The silence that followed our departure from Stonehaven was different. It was no longer just the absence of sound, but the presence of the small, fragile being seated before me. Lys. He sat rigidly on Twilight's back, his entire body a tense line of fear and awe. He didn't lean back against me, but held himself upright, as if afraid any contact would see him dismissed from this impossible reality.
We did not take the between-paths. The strain of the last journey was still a fresh ache in my bones, a dull throb behind my eyes. Twilight's gait was a smooth, ground-eating walk, but it was a walk nonetheless. The world passed at a mortal pace. The broken road unspooled before us, winding higher into the foothills of the Spires. The air grew colder, sharper.
My mind, however, was not on the road. It was fixed on the boy. On the impossible stillness at his core.
My knowledge of Soul-Sparks was a library with most of its shelves empty. I knew they existed. I knew mine was a divine anomaly, a shard of a dead god serving as my engine. I knew the corrupted Spark of the abomination was a perversion. And now I knew that a Spark could be… dormant. Silent. A perfect, motionless sphere of pale grey light where there should be a pulsing heart of silver.
I tried again, my voice low, meant only for the child. "Lys. Your Spark. It doesn't beat. Do you know why?"
He flinched at the direct question, his shoulders hunching. He shook his head, a tiny, frantic motion. He didn't look at me. His confusion seemed genuine, not evasive. He didn't understand the question. The concept of a 'Soul-Spark' was as alien to him as a living city was to me.
Frustration simmered in my gut, but I banked it. Pushing him would be useless. I changed my line of questioning, focusing on the tangible, the physical. "How did you survive, Lys? In the city. Alone. How did you not starve?"
This question, grounded in the brutal reality he had endured, seemed to reach him. He was silent for a long time, the only sound the soft, nearly silent fall of Twilight's hooves on the dusty road.
"Wasn't… alone," he whispered, his voice a raspy thing, unused. "Not at first."
The admission was a crack in the dam. I remained silent, letting the stillness of the mountains pull the story from him.
"There… there were others. After the big noise, and the sky went wrong. We hid. In the deep cellars. Under the old guild hall." He spoke in fits and starts, each word a struggle. "Lots of us. Maybe… a hundred?"
A hundred survivors. The number was staggering. A flicker of a community, a spark of hope in the corpse of Stonehaven. My mind conjured the image: a hidden chamber, crowded with the last dregs of a broken people, clinging to life in the dark.
"How?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "How did you live down there? Food? Water?"
"Water… came from a deep seep. Cold and clean." He took a shaky breath. "The… the mages. The ones with the light in their hands. They… they made the old food last. Stretched it. But it ran out."
Mages. Of course. The Aethelian legacy. Those with the knowledge and the Spark to enact small sorceries. Preservation charms, perhaps. Purification of water. It made a tragic sense.
"And then?" I prompted gently, though a cold dread was beginning to form in my stomach.
His small body shuddered. "Then… the hunters went out. The strong ones. They… they brought back meat."
A grim picture of survival was forming. Scavenging from the ruins, braving the dangers of the surface for scraps. "From the old stores? From wildlife?" I asked, though I had seen no sign of any normal fauna since my awakening.
Lys shook his head, his face pale. "No. The… the other things. The twisted ones. The ones that… that used to be people. Or animals. The corrupted."
The words hung in the cold air, stark and horrifying. I felt Croft go still on my shoulder.
They ate the corrupted.
The revelation struck me with the force of a physical blow. The abomination I had fought—its flesh had been a perversion of stone and life, its core a diseased, screaming thing. The idea of consuming it… it was untenable. It was poison. It was madness.
"You… you ate the creatures of the blight?" I asked, my voice tight with disbelief.
He nodded, a miserable, jerky motion. "The mages… they said they could… could burn the sickness out of the meat. With fire. Make it safe." He wrapped his thin arms around himself. "It tasted… bad. Like metal and old rot. But it kept us alive."
A desperate, monstrous alchemy. Using sorcery to cauterize the corruption from the flesh of monsters so they could devour it to stave off their own end. The sheer, brutal will to live it must have taken was both admirable and terrifying.
"For how long?" I asked.
"Seasons," he whispered. "I don't know. Then… the hunters started… changing. Their eyes… glowed green. They got angry. Then they… they stopped coming back from the hunts. Or they came back… wrong."
The final, grim piece of the puzzle. The corruption wasn't just in the flesh; it was a contagion of the soul. By consuming the blight, even purified, they had been slowly poisoning themselves. The hunters, exposed to the greatest concentrations, had succumbed first. Turned on their own.
"And you?" I asked, the final, crucial question. "Why are you the only one left?"
Lys looked down at his hands. "I was small. I stayed in the deepest dark. I was… quiet. When the fighting started… when the ones who came back wrong attacked the others… I hid. In a crack in the stone. I didn't make a sound. I heard…" He trailed off, his breath hitching. "I heard it all. Then it got quiet. And I was alone."
He had survived the final massacre because of his size, his silence, and the profound, pre-existing stillness of his own soul. A stillness that had perhaps made him less of a target to the senses of the newly-turned, just as it had hidden him from the blight's hunters.
The story was complete. A tale of desperate, brutal survival ending in inevitable, self-inflicted annihilation. The silence that followed was heavier than before, laden with the ghosts of a hundred souls who had tried to cheat death by dining on its heralds.
I had no words of comfort. There were none. I simply reached out, slowly, and placed a hand on his thin shoulder. This time, he didn't flinch. He was too exhausted, too hollowed out by the memory.
He was not just a boy with a silent Spark. He was the last testament to a community that had made a monstrous choice to live, and had been consumed by it. And I, an angel of death, was now the sole keeper of their tragic, terrible story.