The void between places was not empty. It was a symphony of dying echoes. As Twilight moved with that liquid, silent gait, the roaring chaos around us resolved into something else—a tapestry of whispers. I heard the last sighs of forgotten worlds, the faint, lingering warmth of extinguished suns, the ghost of laughter from civilizations turned to dust. This was the sound of what I was, the background hum of ending that had always been there, waiting for me to remember how to listen.
The journey was not instantaneous. It was a passage. Time stretched and compressed in the between-space, moments becoming hours and hours folding back into moments. I could feel the immense strain of it, not on me, but on Twilight. The steady rhythm of its shadowy form was a constant effort against the entropic pull of the void. The Warden's gift within me, that pool of vitality, slowly ebbed, fed into our passage. This was not a power to be used lightly.
Then, the roaring faded. The streaks of light solidified into a dull, grey sky. The howling silence became the whisper of a wind smelling of dust and dry rot. Twilight took a final, shuddering step, and we were elsewhere.
The world snapped back into focus with the clarity of a hammer blow. We stood on a broken road at the edge of a city. Not a colossal, imperial capital like Aethelgard, but a smaller, fortified settlement built into the foothills of the rising mountains. The signpost at the crossroads, its wood petrified and splintered, still bore the faded, rust-colored letters: STONEHAVEN.
The first city on the map. We had crossed a distance of weeks in a single, straining passage.
Stonehaven was a corpse, but a fresher one than Aethelgard. Its walls were mostly intact, though scarred by some great force. The gates of dark, aged timber hung shattered from massive iron hinges. The silence here was not the deep, profound silence of the imperial capital; it was a watchful, uneasy quiet, broken by the skitter of loose stones in the wind.
I slid from Twilight's back, my legs unsteady, not from the ride, but from the expenditure. The pool of vitality was significantly depleted, the gnawing hunger beginning to stir again in my gut. Twilight stood solid, its void-like eyes scanning the broken city, but I could feel a faint tremor in the shadow-stuff of its form. We had pushed our limits.
"We cannot do that often," I said, my voice rough.
"It is a tool for necessity, not convenience," Croft agreed, landing on a broken wall. His form was fully solid again, the ghostly quality of the between-space gone. "This place… it feels different."
He was right. Aethelgard had been a monument to a clean, precise death, a civilization laid out in state. Stonehaven felt… violated. The damage was chaotic, violent. Buildings were not just empty; they were smashed, as if by a giant's fist. Dark, old stains splattered the cobblestones, and I saw the scattered, sun-bleached bones of its defenders, still clad in scraps of rusted mail, lying where they had fallen. They had fought here. And they had lost.
The compass in my chest was quiet. No shard of the god called from here. No fragment of my past waited in the ruins. This was simply a place on the map, a waypoint on our journey. But as I walked through the shattered gate, my staff tapping softly on the bloody stones, a different kind of pull began to nag at me. Not the divine call of the Spark, but the colder, more analytical urge of my nature. The story of this death was written plainly in the ruins, and I felt compelled to read it.
We moved inward, toward what must have been the town square. The evidence was everywhere. The blackened scars of sorcerous fire. The deep gouges in the stone from claws of impossible size. And amidst the Aethelian geometric patterns, another symbol was scrawled, painted in the same rust-colored pigment: a single, stylized, grasping hand.
"It was not just the god-war that ended them," I murmured, stopping in the square. A dry fountain, much like the one in Aethelgard, stood in the center, its basin filled not with water, but with dust and bones. "They were hunted."
"The blight takes many forms," Croft said, pecking at a claw-mark on a nearby wall. "Corruption to twist the land. Beasts to scour it clean."
A flicker of movement in the periphery of my shadow-sight. I turned, my hand going to the black ring on my finger. It was not the sickly silver glow of a corrupted core. It was fainter, warmer. A soul-glow.
"Cassian," Croft warned, his voice low.
I was already moving, following the faint, flickering light. It led me off the main square, down a narrow alley strewn with rubble, to a half-collapsed tannery. The smell of old chemicals and decay was overpowering. The glow came from behind a fallen vat.
I rounded it slowly.
Crouched in the shadows was a boy. He couldn't have been more than ten years old. He was skeletally thin, his face smudged with dirt, his eyes wide with a terror so profound it had passed beyond panic into a kind of vacant shock. He clutched a rusted kitchen knife in one trembling hand.
He was alive.
The sight was so alien, so utterly unexpected in this landscape of absolute death, that for a moment I could only stare. A living, breathing human. His soul-glow was a sputtering, guttering candle flame, weak and starved, but it was undeniably there. It was the warm silver I saw around Croft, not the sickly, corrupted light of the abomination. This confirmed it—he was human. Or had been.
He saw me, and a tiny, choked whimper escaped his lips. He scrambled backward, pressing himself against the wall, the knife held out in a pathetic, desperate gesture of defense.
I stood frozen, my mind reeling. The stories of survivors Croft had spoken of were no longer abstract. They were this terrified child, hiding in the ruins of his world.
"By the dead gods," I breathed, the old invocation slipping out unbidden.
I slowly knelt, placing my staff on the ground. I showed him my empty hands.
"I won't hurt you," I said, my voice softer than I thought it could be. "Who are you? How are you alive? How did you survive this?"
The boy just stared, his knuckles white on the knife handle. His eyes flicked past me, to where Croft now stood silently in the alley entrance. He didn't—or couldn't—answer. The terror had stolen his voice, or perhaps he had been alone for so long he had forgotten how to use it.
My shadow-sight, which saw the truth of things, probed deeper, past the surface glow of his soul. And there, nestled in the center of his being, I saw it. A Soul-Spark. But it was like nothing I had ever seen. It was not a calm, silver sphere like mine, nor was it the frantic, diseased core of the abomination. It was dormant. Still. A perfect, motionless sphere of pale grey light. It had no pulse, no rhythm. It was a heart that had stopped beating.
The sight of it was more shocking than finding him alive. Every living thing with a Spark, from the lowliest beast to a divine angel like myself, had a Spark that beat, that resonated with the energy of existence. His was silent. Frozen. It was as if the very engine of his life had been switched off, yet he still lived, a clock with no mechanism whose hands were stuck in place.
This was how he had survived. He was invisible. To the corrupting blight, to the hunting beasts that sought the warmth and pulse of life, he would have registered as little more than a stone. He was a ghost in the machine of reality, a boy whose own soul had gone into a deep, protective hibernation to keep his body alive.
I was an angel of death. This was my domain. I knew, with a certainty that chilled my blood, that I could reach out with my power and ease his passing. I could subtract the pain, the fear, the slow, wasting hunger. It would be a mercy. The simplest, cleanest end.
But as I looked at him, at the desperate, animal will to live still fighting in his eyes, another memory surfaced, thin and fragile. Not of a function, but of a law. A rule etched into my being long before the shattering.
'Thou shalt not reap a soul before its time.'
I reached slowly into the small pouch at my belt and pulled out the last piece of waybread. I broke off a small corner and placed it on the ground between us, then retreated a few steps.
For a long moment, he didn't move. Then, a tremor ran through him. Hunger overcame fear. He snatched the morsel and shoved it into his mouth, his eyes never leaving me.
"You're alone here," I stated, not asking.
A tiny, jerky nod.
"There's nothing left for you in this place. Only death." The words were harsh, but they were the truth.
Tears welled in his eyes, cutting clean paths through the grime on his cheeks. He was just a boy. A child who had watched his world die.
I made a decision. It was not the decision of an angel, bound by cosmic law. It was the decision of Cassian, a being who was remembering what it was to be more than just a function.
"You cannot stay here," I said, my voice firm but not unkind. "Come with me."
His eyes widened further, filled with confusion and a flicker of desperate hope.
"It will not be a safe journey," Croft spoke from the alley's entrance, his tone neutral. "He will slow us. He is fragile."
"I know," I said, without taking my eyes off the boy. "But to leave him here is to condemn him. I will not do that." I looked at the raven. "The law says I cannot take a life before its time. It says nothing about saving one."
Croft was silent for a moment, then gave a single, slow nod. "The interpretation is… valid."
I turned back to the boy. "My path leads east, into greater dangers. But it also leads away from this tomb. It is your only chance. Will you come?"
He looked from my face to the crumb of waybread in his hand, to the skeletal raven, and then back to me. The knife in his hand trembled less. After an eternity of silence in that foul alley, he gave another small, shaky nod.
"Good," I said. I stood, picking up my staff. "What is your name?"
He swallowed hard, his voice a dry rasp. "Lys."
"Lys," I repeated. A name for the boy with the stillborn soul. "We leave now."
I led him out of the alley, his small, frail form keeping a cautious distance. When we reached the square where Twilight stood waiting, the boy froze, his breath catching in a gasp. The sight of the shadow-steed was enough to make even the bravest man quail.
"It will not harm you," I said. I approached Twilight and laid a hand on its neck, feeling the cool, solid shadow. "He is… a friend."
I mounted, then reached a hand down to Lys. He stared at my offered hand, then at the creature of void and twilight, his small face a mask of terror and wonder.
"Trust must start somewhere, Lys," I said quietly.
Hesitantly, his small, grimy hand reached up and clasped mine. I pulled him up, settling him in front of me. He was light as a bird, all bones and trembling will. He gripped the shadowy mane, his knuckles white, but he did not cry out.
Croft took his place on my shoulder.
The Spires still called. The shards of the god still needed to be found.