CHAPTER 3
Ashend
The forest ended the way a scream is cut short.
One heartbeat Kael was crashing through iron-oaks, curved Talon sword in his fist, blood hammering in his ears, Lira a pale blur at his left shoulder. The next heartbeat the trees were simply gone, and he was skidding on frost-rimed granite that fell away into nothing.
A hundred and fifty feet below, the River Sylver roared between black boulders, white water flashing like the teeth of some vast, hungry thing. Spray rose in cold plumes that caught the weak noon light and shattered it into rainbows. The wind up here was a living force, whipping Lira's midnight hair across her blood-streaked face, snapping her white coat like a battle standard.
Kael's boots scraped for purchase. He stopped an inch from the drop.
Lira halted beside him, breathing hard but steady, echo prism at her throat pulsing slow crimson.
"Dead end," Kael rasped.
"No," she said, voice calm as deep water. "A choice."
Behind them the horn sounded again (three rising notes that cracked the air like breaking bone). Closer now. Much closer. Branches exploded somewhere back in the trees as something large tore through them without care for silence.
Lira's gaze swept the cliff edge. "The bridge is half a mile downstream. We will never reach it."
"Then we jump," Kael said, eyeing the drop. His stomach lurched at the thought.
"Neither." She pointed with her chin to a tangle of ancient roots spilling over the lip of the cliff like the gnarled fingers of a drowning giant. "Down. Twenty feet to a ledge. After that, a chimney the river hides from below. I have used it before."
"You have used it," Kael repeated, voice flat. "In broad daylight. With sixteen killers on your heels."
Her dark eyes met his. "I am still breathing."
A red-fletched crossbow quarrel hissed between their heads and buried itself in an oak with a meaty thunk. Splinters stung Kael's cheek like angry hornets.
He looked at the root ladder, then at the tree line where red cloaks were already visible, then at Lira.
"Next time I find sweet-rot creeper," he muttered, "I burn the whole damn forest."
He sheathed the Talon sword across his back (awkward, but it stayed), seized the thickest root, and swung out over the abyss.
The roots were slick with frost and river mist. His boots scraped stone. Pain flared white-hot in his shoulder where the veil shard had drunk from him; blood soaked his sleeve anew. He climbed hand over hand, muscles burning, the roar of the Sylver growing louder with every foot he descended.
Lira came after, light as a hawk, coat flaring like wings. Halfway down another quarrel shattered against the cliff inches from her head. She did not flinch.
They dropped the last eight feet onto a narrow shelf no wider than a plough blade. The river's roar filled the world. Spray soaked them instantly, turning blood to pink runnels down Kael's arm.
Lira pressed two fingers to the granite wall. Her echo prism flared (crimson bleeding to white). A hair-fine crack appeared in the rock, widened with a grinding sigh, and revealed a cleft just wide enough for a body to slip through sideways.
"Old smuggler's cut," she said over the roar. "River hides the entrance from below. Move."
Kael squeezed in after her. The passage was blacker than the inside of a wolf's throat and smelled of wet iron and old terror. Lira touched her prism again; a soft white glow bloomed, enough to see by. The chimney twisted downward in sharp switchbacks, sometimes so narrow Kael had to turn sideways and exhale to pass. Water dripped from overhead and ran in cold rivulets down his neck, mixing with blood.
They moved fast. Minutes bled into one another. The sounds of pursuit faded behind layers of stone.
At last the passage spat them out into a cavern the size of Briarholt's meeting hall. Sunlight slanted through a jagged hole high in the ceiling, painting silver bars across the wet floor. Stalactites wept steadily. The air was warmer here, thick with the smell of moss and woodsmoke.
In the centre of the cavern stood an old man feeding a tiny cookfire with twigs.
He was painfully thin, all elbows and knees beneath a robe the colour of leaf-mould. A tangle of iron-grey hair stuck out from his skull like straw from a scarecrow. When he looked up, his eyes were the pale blue of winter sky and twice as sharp.
"Took you long enough," he rasped, voice like dry leaves scraping stone. "I've nearly finished my tea."
Kael's iron knife was half-drawn before recognition slammed into him.
"Corvin?"
The old man grinned, showing more gaps than teeth. "In the flesh, lad. Less of it every year, but still enough to be a nuisance."
Lira stepped forward, bow still in hand, arrow half-nocked but not drawn. "You know this man?"
"Since I was knee-high to a grasshopper," Kael said. His voice cracked on the last word; relief and exhaustion hit him like a war-hammer. "He taught me which mushrooms won't kill you and which ones only mostly won't."
Corvin cackled. "Still alive, aren't you?" He turned to Lira and gave a courtly little bow that looked absurd on his scarecrow frame. "Master Corvin Ashwither, hedge-sorcerer, retired finder of lost things, and occasional thorn in the arse of destiny. At your service, Confessor."
Lira's eyes narrowed to slits. "You know what I am."
"I know what you were born to be," Corvin said. "Different matter entirely."
He poked the fire with a crooked stick. "Sit. Both of you. The Red Talons will not find this place before nightfall, and by then the river mists will hide us. Sit before you fall down, Kael. You look like something the river spat out and decided it didn't want."
Kael's legs gave out. He sat hard on a flat rock, the Talon sword clattering beside him. Only now did the full weight of his wounds crash over him (shoulder torn, ribs slashed, side opened). Blood pooled beneath him, warm and sticky.
Corvin rummaged in a leather satchel and produced a small clay cup. He filled it from a dented kettle that hung over the flames and handed it across. The tea smelled of pine needles, bitterroot, and something sharp that stung the nose.
"Drink. Stops the bleeding and keeps the dreams quiet."
Kael drank. It tasted like burnt earth and lightning. Warmth spread through his chest almost instantly, dulling the edges of the pain.
Corvin studied Lira over the flames. "You crossed the Pale with a death-mark on you, girl. And you dragged my favourite pupil into it. Care to explain before I turn you both into toads?"
Lira remained standing. Blood still seeped through the rent in her white coat, but she ignored it as though pain were an old acquaintance she no longer bothered to greet.
"The Veil Lord has named three Seekers dead in the last moon," she said quietly. "He needs a fourth before the crimson moon wanes. I came to stop him."
Corvin snorted. "Stop him. With what? Good intentions and a pretty bow?"
"With the one who can wield the Ashen Blade," she answered.
Silence fell, broken only by the pop of burning pine and the distant thunder of the river.
Corvin's gaze slid to Kael. Something ancient and terrible moved behind the old man's winter eyes.
"Kael, my boy," he said softly, "tell me true. When you found that sweet-rot creeper this morning… did it try to drink your shadow?"
Kael felt the clay cup tremble in his hands. "It moved when I got close. Like it knew me."
Corvin sighed (a sound like wind through a graveyard). "That plant has a name, lad. Mournsbane. Grows only where a life has been stolen by shadow-weave. Feeds on the echo left behind."
He reached into his robe and drew forth a cloth-wrapped bundle no longer than Kael's forearm. The cloth was oil-stained and ancient, embroidered with silver runes that hurt to look at directly. Corvin unfolded it with reverent slowness.
The firelight died against the thing inside.
Ashend lay revealed: a single, seamless blade of kelvinite (blacker than the space between stars, yet veined with hair-fine fractures that pulsed slow white, like distant lightning trapped in crystal forged at the heart of a dying sun). The hilt was a twisted knot of star-forged iron. The edge did not reflect light; it devoured it.
Corvin laid the sword across his knees as though it weighed more than the mountain itself.
"Kelvinite," he said, voice suddenly strong enough to rattle pebbles on the cavern floor. "Higher octave of obsidian. Colder than the void, hotter than creation. Forged in the core of a star that fell during the Starfall and cooled for ten thousand years inside the Pale Rift. It remembers every lie it has ever burned. One day it will remember too many, and the fractures will meet, and the blade will finally reach its melting point from the inside. When that day comes, everything within a league will become ash and memory."
He looked up. For the first time Kael saw real fear in the old man's face (fear, and something that might have been grief).
"Ember's First Law," Corvin said, and the words carried the weight of prophecy. "People will swallow any lie if they are hungry enough to believe it tastes like hope, or terrified enough to believe it will keep the dark away."
He lifted Ashend and offered it hilt-first across the fire.
"The Veil Lord knows this law better than any man alive," Corvin whispered. "And he has just painted it in your father's blood."
Kael stared at the blade. The kelvinite called to him (a low, wordless song behind his eyes). He felt the resonance in his bones, the same pull that had stirred when the mournsbane seed-case turned toward him.
He let the Talon sword fall from his back with a deliberate clatter and reached out.
The instant his fingers closed around the hilt the cavern vanished.
He stood inside a dying star.
Heat beyond heat pressed against him, yet he did not burn. At the centre a crystal lattice formed (black, perfect, absolute), cooling even as the star collapsed. Ten thousand years compressed into a heartbeat. Screams of entire civilisations echoed in the fractures. Hopes. Lies. Loves. Betrayals. All of it crystallised along the edge.
Then the cavern snapped back.
Ashend weighed nothing and everything at once. A single new fracture (bright, hungry, newborn) appeared near the hilt, glowing like a star just born.
Corvin exhaled a laugh that sounded like surrender.
"There it is," he said. "First fracture. Welcome to the countdown, Seeker."
Outside the cavern, far above, the horn sounded again (long, mournful, triumphant).
The hunt had found their trail.
And Ashend, the blade that remembered every lie it had ever burned, was awake in Kael's hand for the first time in three hundred years.