The clicking did not stop.
Click. Click. Click.
A dry, dead sound, like beetle shells tapping on stone. It was the only sound in the monastery courtyard. The wind had died. The Glimmer's hum had faded to a sub-audible tremble against his collarbone.
The child stood perfectly still, its grin a fixed, porcelain gash in the gloom. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl. Its hair was a matted nest. Its clothes were scraps of burlap and rotten wool, hanging on a frame so thin the sharp edges of its shoulders threatened to pierce through. But its eyes… they were old. Old and full of a terrible, patient knowledge.
Cassian did not move. He was a statue of weariness and hollow rage. The geometric cold of Ire's Seed sat in his gut like a swallowed razor, offering no warmth, only a clean, cutting emptiness. The child's clicking was an insult to that emptiness. It was a sound, where he wanted silence. A pattern, where he wanted void.
Click. Click. Click.
It was not a threat. It was an insistence.
The child turned and walked, with a stiff, puppet-like gait, into the dark archway of the refectory. It did not look back. The clicking receded, an auditory breadcrumb trail into the dark.
Cassian's tongue lay inert. No pull. No guidance. Gareth's silent orchestra had paused. This was an interlude. A curiosity.
He should have turned and walked the other way. He knew it. The Glimmer seemed to push weakly against his neck, a faint pressure urging retreat.
But curiosity was a ghost of the man he used to be. A ghost that sometimes twitched.
He followed.
The refectory was a long, high hall. Long tables and benches, coated in dust, were pushed against the walls as if swept aside by a giant's hand. The air was thick with the smell of old wax and dry rot. At the far end, a shattered stained-glass window depicted a benign sun. The light that came through was the color of weak tea.
The child stood in the center of the cleared floor. It had stopped clicking. Its arms hung at its sides, the rusty nails pointing at the floor like talons.
"You are full of holes," the child said. Its voice was high, but not youthful. It was the sound of a cracked bell, tiny and sharp. "He fills them with sharp things and loud things and sad things. But they leak. You are a sieve."
Cassian said nothing. He watched.
The child tilted its head the other way. "The Glimmer tries to sew them shut. With light. But light is weak thread. It breaks." It took a step closer. Its feet were bare, black with dirt. "I have better thread."
It held up one nail. In the dim light, Cassian saw the nail was not entirely rust. A dark, viscous fluid coated it, glistening like a slug's trail.
"Pain is a good thread," the child whispered conspiratorially. "Strong. But it must be the right pain. Not big, booming pain. Small pain. Specific pain. The pain of a splinter under the nail. The pain of a stone in your shoe for a whole day's march. The pain of remembering a stupid thing you said years ago." Its grin widened. "That pain sticks. It binds. It can patch a hole."
This was no Apostle. This was something else. A scavenger. A servant of the Godhand, perhaps, but of a lower, more practical order. A weaver of minor, enduring agonies.
"Gareth sends you pretty paintings," the child giggled, a sound like breaking glass. "Big, loud tragedies. I send… gifts." It gestured around the empty hall. "This place was full of peace. A boring pain. I helped the knight focus it. I gave him the idea that mercy was a structural flaw. A small, sharp thought. Like a nail." It tapped its own temple with the rusty point. Click.
Cassian understood. This creature was a catalyst. It didn't create grand betrayals. It whispered the perfect, tiny, corrosive idea that made them inevitable. It was the author of the first domino's tilt.
"You have a very big hole," the child said, taking another step. It was only ten feet away now. The smell of it reached Cassian—ozone, old blood, and the sweet, cloying scent of a infected wound. "The hole where your 'why' used to be. I have a thread for that."
The child raised both hands, nails crossed before its chest. "I can give you a 'why'. A small, clean, simple one. You won't have to hunt for it anymore. You won't have to eat messy stories." Its ancient eyes gleamed. "Your 'why' will be: To find me and thank me."
The air in the refectory tightened. The dust motes stopped drifting. The light from the broken window seemed to dim. The child's offer was not power, not memory. It was obsession. A single, focused, trivial purpose to fill the howling void of his existence. It would be a relief. A terrible, diminishing relief.
The Glimmer erupted from his collar. It did not whimper. It flared, a desperate, sun-bright burst of white light that filled the hall for one searing second.
The child hissed, recoiling as if scalded. Its porcelain grin cracked with genuine fury. "STUPID LIGHT! USELESS, DYING THING!"
In that moment of brightness, Cassian saw the threads.
Not metaphorical ones. Fine, shimmering, almost invisible filaments of silvery-grey energy, extending from the child's nails. They spider-webbed across the room, connecting to the dust, to the shadows, to the memories in the stones. They were connected to the monastery's pain, to Ire's focused rage, to the lingering echo of the monks' peace. This creature was sewn into the fabric of the place's suffering. It was mending tears with its vile thread, making the trauma permanent, efficient.
The light faded. The Glimmer fell onto Cassian's shoulder, its light guttered to a faint, dying ember. The effort had nearly extinguished it.
The child's fury vanished, replaced by a cold, calculating calm. "It dies. And then you will be in the dark. And you will listen."
It scuttled forward, faster than thought, its nails aiming not for Cassian's heart, but for his eyes.
Cassian swung Last Silence. The heavy blade passed through the space where the child had been. It was like cutting smoke. The child rematerialized two feet to the left, its nail tracing a line of fire across Cassian's ribs. The pain was immediate and specific—the exact burn of a hot wire laid on the skin. A perfect, minor agony.
"See?" the child giggled, darting again. Cassian twisted, but a nail scored his thigh—a precise, deep puncture, the pain of a misplaced step onto a sharp stake. "Strong thread!"
Cassian was not fighting a monster. He was being tailored. Each wound was designed to be a memorable, lingering annoyance. A collection of tiny, perfect sufferings that would itch and burn and distract forever.
He couldn't hit it. It was a thought, a whisper given form.
He stopped swinging. He stood still, breathing hard.
The child paused, curious. "Giving up? Ready for my gift?"
Cassian looked past the child, at the web of silvery threads he could now barely sense, fading with the Glimmer's light. He didn't have a memory sharp enough to cut them. He had no grand pain to repel this.
So he used what he had just been given.
He focused on the two new pains. The burn on his ribs. The puncture in his thigh. Not as wounds, but as data. Precise, clear, specific sensations. He ignored the vast, echoing pain of his Brand. He ignored the hollow ache of the Seed. He took these two, small, expertly crafted agonies and held them up in his mind.
Then, he did what the child did. He offered them back.
He didn't send them as an attack. He sent them as a pattern. A perfect, reciprocal design. Your burn. Your puncture. Here. They belong to you.
For a creature that lived in the exchange of specific suffering, it was a disorienting gift. A completion of a circuit.
The child froze. Its head jerked. It looked at the nails in its hands as if seeing them for the first time. A tiny, identical burn appeared on its own ribcage. A puncture opened on its thigh.
It let out a shriek, not of pain, but of violated aesthetics. "MINE! That pattern is MINE to make!"
In its moment of outrage, its connection to the web of threads flickered. It became slightly more real, slightly more here.
Cassian moved.
He didn't use Last Silence. He dropped it again.
He lunged, not as a warrior, but as a beggar. A hollow man reaching for the only thing that seemed solid in the room.
He grabbed the child's wrist.
The moment his skin touched the cold, dry flesh, the world dissolved into a cacophony of tiny hells.
The sting of salt in a papercut.
The ache of a rotten tooth touched by a cold wind.
The cramp of holding a position too long.
The shame of a petty lie discovered.
The frustration of a dropped tool into deep water.
The loneliness of being forgotten in a room full of people.
A million insignificant, relentless, human sorrows flooded into him. It was not a narrative. It was a swarm. A hive of stinging, biting, gnawing minor agonies. They had no meaning. They had no story. They were the background noise of a suffering world.
It was too much. It was nothing. It was the opposite of the Eclipse's grand, artistic tragedy. This was the mundanity of misery.
Cassian's mind, already fractured, began to granulate. To sand itself down into a thousand meaningless particles of sense-data.
But he held on.
And he began to pull.
He didn't pull the pains into himself. He was already full of them. He pulled on the threads they were attached to. The silvery filaments connecting the child to every minor anguish in the monastery, and perhaps beyond.
He pulled them into the one place in him designed to hold impossible, tangled things: the Brand on his tongue.
The scar tissue swallowed them.
It was not consumption. It was archival. A filing away of infinite, trivial suffering. The Brand grew no hotter. It just grew… heavier. More dense. The taste in his mouth shifted from iron and ash to something indescribable—the psychic taste of a million lost keys, a thousand missed steps, ten thousand unspoken apologies.
The child shrieked, a continuous, thinning sound. It was being unspooled. Its essence was not in a single Seed, but in the vast, diffuse network of petty pain it curated. Cassian was not killing it; he was erasing its life's work.
The silvery threads snapped, one by one, with sounds like tiny bells breaking.
The child' form began to blur, to simplify. The ancient knowledge drained from its eyes, leaving only a blank, childish confusion. The nails fell from its hands, clattering to the stone. It looked down at them, then up at Cassian.
"Why?" it asked, in a small, truly young voice. "I was just… mending."
Then it dissolved, not into dust, but into a sigh—a long, tired exhalation of air that had been held for centuries. It was gone.
The refectory was just a room again. Empty. Quiet.
Cassian fell to his knees. His mouth was full of the static of meaningless pain. He felt bloated with it. He was not nourished. He was clogged. He could feel every grain of the psychic sand now stuck in the matrix of his Brand.
The Glimmer, with a final, desperate effort, fluttered to his lips. It pressed its tiny, cool form against them, as if trying to drink the static away.
The effect was immediate and violent. The Glimmer convulsed, its light strobing erratically. It was not designed for this. It was a shard of hope, trying to filter an ocean of pointless sorrow. It blackened, like a leaf in a fire, and fell, smoking, into his palm.
It was not dead. But it was cured. Silenced. A lump of charred, fragile crystal.
Cassian stared at it. The void in him yawned wider than ever, but now its edges were fuzzy, lined with the psychic lint of ten thousand minor aches.
He had won. He had survived.
He felt more defeated than ever.
A new sound made him look up. From the shattered window, a single, fat drop of rainwater fell, striking the stone floor with a clear, lonely plink.
Then another.
A slow, cold rain began to fall, washing the dust from the tables, diluting the blood on the floor.
Cassian stood. He placed the blackened Glimmer in a small leather pouch at his belt. He lifted Last Silence. Its weight was a comfort. A simple, brutal, unambiguous truth.
He walked out of the monastery, into the grey, weeping day.
The lesson was over. The curated horrors had been presented: Gluttony, Despair, Rage, and now, the mundane horror of a thousand tiny pains.
The road ahead was no longer a path of Gareth's design. It was a washed-out track into a deeper, colder dark.
He knew where he had to go now. Not because his tongue pulled him.
Because it was the only place left.
North. To the stillness.