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Keeper's Adage:
"The scars on the soul bleed long after the wound is sealed. The sacrifice that burns with stolen fire leaves ashes in the spirit. Beware the memory that claws back through the cracks; the past unmourned is the Void's open door."
– From the Book of Unquiet Graves, Keepers of Stories Archive
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Four years ago-part III
The Whispered Void didn't attack. It unmade.
Its form wasn't smoke, but the absence of light given sentience – a tear in reality's fabric. Limbs elongated, not with muscle or bone, but like oil spreading on water, bending at angles that liquefied Hatim's sense of up and down.
It flowed through the air, not displacing it, but chilling it to an aching void. The discordant hum inside Hatim's skull swelled into a physical pressure, a scream without sound that vibrated his teeth and blurred the edges of the phosphor-moss, the trees, his own hands. The ground beneath him warped, roots momentarily dissolving into smoke before snapping back, treacherous and unreal.
"It devours harmony! Its presence unravels!" Granny Maldri's voice, always bedrock, cracked like dried clay. Ancient terror, deeper than the forest's roots, hollowed her eyes.
The Manifestation surged – not a lunge, but an expansion. Its form coalesced near Lyra, a wave of absolute cold radiating ahead of it. It didn't strike. It touched the air around her.
Lyra gasped, a soundless intake of breath. Her vibrant storm-grey eyes widened, not just with terror, but with dawning horror as the world around her seemed to fray. Colors leached from the nearby Ghost-Glow, its deceptive blue light flickering into greyscale. Her hand, reaching instinctively for a bone charm, moved sluggishly, as if pushing through tar.
"LYRA!" Hatim's raw scream tore his throat, swallowed instantly by the oppressive silence. He lunged, cleaver raised in a clumsy, desperate arc, pure instinct overriding terror. He was a gnat against a glacier.
Then—light.
Not comforting. Not pure.
Granny Maldri erupted. Her stooped frame snapped straight, a sapling become ancient oak. Her eyes, usually pools of deep earth, blazed with an emerald fire that mirrored the Blight-Weed suddenly clutched in her gnarled fist.
It wasn't a plant; it was a knot of corrupted energy, pulled from a pouch sewn into her tunic's lining – Unbinding's own poison, turned weapon. Its jagged leaves pulsed with a sickly, violent light.
"By the Ash that Binds! By the Roots that Remember!" Her roar wasn't sound; it was force, vibrating the stagnant air, shaking droplets from the Spider-Silk Weep. "YOU WILL NOT TAKE THEM!"
She slammed the butt of her gnarled staff into the black, sucking earth. Not a gesture. An invocation.
The Blight-Weed in her hand detonated.
A searing flare of emerald light, blinding and wrong, erupted. It wasn't warmth; it was the crackle of ruptured reality, the smell of ozone mixed with burning hair and static that coated Hatim's tongue like ash. Raw, chaotic energy, ripped from the very edge of the Unbinding, roared outwards. It wasn't a shield; it was a wildfire of discord forced against discord.
The emerald conflagration slammed into the Whispered Void.
The Manifestation recoiled, rippling violently like water hitting superheated stone. It emitted a silent shriek that bypassed Hatim's ears and exploded directly in his mind – the psychic equivalent of shattering glass, tearing at his thoughts. Maldri's barrier, a desperate glyph drawn in stolen chaos, held the abomination at bay.
One heartbeat. The emerald light flared, holding the Void's consuming darkness.
Two heartbeats. Lyra stumbled back, gasping, color flooding back into her perception.
The Blight-Weed crumbled to bitter dust in Maldri's hand. The emerald fire guttered, dying.
In that dying flicker, the Whispered Void lashed out. Not with claw or cold. With essence.
A tendril of pure, concentrated unmaking, distilled silence, snaked through the fading light. It didn't strike Maldri's body. It passed through her.
She gasped. A small, choked sound, like a bird's neck snapping.
Then she collapsed. Not like fainting. Like a marionette with its strings severed.
Color didn't just drain from her face; it was sucked out. Her vibrant brown skin turned a terrifying, translucent grey, like river ice over mud. The fierce light in her eyes didn't dim; it vanished, replaced by a dull, vacant sheen, like tarnished pewter. Her very presence in the world felt… thinned. Diminished.
Hatim knew it instantly, viscerally – the same cold, hollow dissonance he'd felt in the Ghost-Glow. The mark of the Unbinding Akar. Spirit Blight. Not a wound to heal, but an erasure.
The Whispered Void, its form shimmering with unstable triumph, flowed backwards into the deeper gloom, dissolving into the shadows as if it had never been. It left behind only a profound, chilling silence deeper than before, a lingering distortion in the air that made Hatim's eyes water, and the sickly-sweet stench of decayed hope.
Hatim scrambled to her, his boots slipping in the mud. His heart wasn't pounding; it was trying to burst through his ribs. "Granny! Maldri! Look at me!"
No wound. No blood. Just terrifying absence.
He grasped her wrist. Her skin was cold – not the chill of the forest, but the deep, unnatural cold of a stone pulled from a glacier's heart. He reached for her Akar pulse, that inner song he'd always sensed faintly humming beneath her skin, the rhythm of her stubborn life.
It was there. But fractured. Discordant. Like a beautiful, complex melody played on broken instruments by madmen – notes jarring, rhythms stumbling, harmonies dissolving into noise. The song of her soul was being scrambled.
Before Hatim could even process the horror, Lyra was there. She sank to her knees in the muck, her satchel of precious Whisper-Bones forgotten, spilling gleaming fragments onto the black earth. Her hands fluttered over Maldri's still form, trembling violently, never quite touching her translucent skin.
"Granny," she whispered, the word raw, broken. Tears streamed down her face, carving tracks through the forest grime. "No. No, no, no. Hold on. Please." Her voice hitched, a sob tearing loose. "There has to be… something. A root… a charm… Hatim!"
She looked up at him, her storm-grey eyes wide, drowning in terror and a fury so pure it burned. "We have to fix it! We have to make it stop!"
Hatim stared at Maldri's face. The woman who was shelter, wisdom, the unyielding stone in the Sinks' shifting sands. The vibrant fire that had defied the gloom extinguished, replaced by this chilling, hollow grey. The horror wasn't just fear; it was the shattering of his world's foundation. It wasn't sickness. It was uncreation.
The scream didn't build. It erupted.
A raw, animal sound of pure, unadulterated agony and helplessness tore from Hatim's core. It ripped through the oppressive silence of the forest, a primal roar of denial that echoed off the gnarled trees, shaking the phosphor-moss.
"NOOOOOOOOO!"
Hatim jolted upright, the strangled tail-end of his own scream still clawing at his throat.
Darkness. Cold stone beneath him. Not sucking forest mud.
His body was drenched in sweat that felt like ice. His heart hammered against his ribs with such violence he thought they might crack. His breath came in ragged, painful gasps, as if he'd been running for miles.
His hands… they felt alien. He stared at them in the dim, guttering light of a single torch. Scars across his knuckles – scars he knew, earned in Middens brawls – looked stark, too defined. The muscle along his forearm felt leaner, harder than it should. He touched his face. A beard, coarse and unfamiliar, scratched his collarbone – a beard he hadn't grown yesterday.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked his spine. Where was he? When was he?
Kander materialized from the deeper shadows near the wall of the small, rough-hewn chamber. A waterskin dangled loosely from his fingers. Hatim's gaze snapped to the old man's hands. Fresh, livid glyph-burns traced patterns across his knuckles and palms, still smoldering faintly, smelling of ozone and singed skin.
"Memory is a stubborn current, Hatim," Kander murmured, his voice a low rasp that barely stirred the thick air. His amber eyes held no judgment, only a weary understanding. "It finds its way back, especially through the cracks pain leaves open. It claws. Especially when you think the door is shut."
The raw stone floor was real. Unyielding. Cold. The torch sputtered, casting long, wavering shadows that banished the lingering, visceral images of the phosphor-moss and the Whispered Void's impossible form. The scent of decay was gone, replaced by stone dust, cold ash, and the faint, metallic tang of Kander's burned glyphs.
Hatim pushed himself fully upright, every muscle protesting, his ribs throbbing with a remembered echo of Masad's fists. He scanned the room – Kander's chamber beneath the city, the place he'd been brought after the Babs… after the trial.
Just a dream.
A nightmare dredged from the deepest silt of his past.
Yet the ache in his chest was a physical weight. The image of Maldri's grey, translucent skin, the sound of Lyra's broken sob, the taste of his own scream – they clung like the ash outside, realer than the cold stone beneath him. The cold touch of the Unbinding felt like it had seeped into his marrow.
He wasn't just remembering. He was reliving. And Kander's burned hands were a silent testament that the past had claws sharp enough to draw blood in the present.
The silence stretched, heavy with the unsaid horror of the forest, the weight of Maldri's sacrifice, and the terrifying echo of the Whispered Void that now felt less like a memory and more like a promise. Hatim met Kander's ancient, amber gaze in the flickering gloom. The question hung unspoken, thick as the ash in his lungs:
What clawed its way back? And why now?