Chapter 26: The Weight of God-Sorrow
The silver grief of the Forgotten God was a quiet tide inside him. It did not rage like the storm or cut like the law. It settled, a deep, cold lake at the bottom of his soul, reflecting a sky full of dead stars.
It was not power. It was perspective.
When he looked at Lin now, he did not just see a warrior bound by debt. He saw the ghost of the family she'd lost to steppe raiders, the quiet shame of survival that walked beside her. The sorrow allowed him to see the hidden tribulations people carried.
The Flawed, transformed, began to call the Meadow something new: The Silver Basin.
Kaelan's form was stable, his sand holding the memory of a desert kingdom that once was. He no longer wept. "I remember my name," he said, wonder in his gritty voice. "I am Kaelan of the Shifting Sands. I was a cartographer of dunes."
Lian's shadow was now a pool of cool darkness she could draw upon, a well of protective silence. "It doesn't hate me anymore," she whispered. "It was just… scared. Like me."
Tock's ticking was a steady, comforting rhythm. "The missing gears were possibilities erased by fate. Their absence now defines my unique causality. I am Tock, the Clock of Alternate Paths."
They had not been cured. They had been made whole in their brokenness.
And they looked to Feng as the source.
He did not want followers. But the god-sorrow in him understood their need. It was a lonely thing, to be forgotten.
"We cannot stay," Feng told Root three days later. The bark-woman's wooden eye had sprouted a single, silver-leafed twig. "The Enforcers will return with greater force. They will scorch this meadow to erase their failure."
Root nodded, her water eye swirling. "The Silver Basin has served its purpose. We will disperse. The Flawed will return to the world, no longer hiding. But where will you go, Catalyst?"
Feng looked north. "The Hermit, Wu, spoke of lands beyond the Rolling River. Of sects that thrive in chaos, where flaws might be currency."
"The Shattered Star Alliance," Root rumbled. "A coalition of outcast sects and rogue clans. They dwell in the Scarred Wastes, where the earth bleeds chaotic Qi. They might see your… appetite as a strength, not a flaw."
It was a direction. A den of wolves where a lone predator might find a pack. Or a bigger meal.
Preparing to leave, Feng was approached by Lian.
"I will come with you," she stated, her new shadow pooling resolutely at her feet. "My flaw is a weapon now. I can be silent. I can be unseen. You need eyes that are not your own."
Kaelan shuffled forward, his form barely shedding a grain. "And I. My sands remember every step they take. I cannot get lost. I can map any terrain, even the shifting Wastes."
Tock ticked thoughtfully. "My path is here. To help the others disperse safely. But our causality is now linked, Xiao Feng. Where you go, ripples of alternate possibility will spread. I will feel them."
Feng did not have the heart, or the will, to refuse. Lin accepted them with a warrior's pragmatism. More fighters, more scouts. Good.
They left the Silver Basin at dawn, the mist clinging to them like a blessing. As they passed the petrified tree with its bone-chimes, Feng reached out. He did not take a bone. He gently touched a bleached rib tied with a faded red thread.
The god-sorrow in him resonated.
A flash, not a memory, but an echo: A young Flawed, her bones singing with a wrong frequency, hanging this offering centuries ago as a plea. Her name was Elara. She had been consumed by her own flaw long before the Tear fell.
Feng withdrew his hand. Now he carried her echo too. Another drop in the lake of sorrow.
This was the weight. He did not just consume tribulation anymore. He was becoming an archive of lost things.
They traveled for weeks, leaving the green hills behind. The land grew arid, then cracked. The sky took on a permanent bruised hue. This was the border of the Scarred Wastes.
The air tasted of ozone and blood. The Qi was not just chaotic; it was angry, laced with the residues of ancient, cataclysmic battles. It was a constant, low-grade tribulation. Feng breathed it in, and it was like sipping weak, spicy broth. Nourishing, but unsatisfying.
They were crossing a canyon of striated red rock when the hunters found them.
Not Enforcers. These were brutal, practical men and women mounted on mutated lizards with scales like rusted iron. They wore scavenged armor and carried notched weapons glowing with captured, violent Qi. Their faces were scarred by the wastes.
A Reaver warband, the roving predators of the borderlands.
There were a dozen of them, blocking the narrow canyon pass. Their leader, a woman with one eye replaced by a glowing green crystal, grinned, showing teeth filed to points.
"Trespassers on Crimson Maw territory," she rasped. "The toll is everything you own. And your bones for the mill."
Lin's spear was in her hand. Lian melted into the shadows of a rock. Kaelan's form tightened, ready to blow a blinding cloud of sand.
Feng stepped forward. He looked at the Reaver leader, and through the lens of god-sorrow, he saw her hidden tribulation: not violence, but a gnawing, empty terror of the wastes. Her cruelty was a wall against a fear so vast it would unmake her.
He didn't draw a weapon. He spoke, his voice carrying the weight of the quiet lake within him. "Your fear is a canyon deeper than this one. You fill it with the bones of others. It will never be full."
The Reaver leader's grin vanished. Her green crystal eye flickered. How did this ragged stranger see that? "Kill the talker first," she snarled.
Two Reavers spurred their lizards forward.
Feng did not fight them. He exhaled.
He breathed out a thread of the Forgotten God's sorrow.
It was not an attack. It was an atmosphere. A bubble of profound, divine melancholy that washed over the charging Reavers.
Their battle-rage, their bloodlust, met the sheer, impersonal grief of a lost god. It was like throwing a lit match into an ocean.
Their anger drowned. The first Reaver pulled up short, a confused, empty sob wracking his body. The second dropped his axe, clutching his chest as forgotten memories of loss—a mother? a home?—surfaced, overwhelming him.
The warband stared, unsettled.
Feng walked towards their leader, the bubble of sorrow moving with him. The lizards whimpered and backed away, sensitive to the spiritual shift.
"The toll," Feng said, his eyes holding the Reaver woman's, "is passage. And information. Where is the nearest Shattered Star Alliance outpost?"
The leader trembled, fighting the foreign despair seeping into her. Her terror, now mirrored and magnified by the god's sorrow, was a knife at her own throat. "North… two days. Crag called the Weeping Pillar. Traders there. Alliance scouts."
"Thank you," Feng said. He withdrew the sorrow, pulling the heavy emotion back into himself. The Reavers gasped as the crushing sadness lifted, leaving them shaken, hollow.
He walked past them, his small group following. The Reavers did not move to stop them. They were too busy remembering what it felt like to be small, to be sad, to be something other than predators.
That was the new power of the god-sorrow. It did not destroy. It disarmed. By showing people the hidden tribulation in their own hearts, it stole their will to inflict tribulation on others.
As they left the canyon, Lin looked at him sidelong. "That was… different."
"It was efficient," Feng replied, but he felt the cost. The god's sorrow was heavier now, having absorbed the echoes of the Reavers' fear and rage. Each use added weight.
He was no longer just consuming tribulation.
He was collecting it.
And the lake inside him was getting deeper, colder, and far, far too still.