The raven's corpse hit the ground and stayed there, still smoldering at the edges where Soryn's flames had caught it.
Nobody moved for a moment. The rain was already thinning, leaving the field cold and wet and quiet.
Soryn crouched beside the ruined sword he had borrowed from a dead soldier and placed it back into the earth carefully, his expression carrying something close to guilt.
His pink flames were long gone. The blade looked worse than when he had found it.
Aren watched him do it without saying anything.
He had seen people kill without hesitation. He had seen people kill and enjoy it. However, he had never seen someone apologize to a dead man's weapon before picking it up, and he had never seen one put it back after.
"We should move," Soryn said, standing.
Elias was already wiping purple blood from his sleeve with the expression of a man personally offended by the color.
"Agreed. Before something else decides we look like a meal."
Aren retracted his chains and fell into step behind them without a word.
They walked for a long time, and nobody tried to fill the silence, which suited Aren perfectly. Silence was just the world being honest.
What he couldn't settle was the feeling underneath it, the thing that had been gnawing at the edge of his attention since they left Vanagir and hadn't stopped since.
Every few minutes, he reached for his Shade without meaning to. An instinct so ingrained it had become reflex, like reaching for a dagger after years of carrying one.
The dark coiling presence that had lived somewhere beneath his ribs since the day he chose defiance over prophecy and earned it through pain.
He reached for it and found nothing. Not sleeping, not suppressed, just absent, like it had been scraped clean out of him, and the space it left behind hadn't figured out yet what it was supposed to be.
'Is this what normal people feel like their entire lives?'
He didn't enjoy the thought.
Elias drifted sideways over the course of several minutes until he was walking level with Aren, doing it gradually enough that it didn't look deliberate. Aren noticed immediately but said nothing about it.
"You keep doing that," Elias said eventually.
"Doing what?"
"Your hand keeps closing. Like you're reaching for something that isn't there." Elias glanced at him sideways. "It's been making me anxious, and I already have enough of that without your contribution."
Aren looked down at his fist, which had closed at his side without him noticing. He uncurled his fingers slowly and let his hand drop.
"Your Aberration will return," Elias continued, "The Infracta here suppresses external power systems, it doesn't destroy them. You're muted, not broken. There's a difference."
"I know that," Aren said.
"You're not acting like it."
Aren said nothing. Elias, to his credit, left it there and didn't push further, which was the most useful thing he had done all day.
Soryn stopped walking without warning, and Aren's hand went to his chains before he had even registered why.
Then he understood. The space between two jagged rock formations twenty meters to their left was empty and still, and it was the kind of stillness that meant something had just stopped moving inside it rather than the kind that meant nothing had ever been there at all.
"We're being followed," Soryn said quietly, without turning his head.
"I know," Aren said. "It's been keeping pace with us since we left the field."
Elias looked between the two of them with an expression that suggested he was reconsidering several recent decisions. "And you didn't think to mention this at any point during the last hour?"
"I was waiting to see what it wanted," Soryn said, thinking Elias was talking to him.
"I don't care what it wants," Aren answered.
"Yes, you do," Soryn replied, with the calm certainty of someone who had been paying attention.
"Otherwise, you would have thrown your chains at it an hour ago."
Aren's jaw tightened. He had no answer for that because it was accurate, which was its own kind of irritating.
They stood still and waited. The wind moved through the gaps in the rock formations and produced a low sound that wasn't quite a whistle.
Then, from the dark between the rocks, a shape came forward and resolved itself into something with a body.
It moved wrong in a way that was difficult to articulate.
Not the wrongness of a predator and not the wrongness of something injured. More like something that had learned how to move by watching other creatures move and had gotten most of it right, but not quite all of it.
Four legged, low to the ground, with a head that stayed unnaturally still even as the rest of it shifted.
Its eyes didn't catch the light because they produced their own, a dim colorless glow that had the strange effect of making the dark immediately around it feel darker by contrast.
'A Whisper Creature.'
The word surfaced from somewhere in the back of Aren's mind, drifting up from the Polymath's memories like sediment disturbed from the bottom of still water, and settled into place.
It stopped and regarded them from a distance, and its attention had a specific quality to it that Aren recognized, the feeling of being looked at rather than merely seen, and it was directed at him rather than the group.
"Don't engage," Soryn said.
Aren was already moving forward.
"Aren."
"It isn't going to attack us." He kept his hands loose at his sides and his voice even, putting one foot in front of the other at a measured pace. "If that was what it came here for, it had an hour to do it, and it didn't."
The creature tilted its head at his approach, a slow and deliberate movement that carried something almost like curiosity in it.
Aren stopped a few meters away, and they regarded each other in silence for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.
Then the creature turned and walked back into the dark between the rock formations. It wasn't retreating.
The difference between retreating and leading was something Aren understood in his body before his mind had finished processing it.
Behind him, Elias let out a long breath. "I want it formally noted that I am opposed to this."
"Noted," Aren said, and followed the creature into the dark.
It led them for twenty minutes before they found the body.
A man, lying face down in a shallow depression in the earth, half covered by dark grass that had grown around him with the patient indifference of something that had been given time and intended to use it.
His clothes were wrong for the Quantum Verge in a way that Aren recognized before he could name why: rougher fabric, simpler construction, worn down in the specific places that came from years of living outside city walls, because there had been no other option available.
It was Primal World clothes.
Aren crouched beside him and turned him over carefully.
The man's face carried the kind of aging that had nothing to do with years and everything to do with cold and hunger and the particular weight of a life lived in conditions that didn't forgive mistakes.
His eyes were open and fixed on a sky he could no longer see. But his chest was still moving.
"A Descender," Soryn said from behind Aren, his voice quieter than usual. "He must have come through recently. The time distortion in the outer regions would have done this to him."
"He's still alive," Aren said.
Elias crouched on the other side and pressed two fingers to the man's throat, checking. "For now."
The Whisper Creature had stopped at the edge of the depression and stayed there, watching without coming closer. It had done what it came to do and seemed to understand that the rest of it wasn't its business.
The man's eyes moved. It took effort that was visible in every muscle of his face, but they found Aren's and something in them sharpened, the very last of his focus pulling itself together for one final use.
His hand came up and closed around Aren's wrist with a grip that had no business being as strong as it was, given the state of the rest of him.
He spoke. The sound barely qualified as sound, more the shape of words than the words themselves, but Aren was close enough and the night was quiet enough, and he caught them.
Three words. The man forced them out with everything he had left, and then the grip loosened, and the breathing stopped, and the dark grass rustled once in the cold wind and went still.
Elias looked at Aren across the body. "What did he say?"
Aren stayed crouched for a moment longer, looking at the man's face.
A stranger from a world he had been thrown out of, who had somehow ended up here, who had spent the last thing he had on three words for someone who had almost not been close enough to hear them.
"Nothing useful," Aren said, and stood up.
He turned and walked back toward the path without looking at the Whisper Creature again. After a moment, he heard the others follow.
When he glanced back, the creature had vanished, leaving no trace except the body in the grass and three words sitting in Aren's chest like a stone in still water.
He didn't know what they meant yet. But they were already spreading.
The Jagged Peaks rose ahead of them as the last of the rain cleared away, massive, dark, and old against a sky that couldn't settle on a color. The path ahead narrowed between the rocks. The cold deepened with every step.
Aren pulled his cloak tighter and kept walking.