CHAPTER 4
The Second Fracture
The horn's final note had barely died when the cavern mouth exploded inward.
Stone screamed. Dust and shards of granite filled the air like shrapnel. Through the choking cloud strode three Red Talons, veil shards already glowing with stolen emberfire. Behind them came the Caller.
He was tall, gaunt, hooded in black that drank the light. His hands were raised, fingers long and white as bone. Around him the air rippled like heat over a forge, and from that ripple stepped shapes (mist made solid, faces Kael knew).
His father, Dren, stood at the Caller's right hand, throat opened, blood still dripping, eyes pleading.
His mother, dead ten years in childbirth, stood at the left, arms outstretched, mouthing his name.
Kael's heart stopped.
The rift-echoes moved with the Caller's will, perfect down to the last scar, the last smile. Only their eyes were wrong (black pits that reflected nothing).
Lira's bow was up in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Her echo prism blazed white-hot. "Illusions!" she snarled. "Shadow-weave! Do not trust your eyes!"
Corvin was already moving, scarecrow frame belying impossible speed. He snatched a handful of pale powder from his pouch and flung it into the fire. Flame roared up green and vicious, filling the cavern with strobing light that made the echoes flicker.
Kael stood rooted, Ashend heavy in his fist. The new fracture near the hilt pulsed like a second heart.
The echo of his father took a step forward. "Kael," it whispered, voice perfect, beloved. "Why did you let me die alone?"
Pain lanced through Kael's chest sharper than any veil shard. The kelvinite blade trembled.
Lira's voice cut through the haze. "Kael, burn it!"
He did not know how he knew what to do. He simply acted.
Ashend rose.
The blade moved of its own accord, or perhaps it was his arm that moved without thought. The edge touched the echo-father's shoulder (no resistance, no blood, only a sound like glass shattering in a cathedral).
Pale fire erupted along the kelvinite.
The echo screamed (a sound that tore at the roots of the world). Lies peeled away in burning sheets: the face, the voice, the grief. Beneath lay only shadow-weave, black threads writhing like worms. They ignited, consumed, turned to ash that drifted upward and vanished.
The fracture on Ashend widened by the width of a hair.
Kael felt it.
Not in the blade (in himself). A piece of his soul, small but unmistakable, tore free and vanished into the kelvinite. The cavern tilted. For one terrifying instant he was hollow, echoing, a man-shaped hole where grief had lived.
Then the emptiness filled again, colder.
The Caller hissed, a sound like steam escaping a grave. "So the blade wakes. Good."
He gestured.
The remaining echoes surged forward (dozens now, spilling from the shattered entrance like smoke given flesh). Townsfolk Kael had known all his life. Friends. A girl he had kissed once behind the mill when they were fifteen. All pleading, accusing, dying again and again.
The Red Talons attacked.
Lira loosed arrow after arrow, each shaft glowing with borrowed emberfire. Where they struck, echoes burst into white flame and were gone. But there were too many.
Corvin pulled threads of light from thin air, weaving them into a shimmering wall that slowed the advance. Sweat poured down his face; his hands shook. "I can't hold them long!" he shouted. "The Caller is stronger than any I've felt!"
Kael moved.
Ashend sang as it cut the air (a low, hungry note that made the stalactites ring). Every lie it tasted fed the blade and starved him. A farmer who had never existed dissolved into screaming ash. A child's echo reached for him with broken arms and vanished in a flare of pale fire. Each destruction widened the fracture a little more, took another sliver of Kael's soul.
He felt himself growing lighter, colder, more terrible.
A Talon lunged past the echo-swarm, veil shard aimed for Lira's heart.
Kael stepped between them. The shard struck Ashend instead.
The crystal weapon shattered like ice. The Talon stared at his empty hand, confused, then looked up into Kael's eyes.
For the first time the kelvinite blade tasted living flesh.
The Talon's mouth opened in a silent scream. His skin cracked along ember-lit seams. Light poured out (not blood, light). Memories, lies he had told himself, lies he had lived. All of it burned away in a heartbeat. What fell to the cavern floor was not a corpse but a hollow statue of ash that collapsed into grey dust.
The fracture on Ashend lengthened visibly. Pain exploded in Kael's chest (his own this time, raw and human). He staggered, went to one knee. Blood (real blood) dripped from his nose.
Lira was at his side in an instant, hand on his shoulder. "Enough! You'll kill yourself!"
The Caller watched from the ruined entrance, head tilted like a curious child.
When only four Talons remained, he raised one hand.
The temperature in the room plummeted. Frost rimed the walls. The fire in the hearth guttered and died.
From the shadows at the Caller's feet rose a single figure (taller than any man, cloaked in night made solid). Where its face should have been was only a smooth expanse of nothing.
A Hollow.
Corvin's wall of light shattered. Echoes poured through.
The old sorcerer snatched a burning brand from the fire and hurled it into the swarm. Green flame exploded outward, driving the shadows back. "Back passage!" he roared. "Now!"
Lira dragged Kael upright. His legs moved without his consent. Ashend dragged at his arm like an anchor forged of guilt.
They ran.
The cavern narrowed into a tunnel barely shoulder-wide. Corvin led, staff tapping a frantic rhythm. Behind them the Caller's voice echoed, amplified by the stone.
"You cannot outrun truth, Seeker! The blade will devour you long before you reach the Veil Lord!"
Kael's vision blurred. Each footstep felt like walking across broken glass. The fracture now ran half the length of the blade, glowing white-hot.
They burst into a smaller cave lit by a single shaft of sunlight. A rope ladder hung from a natural chimney overhead, swaying gently.
Corvin spun, hands already weaving. "Up! Both of you!"
Lira went first, climbing with the grace of a cat despite her wounds. Kael followed, Ashend clenched in his teeth. The kelvinite tasted of star-metal and grief.
Halfway up, the Caller appeared at the tunnel mouth.
He raised both hands. The air thickened, darkened. Shadows coalesced into a single, massive rift-echo (taller than two men, shaped like something that had never been human). It reached for the ladder with fingers of black smoke.
Corvin planted his staff and spoke a single word in a language that hurt to hear.
The cavern floor erupted in green fire. The echo shrieked, recoiled. But the backlash struck Corvin like a giant's fist. Blood sprayed from his mouth; he crumpled.
"Corvin!" Kael screamed.
The old man looked up, teeth red. "Go, damn you! Live long enough to make the fractures count!"
Lira's hand closed around Kael's wrist and hauled him upward. They tumbled out onto a narrow ledge high above the river gorge. Mist swirled below like milk in a cauldron.
Behind them, deep in the earth, green fire roared and died.
Kael lay on his back, chest heaving, Ashend across his chest like a bar of judgment. The fracture now ran three-quarters of the blade's length. Cold seeped into his bones (not from the wind, but from the hollow place inside where pieces of himself had been).
Lira knelt beside him, face pale beneath the blood. "He is gone," she said quietly. "I felt the weave snap."
Kael closed his eyes. Tears came, hot and sudden and useless.
Above them, far off, the horn sounded once more (victory this time, long and mocking).
Lira stood, bow ready, eyes scanning the ridge. "They will find this exit within the hour. We have to move."
Kael pushed himself up. The world swayed, then steadied. Ashend felt lighter now (too light), as though it had begun to feed on emptiness instead of flesh.
He looked at the blade, at the widening fracture that pulsed like a living wound.
"How many lies can it burn," he asked, voice raw, "before there's nothing left of me?"
Lira met his gaze. For the first time, something like pity softened her eyes.
"That," she said, "is what the rest of this war will teach us."
She turned and started along the ledge, white coat already fading into the mist.
Kael followed, Ashend in his hand, the First Law burning in his mind like a brand.
Yet as they vanished into the fog, a single thread of green emberfire (faint, almost invisible) flickered once in the depths of the chimney below and then followed after them, patient as winter, refusing to die.
Corvin was not finished yet.