Kael stood at the edge of the crater, wind brushing past his coat like a warning. The skeletal hand had fully closed around the blackened shard of Mercy's hilt, now half-buried beneath the sprout's gnarled rootlet. It no longer reached east—it simply rested, knuckled into the soil as if waiting to be forgotten.
But the sprout was changing.
Its bark grew pale along one side. The grip-like offshoots along its spine had hardened into claw-like curves. Not natural growth—bone mimicry.
Kael knelt beside it, fingers a breath away from the frost-tipped bud forming at the root. A shimmer of ice slicked the dirt where the black sliver had planted itself.
The Pale Root wasn't coming.
It was already here.
Ilya had begun drawing with her blood.
Not intentionally. Not at first. But when her finger cracked open against stone—too dry, too cold—she'd kept drawing.
Ash and red. Spirals upon spirals. Gallery walls shaped like ribcages. Beneath her small hands, the earth became parchment.
She didn't look up when the chronicler knelt beside her.
"What is it?"
"A way through," Ilya murmured. "It wants to be seen."
The chronicler frowned. "You mean it remembers?"
Ilya's fingers twitched. "No. It collects. Like a gallery. Like Kael."
She dipped a cracked finger into the blood pooling in her palm and traced one final shape—a sword, but bent backward, its edge lined with roots.
The east sent a man with no voice.
He arrived half-dead, dragged into the camp by a pair of salt-caked scavengers who found him wandering near the coastal outcrop. His lips were split open by frostbite. His skin was cracked like porcelain, but only where the veins ran black and frozen, not silver.
No one recognized the pattern on his arm: spiral scars, almost ritualistic, like a root coiling inward.
Kael stood beside the infirmary post, staring as Eris applied heated cloth to the man's frostbitten limbs. They didn't bleed.
"He should be screaming," she muttered. "But nothing."
The man looked up at Kael with half-lidded eyes. A silver tear traced down his cheek. Then a second. Then he blinked—only once.
And wept in silence.
Mara, the settler who'd cared for the blue-veined girl, no longer responded to her name.
She sat beside the fire now, humming a lullaby only one person in camp remembered—a lullaby the dead girl had sung while her veins glowed blue.
Kael tried to speak to her.
"Do you remember her?"
She didn't respond. But her hand shot out and gripped his wrist.
Her nails dug in. Her voice was distant, whisper-thin.
"You're in the soil too."
She let go.
Kael didn't sleep that night.
He wandered the edge of the crater alone, where the cold made breath linger like ghosts. When he paused beside the sprout, he swore he saw movement beneath its bark—a slow pulse, like something dreaming deep inside.
Eris found him in the morning.
She held Mercy's empty sheath in one hand. Not as a gesture of reverence—just a fact.
He raised a brow.
"You planning something?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she walked to the crater's rim and tossed a pebble in.
It bounced off the root's pale surface with a sound like tapping glass.
"Three days," she said finally. "If nothing changes, I'm leaving. With or without you."
Kael frowned. "Where would you go?"
"Anywhere the roots haven't learned to whisper."
He stared at the sheath. It looked lighter without the blade.
Empty. But not harmless.
The chronicler came to Kael at dusk.
"Ilya's map matches something," she said.
"Matches what?"
"A story I heard in the Wastes. About a place that grew itself—beneath the old Order's reliquary. No tools. No stone. Just a cavity that... became."
They followed Ilya's path, guided by her scrawled map and the way her bare feet had left faint ash prints in the dust. The entrance was beneath a dead hearthstone, split open like a cracked tooth.
Inside: cold.
Not the damp cold of earth. A sterile cold. The kind Kael remembered from labs and cryo-chambers.
And the walls were not carved.
They were grown.
The gallery wasn't wide. It was narrow and long, shaped like a ribcage turned inside out. Bone-lattice framed each alcove, and in those alcoves sat relics that should not have been here.
A cracked sparring gauntlet from Kael's childhood.
Lyra's broken pendant, its chain still flecked with dried blood.
A burnt doll—he didn't recognize it, but something in its missing eye made his heart twist.
And halfway down the gallery, a voice box.
He knew it before it whispered.
"You hesitated. That's all it took."
Seth's voice. Hollow. Recorded. Not alive—but echoing.
Kael staggered.
Eris placed a hand on his shoulder, firm and wordless.
They continued.
At the far end, the boy waited.
He didn't blink. Didn't speak. Just placed a palm against the bone pedestal beside him.
Upon it: another shard.
Not Mercy.
This one was silver-veined, rimmed with frost, shaped more like a spine than a blade. It exhaled cold—Kael could feel it from a meter away.
He stepped forward.
His breath crystallized. His fingertips ached with numbness before he even touched it.
But he had to.
He reached out and laid one hand on the shard.
Nothing.
No hum. No whisper.
Just cold.
But behind his eyes—movement. Flickers. A garden buried in snow. A throne made of ribs. The Pale Root, blooming upside down.
A voice: "This one doesn't scream. It forgets."
Kael ripped his hand back.
His skin was frostbitten at the touch point.
The shard hadn't offered him power.
It had offered him erasure.
And before he turned to leave, he heard a second voice—not Mercy, not Seth.
His own.
"You could let it go. Just close your eyes. Let the gallery remember for you."
He didn't respond. He walked away.
But his fingers wouldn't stop trembling.
Later that night, Eris stood at the edge of the fire circle.
She held the sheath of Mercy in her hands.
Didn't say a word.
Didn't throw it away.
Just let Kael see it.
And in that silence, something broke.
Not between them.
But ahead of them.