Ten months. Ten months since Praxus had stood on the cliff over the Mirror Coast and felt the silence of the heavens answer him with a cold, predatory awareness. While the rest of Aethelgard had slowly, painfully awakened to the crisis, Praxus had been living inside it, breathing its chilling air every single day. He had become a man haunted not by a ghost, but by an absence.
He was no longer just a cosmolog. He was an investigator, a man sifting through the ashes of a forgotten crime. He traveled the backroads of the continent, a gaunt, wild-eyed figure with a singular, obsessive purpose. He no longer studied the sky; the sky was a broken text, its key passages ripped out. Instead, he delved into the earth, into the dustiest, most neglected archives he could find. He sought out forgotten monastery libraries, private collections of eccentric lords, and the cellars of record halls where scrolls deemed too heretical or too nonsensical to be displayed were left to rot.
His search had a new, terrifying focus. He was no longer trying to understand where Qy'iel had gone. He was trying to find proof that something else had been there all along.
His own journals had transformed. The pages were no longer filled with elegant charts and astronomical data. They were now a chaotic web of cross-references, connecting a fragment of a pre-historic poem to an obscure passage in a mariner's log from 400 years ago. He was hunting for a shadow in the footnotes of history, a ghost in the margins of their sacred texts. He was looking for any mention, however veiled, of a second god.
He found whispers of it everywhere, once he knew what to look for. Ancient folklore from the Whispering Woods spoke of a "Sky Shepherd" and his jealous "Shadow-Brother." A fisherman's shanty from the southern isles sang of the "Sun-God" and the "Abyss-King." These were tales dismissed as the fantasies of uneducated, primitive ancestors, allegories created before Qy'iel had revealed his true, singular nature. But to Praxus, they were no longer fantasies. They were echoes. Echoes of a truth that had been deliberately and systematically erased.
His breakthrough came in a place of profound silence: the scriptorium of the Sunken Abbey of St. Olan, a monastery built into the marshy fens of the western coast, so isolated that its monks had more contact with migratory birds than with other men. They were preservers, not scholars, copying texts for centuries without any deep inquiry into their contents.
There, in a chest of scrolls deemed "The Ravings," he found it. A scroll fragment, brittle as a dead leaf, written in an archaic form of the First Tongue. It was titled, The Lament of the First Scribe.
It was not a history. It was a poem, a grief-stricken account of a world just born. It did not use the names Qy'iel or Ghra'thul, but its meaning was terrifyingly clear.
"...and so the sky held two masters at its dawn," the text read, the ink faded almost to invisibility. "The Builder of Light, whose song was growth, and the Carver of Silence, whose word was law. They shaped our clay, our frail beginnings, and in this, they were one. But the Builder wished for a chorus of many voices, while the Carver demanded a single, perfect note of worship…"
Praxus's hands trembled as he read on. The scroll described a "bitter argument that burned the heavens" and a "war that unmade the dawn." It spoke of the Carver's defeat, of how he was "cast into the Unwritten Dark."
Then came the passage that made the breath catch in his throat.
"...but his echo remained. A seed of dissent planted in the hearts of the clay children. Every shadow of greed, every whisper of envy, every stone thrown in anger… it is his silent harvest, reaped across the ages, a patient vengeance for his sundered throne."
Praxus leaned back, the scroll held loosely in his fingers. The pieces of the puzzle, scattered across a thousand years of history, slammed into place in his mind with the force of a physical blow.
The wars. The famines. The petty cruelties and grand betrayals that dotted the long, peaceful reign of Qy'iel. Historians had always dismissed them as the flaws of mortal nature, the simple failings of the "clay children." But they weren't. Not entirely. They were the subtle, patient, and malevolent influence of a banished entity, a cosmic loser who had spent millennia poisoning the well from the outside.
And now, the long peace was over. The hole in the sky, the silence of Qy'iel, it wasn't a sign of abandonment. It was a battle report. The second round of their cosmic war had been fought in a place beyond mortal sight.
And this time, Qy'iel, the Builder of Light, had lost.
The realization settled upon him, a weight heavier than any mountain. The God who now sat on the sundered throne of heaven was not their loving shepherd. It was the Carver of Silence, the tyrant who demanded a single, perfect note of worship. Ghra'thul.
He sat in the dusty, silent scriptorium for a full day and a full night, the scroll resting on the table before him. He was faced with a choice of terrible magnitude. To speak this truth would be the greatest heresy imaginable. It would shatter the last, fragile remnants of hope that sustained their crumbling society. The idea that Qy'iel had simply left them was a tragedy; the idea that he had been defeated and replaced by a hostile entity was a pure, paralyzing horror.
But to remain silent? To watch as humanity slowly withered in despair, Whispering prayers to an enemy, ignorant of the true nature of their oppressor?
His decision was made for him on the road, a week later. He was passing a small, desperate village suffering from a blight that had ruined their crops. In the center of the village square, he saw a crowd gathered around a frantic-looking man who proclaimed himself a new prophet.
"Our Whispers are not enough!" the man shrieked, his eyes wild with a feverish fervor. "Qy'iel is testing us! We have grown complacent in his love! We must show him our devotion through a greater sacrifice!" He held up a sharpened obsidian knife. "We must offer him our own pain! Our own blood! Only then will he hear us again!"
Praxus watched in horror as a young woman, her face a mask of desperate hope, stepped forward and offered her arm.
He could not let this happen. He could not watch them mutilate themselves and their children in an effort to appease their hidden enemy. The truth, no matter how monstrous, was better than this slow, ignorant descent into self-destructive madness. The truth provided a target. It turned victims into potential soldiers. Despair offered only the grave.
His hesitation vanished, replaced by a cold, hard certainty. He turned his back on the village and the morbid ritual it was about to commit. He was no longer a wandering scholar. He was a messenger, burdened with the most terrible news the world had ever known.
He set his course for the heart of the kingdom, for the one place that might still have the power to listen.
He was going to Aethelburg.