The cold pull became a drone. A single, sustained note vibrating in the marrow of his jaw. It led him out of the hills and into the fens—a vast, sucking flatland of black water and skeletal reeds. The sky here was a yellowed membrane, pressed low. The air smelled of decay and salt, a stagnant, breath-stealing smell.
It was not emptiness. It was fullness gone rotten.
The Glimmer grew agitated, darting ahead, then back, its light sickly. It didn't whimper. It hummed a dissonant counterpoint to the drone in Cassian's teeth.
He saw the town long before he reached it. It crouched on a low rise, a cluster of dark timber and sod roofs. No wall. No need. The fen was its wall. But something was wrong. No smoke. No movement. Yet the drone was loudest there. A hive-sound.
As he waded through the last of the brackish channels, he saw the first of them.
A man, kneeling in the muck at the water's edge. He was perfectly still, head bowed, hands clasped. He wasn't praying. He was listening. Tears cut clean tracks through the filth on his cheeks, dripping steadily into the black water.
Cassian passed within three feet of him. The man didn't look up.
Further on, a woman sat on a stump, staring at her own hands as they lay open in her lap. Silent tears fell onto her palms. She made no effort to wipe them away.
They were everywhere. Dozens of them. Scattered through the outskirts of the town like broken statues in a garden of despair. All weeping. All silent. All utterly, peacefully, broken.
This was not violence. This was seduction.
The town's gate was a sagging arch of driftwood. The street beyond was clean, swept. The houses were intact. But every door stood open. And in every doorway, or seated on every step, was another weeping figure. Their tears pooled at their feet, small, clear puddles in the dust.
The drone resolved into a voice. A low, honeyed, impossibly gentle baritone that seemed to come from the wet earth itself, from the sighing reeds, from the tears on every face.
"…and in the letting go, there is a purity. A clarity. See the weight you carry? It is not yours to bear. It is the world's cruelty laid upon you. You can set it down. You can simply… cease…"
The voice didn't speak to Cassian. It spoke through the town. It was the air.
Cassian's Brand reacted not with a pulse of hunger, but with a nausea. This was a different flavor of anguish. Not sharp or hot. It was cold, deep, and bottomless. The anguish of surrender. The sweet poison of giving up.
At the end of the main street stood a church. Not of stone, but of woven reeds and polished driftwood, sleek and organic, like the carcass of a great whale beached and sanctified. The door was a curtain of hanging moss.
The Glimmer pressed itself against Cassian's throat, icy with fear.
He pushed the moss aside and entered.
Inside, it was dim and cool. The floor was sand. People sat in rows, not on pews, but on the ground, facing a low dais. They were not weeping. Their faces were blank, smooth, serene. Empty. Their tears had been spent. They had reached the quiet place.
On the dais sat the priest.
He was thin, draped in robes of undyed, rough linen. His hair was long and pale. His face was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at—ethereal, androgynous, etched with a sorrow so profound it had become aesthetic. In his lap, he cradled a large, smooth basin carved from a single block of jet-black salt. It was full of clear water.
His eyes were open, staring into the middle distance, trailing slow, constant tears that dripped with soft plinks into the basin.
This was the Apostle. Not of rage, or gluttony, or petty cruelty.
This was the Apostle ofLament.
The priest's head turned slowly. His eyes, the color of rain, focused on Cassian. A small, tragic smile touched his lips.
"You are not empty enough to be here," the priest said, his voice the source of the drone that filled the fen. It was kind. "You still cling. I can hear the splinters in your soul, scraping as you walk. It must be agony."
Cassian said nothing. The atmosphere in the room pressed on his wounds, a soothing, deadly pressure. It whispered that he could stop. Here. He could sit in the sand and let his memories dissolve into the salt-basin. No more hunt. No more hunger. Just quiet.
"You are Cassian," the priest murmured. "The one with the branded tongue. The one who speaks in blood and silence. Gareth speaks of you. He says you are a masterpiece of unfinished suffering." A tear rolled down his perfect cheek. "That is the cruelest kind. Let me finish it for you."
The priest lifted a hand, dripping with water from the basin. He gestured.
One of the blank-faced men in the front row stood up. He walked to Cassian. He did not attack. He embraced him.
And with the touch, Cassian was flooded not with a memory, but with a feeling.
The utter, complete despair of the man's life. The loss of his child to fever. The contempt of his wife. The pointlessness of his labor. It was a wave of grey, undifferentiated grief. It had no edges, no story. It was pure, weightless sadness.
And it was… peaceful.
To feel this was to feel nothing else. The sharp, specific horrors of the Eclipse—Elara's understanding, Carden's betrayal—were drowned in this vast, soothing ocean of grey. The hunger in his teeth went quiet. The ache of his Brand softened.
It would be so easy.
The Glimmer shrieked. A psychic needle jammed into Cassian's mind.
Flash: Not a happy memory. A painful one. Lyssa, from his band, grinning with a split lip, holding up a dead rabbit for supper. "Quit moping, Cass! We're alive, ain't we? That's a win!" It was a memory of defiance. Of stupid, stubborn will in the face of despair.
The grey ocean receded. The specific, jagged pains of his own history reasserted themselves. They were sharper. They were his.
He shoved the embracing man away. The man stumbled back and sat down in the sand, his face returning to blank serenity.
The priest sighed. "You cling to your thorns. You think they define you. They are just splinters. I would pull them out."
"They are mine," Cassian rasped, his tongue bleeding anew with the effort.
"To own suffering is a vanity," the priest wept. "A selfishness. Give it to me. Let me make it beautiful. Let me make it mean something."
The priest raised the basin. He poured the water—the collected tears of a thousand surrenders—onto the sand at his feet.
The water did not soak in. It coalesced. It rose up in shimmering, liquid shapes—humanoid forms of weeping water. Dozens of them. They moved toward Cassian, their bodies reflecting the dim light, their silent mouths open in endless, soundless sorrow.
They were Lament given form.
One touched his arm. Where its liquid hand made contact, a deep, numbing cold spread. Not frostbite. Apathy. The will to fight seeped out of the muscle. Another touched his leg. He felt a crushing weariness. To take another step seemed a Herculean labor.
They were not attacking his body. They were dissolving his will.
The priest watched, weeping beautiful tears. "See? No violence. Only understanding. Only the end of struggle."
Cassian reeled. Last Silence was a weight on his back. Useless. You could not cut water. You could not kill a sigh.
The Glimmer buzzed around his head, its light frantic, sputtering. It was being smothered by the ambient despair.
Cassian did the only thing he could think of. He reached for his sharpest pain. Not to fuel himself. To repel.
He focused on the memory of the Eclipse. Not the vast horror. One specific, razor-sharp fragment.
The moment Gareth's finger touched his tongue.
He didn't just remember it. He relived it. The searing, white-hot truth of betrayal being branded into his flesh. The pain that was not just pain, but the annihilation of his own voice. The profound, artistic, specific cruelty of it.
He pulled that memory to the surface and let it radiate from his Brand.
The wave of silent, grey sorrow that washed against him met the white-hot, precise agony of the Brand.
The two could not coexist.
The water-creatures hissed. Where Cassian's radiating pain touched them, they steamed. Their forms wavered. Their soothing cold recoiled from his specific, burning truth. Their despair was general, welcoming. His was a singular, screaming point of defiance.
They backed away, circling, confused.
The priest's serene sorrow fractured. For the first time, his tears flowed faster. "No… that pain… it is ugly. It is selfish. It is a scream in my cathedral of sighs. Silence it!"
"No," Cassian gritted out, blood dripping from his lips. He took a step forward, toward the dais. Each step was agony. The welcoming grey apathy tried to swallow him with every movement. He fought it with the only weapon he had: the vivid, unacceptable, personal hell of his own past.
He was a man walking through a sea of honey, holding a live coal in his mouth.
He reached the dais. The priest looked up at him, no longer serene, but disturbed. His beautiful sorrow was now mingled with frustration. "You would rather scream into the void than rest in peace?"
Cassian reached out. He didn't strike the priest. He grabbed the black salt basin.
The moment his fingers touched it, the collective, surrendered grief of hundreds flooded into him. A tidal wave of quiet sadness. It was immense. It threatened to extinguish his own sharp fire, to dilute it into nothingness.
He held on.
He poured his own branded memory—the scream of the Brand—into the basin.
The silent, collected tears in the basin boiled.
A sound erupted from it—a cacophony of a thousand suppressed sobs, given voice at once. The gentle drone of the fen shattered into a screaming chorus of rediscovered pain. The blank-faced people in the sand jerked, as if waking from a dream into a nightmare. They began to wail, clutching their heads, their empty serenity violently replaced by the raw, ragged edges of their original grief.
The priest screamed. It was not a beautiful sound. It was the sound of a perfect note shattering. His form wavered. The aesthetic sorrow melted away, revealing something gaunt and terrified beneath. He was not a demon; he was a man who had found a way to make sadness safe, and now his sanctuary was ruined.
"You monster!" the priest sobbed, real tears of fury now. "You've made it hurt again!"
Cassian overturned the basin. The boiling, screaming water spilled across the dais, soaking the priest's robes. Where it touched him, his skin blistered with the heat of reclaimed feeling.
The Apostle of Lament collapsed, curling around himself, weeping not beautiful tears, but messy, angry, human ones. His power was broken. The seduction was over.
The town outside erupted in sound. Not silence. Not a drone. The chaotic, terrible, living sound of people feeling their wounds again.
Cassian staggered back, empty. He had not consumed anything. He had rejected a feast. His hunger roared back, sharper than ever, a vicious animal in his gut. He had used his own pain as a weapon and was now starving for it.
The Glimmer, dim and frail, settled on his shoulder. It was warm. It had not liked what he did, but it understood.
He walked from the church, past people now writhing in the dirt, re-learning how to suffer specifically, personally. He had not saved them. He had returned their hell to them. It was, perhaps, a crueler gift.
As he passed the town's edge, the drone was gone. The fen was just a fen, cold and wet and real.
His tongue pulsed. A new direction. Not a pull. A command.
East. Toward a place where pain was not soft, but sharp. Not surrendered, but wielded.
Gareth's voice seemed to whisper on the reeds, approving, chilling:
"You begin to understand the palette. Now let us introduce you to rage."