The silence after Lament's defeat was not peaceful. It was loud. A tinnitus of the soul. The fen's weeping had stopped, but the echo of it remained in Cassian's bones—a hollow, damp chill that the greasy heat of battlefield pain or the petty theft of a biscuit could not warm. His hunger was a raw, scraping thing now, made sharper by the feast he had refused.
East.
The land rose into jagged, slate-grey hills. The wind here had teeth. It carried a new scent—not decay, not yeast, not salt-tears. It smelled of hot iron and cold fury.
The Glimmer moved sluggishly beside him, its light a dull, bruised purple. The encounter in the church had drained it. It had touched too much distilled sorrow. Now, it flinched at shadows.
Two days into the hills, Cassian found the fort.
It wasn't a military structure. It was a monastery, carved into the cliff-face like a scar. Its walls were sheer, its gate a massive thing of black oak and iron. No banners flew. No guards walked the battlements. But the air around it shimmered, like the haze over a forge.
Cassian's tongue did not just throb. It vibrated. A high, painful frequency that made his teeth ache. This was not a pattern of passive consumption or seductive surrender. This was a pattern of active, focused rage.
He approached the gate. There were no handles. No seams. Just solid, dark wood.
He placed a hand against it.
The memory-flash was immediate and brutal:
A different gate, splintering. The roar of fire. The smell of burning parchment and incense. The screams of men who had taken vows of peace, cut short. And one voice, rising above it all, not in a shout, but in a low, clear, focused declaration: "You sheltered the coward. You protect the weak. Therefore, you are weak. And weakness must be purified."
The memory belonged to the place. It was baked into the stone, into the iron, into the grain of the door. A crime of conviction.
The door did not open. It shattered.
Not outward. Inward. It disintegrated into a thousand perfect, dagger-sized splinters that hung in the air for a moment before clattering to the flagstone floor.
Beyond was a courtyard of stunning, sterile order. Flagstones swept clean. Neat, dead herb gardens in geometric boxes. A dry fountain. And in the center, a man.
He was kneeling, polishing a sword.
He wore the remnants of a knight's armor, but it was not ornate. It was functional, scarred, pieces missing. His hair was cropped short, grey at the temples. His face was all severe angles, clean-shaven, his eyes the color of flint. He did not look up as the gate exploded.
"You are late," the knight said. His voice was flat, without inflection. It was the sound of a stone dropping into a deep well. "The others were undisciplined. Their sins were messy. Emotional."
He stood. He was not tall, but he seemed dense. As if gravity pulled harder on him. The sword in his hand was a plain, long broadsword, unadorned, its edge gleaming with a cruel, silver light.
"I am Sir Alaric," he said. "I was the Sword of Lord Aethelred. My betrayal was not of greed, or fear, or sorrow." He looked at Cassian for the first time. His eyes held no hatred. Only a terrible, logical certainty. "My betrayal was of principle. I broke my oath to my lord because his mercy became a flaw. It threatened the structural integrity of the realm. I purified my duty by shattering my vow."
He raised the sword, not in a challenge, but in demonstration. "The Godhand named me Ire. Not the frothing rage of a beast. The cold, enduring rage of a broken truth. My purpose is to shatter bonds. To test connections for weakness. You, branded one, are made of connections. All of them… frayed."
This was Gareth's promised lesson in rage.
Alaric moved.
There was no thunderous charge. He crossed the twenty paces of courtyard in a silent, blurring straight line. His sword did not slash. It thrust. A perfect, minimal, lethal line aimed at the center of Cassian's chest.
Cassian barely got Last Silence off his back in time. He twisted, deflecting the thrust with the flat of his heavy cleaver. The impact was not a clang. It was a chime, high and sharp, that vibrated up Cassian's arms and jangled his teeth.
Alaric was already recovered, already thrusting again. A second line. A third. Each was a geometric proposition: If point A (my sword) meets point B (your heart), then C (you cease). There was no anger in it. No passion. Only flawless, furious logic.
Cassian gave ground, parrying, each block sending those painful vibrations through him. He tried to find a pattern, a rhythm. There was none. Alaric's attacks were relentless, random only in their precision. He was not fighting a man; he was deconstructing one.
"Your bond to your past is sentiment," Alaric stated, his voice calm even as his sword became a silver web. "It is a structural weakness." His blade flicked, not at Cassian, but at the air beside him.
A searing pain lanced through Cassian's mind. The memory of Elara's hand in his—the calloused palm, the perfect fit—frayed. For a horrific second, the sensation blurred, turned to the feel of slick, dead fish. The memory did not vanish; it was corrupted.
Cassian staggered. The Glimmer shrieked, a sound of psychic agony.
Ire did not just attack the body. He attacked the connections themselves. The memories that formed the shaky foundation of who Cassian was.
Another precise thrust. Cassian parried, but Alaric's blade slid along Last Silence with a sound like tearing metal, and its point grazed Cassian's shoulder.
The pain was not of cut flesh. It was the feeling of a rope snapping. The memory of Carden pulling him from a muddy ditch—the grip of a brother's hand on his wrist—shattered. In its place was the sensation of falling, forever.
Cassian's breath hitched. He wasn't just being wounded. He was being unmade. His history, the painful, specific tapestry of his guilt, was being unpicked, thread by thread.
He tried to push back with his own memory-weapon, the searing brand of the Eclipse.
He focused, let it radiate.
Alaric paused. He tilted his head. "A profound fracture," he acknowledged. "But a single point. A structure needs many connections to stand. I do not need to break your strongest point. I will sever all the others, and it will collapse under its own weight."
He resumed. His sword became a blur of silver logic. Each near-miss, each graze, snipped another thread.
The taste of stew by a campfire turned to ash.
The sound of Lyssa's laugh became static.
The shared,silent watch on a cold night became the empty chill of the void.
With each loss, Cassian felt lighter, emptier, more hollow. A terrifying numbness spread. The hunger itself began to fade. What was there to be hungry for, if nothing had ever mattered?
The Glimmer was going mad. It zipped around Cassian's head, trying to intercept the sword, its light spattering against the cold steel like wet paint, doing nothing.
Cassian was at the edge of the dry fountain. Backed against stone. Nowhere to go.
Alaric stood before him, sword point leveled at his throat. "You are almost clean," he said. "Soon, you will be a perfect, silent point of pain. A work of pure, logical agony. Gareth will be pleased."
He lunged for the final, perfect thrust.
In that moment, stripped of so much, Cassian did not have a memory to fight with.
He had an instinct.
A memory not of his own, but one he had consumed.
The baker's memory. The small, petty, pathetic sin. The warmth of the oven. The silence from the cellar. The choice to value a full belly over a full heart.
It was not a noble memory. It was not a strong one. It was cheap, tawdry fuel.
He shoved it, not as a weapon, but as a gift. He pushed the entire, greasy, shameful memory-package into the path of Alaric's flawless, logical mind.
The Sword of Ire pierced it.
And his perfect focus slipped.
For a fraction of a second, Alaric was not a principle. He was a man. A man confronted not with grand tragedy or sharp pain, but with the banal, ugly, human reality of cowardice. It was illogical. It was messy. It was without artistic merit. It was… pathetic.
His thrust wavered. The geometric certainty faltered.
It was the opening Cassian needed.
He didn't swing Last Silence. He dropped it.
He stepped inside the sword's reach and slammed his forehead into the bridge of Alaric's nose.
Bone crunched. A wet, human sound.
Alaric stumbled back, not from pain, but from shock. Blood, shockingly red and hot, streamed over his lips, down his pristine armor. His flint eyes widened. The logic was broken. The rage remained, but it was no longer cold. It was confused. Hot.
"You… you fight like an animal," he spat, blood spraying.
"Yes," Cassian rasped, picking up his sword. The weight of it was the only thing that felt real.
He pressed the attack now. Not with skill. With viciousness. He hacked, he chopped, he slammed the heavy cleaver against Alaric's perfect guards. It was ugly. Inefficient. Brutal.
He was fighting not with memory, but with the hunger the memories had left behind. A raw, howling need to connect, to feel anything, even if it was the impact of metal on metal.
Alaric parried, but his movements were no longer geometric. They were desperate. He was an equation trying to solve a mudslide.
Cassian's final blow was a sideswipe that Alaric raised his own sword to block. Last Silence, weighted with the un-screams of the dead, met the pristine broadsword.
With a sound like a bell cracking, the broadsword shattered.
Not into two pieces. Into a hundred glittering shards that flew outward like frozen tears.
Alaric stood, holding the useless hilt. He looked at it, then at Cassian. The cold fury in his eyes melted, revealing a vast, empty confusion. "The bond… to my duty… it was the only one I had left."
His form began to crack. Not like clay, like glass. Fine lines spread across his skin, his armor. Light, not from within him, but from the shattered connections around him, leaked out.
"It was… logical," he whispered. And then, like a pane of glass struck by a stone, Sir Alaric, the Apostle of Ire, shattered. He dissolved into a cloud of crystalline dust that hung in the still air for a moment before drifting to the clean flagstones.
Where he had stood, a single, jagged shard of his sword remained. It pulsed with a cold, silver light. His Seed. Not a lump of bread or stone. A fragment of broken principle.
Cassian picked it up. It cut his palm, a sharp, clean, painless slice. The memory that flowed into him was not a story, but a syllogism.
Major Premise: Weakness corrupts.
Minor Premise: Mercy is weakness.
Conclusion: Therefore, mercy must be destroyed.
It was a hollow, chilling fuel. It filled no emptiness. It only made the void within him feel more geometric, more eternal.
He was standing in a courtyard of perfect order, surrounded by the ghosts of murdered monks, more hollow and hungry than when he had entered.
The Glimmer drifted down and landed on the hilt of Last Silence. It was no longer purple. It was a dull, exhausted grey. It had seen too much. It had learned that not all suffering could be warmed by hope. Some suffering was a cold, dead star.
From the shadows of the stark cloisters, a new sound emerged. Not the drone of Lament. Not the chime of breaking bonds.
A soft, rhythmic, metallic clicking.
Cassian turned.
In the archway of the refectory stood a figure. Small. Dressed in rags. A child, or something shaped like one. In its hands, it held two rusty nails, tapping them together.
Click. Click. Click.
The child's head was tilted. Its eyes were not empty. They were knowing. They saw the hollow in him, the geometric cold of Ire's seed in his hand, the exhaustion of the Glimmer.
It smiled. A smile with too many teeth.
Click. Click. Click.
It was an invitation. Or a summons.
Cassian's branded tongue lay still in his mouth. For the first time, it felt no pull, no itch.
He was not being hunted.
He was being watched.
The next move was his.