Chapter 12, Mossglass
The sky bled rust when they woke up.
Crimson clouds, swollen and unmoving, covered the sky like an old wound refusing to heal. The air felt dull. No birds sang. No insects moved. The world seemed… unfinished.
Lysaria was already awake, kneeling by the cold ashes of last night's fire, her eyes scanning the horizon.
Aurther sat up slowly, the ground beneath him oddly brittle, cracking like dried bone.
"How far are we?" he asked.
Her eyes stayed on the distant cliffs.
"If we don't slow down, by nightfall, we'll see it."
"Mossglass."
She nodded.
They walked in silence. The path narrowed into jagged stone veins that twisted through the earth like scar tissue. Trees grew bent here, leaning away from something that was no longer there. Their leaves were brittle and gray, curling like the skin of corpses left too long in the sun.
The first sign came midmorning.
A bird, frozen in place, perched on a branch.
Dead.
Not decomposed.
Preserved. As though time had forgotten it.
Then a field of flowers that bled ink when stepped on.
Then the statues.
Figures of men and women carved from flesh-turned-stone, their faces caught in mid-scream. Some clutched weapons. Others held their own heads.
Lysaria stepped carefully between them.
"These aren't sculptures," she whispered. "They were people."
"What did this?" he asked.
She didn't answer.
By midday, Aurther began to see things.
Not hallucinations—not at first.
Flickers at the edge of his vision.
Children playing in burned fields.
Soldiers walking backward into fog.
A woman with her face peeled open like parchment, smiling as she spoke words he couldn't hear.
He blinked, shook his head, and kept moving.
But then he saw something real.
Someone.
A boy, about his age or maybe younger, dressed in gray rags, standing in the middle of the path with his back turned. His skin was covered in script, tattooed from neck to heel in a language Aurther couldn't read but felt.
Each word pulsed like a heartbeat.
"Hello?" Aurther called.
The boy didn't move.
He reached a hand forward.
The boy turned.
And his face was Aurther's.
Burned. Hollow-eyed. Lips sewn shut.
The figure shattered like glass.
He collapsed.
Lysaria rushed to him.
"It's started," she said, helping him up. "The moss-glass fog. It pulls memory into form. Regret into shape. That's how the forest defends itself."
Aurther wiped blood from his nose. "This place is wrong."
"Everything about it."
By late afternoon, the trees disappeared entirely. What replaced them wasn't a forest—wasn't anything.
White soil. Gray air. Sky black at the edges.
Aurther felt strongly that they were no longer in Eryndor.
Not fully.
It felt like standing on the scar of the world.
In the center of that scar loomed what remained of the Singing Tree.
It had once been beautiful—every tale said so.
A tree as tall as mountains, its trunk a spiraled silver shell, its branches long enough to shade entire towns. A tree that hummed when the wind passed through it. A tree the gods once listened to.
Now it was dead.
Shattered down the middle.
Its roots dragged out like veins across the land, blackened and hollow.
One part still stood, leaning like a broken tower.
In its side, there was a door.
Carved cleanly.
Simple.
They stood before it in silence.
"This is it?" Aurther asked.
"This is what's left."
They didn't move.
Not yet.
Aurther turned to her. "How does anyone live out here?"
"They don't," Lysaria said. "Only she does."
"She, the Seer."
Lysaria's voice dropped. "The last witness. The last oracle. She sees what no one wants to remember."
"Do you think she'll help?"
"I don't think about her. I just hope she doesn't kill us."
Aurther stepped closer to the door.
The shard at his chest pulsed once—warm.
Then again.
A slow rhythm, like something inside it recognized where they were.
He placed his hand on the wood.
The door opened on its own.
No sound.
Just invitation.
They stepped inside.
And the air changed.
Warm.
It smelled like firelight and old parchment, like wet leaves and mourning.
The walls of the tree interior glowed faintly, lit by veins of crystal embedded in the bark. Runes crawled like ivy. The space widened as they walked, until it felt less like a hollowed tree and more like a hall without end.
And there, at the far end, sat the Seer.
She was not old.
She was not young.
Her face shifted subtly, like an oil painting in motion. Her eyes were void-black, lacking whites or color—only depth.
She sat in a seat grown from the tree itself, her hands folded.
She looked directly at Aurther.
And spoke.
"You've finally arrived."
[End of Chapter 12]