The silence after the landslide was a physical weight. Kaelen stumbled through the Stonemaw Pass, the roar of falling stone still echoing in his skull. His ears rang, and a fine grey dust coated his tongue and throat, tasting of ancient rock and something else—something sharp and metallic, like the ghost of the Blight-Knights' power.
He expected to feel triumph. Vindication. Instead, a deep, unsettling nausea coiled in his gut. He had felt the moment the mountain's flesh had struck the knights. It wasn't a clean impact; it was an unmaking. He had felt their corrosive energy snuff out, not with a bang, but with a sickening sizzle as the living stone crushed and absorbed their foul magic. The earth itself had recoiled at the contact, and he had felt that recoil in his own bones.
He was a mender. He fixed things. Today, he had broken things on a scale he could barely comprehend.
The runestone's pull was his only tether to sanity, a steady, warm thrum against his chest, guiding him out of the northern end of the pass. As he descended, the landscape began to change. The air lost its biting edge, but it gained a new, troubling quality. It smelled… stale. The vibrant green of the highland mosses gave way to a sere, yellowed grass. The few hardy trees he passed were stunted, their branches twisted as if in pain.
He came to a small stream, one that should have been rushing with snowmelt. The water was low, oozing sluggishly between banks of cracked mud. Without thinking, driven by a thirst that was more spiritual than physical, Kaelen knelt and cupped his hands to drink.
The water was warm. And it tasted wrong. Not foul, but… empty. It was like drinking dust. He spat it out, his stomach lurching. He placed his hands in the stream, closing his eyes, seeking the water's song. He found only a dull, mournful drone. The Aether-Weave here was thin, frayed. The land was sick.
The Blight, he realized with a chill. Their passing was like a plague, poisoning the land itself. The knights he had killed were just the symptom; the disease was spreading.
The runestone tugged him away from the stream, eastward, toward a line of rugged hills. As he climbed, the sense of wrongness intensified. The song of the stone beneath his feet was muted, discordant. It was here he found the first sign that he wasn't the only survivor.
A child's shoe, small and leather, lying abandoned on the path. Then, a little farther on, the cold ashes of a campfire. A few scraps of fur and a broken cooking pot. People had come this way. Fleeing.
Hope, sharp and painful, flared in his chest. He wasn't alone. He quickened his pace, following the subtle signs of passage—a recently broken branch, a footprint in a patch of soft earth.
He found them as the sun began to dip below the hills, casting long, skeletal shadows. A huddled group of about twenty souls, camped in a shallow cave that offered little real shelter. They were the ragged remnants of Oakhaven and, he guessed, a few outlying farms. Their faces were hollowed out by grief and exhaustion. He saw Elara, the blacksmith's daughter, her face smudged with dirt, staring into nothingness. He saw Old Man Hemmet, the baker who had threatened to turn him in. Hemmet's eyes were wide with a permanent, cowering fear, and he flinched when he saw Kaelen emerge from the twilight.
A large man named Roric, a woodcutter by trade, stood up, hefting a crude axe. "Who's there?" he barked, his voice rough with fear.
"It's Kaelen," he said, his own voice sounding frail. "Corbin's apprentice."
A murmur went through the group. They looked at him not with recognition, but with a desperate, hungry curiosity. They surged toward him.
"Kaelen! The knights? Did they follow you?" a woman cried.
"Is the way south clear? We have to get to the lowlands!" another man pleaded.
"My boy, have you seen my boy? He was with the flock…" an older woman sobbed, clutching his arm.
He was surrounded by their desperation, their pain a physical force. He tried to answer, to tell them about the knights in the valley, about the Stonemaw, but the words caught in his throat. How could he tell them he had buried their pursuers under a mountain? They would never believe him. Or worse, they would see him as a monster, just like the knights.
It was Hemmet who spoke, his voice a reedy whisper that cut through the clamor. "He was there. In the square. With Corbin." All eyes turned to the baker. Hemmet pointed a trembling finger at Kaelen. "I saw what he did. The stone… it moved for him. Witchcraft. It's what brought the demons down on us!"
A silence fell, colder than the evening air. The desperate hope in their eyes curdled into suspicion and fear. They backed away from him, as if he carried the Blight himself.
Roric stepped forward, his face hard. "Is this true, boy? Are you one of them? One of these… Weavers?"
Kaelen looked at their terrified faces. He saw the truth of his future. He would always be an outsider. A thing to be feared. The weight of it threatened to crush him.
Then his eyes met Elara's. She wasn't looking at him with fear, but with a deep, weary sadness. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head. A warning.
"No," Kaelen lied, the word tasting like ash. "Hemmet's mad with fear. The light was bad. I was just… hiding." He looked at Roric. "The south is crawling with them. The pass north… the Stonemaw… it's blocked. A landslide."
This news sent a fresh wave of despair through the group. They were trapped.
"Then we are dead," Roric said, slumping against the cave wall.
Kaelen looked at them—the hungry children, the exhausted mothers, the broken men. He thought of the sick stream, the wounded land. He was a mender. And this was all that was left of his home to mend.
He walked away from the group, toward the edge of their camp. He knelt, ignoring their wary stares, and placed his hands on the ground. He pushed past the sickness, past the discord, seeking the deep, slow pulse of the earth's heart. It was faint, but it was there. A steady, patient rhythm beneath the injury.
He couldn't heal them. He couldn't lead them. But he could do one thing.
He focused, pouring his will into the earth just beyond the cave mouth. He didn't ask for a wall or a weapon. He asked for shelter. For a shield. He visualized the stone rising, not with violence, but with the slow, sure growth of a natural fold in the land.
The ground trembled. A low rumble, different from the destructive roar of the landslide, filled the air. The survivors cried out, scrambling back. From the earth itself, a curved wall of solid rock began to push upward, five feet high, forming a windbreak that curved around the front of the cave, sheltering it from the elements.
When it was done, Kaelen swayed on his knees, sweat beading on his forehead. The effort had drained him. He turned to face the survivors. They were staring, not at him, but at the newly-formed stone barrier. Their faces were a mixture of terror and awe.
He had not lied his way to safety. He had shown them the truth.
He met Roric's stunned gaze. "It will hold back the wind," Kaelen said, his voice raw. "You'll be warmer tonight."
Without another word, he turned and walked away from the firelight, into the growing darkness. He could not stay with them. He was a danger to them, and their fear was a poison to him. But he had given them a chance.
As he climbed the next ridge, the runestone's pull was a lonely beacon. He was the last Stone-Singer. And his path led away from the living, deeper into the wounded heart of the land, to find the cure before the sickness consumed everything.