The trail east twisted like a split vein, winding through frost-hardened gulches and half-dead groves. Kael led the way, but Eris had started walking further behind him each day. The frost that once lined only his fingertips now crept up the bones of his wrists. The Chronicler said nothing about it. She merely kept writing. And Ilya—
Ilya had stopped appearing in his dreams.
He wasn't sure if that was a relief or a warning.
The ruined Ridge outpost behind them had grown distant in more ways than one. Kael's memories of it blurred. He remembered the frost-bitten cots, the unfinished meals. But the names of the people who'd lived there? Gone. Even when the Chronicler read from her journal, the ink on those names had smudged, blurred beyond recognition.
"It's not just memory loss," she said softly one evening. "It's memory erosion. Like frostbite of the mind."
Kael didn't answer. He was watching the fire, or rather the shadows it cast. In the flicker, his own silhouette looked taller. Antlered. Root-crowned.
When he blinked, it returned to normal. But his breath had frosted the air in front of him, and it wasn't even cold.
The next day, they reached the edge of the basin.
A massive salt-cracked stone marked the border between Rootless territory and the Pale Frontier. Here, the old maps ended. A newer marking had been carved roughly into the base of the stone: a scythe, split down the center, mirrored in reverse.
Kael crouched and ran a gloved hand over it.
"Whoever made this," he said, "wasn't just copying Mercy. They were answering her."
The Chronicler paled. "An inverted rune is a declaration. A rejection of what came before."
Eris said nothing. Her hand hovered near her blade.
They camped that night beneath the broken arches of a dead aqueduct. Roots had once coiled through its underbelly; now they hung limp and cracked like dried tendons. Kael lay awake, staring at the sky.
No stars. Just a faint pulsing, like heartbeat light behind clouds.
That was when he heard the scraping.
He rose silently and found the Chronicler already sitting up, quill still in hand. Her fingers trembled as she wrote. Eris was on her feet, back pressed to a pillar.
The sound came from the edge of camp—a slow drag across stone.
Then they saw it.
A figure, wrapped in frost-colored linen and bark-stitched robes. No face, only a mask made of twisted root and ice, in the shape of a human face that had forgotten how to be one. Its limbs moved jerkily, as if it had forgotten how joints worked. In one hand, it carried nothing. In the other—a branch, polished bone, carved into a spiral and stained with silver.
It walked to the edge of their campfire light, stopped, and slowly placed the branch on the stone. Then turned and walked away.
Not a word.
Not a glance.
The frost remained where it had stood, spreading across the rock like a growing stain.
Kael moved to it, drawn without command. As he neared, the branch gave off a soft pulse. His frost-veined hand ached in response.
Eris stepped closer, her fingers twitching toward her sword. "That thing was one of them," she muttered. "The Cutclean."
Kael shook his head. "It didn't threaten us."
"It didn't need to."
In the morning, the branch was brittle and half-frozen. The Chronicler crouched beside it.
"This was a message," she said.
"No," Kael murmured. "This was a mirror."
They moved on.
The ground beneath their feet was softening, thawing—but wrong. The soil was too dark. It smelled of rot and salt. A pond ahead rippled without wind.
Kael knelt and touched the water.
It reflected not the sky—but the Gallery, pristine and unbroken, as it had once stood. A flicker of himself at its gates. Then the image distorted.
The figure in the reflection wore the root mask.
Kael stumbled back. "It's following us," he whispered.
Eris stepped beside him. "You mean the Pale Root."
He shook his head slowly. "No. I mean the part of us we left behind."
They found the remnants of another outpost—barely more than a circle of stones, a shattered banner, and three scorched bodies.
One wore the insignia of the Rootless.
One bore no brand at all.
The last had the scythe-rune etched into his ribs.
Eris turned away, but the Chronicler kept writing. Her ink bled as if the page rejected permanence.
"We're not seeing a war," she said. "We're seeing a conversation. Carved in flesh."
Kael knelt beside the ashes. Something pale gleamed. A pendant. Half-melted. Blackened by flame, but unmistakably shaped like a twisted scythe.
He didn't touch it.
He dreamed that night of snow.
He stood in a memory—but not his own. A child's room. Wooden toys scattered. A journal open, its pages blank. Then frost crept across the window, and the reflection in the glass wore the mask.
Kael turned.
Seth stood there. Whole. Alive.
"Why did you leave me?" Seth asked.
Kael tried to speak, but his voice cracked like ice.
"You were the first seed," Seth whispered. "I was just what bloomed."
Then the floor opened, and Kael fell through snow, through salt, through screaming earth.
He woke to Eris shaking him.
"You said Seth's name," she said. "And you cried."
His fingertips were rimed with frost.
They kept moving.
The trees grew stranger. Some bent backward. Others bled sap that steamed in the cold. The Chronicler began to write slower. Her journal pages warped, the names she'd once recorded now replaced by new ones.
Kael watched her from behind.
One of the names was his.
But it didn't say Kael.
It said: Warden.
They came to the gate at dusk.
A cleft in the rock, framed by black stone and old symbols. The original mark of the Scythes glowed faintly, etched in bone.
The reliquary.
Eris whispered, "What is this place?"
Kael's frost-veined hand trembled. "It's what they buried under every Garden. The first seedbed."
Before them, the gate pulsed.
A whisper rose from the earth: "One must forget."
Kael stepped forward.
The gate did not open.
A shallow basin formed from its face. A place for a price.
He reached into his coat and withdrew the old pendant—Seth's. The one he'd found by the ashes.
He placed it in the basin.
The gate pulsed.
The Chronicler gasped. Her journal burst into frost along the edges. She clutched her wrist—ink seeping from her skin.
Behind them, Eris turned slowly.
"Ilya," she said.
Kael followed her gaze.
A sketch lay folded at the gate's base. Kael picked it up.
The drawing showed a scene they hadn't lived yet—him kneeling before a silver tree, hands bleeding, a voice rising from the roots.
Beneath it, in Ilya's spidery script: "Not all memories die. Some grow teeth."
The gate began to open.