The High Pass was a world made of only two things: white sky and white earth.
After the violent, screaming chaos of the Bone Garden, the silence of the plateau was physical. It didn't just feel quiet; it felt heavy, a thick blanket of stillness that pressed against Aelindra's eardrums like deep, cold water. There was no wind here, despite the height. The snow fell in perfectly vertical lines, fat, heavy flakes that didn't drift or swirl. There was no scent of ozone, no taste of sulfur, and most importantly, no vibration in the soles of her boots. The Sentinel was still down there, prowling the lower veins of the mountain, but up here, the world felt dead or perhaps just held in a long, shallow breath.
Severin marched through the knee-deep snow, his boots leaving jagged black scars in the pristine surface. He was still holding Aelindra's hand, his grip so tight his knuckles were white. He didn't seem to realize he was doing it, it was the reflexive, desperate grip of a man holding onto a lifeline in a storm, even though the storm had passed.
"Do you see that?" Severin rasped. His voice sounded small in the void, the air so thin it seemed to steal the resonance from his throat.
Aelindra squinted, wiping the frost from her eyelashes. Through the haze of the falling snow, a shape was beginning to coalesce. It wasn't a jagged peak or a natural rock formation. It was a structure, low, sprawling, and built of the same pale, porous stone as the Bone Garden they had just escaped. It sat in the dead center of the plateau like an unburied ribcage, its arches bleached by centuries of high-altitude sun.
"A building?" she whispered, her own voice sounding like a ghost in her ears. "Who could live up here, Severin? There's no wood for fire, no water but the snow."
"Nobody," Severin said, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the perimeter with a soldier's instinct. "Not anymore. This place shouldn't exist. Not after the Edicts."
As they drew closer, the staggering scale of the ruin emerged. It was a monastery, or perhaps a fortress-sanctuary, its walls etched with ancient runes that had been weathered into smooth, illegible scars. There were no gates, no doors to keep out the cold, only high, arched openings that looked like screaming mouths frozen in stone.
The silence here changed. It wasn't just the absence of noise anymore; it was an intentional, curated void. As they stepped under the first great arch, the sound of their own footsteps vanished. Aelindra watched her boot sink into the dust-covered floor but heard nothing. It was as if the building itself ate sound.
They reached the threshold of the main hall, a space so vast it could have housed a small village. The floor was covered in a thick layer of silver dust and frost, but beneath it, Aelindra could see the remnants of intricate carvings. She knelt, her knees hitting the stone with a muted thud, and brushed away the grime with a trembling hand.
The carvings were beautiful and terrible. They depicted a woman standing between a blackened sun and a crumbling mountain. In her hands, she held a chain made of what looked like human hearts, each one pulsing with a carved light.
"An Anchor," Aelindra murmured, her chest tightening with a sudden, sharp grief she couldn't explain. She traced the line of the chain. "She's holding them together. The sun and the earth."
"This was a sanctuary for your kind, centuries ago," Severin said, standing over her, his shadow long and dark against the white stone. He looked around the cavernous hall, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his body taut with a tension that hadn't left him since they reached the Spire. "Before the purges. Before Solis decided that Healers were a threat to the natural order. My ancestors called this place the 'House of the Hollowed.' They burned the records, but the stone remembers."
He walked toward a row of stone basins at the far end of the hall. Each basin was filled with a dark, frozen liquid, not water, but something thicker, like oil. Beside them sat rows upon rows of small, clay jars, each one sealed with black wax and labeled in a language Aelindra couldn't read.
Aelindra stood up, her heart hammering against her ribs. She felt a strange, magnetic pull toward the jars, a resonance that felt like a faint, persistent hum against her teeth. The golden light still flickering beneath her skin seemed to reach out toward the shelves, as if recognizing something long lost.
"Severin, wait," she said, her voice echoing too loudly in the hollow space.
At the end of the hall, a door creaked open. It was a slow, agonizing sound that felt like a needle scratching across the silence.
A figure stepped out from the shadows of the inner sanctum.
It wasn't a stone creature. It was a man, hunched and impossibly ancient, wrapped in furs that were so old they looked like strips of bark. His skin was the color of parchment, translucent enough to see the blue veins beneath, and his eyes were clouded over with thick, white cataracts. But it was his neck that made Aelindra gasp, a series of jagged, circular scars ran around his throat, thick and ropy, as if his voice box had been cut out and sewn back in by an unskilled hand.
The old man didn't look at Severin. He didn't seem to notice the Prince's sword or the fire that simmered just beneath his skin. He turned his sightless face toward Aelindra, sniffing the air like a hound.
He lifted a hand, pointing a bony, shaking finger at the golden light in Aelindra's palms. Then, he tapped his own temple and shook his head with a slow, mournful finality.
"He's a Keeper," Severin whispered, stepping between Aelindra and the stranger. "Arveth mentioned them in the stories. They stay in the silence so they don't have to hear the mountain's scream. But the mountain doesn't let anyone live for free. There's a price for the peace."
The old man didn't speak. He reached into the heavy folds of his furs and pulled out a small, jagged piece of dark glass. He walked toward Aelindra with a slow, deliberate gait, his bare feet making no sound on the frost.
Severin's blade cleared its sheath with a metallic ring that shattered the silence like a hammer on glass. "Back away, old man. One more step and i'll check to see if you can bleed."
The Keeper stopped. He didn't look afraid; he looked bored, as if he had seen a thousand princes and a thousand swords. He simply held the glass shard up to the pale, dying light filtering through the holes in the roof. On the surface of the glass, a reflection appeared, not of the old man, but of a woman who looked remarkably like Aelindra, only older, her eyes bright with a sharp, piercing intelligence.
Aelindra's breath caught in her throat. The woman in the glass was laughing. She could almost hear the sound of it, a rich, warm sound that felt like home. "Is that... a Healer?"
The old man nodded. He gestured to the clay jars on the shelves, his hand sweeping over the thousands of vessels.
Storage.
The realization hit Aelindra like a physical blow, stealing the air from her lungs. This wasn't just a monastery. It wasn't a house of prayer. It was a library. But they weren't storing books or scrolls or the history of kings.
They were storing the memories that Healers had been forced to discard. Every time an Anchor saved a life, every time they hollowed themselves out to bridge the gap between life and death, the "waste", the precious pieces of their own lives, was collected here.
"Severin," Aelindra whispered, her hand going to her throat. "The whistle. My mother's eyes. They aren't just gone. They might be here."
Severin looked at the jars lining the walls, and then back at the scarred throat of the Keeper. He saw the trap before she did. He saw the cruelty of a place that kept what was stolen but refused to give it back. "Aelindra, look at him. He didn't give those memories away to save them. He gave them away to survive the mountain. To become part of the silence. If you take them back, you take back the weight they carry. You weren't meant to hold them and the power at the same time."
The old man stepped closer, offering the glass shard to Aelindra. The reflection shifted. Now it showed a man, Aelindra's father, kneeling in a garden, his mouth open as if in a whistle she could no longer hear.
"One memory," the old man rasped. The sound was like dry bone grinding on stone. It was the first time he had spoken, and the effort seemed to drain the last bit of color from his parchment skin. "One for one. Give the Prince a name he has forgotten... and I will give you back the sound of the whistle."
Aelindra looked at Severin. He looked horrified, his face pale, his eyes wide with a sudden, sharp distrust.
"What is he talking about?" Aelindra asked, her voice trembling. "What name?"
"I haven't forgotten anything," Severin hissed, though the way his hand shook on the hilt of his sword told a different story. "Aelindra, don't do it. It's a bargain with the dead. He's a scavenger."
"He said a name you have forgotten," Aelindra countered, her gaze fixed on the reflection of her father. The loss of that sound, the simple, trilling whistle from her childhood, felt like a hole in her soul that was finally being offered a plug. "If I can give him something you don't even remember having, and I get my father back..."
"You don't know what you're promising!" Severin roared, the Crownfire flared in his eyes, turning the amber to white. "In this place, names have weight. If I've forgotten it, there is a reason."
But Aelindra was already reaching for the glass. Her fingers brushed the cold surface, and the moment they did, the hall didn't just go silent. It went dark.
The Keeper smiled, showing teeth that were nothing more than jagged yellow pegs. "The Prince had a brother," the old man whispered into the dark. "Tell him the name, and the whistle is yours."
Aelindra felt a cold, oily sensation slide into her mind. A name she had never heard before began to form on her tongue, a name that tasted of ash and royal silk.
Beside her, Severin let out a low, pained groan, clutching his head as if his skull were splitting open.
"Aelindra... stop..."
But the bargain was already struck.