The warmth of the runestone was a lie.
It promised guidance, a path to sanctuary, but the land it led Kaelen through was a corpse. Each day's march north deepened the silence. The streams he crossed were tepid and lifeless, their beds littered with the bleached bones of fish. The pines stood as grey sentinels, their needles carpeting the ground in a brittle, brown blanket. The very air was thin, starved of the vibrant hum of the Aether-Weave. It was like walking through a world after a fever had broken, leaving only exhaustion in its wake.
The Blight had not just killed; it had consumed. It had feasted on the life force of the land itself.
His encounter with the survivors had left a different kind of wound. Their faces, twisted by fear and awe, haunted him. He saw not gratitude in their eyes, but the look men give a sudden lightning strike—a phenomenon of terrifying power, to be avoided. He was no longer Kaelen, the mason's apprentice. He was a weapon, a specter. And a weapon has no place by the hearth.
His body was a collection of aches. The journey-bread was gone, and his attempts to forage yielded only tough, bitter roots that did little to quiet the gnawing in his belly. But worse than the physical hunger was the drain in his soul. Using his power to raise the stone windbreak had cost him. A deep fatigue had settled into his bones, and a dull throb had taken up residence behind his eyes, a constant reminder of the energy he had expended.
On the third day after leaving the survivors, he found the goat.
It was a scrawny nanny, trapped in a rocky crevice, its leg bent at an unnatural angle. Its frantic bleats were the first living sounds he'd heard in days. The sight of it, a testament to stubborn life in this dead place, brought a sudden, sharp pang of loneliness. Here was something that didn't look at him with fear.
He approached slowly, his hands raised. "Easy now," he murmured, his voice raspy from disuse.
The animal struggled, its eyes wide with pain. Kaelen knew what needed to be done. It was a clean break. He could feel the misalignment in the bone even from a few feet away. A simple, focused act of mending. A thing of goodness.
He knelt beside the terrified creature, placing one hand gently on its flank, the other hovering over the broken leg. He closed his eyes, seeking the familiar warmth in his chest, the connection to the living weave. He found it, but it was fainter than before, a guttering candle flame. He focused on the fracture in the bone, visualizing the splintered edges knitting together, the pain subsiding.
He pushed.
A wave of dizziness washed over him so violently he almost retched. The world swam, the grey sky tilting. The throb behind his eyes became a spike of white-hot agony. He felt a pop deep within his own leg, a sympathetic jolt of pain that made him cry out. The goat gave a final, startled bleat and scrambled free, its leg seemingly whole. It bounded away without a backward glance, leaving Kaelen kneeling in the dirt, gasping.
He had mended the goat. But he had broken something in himself in the process.
He slumped against the rocks, clutching his head. This was the true cost. This was the "Weaver's Burn" Corbin had warned him about. Every use of the power drew from his own life force. In a healthy land, perhaps it could be replenished. But here, in this blighted waste, he was drawing from a well that was almost dry.
As he sat there, shivering and nauseous, a new sensation began to bleed into his awareness. It was a faint, sickly sweet pull, a whisper from a different direction than the runestone's steady warmth. It seemed to emanate from a nearby cluster of rocks that had been blackened and glazed, as if by tremendous heat—a clear site of the Blight's touch.
The whisper was seductive. It promised ease. It whispered that the power he sought didn't have to be so difficult, so costly. That strength could be taken, not just given.
Horrified, he recoiled from the feeling, scrambling away from the blackened stones. It was the same foul resonance he'd felt from the Blight-Knights. The land here was so wounded that its very wounds were tempting him, offering a corrupted shortcut to power.
He clutched the runestone until its honest warmth burned against his palm, a beacon against the darkness. The path of the Stone-Singer was one of endurance, of patience. It was the path of the anvil, which accepts the hammer's blow to strengthen what is placed upon it. The other path—the path of the hammer that only breaks—led to decay. To becoming like Malakor.
The choice was now terrifyingly clear. He could continue north, following the true song, and risk starving or burning himself out before he ever reached the Sky-Anvil. Or he could listen to the whisper, and gain the power to survive at the cost of his soul.
Gritting his teeth, Kaelen forced himself to his feet. His body screamed in protest. His spirit felt frayed. But he turned his back on the blackened rocks and their seductive promise.
He would endure. He would be the anvil, even if the hammer was the entire weight of this broken world.
Stumbling forward, he focused only on putting one foot in front of the other, a solitary figure in a vast, wounded land, clinging to the fading warmth of a stone and the memory of his master's voice. The price of power was high, but the price of corruption was eternal.