CHAPTER 6
Briarholt Burns
The doorway framed Corvin like a corpse that had refused its grave.
He leaned on his staff, robe burned half away, skin blistered and black in patches, yet the winter eyes were bright and alive. Blood crusted his beard, but his grin was the same crooked slash Kael had known since childhood.
"Told you death was just another lie people swallow," the old man rasped. "Took you long enough to burn it."
Kael could not speak. The second fracture on Ashend had sealed with a sound like mountains mating; the blade now glowed with a steady, terrible light that made the shadows in the ruined study retreat. The kelvinite shard (his father's last gift) had fused into the fuller, its runes pulsing in time with Kael's own heart.
Lira's bow was half-drawn, arrow trained on Corvin's chest. "Prove you are real."
Corvin lifted his left hand. The flesh was charred to the bone in places, yet he flexed the fingers with deliberate care. "Real enough to hurt, girl. Real enough to bleed." He turned the palm toward her; in the centre was branded the same rune now glowing on Ashend's shard. "Your turn. Touch me. Echo me. You'll taste the truth."
Lira lowered the bow a fraction. Her echo prism flared crimson. She stepped forward, placed two fingers against Corvin's wrist.
The cavern fire roared in memory (green flame, Corvin's body crumpling, the weave snapping). But beneath that memory ran another thread: Corvin weaving a death-echo of himself, pouring his own emberfire into the illusion so completely that even the Caller believed it. A lie so perfect it had fooled death itself.
Lira exhaled, a sound almost like grief. "You let us mourn you."
"Had to," Corvin said. "The Caller was reading Kael's heart. If the boy hadn't believed I was gone, the fracture would never have sealed. Pain is the only whetstone sharp enough for kelvinite."
Kael found his voice. "You bastard."
Corvin's grin widened. "Love you too, lad."
Outside, the chanting stopped. Boots on cobblestones. Sixteen Red Talons, moving in perfect formation, quartering the village street by street.
Corvin's eyes narrowed. "They've ringed the house. Two quadrae. One Caller. And something worse." He sniffed the air like a hound. "Shadow-weave thick enough to choke on. They know the shard has been claimed."
Lira was already at the window, white coat streaked with soot and blood. "We are surrounded."
Corvin limped to the overturned desk, kicked aside broken drawers, and pried up a floorboard. Beneath lay a short, brutal war-axe with a head of the same black kelvinite as Ashend (smaller, cruder, but alive with fractures). He hefted it with a wince.
"Old friend," he muttered to the axe. "Time to earn your scars again."
Kael stared. "You had another piece?"
"Three pieces in all," Corvin said. "Your father found the second. I kept the third. The Veil Lord has been hunting the set for thirty years." He met Kael's eyes. "Tonight he loses."
The front wall exploded inward.
Wood and plaster became shrapnel. Through the breach stepped the Caller (taller now, robes writhing with living shadow). Behind him fanned eight Red Talons, veil shards already drinking the firelight.
The Caller's voice filled the room like oil poured over flames.
"Give me the shard, Seeker, and I will let the Confessor live."
Lira's arrow took him in the throat.
Or it would have. The shaft struck shadow-weave and turned to ash mid-flight.
The Caller smiled. "You should have learned that kindness is a blade turned inward."
Corvin moved first.
He spun the kelvinite axe in a low arc that severed the nearest Talon's leg at the knee. The man screamed once before the blade's fractures drank the sound and turned it into pale fire. Ash exploded outward.
Kael followed, Ashend singing as it woke fully for the first time.
The blade met veil shard and did not clash; it devoured. The Talon's weapon shattered into a thousand glittering motes that Ashend swallowed greedily. The man stared at his empty hand, then at Kael, then at the edge descending toward his face.
He had time for one heartbeat of perfect understanding before the lie that was his life burned away.
The room became a maelstrom.
Lira danced through the chaos, bow discarded, twin curved daggers of pale bone flashing. Each strike carried an echo: fear, regret, rage. Talons froze mid-step, clawing at illusions only they could see. One drove his own shard into his eye to make the visions stop.
Corvin fought like a man who had nothing left to lose and everything to prove. His axe carved glowing wounds in the air itself, severing shadow-threads that tried to bind him. Blood poured from his burned flesh, but he laughed (wild, free, terrible).
Kael was the eye of the storm.
Ashend moved without thought, guided by something older than muscle memory. Every lie it tasted fed the blade and starved him. A Talon's boast that he felt no fear (burned). Another's belief that the Veil Lord was a god (burned). The lie that they could win this fight (burned).
With each truth revealed, another fracture spider-webbed across the kelvinite.
The Caller watched from the ruined doorway, 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.
The true horror.
Corvin's laughter died. "Stars preserve us. He brought a Hollow."
The Hollow took one step forward. The floorboards beneath its foot turned to ash and fell away into nothing.
Lira's daggers trembled in her hands. "We cannot fight that."
"We don't," Corvin said. He looked at Kael. "You do."
Kael felt Ashend vibrate, eager. The fracture now ran the full length of the blade, glowing white-hot. One more lie. One more truth.
The Hollow raised a hand that ended in fingers of pure absence.
It pointed at Lira.
The lie came unbidden to Kael's mind (clear, seductive, perfect):
She will die if you do not surrender the blade.
He felt the promise wrap around his heart like warm chains. All he had to do was drop Ashend, step forward, and she would live. The village would burn, the world might fall, but Lira would live.
The sharpest chains are forged from the promises men most want to hear.
The Second Law, spoken in Corvin's dying voice.
Kael looked at Lira (blood-streaked, fierce, beautiful, terrified beneath the mask).
He made his choice.
He turned Ashend inward and drove the blade through the lie itself.
The kelvinite met the promise and burned it root and branch.
Pain beyond pain exploded in his chest. The third fracture split the blade from hilt to tip with a sound like the sky tearing open. Light poured out (not pale now, but blinding, actinic, the colour of stars being born).
The Hollow shrieked (a sound that was every scream ever screamed) and recoiled. The lie that had birthed it unraveled, thread by thread, until only a man-shaped cloud of ash remained. It collapsed inward and was gone.
The Caller staggered, blood pouring from his eyes and ears. "Impossible," he whispered. "No one burns their own heart—"
Kael stepped forward. Ashend moved once more.
The Caller's head parted from his shoulders and rolled across the floor, still mouthing the word impossible.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of burning homes outside.
Kael dropped to his knees. Ashend clattered beside him, split perfectly in two, yet still whole (an impossibility made real by kelvinite and will).
Corvin knelt, placing a trembling hand on Kael's shoulder. "Three fractures," he said softly. "Three truths. You are the Seeker now, whether you want it or not."
Lira stood over the Caller's body, daggers dripping. Her face was pale as death.
"What did you burn?" she asked.
Kael met her eyes. "The lie that I could save you by giving up."
Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on her cheeks.
Outside, the remaining Talons broke and ran. The village burned, but the hunt, for tonight, was over.
Corvin helped Kael stand. The old man's burned flesh was already knitting beneath a lattice of green emberfire.
"There's one more thing," Corvin said. He reached into his ruined robe and drew out a small, stoppered vial filled with liquid starlight. "Your father's real message. Not the shard. The words he died to give you."
He pressed it into Kael's hand.
"Drink when you're ready to see what the Veil Lord truly fears."
Kael closed his fingers around the vial. The split halves of Ashend lay on the floor, yet he could feel them pulling together, slow as continents, waiting for the next lie great enough to weld them whole.
He looked at Corvin. At Lira. At the burning village that had been his home.
Then he looked east, toward the Pale Rift, where something ancient stirred in its sleep.
"I'm ready," he said.
And for the first time since the mournsbane had turned its thorn toward him, Kael of Briarholt felt the shape of the war to come.