The wind had a new scent—burnt iron and wilderness.
Cyril moved between brambles, cloak tugged tight around his shoulders. Every birdcall made him twitch. The war didn't catch up to them yet, but it breathed down their necks—closer with each hour, like thunder hiding behind lightning. Miren walked behind him, her steps soft as shadow. Ironbark trees curled overhead like smoke-frozen flames, their bark etched by centuries of scorch and storm. Some whispered, others creaked. None of them comforted.
Cyril crouched low, brushing his fingers through soil. It was still warm—residual heat from a leyline ripple.
"I think another patrol passed here," he murmured.
"Hours ago," Miren said. Her eyes scanned the treetops.
"They're not looking for us yet. But they're spreading their net wide."
They pressed deeper into the forest. Their destination: a buried leyline that Miren called Hollowthread, a ghost-path etched into old maps and erased from new ones. Cyril didn't know what it was. Not yet. But he trusted her.
Then came the sound—a sharp snap.
Both froze.
Not an animal.
Not a scouting party.
Too close.
Miren's hand drifted toward her blade. Cyril felt the Flow stir, coiling beneath his skin. He attuned to it.
There.
A figure emerged from between leaning boughs.
Young. Weather-worn. Covered in a black and grey cloak. His black hair tied back, and his eyes sharp—like someone who learned early how to see through lies.
He held a broken-bladed longsword in one hand—not raised to threaten, but steady. Anchored. His stance was no artist's flourish. It was a shield made of presence.
"Step no further," the stranger said, his voice low but leveled.
Miren lifted her hands slightly.
"We're not Dominion, or Braithborne."
"Doesn't matter," the young man replied.
"You're trespassing."
His sword didn't waver.
Cyril stepped forward.
"We're heading west. Away from the crater."
The young man's jaw worked.
"Then you're walking into a firestorm."
"Something we helped light," Miren said.
That cracked the tension, if only slightly. The stranger looked closer—his gaze landing on the shimmer clinging faintly to Cyril's skin, a lingering echo of crater-born Flow. Something shifted in his expression.
"The ones they whisper about…" he murmured.
"The spear that broke the sky."
Cyril tilted his head.
"What's it to you?"
The young man lowered the blade a tad.
"I'm someone whose master died protecting a truth no one wanted to remember. Someone whose sect was buried in silence. I care because I've seen what happens when truth is weighed down till it disappears."
Miren looked to Cyril.
He nodded once.
But Miren's eyes still stared at the stranger with indifference.
"How do we know that your so called truth, isn't just a watered down variation of Sunvault's?"
"…"
The man stood silent for a moment before he let his words slip, slow and bitter.
"You don't, all I can assure…is that my truth doesn't end with death."
Miren's indifferent eyes finally shifted a bit, the man earning some approval.
"Name?" Cyril asked.
"Kaen," the man said.
"Kaen Virell."
He sheathed his broken sword—an act of trust, not submission.
"If you're really going west," he added,
"you'll need someone who knows its land. You're heading straight into the shardfields—Flow-warped and war-twisted . I've lived there for years."
"And what do you want?" Miren asked.
Kaen shrugged with the heaviness of someone who'd already lost everything.
"A chance to make the ones who silenced my family bleed."
Cyril didn't hesitate, he sensed a similar conviction in Kaen's tone to when he shattered the quarry floor for Ren.
That's something hard to replicate.
"Then walk with us."
***
They followed Kaen through a winding path, the forest shifting around them like a slumbering beast. The light dimmed as they neared the edges of the shardfield. Strange hums pulsed in the soil. Rootlines glowed with trapped energy.
"The Dominion didn't stabilize this part of the range," Kaen said, walking deliberately.
"Too unstable. Too ancient. They couldn't anchor their pylons here, so they let it rot."
He paused and knelt near a fracture in the earth. A dark vein of stone pulsed faintly beneath.
"This is where leylines split like broken ribs," he said.
"Flow here doesn't rush—it drags. One wrong step and it won't push you away, It'll pull you in."
Cyril leaned in.
"How do you navigate something that tries to swallow you?"
Kaen placed a flat hand to the ground. A deep rumble answered. His eyes sharpened—not glowing with raw Flow, but firm, like he was listening to stone speak.
"You don't run," Kaen said.
"You anchor. You match its rhythm. Then you guide others through its stillness."
He rose and led on. As they walked, Cyril noticed how Kaen's steps were deliberate—not slow, but deliberate. Each footfall felt like it belonged, and when Kaen moved, the land didn't resist him. It accepted him.
Kaen's approach to using flow was different from his and Miren's, it was steady, grounded, anchored.
A mile deeper, they reached a ledge overlooking a ravine choked with black thorns.
"Dominion outposts used to post lookouts here," Kaen said, pointing to the ruined skeleton of a tower.
"Until the roots started growing up through their boots."
Miren squinted down into the abyss.
"We're crossing that?"
"No," Kaen replied.
"We move under it."
He led them into a narrow crevice. Roots coiled around ancient Flow-stones, long dormant but still humming beneath time. Cyril's chest thrummed in harmony with it—a deep, background resonance.
"This place feels different," he muttered.
"You're right," Kaen said.
"It's old. This was a sanctuary once."
"Sanctuary?" Miren asked.
"This?"
Kaen nodded.
"My sect trained here. We studied pressure, resistance. The laws that make gravity sacred. We were taught that Flow didn't always move fast—it could also refuse to move."
He laid a hand on a broken sculpture, half-sunken into the moss. A faded carving showed warriors standing, blades down, knees bent—not to kneel, but to root.
"They burned it all," Kaen said softly.
"They said it was heresy. We taught that sometimes stillness was stronger than motion. That resistance had power."
Cyril felt it now. The weight Kaen carried wasn't grief—it was carved into bone.
As they emerged from the crevice, distant lights danced on the horizon.
"Campfires," Kaen said.
"Riverfork scouts. If we move now, we can pass under the crystal shelf and avoid detection."
They moved fast. The land here was jagged, broken by buried surges. Flow leaked in weird directions—Cyril almost stumbled when the ground pushed back against his footfall.
Kaen caught his arm.
"Breathe. Listen," he said.
"Feel the shape of the land. Not all Flow is flame and sky. Some of it lives here. Beneath."
Cyril centered himself. The pressure shifted—and he felt it. Not energy, but a gravity of sorts. A rhythm. He moved forward again, this time without resistance.
Miren watched Kaen with quiet interest.
"You're not like most swordsman."
Kaen smiled faintly.
"I don't walk to cut. I walk to break what must never rise again."
***
By nightfall, they found shelter in a cave chiseled into a blackstone bluff. Kaen lit a small fire using Flow-insulated kindling, careful not to let the smoke rise too high. The land didn't like being disturbed.
As they sat, Cyril turned to him.
"What are you chasing?"
Kaen looked into the flame.
"There are ancient relics in this region. Buried. Sealed before the first pylon rose. I don't care about treasure. I care about the value they hold in the hearts of my predecessors."
He looked up at Cyril.
"If you really broke the Dominion's seal, more will start to stir. Places like this… they'll wake. And I won't let them be buried again."
Cyril nodded.
"Then we'll wake them together."
Kaen didn't smile. But he nodded, once—and it was heavier than any vow he could've sworn.
***
Outside, the shardfield pulsed.
The world was waking.
And once it's eyes fully opened, it won't be blind.