The trek across the high pass was proving to be a war of attrition that Aelindra wasn't sure they were winning. The soot-stained snow and the thin biting air had turned the simple act of walking into a gruesome labor. Severin had become a ghost of himself, his eyes constantly tracking toward the northern horizon, yet he rarely spoke a word.
It had been a few hours since they left the Keeper's monastery, Aelindra's legs felt like lead, and the frostbite on Severin's chest, where those translucent creatures had struck him, was turning a sickly, translucent gray. He was hiding the pain, but the way his fire flickered and died every time he exerted himself told a different story.
"Severin," she gasped, stumbling over a ridge of frozen obsidian. "We have to stop. The light is fading, and I can't... I can't feel my feet anymore."
Severin stopped, his shoulders heaving. He looked back at her, and for a moment, the hardness in his gaze softened into something resembling the man she knew. He looked at her blue-tinged lips and then down the slope of the ridge.
"There," he whispered, pointing into a sheltered basin nestled between two towering walls of ice.
Aelindra squinted. It looked like a trick of the light at first, a cluster of low, stone huts built directly into the base of the cliffs. There was no smoke rising from chimneys, no sound of barking dogs or children, but there was a faint, warm glow emanating from the cracks in the stone walls.
It took them another hour to reach the perimeter. As they entered the basin, the wind simply... stopped. It was as if they had stepped behind a heavy velvet curtain. The screaming gale of the High Pass became a muffled hum.
As they descended into the basin, the wind died. It didn't just fade; it vanished, as if they had stepped through a physical barrier. The silence that rushed in was deafening. It was the same intentional void they had felt in the presence of the Keeper with the scarred throat.
"The same," Severin whispered, his hand dropping from his sword hilt to steady himself against a rock. He looked around the quiet circle of houses. "This isn't just a monastery. It's a colony of them."
Aelindra nodded, her mind flashing back to the old man with the white cataracts and the jagged piece of memory-glass. "The Keepers. He wasn't the only one who gave up his voice to stay in the silence."
A door, a slab of pale stone on hidden hinges, slid open to their right.
A woman stepped out. She was dressed in layers of thick, uncolored wool, her face lined with the same parchment-like skin they had seen on the Keeper. She didn't look at them with suspicion or fear. She looked at them with a profound, unsettling stillness. She raised a finger to her lips, then gestured toward her own throat, where a faint, circular scar peeked out from beneath her collar.
She didn't speak. She didn't even breathe heavily. She simply beckoned them toward the largest of the stone dwellings.
Severin hesitated, his eyes narrowing. "Aelindra, we don't know what they harvest here. The other one wanted a name. What do these people want?"
"They want us out of the wind, Severin," Aelindra said, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the hallowed space. She felt a wave of dizziness wash over her, the adrenaline of the trek finally bottoming out. "And right now, I don't care what the price is if I can just sit down."
The woman led them inside. The interior was a marvel of subterranean engineering. The walls were lined with shelves carved directly into the rock, holding hundreds of clay jars, some small and sealed with black wax, others large and pulsing with a faint, internal rhythm. It was a library of things that shouldn't exist.
The air inside was warm, heated by a central pit filled with glowing, flameless coals that gave off a scent of dried lavender and old paper. The woman gestured for them to sit on mats made of woven moss.
As Aelindra collapsed onto the mat, her body finally acknowledging the bruises and the cold, the woman approached with a stone bowl filled with a clear, shimmering liquid. She offered it to Severin first.
He didn't take it. He stared at the bowl, then at the woman's scarred neck. "We met one of your kind. In the Monastery. He took a name from me."
The woman's expression didn't change, but she tilted her head slightly, her silver-gray eyes tracking the flicker of Crownfire that still danced weakly in Severin's eyes. She dipped her fingers into the liquid and traced a symbol in the air, the same woman standing between the sun and the mountain that Aelindra had seen carved in the Monastery floor.
The Anchor.
She then turned to Aelindra and touched her own temple, then pointed to the rows of jars on the walls.
"She knows," Aelindra whispered. "She knows I'm a Healer. She knows I'm... I'm leaking."
The woman moved behind Aelindra, her touch as light as a moth's wing. Before Aelindra could protest, the woman pressed her palms against Aelindra's shoulder blades.
Aelindra didn't feel a magical surge. She felt a sudden, profound quiet. The thousands of voices that had been whispering in the back of her mind since she took the name Valerius, the echoes of a brother she didn't know and a father she could no longer hear, simply went mute. It was like a fever breaking.
She let out a long, shuddering sob of relief, her forehead dropping to her knees.
Severin stood up, his hand finally leaving his sword, but his posture remained wary. He watched the woman move to a side table and begin grinding dried herbs with a stone pestle. The sound, skritch, skritch, skritch, was the only thing in the room.
"Why are you helping us?" Severin asked, his voice softer now. "What is this place?"
The woman paused her grinding. She walked to the wall and pulled down a small, unsealed jar. She brought it over and tipped it toward the light of the hearth. Inside, there was no black mist, no golden light. There was only a handful of silver sand.
She let the sand pour through her fingers. As it hit the stone floor, it didn't scatter. It formed a shape, a map of the High Pass, with the Spire of the Shadow-Hold at the center. She then pointed to the village they were in, then to the Spire, and made a cutting motion across her throat.
"They are the filter," Aelindra realized, looking at the silver sand. "The Shadow-Hold... it's where the secrets are kept, but this village... this is where the noise is stopped. They live here to keep the mountain from hearing the kingdom's sins."
Severin looked at the map in the sand, his jaw tightening. "And we just walked right into the middle of the silence."
The woman nodded once, a grave, slow movement. She handed the bowl of liquid to Severin again. This time, he took it. He drank deeply, his eyes never leaving the woman.
For the first hour, they sat in the heavy, warm hush of the hut. The woman went about her work, ignoring them as if they were nothing more than furniture. She brought them bread that tasted of honey and ash, and more of the shimmering water that seemed to dull the ache in Aelindra's bones.
But even in the safety of the hut, the psychological weight of their journey remained. Severin sat by the hearth, the glow of the flameless stones reflecting in his eyes. He wasn't looking at Aelindra; he was looking at nothing, his fingers tracing the hilt of his sword in a rhythmic, obsessive pattern.
"Valerius," he whispered, so low Aelindra almost didn't hear it.
She flinched. The name felt like a bruise. "Don't, Severin. Not here."
"I can't stop it," he said, turning to her. The amber in his eyes was clouded. "The name... it's like a bell that someone keeps ringing. I look at these walls, Aelindra, and I wonder which jar he's in. Or if he's the reason the sand is silver."
"He's a man, Severin. Not a jar."
"Is he? The Eye didn't think so." He stood up, pacing the small confines of the room, his shadow stretching long and jagged against the stone. "They turned a person into a secret. And now that secret is the only thing I can feel."
Aelindra watched him, her heart aching. She wanted to reach out, to anchor him back to the present, but she felt her own strength flagging. The "quiet" the woman had given her was a temporary bandage, not a cure.
Outside, the light of the High Pass began to fade into a deep, bruised violet. The silence of the village deepened as the inhabitants retreated into their stone dwellings. Through the narrow slit of the door, Aelindra could see the central well. The violet light coming from it was pulsing now, a slow, rhythmic beat that matched the thrumming in her own chest.
It wasn't a well of water. It was a well of something else.
Suddenly, the woman stood up. She walked to the door and barred it with a heavy piece of silver-wood. She turned to them, her face illuminated by the hearth-fire, and for the first time, she looked afraid.
She pointed to the floor, "stay down" and then blew out the small oil lamp on the table.
The hut went dark, save for the faint red glow of the coals.
"Something is coming," Severin whispered, his blade sliding from its sheath with a hiss that felt like a scream in the darkness.
Aelindra crawled toward him, her hand finding his. His skin was burning hot, the Crownfire reacting to the sudden spike in his fear.
From outside, through the stone walls, came a sound. It wasn't the wind, and it wasn't the grinding glass of the creatures from the ravine.
It was a whistle.
A long, low, trilling melody that Aelindra recognized with a jolt of pure, ice-cold terror.
It was her father's whistle.