The silence in the aftermath was a physical presence, thick and heavy. It was not the aggressive, consuming Silence of the Blight, but the stunned, weary quiet that follows a great and terrible storm. The air no longer crackled with malevolent energy. The oppressive weight of the rift was gone, replaced by the simple, immense weight of the mountain that now entombed it.
Kaelen lay on the cold stone, his body a hollow vessel. He felt scraped clean, not just of power, but of everything. The void in his chest was no longer a hungry thing; it was just… a part of him now, a quiet, numb space where a piece of his soul had been scoured away. He had used the last of his strength not to create a new song, but to ask the world to remember its oldest one: the song of endurance.
Elara's hand was warm in his. Her touch was a tether, pulling him back from the edge of a vast emptiness. He could hear the others stirring, their whispered questions echoing softly in the vast, dark cavern.
"Is it… over?" someone asked, their voice small and hopeful.
"The screaming… it's stopped," said another.
Kaelen pushed himself up, his muscles protesting. He looked at the wall of fresh, seamless granite that now sealed the chamber. It was perfect. Unadorned. A final, definitive full stop at the end of a catastrophic sentence. There was no sign of Morwen, or the Crown shards. They were buried, along with the source of the Blight, under a mountain of their own making.
"It's contained," Kaelen corrected softly, his voice raw. "The wound is closed. But the scar remains." He could still feel it, a deep, dormant sickness sleeping in the heart of the world, forever walled off but never truly gone.
They were trapped. The way they had come was likely collapsed. But as Kaelen cast his weakened senses outwards, he felt something else. A faint, familiar pull. Not the urgent call of the Lady's lake, but the steady, patient hum of the Sky-Anvil. The Warden's song. It was fainter, as if the world itself was quieter, but it was there. A guiding star in the new, quiet dark.
"We can get out," he said, a flicker of the old determination returning. "The mountain will show us the way."
The journey back to the surface was a slow, silent pilgrimage. They moved through a changed world. The air, while clean of the Blight's active corruption, was thin and carried the dust of recent, colossal upheaval. The land was scarred, great swathes of it rendered permanently grey and lifeless by the Blight's passage. It was a victory that looked strikingly like defeat.
When they finally stumbled out of the foothills and into what was once a green valley, they saw the true cost. The world was not healed. It was wounded, convalescing. But it was alive.
Weeks later, they stood once more at the foot of the path to the Sky-Anvil. The climb felt different. Kaelen was no longer a desperate apprentice, but a weary veteran. When he reached the top and stepped onto the black rock, the Warden was waiting, as immovable as the peaks themselves.
The ancient being's obsidian eyes regarded Kaelen, taking in the new stillness in his soul, the quiet acceptance of the void within him.
"You did not bring back a song of victory," the Warden's voice resonated in his mind.
"There was no victory to be had," Kaelen replied, his gaze sweeping over the quiet, scarred world below. "Only a choice to endure. I asked the world to be the Anvil, and it was."
"And you?" the Warden asked. "What are you now?"
Kaelen looked at his hands. They were still a mason's hands. But they were no longer just that. He was the boy who had heard the stone's song. The apprentice who had learned its notes. The man who had used them not to build a kingdom or win a war, but to give the world a chance to keep singing.
"I am the one who remembers the song," Kaelen said. "And I will teach others to listen."
He did not stay on the mountain. His place was not in a sanctuary, but in the wounded world below. He returned to the survivors, to Elara and Roric, and the others. They settled in the highlands, near the sealed tomb of the Blight, a permanent watch kept on a sleeping enemy.
He did not build a castle or a throne. He built a school. A simple, open-air structure of stone, where he began to teach. Not just the children who showed a flicker of sensitivity, but anyone who would listen. He taught them to hear the wind in the grass, the patience in the stone, the resilience in their own hearts. He taught them that power was not about control, but about connection. That the world's song was not a single, grand symphony to be conducted, but a chorus of countless small voices, each one precious.
He never fully mended the void within himself. Some wounds are too deep for even the most powerful song. But he learned to sing around it. His own melody was quieter now, more complex, woven with threads of loss and resilience. It was a song that understood the price of peace.
The Age of grand Stone-Singers was over. The Age of the Anvil had begun. It was not an age of glory. It was an age of quiet, patient, relentless mending. And as Kaelen watched a young girl's face light up as she felt the deep, slow hum of the earth for the first time, he knew it was enough. The song was not over. It had just begun again, from a single, quiet note.