CHAPTER 7
Into the Pale
Dawn came bloody.
The sun rose behind a veil of smoke from Briarholt's ruins, painting the sky the colour of fresh wounds. What had been a village was now a pyre; roofs had fallen in, walls stood as blackened skeletons, and the air stank of charred flesh and wet ash. Crows circled overhead, waiting.
Kael stood in the wreckage of his father's house, Ashend whole again in his hand. The third fracture had sealed during the night, leaving only a hair-fine scar of white fire that pulsed like a healed wound. The kelvinite felt warmer now, almost affectionate. It knew him now. It knew what he was willing to burn.
Corvin leaned against the doorframe, wrapping fresh bandages around his charred arm. The kelvinite axe (Nightbiter, he called it) hung at his belt, fractures glowing softly in sympathy with Ashend.
Lira stood apart, white coat burned and torn but still impossibly clean in places, as though the cloth itself refused to accept defeat. She stared east toward the Pale Rift, eyes unreadable.
No one spoke of the dead. There was no time.
They left Briarholt without ceremony. Kael did not look back.
The first day was silence and ash.
They followed deer trails north-east, skirting the river until the smoke was only a smear on the horizon. The forest here was older, darker; iron-oaks gave way to thorn-oaks whose branches wept red sap like blood. The ground was carpeted in centuries of fallen needles that muffled their steps and drank sound. Even birds were scarce.
Corvin limped at the rear, staff tapping a slow rhythm. His burns were healing too fast (emberfire knitting flesh), but every step cost him. Lira scouted ahead, ghosting from shadow to shadow. Kael walked in the middle, Ashend wrapped but awake, whispering against his mind in a language older than words.
By dusk they reached the foothills of the Ashen Spine (black granite ridges that rose like the broken teeth of some titanic beast). Here the trees thinned and the wind came cold off the Pale, carrying the scent of ozone and rot.
They made camp in the lee of an overhang. No fire. Lira poured another drop of moss-light; the glow was fainter now, the vial nearly empty.
Corvin broke the silence first.
"Drink it," he said, nodding at the vial of liquid starlight in Kael's hand. "Your father's real message. Can't cross the Pale carrying questions."
Kael uncorked the vial. The liquid inside moved like captured nebula, swirling silver and violet. He met Corvin's eyes.
"Will it hurt?"
"Everything worth knowing does."
Kael drank.
The world dissolved.
He fell through starlight and memory.
He saw the Starfall (not as story, but as truth): dying suns hurled across the void by warring gods, smashing into the world like hammers on an anvil. One star did not burn out. It struck the earth and lived, burying its heart beneath what would become the Pale Rift. From that heart grew kelvinite, and from kelvinite grew the first blades.
He saw the First Seeker (a woman with eyes like winter) forge Ashend from the star's core, speaking the Ember Laws into its fractures so that no lie could stand against it.
He saw the True Lord of the Rift (not the Veil Lord, but the one who came before): a being of pure emberfire who bargained with the falling stars to save what little remained of the world. The price was chains of promise, forged from the Second Law itself. He sleeps still, bound by the words he spoke to keep the stars from finishing their destruction.
He saw the Veil Lord (once a man, now less, now more): a scholar who found one of the star-hearts and tried to wear it. The heart did not kill him. It hollowed him. Now he wears a man's skin like a mask, and beneath it is only hunger. He seeks the kelvinite blades to cut his predecessor's chains (not to free the True Lord, but to take his place).
Last, Kael saw his father.
Dren knelt in the study, blood pooling, mournsbane in one hand, kelvinite shard in the other. His eyes found Kael across time.
"I'm sorry, son," he whispered. "I thought I could keep you out of it. But the stars chose differently."
Then the vision showed the final truth:
The Veil Lord's name is a lie. His true name was spoken into the chains. Speak it aloud beneath the crimson moon, and the chains break. The price: the speaker's life, burned away with the last fracture of Ashend.
The vision released him.
Kael gasped, on his knees in the dirt. Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on his face.
Corvin's voice was gentle. "What did you see?"
"Everything," Kael croaked. "And nothing I wanted."
Lira moved closer, hand resting lightly on his shoulder. "The crossing begins tomorrow. The Pale is two days' march. After that… no maps."
Corvin nodded. "Sleep. You'll need it."
Kael did not sleep.
He lay staring at the rock ceiling until the moss-light died, listening to the wind moan through the Spine. When Lira's breathing deepened into sleep and Corvin's snores rasped like dry leaves, Kael rose.
He walked into the dark.
The wind off the Pale was a knife. It flayed the skin, sought the gaps in clothing, whispered in voices almost human.
Kael…
He stopped at the edge of their camp, Ashend in his fist.
The blade woke fully, fractures glowing. Ahead, in the moonlight, stood a figure.
It looked like his father.
Same height, same stoop from years of carrying packs, same crooked smile. But the eyes were black pits, and where the throat wound should have been was only smooth, unbroken skin.
The rift-echo took a step closer. "You left me to die alone."
Kael's grip tightened on Ashend. The blade burned, eager.
"I know what you are," he said.
The echo smiled wider. "Do you? Then why does it still hurt?"
The lie struck home. Grief rose like bile.
Ashend trembled, hungry for the burn.
Kael raised the blade… and stopped.
Because the echo was right.
It did still hurt.
He lowered the sword.
The echo tilted its head. "Good," it whispered, and dissolved into mist.
Kael stood there until the wind numbed his face. When he returned to camp, Lira was awake, watching him.
"You let it live," she said.
"It wasn't alive."
"You know what I mean."
He sat beside her. The space between them was small; their shoulders touched.
"I'm tired of burning things," he said.
Lira was quiet a long time. Then: "My first confession was my mother."
The words hung in the dark.
"She was accused of treason against the Circle. I was sixteen. They made me take her." Lira's voice was steady, but her hands trembled. "One touch. She confessed everything (loves, hates, secrets she'd never told anyone). Then I took her will. She walked into the fire herself. Smiled as she burned."
Kael said nothing.
"I tell myself it was mercy," Lira continued. "That the Circle's justice is necessary. But sometimes, in the dark…" She looked at him. "Sometimes I wonder if I just wanted the power."
Ashend lay between them, silent for once.
Kael reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold.
"Third Law," he said softly. "Mercy offered to the merciless is only a slower form of suicide."
Lira's laugh was bitter. "Corvin teach you that one too?"
"No. I just learned it."
She leaned against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, hair smelling of smoke and pine and blood. They stayed like that until the stars wheeled overhead.
Morning came grey and cold.
They broke camp and began the climb into the Ashen Spine.
The path narrowed to a knife-edge ridge with drops on both sides that fell into cloud. Wind howled constantly, trying to pluck them off. Corvin led now, staff probing for loose stone. Lira brought up the rear. Kael walked in the middle, Ashend naked in his hand. The kelvinite drank the wind's lies and grew warmer.
By midday they reached the Crest of Knives (a place where the granite had been shattered into vertical blades taller than houses). Here the Pale Rift became visible: a wound in the earth twenty miles wide, filled with shifting mist that glowed faint violet. Lightning crawled across its surface without sound.
Corvin stopped. "From here on, the air itself lies. Echoes will wear faces you love. Promises will taste like truth. Trust nothing but the blade."
They descended.
The path switchbacked down the eastern face of the Spine, each turn revealing more of the Rift. The mist rose to meet them, thick as milk, sweet as rot. Sound changed; footsteps echoed wrong, voices came from the wrong direction.
The first echo came at twilight.
It wore Corvin's face, but younger (the Corvin of Kael's childhood, before the burns, before the weight). It stepped from the mist with open arms.
"Kael, my boy," it said, voice warm with affection. "You've done so well. Give me the blade. I'll carry the burden now."
Real Corvin stood ten paces back, face grim. "Burn it."
Kael raised Ashend.
The echo smiled sadly. "You'd kill me again?"
The lie struck deep. Kael's arm trembled.
Lira's voice cut through. "It's not him. Look at the eyes."
The echo's eyes were black pits.
Kael burned it.
The fourth fracture opened with a sound like breaking hearts. Pain lanced through him, but he did not fall. The echo screamed and dissolved.
Corvin clapped him on the shoulder. "Good lad."
They continued into the dark.
Night in the Rift was not darkness; it was absence.
The mist glowed with its own sick light, turning everything the colour of old bruises. The ground was uneven, littered with shards of kelvinite that sang when stepped on. Time stretched. Hours felt like days.
They walked until their legs gave out, then walked more.
The second echo came near what might have been dawn.
It wore Lira's face.
She stepped from the mist naked, skin luminous, hair unbound. Her eyes were soft with wanting.
"Kael," she whispered. "I'm cold."
The real Lira stood beside him, clothed and armed, face hard.
The echo reached for him. "Touch me. Just once. I'll make the pain stop."
Ashend burned hot enough to sear his palm.
Kael looked at the real Lira.
She met his gaze, unflinching. "Burn it," she said. "Or I will."
He burned it.
The scream was Lira's true voice twisted into something inhuman. When the ash settled, the real Lira was crying silently.
They did not speak of it.
The third echo was worse.
It wore Kael's own face.
It stood in the path, Ashend in its hand, fractures glowing.
"You're becoming the monster," it said in his voice. "Every truth you burn takes more of you. Soon there'll be nothing left but the blade."
Kael stopped.
Corvin and Lira kept walking, then realised he was not following.
The echo smiled. "They'll leave you. They should. You're poison now."
Kael looked at Ashend. The fourth fracture pulsed, hungry.
He raised the blade to his own throat.
Corvin's voice cracked like a whip. "Don't you dare."
The echo laughed. "Listen to him. He's terrified you'll see the truth."
Kael pressed the edge against his skin. A bead of blood welled.
Lira stepped between them, hand gentle on his wrist.
"Look at me," she said.
He did.
Her eyes were dark and ancient and unafraid.
"Fourth Law," she whispered. "The mind will betray the heart long before the heart admits the betrayal."
Kael lowered the blade.
He turned it toward the echo and spoke the words that burned themselves onto his tongue.
"I choose to carry this."
Ashend flared.
The echo burned without sound, folding inward until only a single fracture remained glowing in the mist.
When it was gone, Kael was shaking.
Corvin's hand rested on his shoulder. "You just burned the worst lie of all," he said softly. "The one that says you're alone."
They walked on.
The heart of the Pale Rift was a place where the world had forgotten its own name.
Here the mist formed shapes that almost became real: cities of glass that shattered when looked at directly, rivers that flowed upward, faces in the rock that wept blood. The kelvinite shards on the ground grew larger, some the size of trees, humming with trapped star-song.
They walked for what felt like weeks.
Echoes came and went. Some they burned. Some they let pass, because the cost was too high.
On the seventh day (or the seventh hour; time had no meaning), they reached the centre.
A perfect circle of clear ground, ringed by kelvinite spires. At its heart stood a throne of black crystal, and on the throne sat the True Lord.
He was beautiful.
Hair like starlight, skin like moonlit marble, eyes that held galaxies. Chains of pure promise bound him (invisible to the eye, but Ashend screamed at their touch).
He opened his eyes.
"Kael of Briarholt," he said, and the words were music and grief and hope. "You have come to free me."
The promise wrapped around Kael's heart like warm arms.
All he had to do was speak the Veil Lord's true name (the name that burned behind his eyes now, gifted by the vision). The chains would break. The True Lord would rise. The world would be saved.
Lira and Corvin stood frozen, faces slack with longing.
The True Lord smiled. "Your father would be proud."
Kael raised Ashend.
The blade pointed at the chained god.
He spoke the Fourth Law aloud, voice steady.
"The mind will betray the heart long before the heart admits the betrayal."
He drove the blade into the throne.
Not to free the prisoner.
To burn the lie.
The True Lord screamed as his beauty peeled away like burning paper. Beneath was the first Hollow (the original star-heart that had tried to wear godhood and been chained here as both punishment and bait).
The chains were the lie. The promises were the cage.
Ashend drank deep.
The fourth fracture split the blade from hilt to tip, and light poured out (blinding, purifying).
When Kael could see again, the throne was empty. The chains lay in pieces that turned to ash and blew away.
The mist began to thin.
Corvin exhaled a laugh that was half sob. "Stars preserve us. You saw through the oldest lie of all."
Lira looked at Kael with something that might have been awe.
"The promise of salvation," she whispered. "The sharpest chain."
Kael looked at the blade. The fourth fracture sealed slowly, leaving only three hair-fine scars glowing like silver threads.
In the distance, something vast stirred in rage.
The Veil Lord had felt his cage rattle.
Kael smiled (small, tired, real).
"Let him come," he said.
They walked on, into the far side of the Pale, where the mist parted like curtains and the first true sunlight in weeks touched their faces.
Behind them, the Rift began to close.
Ahead lay the Heartlands, and war, and truths that would burn the world clean.
But for now, three souls walked together.
And Ashend, the blade that remembered every lie it had ever burned, was content.