The Gallery did not release them.
They had walked the path in silence—Kael, Eris, and the Chronicler—leaving the frost-chamber behind, the echo-pendant untouched, or so they thought. But even after climbing past the roots that once curled like ribs above them, the air hadn't changed. The cold remained. The hum followed.
By the time they emerged into the main floor of the Gallery, something was wrong.
The sculptures had shifted.
Not just broken or worn by time—but subtly altered. The statue that once bore Mercy's blade now held a withered sprout. A bust of Seth, unfinished, had new eyes etched into the stone—hollow and open.
Kael paused in the center of the chamber, his breath curling visibly in front of him.
"They've moved," Eris said behind him, her voice taut.
The Chronicler, pale and sweating despite the cold, whispered, "No. They've remembered."
Ilya was seated at the back of the Gallery, hunched over a table, sketching on the stone with a shard of bone. Her hair hung in damp ropes over her face. Kael stepped closer—and stopped.
She was drawing him.
Not as he was now, but as he had been in the root-chamber. His eyes black. Frost at his mouth. A figure behind him in the drawing—a silhouette of bark and rot.
Ilya didn't look up. "I can't help it. It draws the memory out. You left it down there."
Kael swallowed hard.
"Left what?" Eris asked.
"The part that wanted to leave," Ilya said.
They made plans to flee.
The Gallery was no longer safe. The ground trembled hourly now, the roots beneath twitching like nerves under broken skin. Salt did nothing. Fire slowed them but didn't stop them.
Eris threw her pack down near the entrance. "We burn the rest and collapse the back tunnel. Whatever's in there—it can stay buried."
The Chronicler didn't argue. She had stopped writing. Her last entry was a smear of ink and a line: Ilya is changing faster than the walls.
Kael didn't move.
Something had followed him.
That night, he dreamed of the pendant again.
But it was no longer resting in the frost chamber. It was in his hand—growing. Vines of silver curling around his wrist, threading into his blood. In the dream, he screamed—but the sound froze in his throat.
When he woke, Ilya was watching him from across the room.
"You brought it back," she said softly.
Kael looked down.
His fingertips were dusted with frost.
The Pale Root's warband arrived just after dawn.
A Rootless scout stumbled into the Gallery, bleeding from the mouth, eyes unfocused. "They don't bleed," he rasped. "They forget they're supposed to."
Behind him came the others.
Tall figures wrapped in bone-coats. No faces. No voices. They carried banners grown from frostbloom—petals sharp as razors, silver-edged and silent.
They did not attack. They stood.
Waiting.
Eris took one look and turned to Kael. "We leave. Now."
They packed fast.
Kael passed Ilya again. She'd finished the drawing. It was no longer him in the center. It was the pendant. Around it, frost-bloomed memories: Seth's eyes, Mercy's blade, Eris's scar.
"It's growing from what you don't remember," she said.
He said nothing.
As they turned to go, Kael paused. A sliver of black root had pierced through the wall just beside the exit.
It wasn't blocking the path.
It was pointing.
Toward the east.
Toward the Pale Root.
They left the Gallery behind them at sunset.
Kael didn't look back.
He didn't have to.
The frost was already in his lungs.
And in the distance, the wind carried a whisper:
"You didn't bury it. You wore it."
Interlude — Roots That Remember
Two days later, under the stretched sky of the broken horizon, the camp at the Ridge burned. Not with fire—but with silence.
Of the forty who had lived there, only six remained.
Elder Janos stood over the salt line, muttering prayers that had not been spoken since before the Garden. The others dug trenches in the frost-hardened ground.
One child—eight, maybe nine—watched a silver sprout push through the ashes. She reached down, touched it.
It didn't recoil.
It bloomed.
Back in the Gallery, Ilya sat alone. Her sketches now lined the walls—maps, faces, weapons, roots. No longer random.
She touched a new one—Kael, standing before a throne made of petrified memory. Not seated. Not crowned.
"I didn't finish you," she whispered.
Behind her, the cracked pendant pulsed once.
Then stilled.
They didn't speak for most of the first day.
The Gallery had taken something from all of them, though none of them could name what. The frost-lined hills stretched ahead like a memory trying to rebuild itself—familiar, but subtly wrong. The sky was dim even at noon, thick with colorless clouds.
Kael walked at the front, a half step ahead of Eris and the Chronicler. Ilya remained behind, as they had agreed—or so she'd said. He hadn't looked her in the eye since that final whisper: You didn't bury it. You wore it.
There was a weight in Kael's chest. Not pain. Not grief. Just... silence, but coated.
By the second night, they found the ridge where the Rootless outpost had once stood. It was gone. Not destroyed—emptied. Tents remained. Cookpots. Unfinished letters. A shovel embedded in half-dug earth, its edge iced over.
"What the hells happened here?" Eris asked.
No one answered.
The Chronicler crouched by a frozen cot. The sheets were ruffled, shaped like someone had been lying there—but the pillow was caked in frost, and tiny cracks had formed on the wall beside it. As if something underneath had pressed outward.
"There's no blood," Kael murmured. "No struggle."
"Just frost," Eris added.
Just forgetting.
That night, the dreams came.
Kael stood before the cracked pendant in the echo chamber again. But this time, he held it. It had grown—no longer a shard, but a spiraled root-knot that pulsed like a heart. Silver veins wrapped his wrist. Beneath his feet, the ground glistened with ice.
A voice spoke—not Mercy. Not Seth. Not the Hollow King.
Just breath:
"You wore it long before the Gallery. You only remembered now."
He awoke to find Eris staring at him, blade half-drawn.
"You were whispering," she said.
"What did I say?"
"You said my name." She paused. "Twice. But neither time it was you."
The third morning, they found the first token.
A pendant-shaped bone shard, carved with twisting roots and set atop a cairn of saltless stone. The Chronicler stepped toward it.
"Don't," Eris said.
Too late. She had already picked it up.
A tremor shuddered through the earth.
The brand scar on Eris's side flared to life, glowing faintly through her shirt. She grabbed the token and hurled it into the ravine.
Kael didn't move. He stared at where the bone had landed.
He could still see its shape.
That night, they set no fire. Frost formed in their breath before they could sleep. When Kael blinked, he saw memories that weren't his: a pair of root-bound hands, pressing a child's face into snow. Lyra's smile from years ago, warped and reversed. The Hollow King's crown buried beneath waves of black sand.
But most of all, he saw Seth's eyes—not angry, not cruel. Just empty.
"I think something's following us," he said.
"I think it's inside us," Eris replied.
The following afternoon, a bone bird landed beside their camp.
It was delicate. Carved from ribs and ash, held together by strands of root-fiber. In its chest cavity was a single folded piece of paper.
The Chronicler opened it.
Kael's sketch.
The one he'd left behind in the Gallery.
It had changed.
The figure now had no face. Just eyes—wide, mirrored, and frost-rimmed.
Eris glanced at Kael. "This isn't Ilya sending messages. It's the thing using her."
"She may not even know," Kael murmured.
"But you do."
He didn't deny it.
That night, Kael sat apart from the others. His breath steamed the cold air. His fingertips were rimmed with ice again.
He took the sketch and folded it carefully, pressing it between two stones. His hands shook.
Then he looked into the blade of his dagger. Just for a moment.
His reflection blinked.
It wore a mask of twisted root and bark.