The world beyond the window was a wound of light.
Kaelen Moss pressed his forehead against the warm, vibrating glass of the spirit-train carriage, his eyes scratchy from lack of sleep and from staring at the relentless expanse. For seventeen days, he had been in motion. Seventeen days since he'd bartered the last of his Eastern silks for passage on a grimy freighter sailing the Jade Currents west. Eleven days since he'd stumbled onto this rattling, shrieking testament to what passed for progress in this foreign land.
Veridia.
The name tasted like iron and dry soil on his tongue. They said it meant "the Verdant" in some forgotten trader's tongue, but from Kaelen's vantage point, it was a lie painted in shades of ochre, rust, and bleached bone. The Sagebrush Expanse unspooled from the train's tracks like a vast, desiccated hide stretched over the ribs of the earth. It was not flat, but endlessly rolling—great, humpbacked rises of land covered in a grey-green fuzz of tough, woody scrub that seemed to sweat dust into the air. Distant mesas stood like crumbling altars, their layered strata telling a history of ancient seas and fire that Kaelen had no energy to read.
It was the sky, though, that oppressed him most. In the Jade Flame Sect, the sky was a curated dome, its energies channeled, its moods mediated by formation arrays. Here, the sky was a vast, indifferent bowl of polished cobalt, depthless and brutal. The sun did not shine; it pounded, a hammer of white-gold light that drove all shadow into desperate, narrow crevices. It was a sky that declared all things small, especially a man with a broken past and a hollow core.
The train itself was a marvel of ugly, grating functionality. They called it a "spirit-train," but Kaelen sensed no spirits in its construction, only captive agony. It was a long, black snake of riveted iron and soot-stained wood, powered not by steam or Qi, but by a crude and violent manipulation of the local Aether. In the engine car, a "Conductor-Savant"—a cultivator of a sort Kaelen found utterly bizarre—was bonded to a massive, polished geode of pulsating crimson crystal known as a "Heartwood Shard." The Savant's will, funneled through the shard, gripped the ambient Aether in the land and wrenched the train forward along pre-laid "Resonance Rails." It was not cultivation; it was extraction. Every lurch of the carriage, every scream of metal on metal, felt like a theft from the silent, watching land.
The carriage was nearly empty. A few dour-faced settlers in homespun wool, their faces lined like the badlands outside. A merchant with a case of cheap tin charms that allegedly warded off "Blight-miasma." And in the corner, a figure wrapped in faded, ochre-dyed leathers, face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat—a Ghost Nation scout, utterly still, giving off a vibe of such potent, silent presence that Kaelen's skin prickled. He kept his gaze averted, his own Aether, what little he could naturally hold, drawn tight and inert within him. The technique was instinctual now: to be a stone, a void, to offer nothing that could be tasted or taken. Or noticed.
His body still hummed with the wrongness of this place. It wasn't just the dryness that cracked his lips or the grit that found its way into every seam of his clothing. It was the Aether. In the East, Aether was a celestial downdraft, a clean, vertical river one learned to siphon and refine. Here, it was horizontal. It rose from the ground itself, a slow, simmering exhalation. He felt it through the soles of his boots, a low, tectonic thrum that was less an energy and more a sensation—the smell of ozone after a lightning strike, the taste of flint on the wind, the sub-audible groan of stone settling. It was untamed, undirected, and thick with the echoes of life and death. It was also, he noted with the detached curiosity of a physician observing a disease, profoundly resonant with the unique, twisted pathways of his own ruined core. It called to the hunger in him. The thought made him nauseous.
"Next stop! Dusthaven Junction! Twenty-minute respite for watering and Aetheric recalibration! All disembarkin' for the Whisper Creek spur line, this is your transfer!"
The conductor's voice was a metallic bark through a speaking-tube. Kaelen stirred. Whisper Creek. The name on the ragged, oil-stained map he'd acquired in the last port. A dot at the end of a dotted line, deep in the territory marked 'Sagebrush Expanse.' Far from major ley lines. Far from Syndicate strongholds, according to the drunken map-seller. Far from everything. It would do.
The train groaned to a shuddering halt in a cloud of its own dust and spent Aether, the ghost of a scream fading from the rails. Dusthaven Junction was less a town, more a conspiracy of ramshackle buildings clinging to the side of the tracks: a water tower, a clapboard station house with a sun-bleached sign, a general store with bars on the windows, and a saloon that listed to the south as if tired of standing. The air outside the carriage was a wall of heat, dry enough to sear the lungs.
Kaelen shouldered his single, worn leather pack—containing a change of rough-spun clothes, a waterskin, the last of his coin, and the carefully wrapped, guilt-heavy manuscript—and stepped down onto the gravel. The Ghost Nation scout glided past him without a sound, melting into the shimmering heat haze beyond the station house. Kaelen bought a lukewarm bottle of sarsaparilla from a sullen boy at a stall, the sweet, herbal taste a bizarre comfort. He asked about the Whisper Creek spur.
"Ain't a spur," the boy said, squinting at him. "Engine car's busted. Been busted. Stagecoach leaves tomorrow mornin'. From the livery." He jerked a thumb towards a large, dusty corral behind the saloon.
A day's wait. Kaelen nodded, a tight, economical movement. Time was a currency he had in abundance, and spending it here was as good as anywhere. He found a sliver of shade against the lee side of the station house, slid down the wall to sit on the ground, and pulled his broad-brimmed pilgrim's hat low over his eyes. He would meditate. Not to cultivate—that avenue was forever closed to him in the traditional sense—but to settle the restless, alien hum of the Veridian Aether against his senses, and to quiet the more familiar hunger within.
He had almost achieved a state of numb equilibrium when the disturbance rippled through the ground.
It was not a sound, but a cessation. The ever-present, subliminal thrum of the land… faltered. Then it returned, but twisted, carrying a new flavor: a sour, chilling note of despair and absolute finality. It was the Aetheric equivalent of a death rattle.
His eyes snapped open. Around him, life at Dusthaven went on—the clang of a hammer from the blacksmith's, the murmur of conversation from the saloon doors. They hadn't felt it. Or they were so used to the background noise of the land they no longer distinguished its moments of pain. But Kaelen, the perpetual outsider, the void that sensed fullness with acute sensitivity, felt it like a spike of ice in his spine.
Driven by a compulsion he didn't understand, he stood and followed the fading tremor. It led him away from the tracks, past the corral where a few sad-looking mules flicked their tails at flies, and up a low, rocky rise dotted with sagebrush. The smell here was different—less dust and heat, more the scent of damp stone and something eerily sweet, like rotting honey.
At the crest of the rise, he stopped.
The other side sloped down into a shallow, circular depression, a natural amphitheater. In its center stood a tree. Or what had been a tree.
It was an oak, or something like it, but of a size and proportion that spoke of immense age and power. Its trunk was wider than a house, its bark a labyrinth of deep, black fissures. But it was not brown. It was the color of weathered ash, of stone. It was utterly, completely leafless, its multitude of branches reaching for the sky like the petrified capillaries of a lung. No bird perched on it. No insect buzzed near it. The very air around it was still and cold, a pocket of winter in the baking expanse.
And from it wept the Aetheric silence he had felt. This was the source. This was a "Silentwood."
He had read the term in a broadsheet on the train, in a sensationalist article about "the perils of Rootwalking." It had been an abstraction. Seeing it was a physical blow.
As he stared, details resolved. There was a figure at the base of the massive trunk. A man, or the statue of a man, kneeling as if in prayer, his back against the grey bark. His clothes were those of a rancher or prospector—durable trousers, a thick jacket. But they, too, were the same uniform stone-grey as the tree. His face was tilted upwards, mouth slightly open in a silent cry or song, eyes wide and unseeing, their sockets filled with a crystalline, woody substance. One hand was pressed flat against the trunk, fingers elongated and fused with the bark, as if the tree had accepted him back in the most literal way possible. The other hand was outstretched, clutching a simple, stone-carved medallion on a leather thong that had also turned to mineral.
Petrification. The final cost of a Rootwalker's failure. The article had spoken of "Aetheric saturation," of a cultivator drawing too deeply, too greedily, from their bonded Heartwood or ley line, until the wild, vivifying power of the land overcame their mortal shell and turned them to a permanent part of the landscape—a warning and a tombstone.
Kaelen approached, his steps silent in the deep dust. The wrongness was palpable, a vacuum that pulled at the edges of his own spirit. He stopped a few paces from the statue-man. Up close, the detail was exquisite and horrifying. He could see the individual stitches in the jacket, now stone ridges. The stubble on the man's jaw, now a rough texture. The desperate hope or fear etched into the grain of his stone skin.
This was not a clean death. This was a transformation arrested at the moment of ultimate connection, a marriage of flesh and earth that had consumed the groom. The man's Aether was gone, not dissipated, but transfixed, locked into the rigid matrix of stone and dead wood. It was a harmony that had become a cage.
A sudden, violent urge rose in Kaelen—a reflex born of months of desperate survival in the wake of the Jade Flame's fall. His parasitic core, sensing a concentration of potent, albeit frozen, energy, gave a painful twitch. It was like a salivating pang. He could… try. The technique was different here—the energy wasn't flowing from a living cultivator, but trapped in a stasis. Could he crack that stasis? Could he draw the petrified Aether out, like sucking marrow from a fossilized bone?
The idea revolted him. It was a new depth of graverobbing. He clenched his fists, driving his nails into his palms, using the sharp pain to focus. No. This was not why he had come west. He was here to disappear, not to become a ghoul feeding on the corpses of failed cultivators.
As he fought the internal battle, his eyes fell on the stone medallion in the statue's hand. Carved into it was a simple symbol: a single, vertical line with three roots spreading from its base, and above it, a single, radiating wave. A personal sigil. A mark of identity, now eternal.
From behind him, a voice, dry as the sagebrush, spoke. "He was a fool. Tried to bond with a wild ley spur without a Heartwood sapling to mediate. Thought he could tame the song himself."
Kaelen didn't startle. He had sensed no one, which meant the speaker was either very, very good, or had a harmony with the land so complete it rendered them a part of its background. Slowly, he turned.
It was an old woman, seated on a rock he'd sworn was empty a moment before. She was Native, her skin like sun-cured leather, her hair the color of snow and bound in two long, thick braids wrapped with strips of faded blue cloth. She wore a deerskin dress decorated with minute, chipped beads in geometric patterns. Her eyes were black and deep, holding the same timeless quality as the mesas on the horizon. In her lap, she held a bundle of dry sage stalks, her fingers slowly, methodically weaving their ends together.
"You feel it, don't you?" she said, not looking at him, her gaze on the Silentwood. "The hole he left. The wrong silence."
Kaelen said nothing. Denial was pointless.
"Eastern man," she observed, her voice neutral. "Running from something. Or to something. You have the look. The sky doesn't fit you right."
"I'm just passing through," Kaelen said, his voice rough from disuse.
The old woman's lips quirked in something that wasn't a smile. "Aren't we all? He was passing through too." She nodded at the statue. "Name was Eli. Had a wife in Dusthaven. Wanted to be a big man, a 'Rootwalker.' Wanted to make the land sing for him. The land don't sing for anyone, Eastern man. You can learn its song, and maybe hum along for a while. But try to take the fiddle from the fiddler…" She shrugged, a small, eloquent movement. "You join the chorus permanent-like."
She finished her weaving, held up the sage bundle—a loose, circular knot. "This land remembers. It holds onto things. Pain, joy, life, death. The Aether here ain't just power. It's memory. You pour your memory into it when you draw from it. And if you take too much, too fast, its memory pours into you. And sometimes… the land's memory of being stone is stronger than your body's memory of being flesh."
She stood, with a grace that belied her apparent age, and walked past Kaelen. She placed the woven sage circle gently at the base of the Silentwood, between the roots. She whispered something in a language that sounded like wind over rock and the click of stones in a stream.
"What do they call you?" she asked, turning back to him.
"Kaelen." He saw no risk in the truth of his given name. It meant nothing here.
"I am Walks-Behind-the-Rain," she said. "Of the Ghost Nation. You are going to Whisper Creek."
It wasn't a question. Kaelen remained silent.
"Good," she said. "That place has a song right now. A troubled one. Maybe a broken Eastern ear will hear something those too close to the melody have missed." Her dark eyes seemed to see straight through his hat, his clothes, his skin, to the hollow, hungry thing coiled where his core should be. A flicker of something—not fear, but deep, ancient recognition—passed through her gaze. "Or maybe you are just another kind of silence coming to visit. Either way, the land will know what to do with you."
She walked away, not back towards Dusthaven, but out into the open expanse, seeming to blur into the heat shimmer until she was gone.
Kaelen stood before the Silentwood for a long time after, the old woman's words etching themselves into his mind. The Aether here is memory. It explained the thick, resonant, almost sentimental quality of the energy here, so different from the detached, celestial purity of the East. To cultivate here was not just to absorb power; it was to immerse yourself in the collective ghost of the continent. The risk wasn't just burnout or spiritual backlash; it was assimilation. Losing yourself in the song until you forgot your own verse.
He looked at the stone face of Eli, the failed Rootwalker. Was this fate truly worse than his own? To be frozen in a moment of aspiration, becoming a permanent part of the world you loved? Or was it a merciful end compared to Kaelen's endless, parasitic existence—a hunger that could never be sated, a melody he could only ever steal?
The sun began its slow, bloody descent towards the razor-edge of the western horizon, painting the Silentwood in shades of orange and long, deep purple shadow. The stone figure seemed to watch the sunset with its blind eyes, a sentinel for a memory it had become.
Kaelen turned his back on the ghost and walked down the rise towards the jagged, haphazard lights of Dusthaven. The taste of rotten honey lingered in his mouth, and the memory of that silent, sucking wrongness in the Aether lingered in his bones. He found the livery, paid in advance for a seat on the morning's stagecoach to Whisper Creek with the last of his serviceable coin, and took a cramped, flea-infested cot in the loft above the stable for the night.
Sleep, when it came, was not restful. He dreamed not of the Jade Flame's fall, but of stone. Of his own hands, grey and rough, grasping at a river of golden sap that flowed just out of reach, while the roots of a great, unseen tree slowly, tenderly, began to encase his legs, pulling him gently, irrevocably, down into the warm, remembering dark.
The stagecoach was a bone-rattling contraption of cracked leather and groaning wood, pulled by six sweating, determined mules. The driver was a grizzled lump of a man named Grissom who spoke only to curse the mules, the heat, and the "goddamn Syndicate skimmers." The other passengers were a travelling tinker with a cart full of pots lashed to the roof, and a tired-looking woman in a faded bonnet clutching a carpetbag to her chest like a child.
The road was not a road, but a pair of deep-rutted tracks worn into the hardpan by countless wheels and hoofs. They traveled east, away from the setting sun, into the deepening heart of the Expanse. The landscape grew more severe, the sagebrush giving way to fields of shattered, black volcanic rock, then to canyons of striated red sandstone that echoed with the coach's passage like the halls of a sun-bleached skeleton.
Kaelen watched it all through the dust-caked window, his senses tuned to the thrum of the land. He felt it shift and change—pockets of thin, anxious energy where water was scarce; sudden, vibrant swells of life near hidden seeps where cottonwood trees gathered in grateful clusters; and once, a deep, subterranean pull, a slow, massive current of Aether that made the hairs on his arms stand on end—a ley line, one of the continent's great spiritual arteries.
Hours bled into one another, measured in dust and jolts. The tinker got off at a lonely crossroads marked by a sun-bleached cattle skull on a post. The woman in the bonnet descended at a fortified-looking ranch house flying a flag with a stylized tree inside a gear—the Ironwood Syndicate emblem. Her posture, Kaelen noted, changed as she approached the gate, becoming straighter, harder. Not a settler's wife. A Syndicate employee.
Finally, as the sun reached its zenith and the heat inside the coach became a soup, Grissom called out, "Whisper Creek! End of the line!"
The coach lurched around a final bend, and Kaelen got his first look at the town he hoped would be his tomb.
Whisper Creek nestled in a shallow valley where two worn-down ridges of basalt met. A thin, silver ribbon of water—the creek itself—threaded through its center, giving life to a narrow band of startling green: cottonwoods, willows, and small, irrigated plots. The town clung to the water's gift. Buildings of rough-hewn timber and local stone lined a single main street that followed the creek's curve. There was a stable, a blacksmith whose forge sent a shimmer of heat into the air, a general store with a broad porch, a squat building marked "TOWN MEETING HALL," and at the far end, a two-story structure with a faded sign declaring it "The Rusty Nail – Drink & Lodging."
It was a picture of fragile, hard-won survival. But it was the view beyond the town that captured Kaelen's attention and sent a fresh chill down his spine, a chill that had nothing to do with the creek's moisture.
On the northern ridge, overlooking the town and the verdant valley like a watchtower, stood a young tree. It was unmistakably a Heartwood sapling. It was maybe thirty feet tall, its bark a smooth, pale silver, its leaves a vibrant, almost metallic jade green that seemed to hold light within them. It pulsed with a soft, golden Aetheric glow visible even to Kaelen's untrained physical eyes—a gentle, living lighthouse in the spiritual landscape.
And a mile beyond it, on the next ridge over, was the blight.
A massive, ugly structure of black iron and brass pipes squatted on the land like a mechanical tick. It was angular, smokestacks belching not smoke, but a visible, sickly-yellow vapor that distorted the light around it. From its base, thick, ribbed cables snaked across the rocky ground, disappearing into the earth in the direction of the sapling. This was a Siphon Engine. Even from this distance, Kaelen could feel its function—a relentless, grinding pull, a dissonant hum that set his teeth on edge. It was an inversion of the Silentwood. Where the petrified tree was a frozen silence, the Engine was a screaming, active hunger. It was leaching the Aether from the land, from the sapling, funneling it away. A faint, corrupted shimmer, like a heat haze tainted with oil, hung in the air between the Engine and the town.
The town itself lay under this invisible pall. The Aether here, which should have been rich and nurturing near a Heartwood sapling, felt thin, strained, and bitter. It was the taste of a wound being slowly drained.
The stagecoach rolled to a stop outside the general store. Grissom spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the dust. "Whisper Creek. Mind your business, pay your tab, and don't stare too long at the pretty light on the ridge. It's got a mean dog."
Kaelen shouldered his pack and stepped down into the dust of the main street. The air by the creek was cooler, laced with the smell of water, willow, and… yes, the faint, acrid back-note of the Siphon Engine's exhaust. He could feel eyes on him from behind curtained windows, from the shadowed porch of the blacksmith's. A stranger was an event here.
He looked up at the silver sapling on the ridge, its leaves trembling in the dry breeze. He looked at the ugly, mechanical fist closed around the horizon. He felt the land's memory here—a memory of freshness now being soured, of a song being interrupted by a scream of metal.
Walks-Behind-the-Rain's voice echoed in his mind. That place has a song right now. A troubled one.
He had come to find silence. Instead, he had found a dirge. And deep within his cursed, hollow core, the part of him that was forever hungry and forever listening, stirred from its torpor. It was not a pang of hunger this time, but something else—a resonant dissonance, a recognition of a wrongness that mirrored his own in a different key.
He adjusted his pack and started walking towards the saloon. He needed a drink. Something strong enough to drown out the taste of dust, the memory of stone, and the first, faint, unwelcome stirrings of something that felt horribly like purpose.