The quiet of the barn was a lie. It was a thin parchment stretched over a roaring chaos. Kael sat on a rough-hewn bench in the loft, the scent of dry hay and old wood a poor balm for his frayed spirit. He had sought solitude here, away from the fearful glances and the murmured prayers to Lysander that now felt like accusations. He closed his eyes, trying to find the center of the storm within him, the quiet place where the farmer still lived.
Instead, he found only the silver.
It began as a faint luminescence behind his eyelids, a cold star igniting in the darkness of his mind. Then came the scent—not of hay, but of cold stone, of ancient parchment and ozone. The world fell away, the sounds of Emberwood fading into a profound, waiting silence.
"You seek peace," a voice spoke, and it was the sound of a glacier calving, of a marble floor cracking under an unforgiving weight. It was Theron. "There is no peace while debts remain unpaid. The Scale does not balance itself. Look."
The darkness behind his eyelids dissolved. He was no longer in the barn. He stood in a realm of stark, monochromatic light. The ground beneath his feet was a vast, polished disc of obsidian, reflecting a sky devoid of sun or stars, only a diffuse, silver glow. Before him, suspended in the air, hung a massive scale wrought of a metal that seemed to drink the light. Its two plates, perfectly level, were empty.
"Witness the weight of inaction," Theron's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere.
A scene bloomed on the surface of the obsidian disc, vivid and terrible. It was a homestead, much like those on the outskirts of Emberwood. A goblin raiding party, the same foul breed that had attacked his home, swarmed over it. He saw a man cut down as he raised a wood-axe. He saw a woman dragged screaming from her doorway. The images were not silent; they were saturated with sound—the shrieks, the bestial laughter, the wet, final sounds of violence. A deep, crimson stain spread across the obsidian, a metaphysical bloodstain.
As the last cry was silenced, a single, glowing orb of deep red light coalesced above one plate of the Scale. It was a weight of pure suffering. The plate sank with a definitive clank that vibrated through Kael's very bones.
The scene shifted. A different village, another raid. A child, hiding in a rain barrel, wept as he watched his world burn. The specific, piercing terror of the boy became another red orb, dropping onto the pile. The plate sank further.
Again and again, the visions came. A trail of plundered caravans, a desecrated shrine, a forest glade where the trees were hung with the skins of those who had trusted to the safety of the woods. Each atrocity added its weight to the Scale, a growing mountain of crimson light, pulling the chain taut. The debt was immense, a canyon of pain gouged into the world.
"This is the past," Kael said, his voice a whisper in this vast space. "I cannot change it."
"The past is the foundation of the present," the goddess intoned. "But the debt is not static. It accrues interest."
The vision changed. He saw the cave he had found, the goblin den. But now, he saw it not as it was, but as it would be. The chieftain he had killed was alive, rallying its warriors. He saw them not as the scattered rabble he had faced, but as a unified, growing horde. The trophies in their cave—a child's wooden doll, a silver locket, a merchant's seal—multiplied into a grisly hoard. The crimson light from the Scale began to bleed into this future vision, tainting it, showing the potential suffering yet to be unleashed. The single, unified weight of the horde's future crimes formed a massive, pulsating orb of darkest crimson, hovering over the already overloaded plate.
"To wait for the crime to be committed is to share in the guilt of the victim's suffering. The debt grows. The Scale tips further into imbalance. Justice is not merely reactive. It is prophylactic. It is the pruning of the diseased branch before it rots the entire tree."
A final image seared itself into Kael's mind: the face of the goblin chieftain, its eyes glowing with malevolent intelligence. It was sharpening a crude spear, and on the wall of its cave was a crude, bloody map. A single, familiar location was circled: Emberwood.
A surge of raw, silver power erupted from the other, empty plate of the Scale. It did not gently balance the crimson weight. It slammed into it, a counterweight of pure, relentless force. The chains shrieked. The massive, dark orb of future suffering shattered under the assault, its potential evil unmade before it could be born. The Scale shuddered, then settled, not perfectly level, but with the silver plate holding dominance.
The force of it threw Kael backwards out of the vision.
He gasped, his eyes flying open. He was on his back in the hay, the rough wood of the loft floor solid against his spine. The familiar scents of the barn flooded back. But the world was different. He could still feel it—the immense, tilting imbalance of the Scale. It was a physical pressure in the air, a wrongness that grated against his newly awakened senses. The memory of the chieftain's face, the certainty of its future attack, was not a possibility. It was an inevitability. A debt waiting to be incurred.
Theron's voice was a cold ember glowing in his mind, no longer a vast echo but a focused, intimate command.
"The choice is an illusion. The path is clear. You are the instrument of balance. You are the weight upon the Scale. Go to the source. Prune the branch. Let the silver light cleanse the rot before it spreads. This is not a request. This is the nature of your service."
Kael pushed himself to his feet, his body humming with a purpose that was no longer his own. The conflict was gone. The philosophical debate between mercy and justice was a luxury for scholars in safe libraries, for gods who did not feel the blood of mortals soaking into the earth. He had felt it. He had seen the cost of waiting.
He looked at his hands. They were no longer a farmer's hands. They were the hands of a judge. An executioner.
He descended from the loft, his movements precise and filled with a grim certainty. The villagers he passed on his way to his cabin did not see a conflicted man. They saw a man forged of chilled steel, his winter-blue eyes now holding the unwavering glint of a honed blade. He did not see the fear in their eyes anymore. He saw the future victims he had been shown, and his resolve hardened into something unbreakable.
Entering his cabin, he went straight to the chest. This time, he did not hesitate. He drew the sword. It did not glow, but he could feel the potential within it, a coiled serpent of silver light waiting to strike. He buckled the belt around his waist, the weight a comfort, a promise.
He walked to the door and looked north, towards the Murkwood. Towards the den. Towards the chieftain.
The debt would be paid before it was due. The Scale would be balanced.
The hunt has begun.