THE EMBER AND THE ECHOES

Episode 7: The Hollow Lord

The groan of the rising portcullis was the sound of the world shifting. Kaelen walked through the gate’s shadow, the eyes of the Talons boring into him. No one moved to stop him. No one touched him. The name ‘Morvath’ had acted as a key more potent than any steel.

The inner courtyard was a barren, windswept place of crushed dark gravel. No banners flew. No merchants hawked wares. It was a military encampment draped in the trappings of a noble house, devoid of life. Blackwood Talons stood at rigid attention along the path to the great doors of the keep proper, their helmed faces giving nothing away, but the air vibrated with a tension that was almost audible.

The great doors swung inward silently. Beyond lay the Great Hall, a cavernous space meant for feasts and courts. No fires roared in the twin hearths. Sconces held faint, mage light orbs that cast more gloom than illumination. At the far end, on a dais, sat a man on a throne of black oak and obsidian.

Lord Theron Vance.

He was not the towering demon of Kaelen’s nightmares. He was a sculpture of sorrow carved from pale ash. His hair, once likely as dark as Kaelen’s own, was shot through with stark silver, swept back from a high forehead. His face was gaunt, all sharp angles and shadowed hollows, but it retained the handsome structure of a leader. He wore simple, dark robes, not armour, and his hands rested on the arms of the throne. On one finger, the obsidian signet ring gleamed dully.

But it was his eyes that held Kaelen captive. They were the glacial blue from the memory-flash, but the cruel fire was gone. In its place was a bottomless, weary anguish, a pain so deep it had frozen into a permanent landscape. And within that ice, a spark of something desperate and terrified—a flicker of hope seeing a ghost walk.

Kaelen stopped ten paces from the dais. The silence was a physical weight.

“You speak a name,” Theron said. His voice was low, raspy from disuse, but it carried a remnant of the power that had once commanded this hall. “A name that is a death sentence to speak within these walls. Why do you seek your death?”

“I do not seek death. I seek an enemy,” Kaelen stated, his own voice flat, betraying none of the storm inside. “The enemy of Lyra Verdant. The enemy who holds your will in a vice.”

A faint, dark ripple, like heat haze, shimmered around Theron’s wrists where they gripped the throne. He did not move. “You have her eyes. Proof of blood is simple. Proof of madness is easier. Many have claimed to see shadows that are not there.”

“The shadow has a name. It lives in a spire of stolen time. It has been draining the Verdant fortune from your coffers for nineteen years, funneling it north to feed its power.” Kaelen took a step forward. A Talon captain shifted, but Theron raised a finger—the barest twitch—and the man froze. “You feel it, don’t you? Even here. A constant drain. A whisper in your mind that isn’t yours. The Geas isn’t just a scar, Lord Theron. It’s an open wound, and he still holds the knife.”

Theron’s knuckles turned white on the throne. The dark haze around his wrists thickened, coiling like living smoke. A low, almost imperceptible hum filled the air. He was fighting it. Now.

“What is your name, boy?” Theron asked, the words strained.

“I am called Kaelen.”

“Kaelen.” Theron breathed the name, and it sounded like a prayer found in ruins. “And you believe… you believe I did not will her death? That I did not cast you away in cold blood?”

This was the precipice. Kaelen looked into the eyes of the man who had haunted him. He saw not a monster, but a reflection of his own profound isolation, magnified by decades of magical torture. He saw the truth in the agonized clench of his jaw, in the way his whole body was a bowstring pulled taut against an invisible force.

“The man who wrote those letters to my mother did not will her death,” Kaelen said, his voice low but clear in the vast hall. He gestured vaguely toward the Scriptorium. “The man who loved her enough to earn the loyalty of an archivist who would die to protect her memory… that man was murdered that night, too. Just more slowly.”

A shudder wracked Theron’s frame. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they were swimming with a pain so raw it was difficult to look upon. The spark of hope was guttering, threatened by an overwhelming tide of shame. “You do not know what you ask. The Geas… it is not a chain on my limb. It is a vine in my mind. To move against him is to try to run while tearing your own roots from the earth. I will falter. It will… use me.”

“Then we account for it,” Kaelen said, his hand resting on the haft of his hatchet. “I am not here as your son. Not yet. I am here as your warden. And if need be, your executioner. But first, we use what remains of you to cut out the cancer named Morvath.”

A ghost of something—not a smile, but a brutal acknowledgment—touched Theron’s lips. “A warden.” He nodded, a slow, heavy movement. Then he addressed the hall, his voice gaining a sliver of its old, resonant authority. “Hear me! This man is Kaelen of Blackwood. His word is my word. Our enemy is Morvath the Soul-Thief. The long shadow ends. Now.”

The hall erupted in controlled chaos. Confusion, fear, a dawning grim resolve on some of the older Talons’ faces. Orders began to be barked.

Theron descended the dais, each step deliberate. He stopped before Kaelen, looking at him not as a lord to a subject, but as one shattered ruin to another.

“The path is into the dark,” Theron said, his voice barely a whisper. “And I am… not the man I was.”

Kaelen met his gaze, the embers in his own eyes reflecting the fragile, desperate flame in Theron’s. “Neither am I,” he said. “We will have to be enough.”

The reunion was not an embrace. It was a pact, sealed in a handshake that was more a testing of grip—an assessment of strength and will. The orphan and the prisoner. The warrior and the broken mage. The duo was formed in the heart of the enemy’s cage. The real war for their souls, and for vengeance, had just begun.

Episode 8: The Unravelling

The strategy room of Blackwood Keep was a vault of cold stone and lingering dread. Maps of the Vale were spread across a massive table, weighed down by daggers and empty cups. Kaelen stood by the weapon rack, a statue of simmering intensity, sharpening a already-keen dagger. The rhythmic clanging of stone on steel was the only sound.

Theron paced on the other side of the table, a vortex of restless energy. His fingers traced routes on the map without touching it, dark tendrils of magic—the visible seepage of the Geas—writhed like smoke around his wrists, which he would periodically clench to suppress.

“A direct assault on the Spire is a fantasy for martyrs,” Theron stated, his voice tight. He pointed to the rendered illustration of the jagged tower. “Its outer wards are not shields; they are miasmas. They don’t just block, they infect. They twist desire into despair, courage into apathy. Your soldiers would become weeping statues, rooting themselves to the ground in sorrow.”

“Then we don’t send soldiers into the wards. We draw its attention away,” Kaelen countered, not looking up from his blade. He stepped to the table and placed the tip of his dagger on a point south of the Spire. “The Amethyst Vein. Marius’s game showed ore shipments going in. It fuels his magic. We hit the mine. Hard. A full Talon assault. Morvath will be forced to choose: let his source be plundered, or divert power from the Spire’s defences to protect it.”

Theron considered this, a flicker of analytical sharpness cutting through the pain in his eyes. The boy thought like a strategist. “A diversion. It could create a window. But the core of the Geas, the Heart-Thread… it is anchored in the Spire’s pinnacle, and it is anchored… here.” He touched his own sternum. “To sever it, I must be close, and I must perform a counter spell that will leave my mind and magic utterly exposed. The backlash could unmake us both.”

“Then I’ll be your guard,” Kaelen said, as if stating the weather. “You break the spell. I break anything that tries to stop you.”

Theron looked at him, a profound exhaustion warring with a dawning, desperate trust. “You would trust me to hold? The Geas will scream that Morvath is my savior, that you are the thief of my destiny. It may turn my hands against you.”

Kaelen finally looked up, meeting his father’s haunted gaze. “I don’t trust you. I trust my axe to stop you if you break. And I trust your hatred for him to be stronger than his spell. That’s the warden’s duty.”

It was a brutal, honest compact. No false sentiment, only a mutual recognition of utility and a shared, snarling hatred for the puppet-master.

Their first test came not at the Spire, but in the Murkwood, on the march to scout the mine. A patrol of Morvath’s creatures—Blight-Wights, beings of thorn, jagged bark, and fossilized bone—ambushed their forward riders.

Kaelen moved with the lethal economy of the Marches. He didn’t meet the charging Wights; he sidestepped, his hatchet shearing through animated bramble and his dagger finding the necromantic knots in the fossilized bone. He fought silently, creating a zone of controlled, physical violence around Theron.

Theron’s magic was a revelation. It was not the fiery blasts Kaelen expected. It was subtle, surgical, and devastating. He didn’t attack the Wights; he attacked the binding. With a whispered syllable and a gesture that seemed to pluck at the fabric of reality, he enwove the stitches of dark magic holding a Wight together. It didn’t explode; it simply fell apart into a harmless pile of twigs, thorns, and dust. He cast a ward—not a wall of light, but a field of resonant frequency that made two advancing Wights vibrate until they shattered.

Midway through the fight, Theron stiffened. A strangled gasp escaped him. His weaving hands clawed at the air, then at his own throat. His eyes glazed over, the blue icing into that familiar, empty cruelty. The Geas had seized the reins.

“Foolish… child…” Theron’s voice was not his own; it was a venomous, echoing sneer. He turned, dark energy crackling around his fingers, not toward the remaining Wights, but toward Kaelen’s back.

Kaelen didn’t hesitate. He didn’t shout or plead. He acted. In one fluid motion, he dropped low under a Wight’s claw, spun, and brought the flat of his axe blade down in a concussive crack on the side of Theron’s head.

The lord crumpled, the dark energy snuffing out. The remaining Wights, suddenly lacking the greater magical pressure, were quickly dispatched by the Talons.

When Theron came to, groaning in the moss, Kaelen was standing over him, checking the edge of his axe.

“You… struck me,” Theron mumbled, probing the rising welt.

“You were compromised. The mission continues,” Kaelen said, offering a hand. It was not a son’s hand, but a partner’s. “Next time, fight harder.”

Theron took the hand, a grim, pained smile touching his lips. The blow had been merciful. It had been tactical. It was the exact language of their alliance. There was no room for fragility, only function.

That night, by the campfire, Theron spoke unprompted, his eyes on the flames. “The spell… it is like a second conscience. A vile, persuasive whisper that has lived in my head for so long it sings in my own voice. It tells me you are the thief, stealing my purpose.”

Kaelen sharpened his dagger. “What does it say about my mother?”

Theron flinched as if branded. “It says she was weak. That her love was a chain. That her fortune was wasted on gardens and laughter.” He looked up, his face raw. “I hear that, and the part of me that is still *me* wants to tear my own mind out.”

Kaelen stopped sharpening. The firelight danced on his scarred knuckles. “Then use that part. Let the ‘you’ that wants to tear your mind out, tear *his* Spire down instead.”

It was the closest they would come to a moment of understanding. The warrior and the mage, bound not by blood, but by a shared, brutal understanding of the enemy within. They were an imperfect, dangerous weapon. But as the twisted peak of the Spire came into view at dawn, they both knew: it would have to be enough.

Episode 9: The Diversion

The Amethyst Vein was not a mine; it was a wound in the earth. A jagged canyon split the northern foothills, its depths glowing with a persistent, sickly violet light that stained the twilight sky. The air hummed with a low, discordant frequency that set teeth on edge. This was where Morvath harvested the raw power for his corruption.

From a ridge overlooking the canyon, Kaelen and Theron watched with the Talon captain, Brant. Below, ghostly, semi-transparent figures geas-bound thralls—moved in silent, jerking motions, hauling carts of pulsating violet ore from tunnel mouths.

“The wards here are lesser,” Theron murmured, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Sweat beaded on his temple despite the cold. The dark tendrils around his wrists were active, restless. “They are tuned to deter the curious and pacify the thralls. A show of force will draw a response from the Spire. It will have to pull energy from its own defences to reinforce this place.”

Captain Brant, a man of few words and a face like seasoned oak, grunted. “My men are ready. We hit the eastern concentrator. It’s the bottleneck. Smash it, and the flow stops for weeks.”

Kaelen nodded. The plan was set. Brant and sixty Talons would launch a frontal, brutal assault on the processing facility. The noise, the violence, the threat to the resource—it would be an alarm bell Morvath could not ignore.

“Give us until the moon reaches its peak,” Kaelen said, pointing to the sliver in the sky. “Then attack. Make it loud. Make it costly.”

Brant nodded, a fierce glint in his eye. “We’ll give them a symphony.”

As Brant melted away to prepare his troops, Theron turned to Kaelen. In the fading light, he looked ancient, the weight of his impending internal war already bowing his shoulders. “The window will be short. When the Spire’s power diverts, the outer wards will thin, but the inner defenses… they are more personal. Phantasms. Reflections.”

“I’ll handle reflections,” Kaelen said, checking the straps on his vambraces. He carried only his hatchet and two daggers now—tools for close, fast work in tight spaces. “You just get us to the Thread.”

They moved under the cover of a moonless, overcast night, a smaller, hand-picked group of ten Talons led by a grim-faced sergeant named Varek. They were to be the anvil’s point—the distraction within the diversion. Their job was to breach the Spire’s base during the chaos and cause as much havoc as possible, drawing internal guards away from the central ascent.

The approach was a crawl through barren, rocky ground that felt dead underfoot. The Spire loomed larger with every step, its pulsating light casting long, grasping shadows. Kaelen felt the psychic pressure increase—a whisper that was now a murmur of despair. You are alone. He will fail. Your strength is dust.

He acknowledged the thoughts and let them pass, as he had learned in the Marches when facing fear. He focused on the physical: the feel of the cool rock, the rhythm of his breath, the solid, strained presence of Theron beside him, muttering a continuous, low-frequency counter spell that made the air around them shimmer like a heat haze.

They reached the edge of the barren zone. Before them, the air itself seemed to warp and weep—the outer ward. Theron raised a hand, his fingers moving in a complex, painful-looking pattern. He wasn’t trying to break the ward; he was tuning it, finding the dissonant frequency of Morvath’s diverted attention.

A low chime, like a cracked bell, echoed in their bones. A tear appeared in the miasma, just wide enough for a man to slip through. “Go, now!” Theron hissed.

They went through single file. The moment Kaelen crossed the threshold, the world changed. The silence was absolute, a vacuum that pressed on the eardrums. The light from the Spire was no longer external; it was embedded in the weird, crystalline substance of the walls, which seemed to shift and reform in his peripheral vision.

Varek’s team immediately branched off down a side passage that glowed with a warmer, orange light—the forge levels, their target. Their footsteps made no sound.

Kaelen and Theron were alone in the artery of the Spire. Before them, a spiraling ramp of fused bone and crystal led upward into the pulsing heart of the structure. Theron’s dowsing rod of pure silver twitched violently, pointing straight up.

A tremor shook the ground. Far away, but within the Spire, a deep thrum of power stuttered and faded. A cheer, silent but felt, echoed from the direction of the Amethyst Vein. Brant’s assault had begun. The diversion was working.

The violet light in the walls dimmed by a fraction.

“Now,” Theron said, his voice filled with a terrible resolve. “The Spire is blinking. We climb.”

They began their ascent, two figures against the impossible geometry of a sorcerer’s heart. The air grew thicker, harder to breathe. Whispers became distinct voices—fragments of stolen memories, pleas of the defeated, Morvath’s own poisonous suggestions looping endlessly.

Kaelen kept his eyes on Theron’s back, on the ramp ahead, on the next step. He was the shield. His war was against anything with form. The formless war, the war for his father’s mind, was Theron’s to fight. For now, all was according to plan.

But in a place that stole moments, plans were fragile things. And they had just entered the spider’s parlour.

Episode 10: The Chamber of Echoes

The ascent up the Spire’s internal ramp was a journey through a gallery of stolen lives. The crystalline walls were no longer inert; they swirled with captured moments—a child’s laugh frozen in a bubble of amber light, a knight’s final prayer etched in shuddering silver, a feast dissolving into ash and screams. The air was thick with the psychic residue of a thousand violated moments, a cacophony of silence that scraped at the mind.

Theron moved like a man walking against a hurricane. Each step was a struggle, not against gravity, but against the intensifying pull of the Heart-Thread Geas. The dark tendrils around his wrists had thickened into smoky cables, tugging him backward, whispering in a voice only he could hear. His counterspell was a constant, gritted-teeth murmur, a golden nimbus around him that fought against the invading violet dark.

Kaelen walked a step behind and to the side, his senses stretched taut. The hatchet in his hand felt like the only real thing in this nightmare of captured time. The diversion at the mine had thinned the wards, but it had not emptied the Spire.

They came as **Echoes**.

The first was a shimmer in the air ahead, resolving into the form of a Crimson Sword mercenary—Kaelen’s old comrade, Jorin, who had died at Gutter’s Creek. The phantom held its bloody side, face contorted in accusation. “You left me, Ash. You ran ahead…”

Kaelen’s breath hitched. The memory-pain was sharp and real. But Branson’s lesson was older: phantoms on a battlefield are a trick. He didn’t slow. He walked through the apparition. A wave of freezing sorrow washed over him, a borrowed grief, and then it was gone. The Echo hadn’t attacked; it had tested his resolve.

“They are probes,” Theron gasped, not looking back. “Testing for weakness. The next will be sharper.”

The next was not a memory of Kaelen’s. It was a woman with golden hair and Lyra’s kind eyes, but her face was twisted with a demonic rage. She flew at Theron, fingers hooked into claws. “You betrayed me! You murderer! You gave our son to the dark!”

Theron cried out, stumbling to a halt. The golden nimbus around him flickered wildly. “Lyra… no… I didn’t…”

Kaelen saw it—the Geas, using the stolen image of his mother to shatter Theron’s focus. He didn’t think. He stepped between the phantom and his father. The Echo of Lyra raked spectral claws across his chest plate. There was no physical damage, but a wave of debilitating, soul-crushing guilt and loss slammed into him, so potent it nearly drove him to his knees. This was Morvath’s venom, distilled.

He gritted his teeth, the pain from a hundred old wounds flaring in sympathy. “It’s not her,” he growled, more to himself than to Theron. “It’s his poison. Keep moving!”

His words, harsh and practical, seemed to anchor Theron. The lord blinked, his eyes clearing slightly. With a sob of effort, he raised a hand and made a tearing motion. The Echo of Lyra fragmented into shards of light that were sucked into the walls.

They climbed faster. The ramp began to level out, opening into a vast, spherical chamber—the Spire’s heart. The air here was solid with power. In the centre of the chamber, hanging in mid-air without support, was the Heart-Thread.

It was horrifyingly beautiful. A braid thicker than a man’s arm, woven from strands of molten gold, rushing shadow, and what looked like liquid amethyst. One end plunged into the floor of crystal. The other end disappeared into a swirling vortex of energy high above. And along its length, pulsing in time with a slow, sick heartbeat, were nodes of captured light—the stolen moments, the bound wills. Kaelen saw a node that flickered with Lyra’s warmth. He saw another that seethed with Theron’ silent, decades-long scream.

Beneath the Thread, on a disc of polished bone, sat **Morvath**.

He was not the wizened monster Kaelen had imagined. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, his features sharp and intelligent. He wore simple grey robes. His eyes were closed in meditation, his hands resting on his knees. He looked serene, utterly in control. A single, thin strand of the Heart-Thread connected to his own chest, glowing softly.

He didn’t open his eyes. “Lord Theron. And you’ve brought the complication. I felt the diversion. Crude, but effective. It has been… instructive to feel you struggle up my spine.”

Theron was shaking, his whole body a battleground. The golden nimbus was a feeble candle against the chamber’s violet glare. “It ends… today, Morvath.”

“Does it?” Morvath’s eyes opened. They were the grey of a tombstone, depthless and cold. “The Thread is not just a leash, Theron. It is a symbiote. To cut it is to cut out a part of your own soul. The part that has known my will for longer than it knew its own. You will be less than an empty shell. You will be nothing.”

He raised a hand. The chamber walls rippled, and from them stepped four figures. Not Echoes this time, but Solidified Regrets. They were armored in crystalline grief, their faces blank masks, their weapons shimmering with captured time. They moved with a silent, deadly purpose.

“The boy may pass, if he can,” Morvath said softly. “I have use for his vitality. But you, Theron… your part in this is to witness.”

The Solidified Regrets advanced. Theron, facing the source of his torment, seemed to shrink. The Geas’s whisper was now a roar in his mind, paralyzing him.

Kaelen stepped forward, placing himself squarely between the Regrets and his father. He hefted his hatchet, his world narrowing to the four advancing shapes. The grand strategy, the magic, the decades of pain—it all distilled to this moment. He was the shield.

“Do your part,” he said to Theron, his voice calm, final. Then he charged the nearest Regret, his battle cry not a shout, but a silent, focused expulsion of breath. The duel for the Spire’s heart had begun, and Kaelen’s war was now brutally, beautifully simple: hold the line.

Episode 11: The Keeper's Bargain

Kaelan, the archivist, did not call for the guards. He stood in the doorway of the Scriptorium, his crystal orb casting a gentle light that seemed to push back the oppressive gloom of the keep. His eyes, old and weary, held not accusation, but a profound, heart breaking recognition as they fixed on Kaelen’s face.

“Lyra’s eyes,” he breathed, the words a sigh of released pain. “I wondered if I would ever see them again.”

Kaelen slowly straightened from his defensive crouch, but did not sheathe his daggers. “You knew her.”

“I was her tutor, then her friend, and finally… a keeper of her ghosts.” Kaelan stepped fully into the room, his movements stiff. He glanced at the open ironwood box, the letters scattered. “You found them. Good. She would have wanted you to know her voice, not just the story of her end.”

“The story is that Theron Vance murdered her for her fortune,” Kaelen stated, the old hatred a cold stone in his gut, even as the letters in his hand felt warm with life.

“The story is a lie woven by a master weaver,” Kaelan said sharply, then his voice softened. “Oh, Theron’s hand held the blade. Theron’s will, in that moment, believed it necessary. But it was not *his* will. It was a borrowed one. A poisoned one.”

He moved to the desk, brushing a hand over the inlaid vines. “You have seen the keep. Do you feel love in these stones? Do you feel the warmth of a home, of a family? Or do you feel a barracks? A prison?”

Kaelen said nothing. The keep was a tomb.

“Lyra Verdant was sunlight. She was going to change this place. Theron, for all his sternness, loved her for it. He was… thawing.” Kaelan’s eyes grew distant. “But there was a frost that never left. A childhood shadow. **Morvath**.”

The name hung in the air, new and yet fitting the dread Kaelen felt.

“He was of a minor house, a playmate in their youth. Where Lyra was generous, he was covetous. Where she saw a garden, he saw a claim. His desire for her curdled into envy when she chose Theron. Envy is a patient poisoner.” Kaelan fixed Kaelen with a piercing look. “He insinuated himself as an advisor. He fed Theron’s fears, stoked his ambitions, always subtly, always plausibly. For years. He was preparing the ground for a very specific crop.”

“The Geas,” Kaelen guessed, the word feeling foreign.

“A Heart-Thread Geas,” Kaelan nodded. “The most insidious of magics. It does not enslave the body; it seduces the mind. It convinces the victim that the caster’s desires are their own deepest, most rational truths. On the night you were born, Morvath made his final move. He pulled the thread taut. Theron believed, with every fiber of his soul, that killing Lyra was a tragic necessity to secure her fortune for the ‘greater good’ of the house—a purpose Morvath had spent a decade painting for him. He believed abandoning you was an act of mercy.”

The cold stone of hatred in Kaelen’s gut cracked. Beneath it was a void, a terrifying emptiness. “Why tell me this?”

“Because you are not here to rob. You are here for truth. And because I am old, and tired of keeping secrets for a ghost.” Kaelan’s gaze was unwavering. “Theron lives in a hell of his own making. The Geas is a leash. He rules, but he is a puppet. The Verdant wealth flows north, to Morvath’s Spire. Everything you see—the grim discipline, the joylessness—it is the reflection of a mind in chains.”

The sound of booted feet, swift and purposeful, echoed in the corridor outside. The Talons. The two dead men at the water gate had been found.

Kaelan’s eyes widened with urgency. “You must go. Now.”

“Come with me.”

“I cannot. My life is a candle in this library. If I flee, it teaches others that hope has a cost. My duty is to remain, a quiet ember of her memory.” He gripped Kaelen’s arm. “The stairs behind the tapestry of the griffin hunt. It leads to the old garderobe chute, to the river. Go!”

“Where is Morvath?” Kaelen demanded, shoving the precious letters into his tunic.

“The **Spire of Stolen Moments**. A blight on the northern vale. Now GO!”

The footsteps were at the door. Kaelan made a sudden, decisive motion. He snatched the crystal orb from the desk and hurled it against the stone wall.

It did not shatter. It imploded with a silent, concussive WHUMP. A wave of force and blinding white light filled the room, throwing scrolls from shelves and knocking the breath from Kaelen. A profound, ringing silence swallowed all sound.

In the silent chaos, Kaelan mouthed a word, pointing frantically: GO.

Kaelen stumbled, his ears screaming with silence. He ripped down the heavy tapestry, revealing a dark, fetid opening. He cast one last look at the old archivist, who stood amid the swirling dust and fallen knowledge, and gave a small, sad, firm nod.

Then Kaelen plunged into the dark, leaving the truth behind, carrying it with him.

to be continued.....