Chapter 17: The Seer and the Shattered Sky
The Aethon Seer was young. Painfully so. He couldn't have been more than a teenager in human years, his feathers still holding the softness of youth. But his eyes... his eyes were ancient. They were a luminous, solid silver, with no pupil or iris, and they seemed to hold the light of the galaxy within them. He sat cross-legged, floating a few inches above the floor, his wings drooping slightly as if the weight of his visions was a physical burden.
"This is Orion," Corvus said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. "The Voice of the Winds."
Orion's head tilted, though his silver eyes didn't seem to focus on them. "The thread from beyond," he whispered, his voice a chorus of echoes, as if many were speaking through him. "You are tangled in so many futures. A wolf's devotion, a fox's cunning... and a shadow that seeks to unweave it all."
Astra felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. "The Rot. You've seen it?"
"I have seen the world without song," Orion murmured, his form flickering slightly. "I have seen the silence. It begins in the places between. The wounds."
"Wounds?" Lykos asked, his guard still up.
"The places where the world is thin," Orion explained, his hand moving to trace patterns in the air. "Where great magic was spent, or great tragedy occurred. The veil is fragile there. The Rot... it seeps through from the other side. It does not create the void. It is drawn to it."
Astra's mind raced. Places where the world is thin. It sounded like fantasy, but the System was already cross-referencing the concept.
[Hypothesis: The "World-Devourer Pathogen" is an extra-dimensional entity that requires a metaphysical "low pressure" zone to manifest. Areas of high spiritual decay or energetic trauma act as gateways.]
"Can you show me?" Astra asked, stepping closer. "Can you show me the nearest 'wound'?"
Orion flinched, a tremor running through his small frame. "To look upon it is to feel the hunger. To invite it in."
"Please," Astra insisted. "I am not of this world. Its hunger may not recognize me as easily. I need to see the source."
The young Seer hesitated, his silver eyes swirling. Then, he slowly raised his hands. The crystals in the room flared to life, and the air in the center of the room shimmered, coalescing into a three-dimensional image.
It was a valley, but a sickly one. The trees were twisted and grey, the ground was cracked and barren. A sense of profound sorrow and ancient violence emanated from the vision. In the center of the valley was a massive, blackened crater, and from it, a faint, visible haze of the black corruption wafted like a heat shimmer.
"The Shattered Glen," Corvus identified, his voice grim. "Where the Great Bear Clan was annihilated in the Tribal Wars a century ago. Thousands fell. Their rage and sorrow poisoned the land. It has been barren ever since."
"And now it's festering," Astra concluded, her heart sinking. The scale was immense.
In the vision, she saw corrupted beasts—wolves with obsidian fangs, boars with eyes of void—prowling the perimeter. They were not just mindless; they were organized, like guards.
"The Rot is not just spreading," Astra realized with dawning horror. "It's building. It's fortifying its beachhead."
The vision shifted, and for a fleeting second, Astra saw something else. A figure, tall and cloaked in shadow, standing at the edge of the crater. It had the general shape of a beastman, but its form was indistinct, woven from the same nothingness as the Rot. It turned its head, and though it had no face, she felt its attention lock onto her through the scrying spell.
A psychic backblast, ten times stronger than the one from the eagle, slammed into her. It was a command, a single word etched in fire and ice across her soul:
MINE.
Astra cried out, the vision shattering as she was thrown backwards, clutching her head. The crystals in the room dimmed. Orion collapsed, gasping, a trickle of silver blood leaking from his nose.
Lykos and Corvus were at her side in an instant.
"What happened? What did you see?" Lykos demanded.
Astra could only shake, the echo of that possessive, consuming word rattling in her skull. The bond with Kaelen was a frantic scream of alarm.
She looked up at Corvus, her face pale with terror.
"It's not just a pathogen," she whisp
ered. "It has a general. And it... it knows I'm here."