The days that followed were a slow, grinding ascent into the shoulders of the Spires. The air grew so thin and cold it burned the lungs, and the wind carved knife-edged channels through the rock. Lys endured it with a quiet, desperate resilience, his small body shivering constantly beneath the oversized wool cloak. He spoke little, but his eyes were constantly moving, scanning the jagged horizons.
On the third day, a new tension entered our journey. It began as a faint pressure at the back of my skull, a wrongness in the air that had nothing to do with the thin cold. Twilight's ears lay flat against its head, and a low, silent vibration stirred in its shadowy chest. Croft took wing, climbing high on the bitter wind, a dark sentinel against the iron-grey sky.
He returned swiftly, landing on a jagged outcrop. "They are near," he rasped, his voice tight. "A pack. Their stench carries on the wind." His gaze drifted to Lys, and the unspoken truth settled over us. The boy's dormant Spark might offer him some protection, but my own divine fragment was a beacon, and Twilight was a creature of potent, alien energy. We were no longer ghosts in a dead land. We were prey.
We pushed on, our pace quickening, searching for any defensible ground before the light failed. The mountains offered little mercy. The trail snaked through a narrow, treacherous pass, its floor a river of loose shale, its walls sheer and crumbling. It was there, in that stone throat, that they found us.
They came from cracks and fissures in the rock, a scuttling, clicking horde. A dozen of them, perhaps more. They were smaller than the great abomination I had faced on the road, the size of large hounds, but they shared the same horrific marriage of flesh and stone. Globs of weeping, black flesh pulsed between plates of jagged granite. Their eyes were pits of sickly green fire, and their mouths were ragged wounds filled with crystalline teeth that ground together with a sound like breaking slate. They moved with a terrifying, insectile speed.
Lys let out a choked gasp and pressed himself against Twilight's flank, his small hands clutching at the shadowy mane. My own shadow-blade was in my hand in a heartbeat, the dark metal flowing from the ring as I swung down from the saddle.
"Get back!" I shouted at the boy, shoving him roughly toward a shallow depression in the rock wall. "Do not move!"
Then they were upon us.
The pass became a chaos of shrieking stone and sizzling shadow. My blade was a arc of darkness, shearing through limbs and carapaces. Each impact sent a jarring shock up my arm, the foul energy of the creatures a physical poison. Black blood, thick as pitch, sprayed through the air, sizzling where it struck the stone. Twilight was a whirlwind of obsidian hooves and tearing shadow, its silent, efficient violence a stark contrast to the mindless screams of the corrupted. Croft dove and harried, a black dart, his sharp beak finding the glowing green eyes with brutal precision.
But they were many, and fear was a cold knot in my belly. Not for myself, but for the child huddled behind me. A single one of these things getting past our line would be the end of him.
Every swing, every sidestep, was measured against the dwindling reserve of the Warden's gift within me. I used the shadows not to hide, but to confound, pulling tendrils of darkness across the pass to make the creatures stumble and crash into one another. It was a draining, meticulous battle, a war of attrition against both the horde and my own fading strength.
When the last creature finally lay still, its green light guttering out, the silence that fell was heavy and thick with the stink of ozone and rot. I leaned on my shadow-blade, my breath tearing from my lungs in ragged, pluming gasps. The cost had been steep. The well of vitality within me was perilously low, and the deep, familiar ache of hunger was waking, a beast stirring from its slumber.
Lys crept out from his niche, his face a pale mask of terror. He stared at the carnage, at the twitching, stony limbs and the black blood staining the grey scree.
Croft landed amidst the corpses, hopping from one to the next, his head cocked. He pecked thoughtfully at a chunk of stony flesh, then looked from the dead creatures to me, his gaze unnervingly calm.
"A costly victory, Cassian," he stated, his voice cutting through the ringing in my ears. "You have spent a king's ransom of your strength to destroy what could have been a resource."
I stared at him, the words not making sense through my fatigue. "Resource? They are filth. A plague upon the land."
"They are flesh," Croft replied, his tone utterly devoid of emotion. "And we have none. The boy starves. You starve. Your power is not merely a weapon of destruction. You have shown you can purify. You can subtract the unwanted."
The meaning of his words crashed down upon me, slow and terrible. "You cannot be suggesting we…"
"I am stating the only logical path forward," Croft interrupted. "The survivors of Stonehaven consumed such flesh to live. Their method was crude, using simple flame. Your power is one of fundamental negation. You could achieve a far more complete cleansing. You could reach into the very essence of the meat and subtract the corruption itself."
I looked at the twitching, foul-smelling carcasses. The idea of using my power, a shard of a death god's will, to prepare a meal was a perversion that sickened me to my core. It felt like a defilement of my very nature.
"I am no butcher, Croft."
"You are responsible for a life," he countered, his gaze shifting to Lys, who was watching us with wide, horrified eyes. "Your principles are a luxury your empty bellies can no longer afford."
The truth of it was a cold stone in my gut. My own hunger was a growing roar. Lys's fragility was a visible weight. We had no supplies. The mountains were barren. To continue without food was to choose a slow, wasting death.
I looked at Lys. He met my gaze, and in the depths of his eyes, I saw the ghost of the boy from Stonehaven who had done monstrous things to survive. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shudder, and then looked away, his shoulders slumping. It was not consent. It was a surrender to a terrible necessity.
Gritting my teeth against a rising tide of revulsion, I approached the least-mangled of the corpses. The stench was overwhelming, a mix of opened graves and lightning-struck stone. I pushed past it and placed my hand upon the cold, rough flesh. I reached for my Spark, for the well of shadow and ending within.
I did not seek to destroy. I sought to see. My awareness flowed into the corrupted flesh, and I felt it—a seething, chaotic, malevolent presence woven through its very substance. The blight. It was a screaming, discordant note in the silent music of the world.
I focused my will, defining it with absolute clarity. Unwanted.
I called upon the shadows, not to annihilate, but to perform a precise and terrible surgery. I imagined my power as a blade of perfect void, carefully cutting the shrieking, green-tinged corruption away from the simple, inert matter of the flesh.
A faint, grey mist began to weep from the creature's body, drawn into a small, swirling vortex of darkness that I held above my palm. The process was agonizingly slow, a grinding mental strain far greater than the frenzy of battle. It was like trying to unpick a tangled, venomous knot with my mind alone. I felt the foul energy resist, clinging to its existence, fighting its own erasure. Sweat beaded on my brow and my hands trembled with the effort.
Finally, with a soft sigh like a dying breath, the vortex vanished. I slumped back, my head spinning, my vision blurring at the edges. The creature beneath my hand was… transformed. The stony plates remained, but the pulsing black flesh between them had turned a dull, lifeless grey. The horrific stench had faded, replaced by a bland, almost metallic odor. It was no longer a thing of blight. It was merely meat. Strange, unwholesome meat, but inert. Purified.
I looked at my hands, feeling a stain upon my soul that no amount of mountain wind could cleanse.
Croft hopped closer and pecked at the purified flesh. "The corruption is gone. It is… neutral."
Using my shadow-dagger, I cut a small, hesitant strip from the grey flesh. I skewered it on the blade's tip and held it over our meager fire.
We cooked the meat of the blight in a heavy, shameful silence, broken only by the crackle of the flames and the mournful wind. When it was charred and smoking, I offered the first piece to Lys.
He looked at the offered morsel, then at my face, his expression a hollowed-out thing. Slowly, he took it. He closed his eyes, as if in prayer, and took a bite.
He chewed. Swallowed. He did not retch. He simply opened his eyes and gave a single, small nod.