The front door to the cabin closed behind them as Weaz and Yarda entered with half-hearted surety.
Nouz must have prepared something for them. There was no way he would let them step into the place where he kept their teacher without repercussions.
Did he know that the Chief was still alive? Did he not? The answer might be the only thing that kept Weaz and Yarda alive in front of Nouz, and Weaz knew he had to find out the moment they got the slightest chance to speak.
Yarda looked around.
The rectangular cabin was not some abandoned shelter Nouz stumbled upon. This place was deliberate, built in the middle of a frozen patch on the way to the Spire, just above the Western Split. Phials and mixing tools lined the surfaces. Mortars and pestles. Knives. Jars filled with a clear, yellowish liquid, viscera suspended inside from things that lived around the Stake.
Yarda's gaze slid to the bed on their right, near the closed wooden windows.
Naama sat there quietly. Her expression changed the moment she saw them, a vague mix of relief, fear, and worry. She tried to stand.
Nouz sat across from her, right in front of the hearth, on a short wooden stool that forced his tall body to crouch. Without looking up, he raised the small knife he had been using to peel an apple, and the gesture pinned her in place.
"Teacher Naama, please remember your condition."
Nouz did not even glance at her. His attention stayed on the apple in his hand. He peeled it so neatly, so beautifully, that the skin stayed connected throughout the act, one continuous strand spilling to the floor while the fruit remained intact, unbroken in its shape.
"I didn't know you were that good with a knife," Yarda said suddenly.
Weaz stared at him like he had lost his mind.
"Yarda!" Weaz tried to whisper, trying to tell him they still did not know enough. For all they knew, the cabin could already be rigged, noxious air waiting in the rafters, the specialty of poisoners.
Yarda did not ignore him. He only spared Weaz a split-second glance and a small nod, telling him to trust him without a word.
Weaz hated it. He would have preferred to wait and see what card Nouz pulled before speaking. But Yarda had always been a risk-taker.
"I don't like making other people feel inadequate," Nouz said. Calm. Steady. Unerring.
His eyes did not lift from the apple.
When he was satisfied, he placed it on a wooden plate near the hearth. Weaz saw three other apples there, perfectly peeled, sitting for longer. The cold kept them fresh.
"Apples?" Nouz lifted the plate with his left hand and offered it toward Naama.
Naama only shook her head. Her hair, already peppered with white, caught the hearthlight.
"I don't want apples. I want answers." Her voice was strong. Assertive. She was not afraid. Not yet. "Where is Saylan."
Yarda and Weaz looked at each other.
Saylan? Naama's and Gazmir's son. The one who died after he fell in love with a girl betrothed to another, and the girl loved him back. That Saylan.
Surely there had to be a mistake.
"You need to eat something, teacher." Nouz's arm stayed extended. The plate did not move. "I will answer right after you take a bite."
Weaz's body screamed.
No. Teacher. That plate might be poisoned. The apple might have been tampered with. Don't take it.
His muscles twitched with the urge to slap the plate away, to break the spell of the room with a single violent motion.
But something stopped him.
A pressure that filled the cabin. A sense of being watched since the moment they stepped inside.
A predator's domain.
Yarda reacted too. His left hand slid to the dagger at his back waist, ready to draw, but the pressure held him, thick and heavy, like stepping into fog that wanted to suffocate you and refused to let you go. Worse than Rahzar's killing intent from earlier, back when he fought Gazmir.
"I'm not hungry," Naama answered curtly, then turned her gaze to her two students standing near the doorframe. "Weaz. Yarda."
Both of them snapped to her at once.
"Is Gazmir alright? Did the nil mac'gjar…" She stopped herself.
Weaz knew she had already foreseen it. An old veteran from a war five hundred years back fighting a younger warrior. The son of the previous Unifier. A man who could call an Infernal Armament even here, in another realm entirely.
Did she know? Rahzar can call an Armament? Weaz whispered from an angle where Naama could not see.
Nouz still showed zero care. His hand remained. Waiting for Naama to take the apple.
Yarda did not answer Weaz. He only opened his mouth to answer their teacher.
"He's…" Hesitation caught in his throat, and in his eyes. "…Alive. Rahzar spared him."
It was a lie. Yarda knew it. Nothing survived that kind of power. Not even a veteran of the Final Conflict. A Nhevari without an Armament was nothing against a Nhevari with one. No experience, no wisdom, could tilt that outcome.
Nouz stayed silent.
He must have known Rahzar could draw upon a power that large. None of this should have surprised him.
"I see…" Naama's gaze dipped. Then she looked back up at Nouz, eyes wet with rage. She took the plate with her right hand and set it on the small table near the bed. "Thank you, Nouz."
Nouz did not respond.
He stood and turned to the two near the doorframe.
"Why the beheading?" His voice was smooth. Clear. Confident. Yet there was something dark along the edge of those words that Yarda could not name.
He knows?
"Because we hate him as much as you do. What else." Weaz answered first, faster than Yarda could.
Yarda's mouth closed. He looked at Weaz with worry.
Naama picked up an apple and sniffed it. Fresh. Clean.
The Drowned Apple could be found in parts of the Dalmas, where tree roots bore fruit inside near-frozen waters, keeping apples crisp year-round, sometimes for years. Their texture was firm. Their aroma carried a citrus brightness with a warm note of ginger. The taste was usually bland, lifted with honey when you had it.
"Will I die if I take a bite out of this?" Naama asked. Firm.
Nouz looked her squarely in the eyes and shook his head. "I would not dare to poison that. I still need to give you answers about Saylan."
Naama swallowed once, then took a healthy bite.
The apple was sweeter than the drowned apples she remembered. For a moment, she worried. Then she chewed, and nothing happened. No sting. No heat. No choking reflex. No tightening throat.
Nouz had not poisoned it.
"Now that you've eaten something, I suppose I owe you an explanation." Nouz's eyes shifted to Yarda and Weaz. Sharp. Shrouded. "An explanation about why I conspired against the Chief, why we need to kill him, why I invoked Saylan's name, and why I took you here."
He paused.
"But let me preface it by saying this." His voice stayed level. "I did all of this for the sake of all the Nhevari that live in the village of Elm. Nothing more."
Lies, Weaz thought. He could see it.
Nouz pulled a chair from the alchemy table on the left side of the room and slid it out. He sat. With a small gesture of his left hand, he signaled Yarda and Weaz to sit somewhere. On the rug. On the bed's edge. He did not care.
"My father, Nouan, came from the line of the Nhevari Poisoner. He crammed into me everything he knew about the art of poison. How we can create it out of virtually anything. A drop of blood. A strand of hair. Even a rock, if we know what to do with it."
His fingers brushed a phial. Clear liquid trembled under the touch.
"And you know what the Nhevari are proud of. Strength. Duty. The charge of keeping the Inner Rings of Gehenna safe from the assaults of the Forsaken. The ones who claimed Gehenna was theirs." Nouz's eyes stayed unfocused, as if he was staring through the walls. "And you also know that we, the Poisoners of Nhevari, were part of that effort. We made sure the Forsaken's capabilities of adaptation could be disturbed. We made things possible, by sacrificing our blood, our veins, our health…"
He took a breath.
"…Our hearts."
Another pause, and then he continued, quieter.
"Hundreds, if not thousands, of kinds of venom were introduced to our veins, so we would know how they would react with our physiology, so we might intuit how they would react to the Forsaken. Hundreds, if not thousands, of our kind died in vain for the purpose of creating a new weapon. A new avenue of victory for the honorable, great, proud Nhevari Warriors to stand upon their front lines of war. Their fields of death."
He set the phial back. His hand found a pestle and turned it gently. Weaz saw a tinge of melancholy in his eyes, thin as frost.
"And then Gardens of Ferdeios invaded us." Nouz's gaze sharpened. "And we were recalled back to the Inner Rings. The Crowns deemed it so. So we moved. We left the frontier behind. We let the Forsaken run rampant at our home. We let them burn. We let them ravage. We let them spread their blight."
His voice cooled further.
"And you left something behind."
The light in Nouz's eyes changed.
"You left them behind, to do what you were not willing to do. To hold what you were not willing to hold."
He looked at them.
"You left the Poisoners behind."
"…Nouz." Naama tried to stand.
Nouz lifted his left hand, and she stayed seated. She complied.
Yarda's left hand was still gripping his dagger behind his back. Nouz would try something. Something unthinkable. They might already be caught. Maybe the moment they stepped inside was the trigger.
Weaz took a step forward.
"That was more than five hundred years ago, Nouz. You can't blame the Chief for something he had no control over. He was there, yes. Gazmir was there. Rahzar's father was there. But none of them had control over it. Either they go back to defend the Inner Rings, or we die. Either to the Crowns, the Gleaming Ones from the Gardens, or the Forsaken."
"Weaz." Nouz's voice held no malice. No annoyance. No anger.
Nothing at all.
"Take a seat. Will you allow me to finish my story?"
Weaz stepped back and sat near Naama, on the edge of the bed.
Yarda stayed near the doorframe. He needed to stand. He needed the initiative.
Nouz nodded once.
"Where was I… Ah, yes."
He spoke as if he was reciting something he had practiced for years.
"The Poisoners were left behind. To fend for themselves against the cold of the Outer Rims, against the assault of the Immortal Forsaken, against those who could adapt and change to any approach."
He exhaled.
"With certainty, they died soon after. My father, Nouan, was still a child at that time, perhaps even younger than me. His father, and his grandfather before him, left him a way to concoct poison inside his body. A way to change his physiology so he would become a living phial."
He looked at Naama.
"Not only that. Remember when I said poisoners can create poison out of anything? They took a drop of Forsaken blood, and they used my father as the vessel."
Naama's eyes widened. Cold sweat prickled behind her back. To force a child to carry an Immortal Forsaken's blood, to make him a vessel, to turn that blood into a weapon.
"To what end?" Naama's voice trembled.
"To create something," Nouz said. Flat. Distant. "Something powerful enough to alter an outcome."
"Something? Outcome?"
"Yes." Nouz's gaze did not waver. "A poison that might work against anything."
Naama's breath caught.
"Anything… you don't mean…"
"A way to force even the immortals to die. Not just the Forsaken." Nouz's voice did not rise. "But also the Gleaming Ones of the Gardens of Ferdeios. A way to finally set us all free. From conflict. From pain. From death that has soaked the aeons."
He stared into the hearth, as if the flames held an answer.
"My father, the moment my mother conceived me, passed that drop of Forsaken blood into my body, so I might refine it further. So the poison might be perfected." Nouz's lips tightened. "The pain left me debilitated as a baby. As a child. I was unable to do many things I wanted to do, until the moment the crystal was ready to be harvested from my heart, and my father finally allowed me to be free…"
He blinked.
"However, we needed a way to test it."
"A way to test?" Weaz's voice cracked with emotion he did not want to show. "Your father tested this? This weapon?"
Naama's face had gone still.
The pieces were all there. The chain of events. Korviana's ascension. An Apex's abrupt birth. The Frostblood curse the Rimelord placed upon Elm.
She had theorized this. She had carried her suspicions about Saylan, and about how it wasn't their original Saylan, but it never made sense. Saylan lived far after the burning of the house, far after the Rimelord's ascension. Saylan died only a couple years back, shot with a crossbow after he refused exile, after he refused to let go of Jaana's heart. Jaana followed him shortly after, found sleeping peacefully, without pain, without worry.
A poisoner's work.
Weaz and Yarda did not know. Not yet. But they needed to.
Nouz continued.
"Yes. Fifteen years ago." His gaze slid to Naama. Then, for the first time, a faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Bitter. Exhausted. "Using that blood, my father poisoned the entire Rime Raven population, forcing one of them to become an Apex. The survivor, the archmother of the Ravens, Korviana…"
He paused.
"…We force fed it Saylan's body."
Yarda's grip tightened around his dagger, yet he couldn't find his strength. Everything had been sapped away. Then the pain came. His heart pumped fire. His breathing turned ragged. His lungs burned from the inside.
His gaze drifted to the hearth. Then the apples.
The burning wood…? That was it…? Antidote…? Ap...ple…?
Yarda dropped to one knee. Blood pooled in his mouth. "Apple... Weaz... Eat the app...le..." He fell forward, face first.
Weaz noticed a moment too late. His veins lit up from the inside. His heart felt like it was tearing itself open. He grabbed an apple and bit into it, then forced the swallow. With what strength he had left, he lurched toward Yarda, trying to feed him, but Yarda was already unconscious.
Nouz stood.
And smiled.
"Inside Saylan's body," Nouz said softly, "was the crystallized blood of the Forsaken that was made from us. So, teacher, when I say Saylan is still alive, I wasn't lying…"
Naama's eyes went wide with terror.
"Your son is the Rimelord."