The silence that settled after Lys's story was profound. The wind seemed to hold its breath, and even Twilight's silent footfalls felt like a intrusion on the memory of the horror he had just described. The boy had shrunk in on himself, the act of speaking the truth seeming to have drained the last of his fragile energy.
I kept my hand on his shoulder, a silent anchor in the storm of his past. My mind reeled. They had consumed the corrupted. It was a level of desperation I could barely fathom. It explained the final, violent end of the survivors, a poison of the soul turning them against each other. But it did not explain Lys. His stillness had predated the fall. It had been his shield.
Croft, who had been a silent, dark statue on my shoulder throughout the boy's halting tale, now stirred. His head tilted, his bright eyes fixed on Lys with a new, sharp intensity.
"The consumption of the blighted flesh… it is a path to a swift and terrible end. That he is here, separate from that fate, is a testament to his… difference." The raven's voice was pensive. He hopped from my shoulder to a low-hanging, petrified branch as we walked, keeping pace with Twilight's steady gait. "Cassian. Your assumption about his Spark may be flawed. You view its stillness as a wound, a failure. But what if it is not a condition, but a state?"
I glanced at him. "A state?"
"My knowledge of mortal development is… fragmented," Croft admitted, choosing his words with care. "But the pieces I possess suggest that for humans born with the potential for a Soul-Spark, it does not begin its life beating. It is dormant. A seed of potential. Still and grey, much as you describe."
The revelation landed softly, yet it shifted the entire foundation of my understanding. I looked at the back of Lys's head, at the vulnerable curve of his neck. "So it is not broken?"
"It is unawakened," Croft corrected. "In a world that was, he would have been tested. Those with the potential would have been found by mages or priests. Through rigorous practice, meditation, or a moment of extreme emotional or physical trial, the Spark would be ignited. It would begin to pulse, to channel the energy of the world, and the human would learn to shape it. That is what the Aethelian sorcerers were—not beings born with raging infernos in their chests, but individuals who had learned to light their own, internal candle."
The implications unfolded slowly, changing the nature of the boy's silence from one of tragedy to one of… latency. He wasn't a ghost. He was a seed, buried in the ashes of a dead world, waiting for a sun that would never rise.
"He never had the chance," I murmured, the truth of it a fresh kind of ache. There were no mages left to teach, no safe monasteries for study, no moment of trial that was about growth and not mere survival. The cataclysm had not just killed the living; it had extinguished the future. It had stranded potential like Lys in a perpetual, silent childhood of the soul.
"Precisely," Croft said. "His survival is a paradox. His dormant Spark made him invisible to the blight, allowing him to endure. But that same dormancy means he possesses a power he cannot access, a strength he cannot wield. He is, and will remain, utterly vulnerable, unless…"
"Unless what?" I asked, though a part of me dreaded the answer.
Croft's dark eyes met mine. "Unless someone awakens it."
The responsibility of it felt even heavier than before. It was one thing to guard a silent, broken thing. It was another to be the custodian of a locked door, holding the only key. I was an angel of death, a being of ending and subtraction. The art of nurturing, of igniting life… it was the antithesis of my nature. It felt as foreign as breathing water.
"I am not a teacher, Croft."
"You are a being of immense power, with a Spark of divine origin," he countered. "The principles of energy, of channeling, may be universal. And you are, for better or worse, all he has."
I fell silent, the weight of the boy and his unlit soul pressing down on me. The compass in my chest tugged east, a clean, simple call of power and purpose. But this… this was messy. This was fragile.
As dusk began to bleed into the sky, I found a sheltered alcove for us to rest. I helped Lys down, his small body trembling with a fatigue that was more than physical. He curled up against the rock wall the moment he sat, his eyes closing almost immediately, escaping into sleep.
I sat across from him, the small fire between us. In the flickering light, I studied him with my shadow-sight. The dormant Spark was there, a pale, grey moon in the center of his being. Still. Waiting.
Could I do it? Did I even have the right? To awaken him to a world of such pain, to grant him power in a land where power had only led to ruin? Or was it a greater mercy to let him remain as he was—a silent, hidden thing, safe in his ignorance, until his body eventually gave out?
The questions had no easy answers. The path east was no longer just a journey of reclamation for me. It had become a trial of judgment. I had to decide not only what to do with the shards of a dead god, but what to do with the living, breathing potential of a single, silent boy. And I had never felt less qualified for either task.