies—just clothes, bones, and tools, arranged neatly in a circle around a scorched pit. In the center stood a single survivor.
A woman.
Or what had once been a woman.
Her skin was etched with frost-burn scars, the veins beneath her cheeks a faint, unnatural blue. She didn't blink. Didn't speak. Just stared at them with eyes that looked carved from glass.
Eris raised her blade.
"Wait," Kaien murmured.
He stepped forward, slowly.
The woman tilted her head. Her mouth opened—but no words came out. Only vapor. Like a breath stolen from a frozen grave.
Then her fingers twitched. Reached into the ashes. Drew something from the soot.
A bone pendant.
Twisted. Burned. But familiar.
Kaien felt the cold before he saw it.
The woman placed the pendant in the fire-pit and stepped back. Her gaze locked to Kaien's.
"She's watching," she whispered. "From the tree that doesn't bloom."
And then she crumbled.
Not fell—crumbled.
Her body turned to ash in a slow, silent collapse, scattering into the scorched soil.
They left the village with the pendant wrapped in cloth. It hummed in Kaien's pack—soft, erratic. Not Mercy's hum. Something colder.
"She said 'the tree that doesn't bloom,'" Eris murmured. "That's not just metaphor, is it?"
"No," Kaien said. "It's a place."
"Where?"
He looked eastward.
"I don't know. But we're going there."
Three days passed.
The road led them to a field of mirror-grass, where the blades shimmered like silver under the rain. At night, the grass whispered in voices Kaien almost remembered—his mother's hum, Seth's laugh, a phrase from a dream he couldn't place.
Ilya collapsed on the third night.
Her sketches fell around her—dozens of them, spiraling in design, all centered on a single image: the hand from before, now clenched into a fist.
Kaien lifted her gently. Her skin was cold.
Eris lit a torch and held it near.
"That's not frostbite," she muttered. "It's something older."
Ilya's eyes opened. For the first time, she looked afraid.
"It's speaking through me now," she said. "I don't want to draw it. But it draws itself."
They reached the base of the black tree at dusk.
It wasn't blooming. It was dead. But not silent.
Its bark was smooth, charred black. Its roots tangled into the earth like grasping limbs. Symbols were carved deep into its trunk—not runes, but names. Dozens. Hundreds.
Kaien stepped closer.
One of them was his.
"What is this place?" Eris whispered.
"The Sovereign's gallows," Kaien said. "Every name here tried to carry a crown."
He turned slowly. The ground beneath them pulsed.
A root twitched.
From behind the tree, something stepped forward.
Not a figure—not exactly. A mask of twisted root, a body of frost-slicked shadow. And at its side—something Kaien recognized immediately.
Mercy.
Not the sword itself, but its twin. Inverted. Pale. Carved from bone and grief.
The root-mask tilted its head.
"You left the cycle," it said. "But you brought its ashes with you."
Kaien's hand went to his blade.
Eris stepped in front of him.
"Not yet," she said.
The mask watched them in silence.
Then it turned and walked into the roots—vanishing like smoke into the tree's hollow.
That night, Kaien couldn't sleep.
He sat beneath the dead tree, tracing his name with calloused fingers. It felt wrong. Like it had always been there. Like the tree remembered him better than he remembered himself.
Ilya sat beside him, sketchbook silent.
"I think it's watching us," she whispered. "Not just from the tree. From what we leave behind."
He looked at her.
She was drawing again.
Only one image this time.
A crown made of broken pendants.
Kaien stood.
"We're done remembering," he said.
"But we haven't chosen what to forget," Ilya answered.