A shadow only remembers the shape of the light it was forced to extinguish. The greatest defiance is not in refusing to look, but in choosing which ember to hide beneath the ash.

— Excerpt from Anguish of the Heart, First Book of the Revelations from the Lost Soul

The midday sun broke through the upper boughs in thin, pale shafts, bringing a mild spring warmth to the high western ridge. To Qianna, whose shandaryn blood warmed naturally by its own internal hearth, the mountain air felt clean and comfortable. The only chill in the glade was the unnatural, creeping draft radiating from Vorik’s boots—a localized cold that withered the green moss to grey crust around him.

Qianna crouched low, her shoulder pressed to the rough bark of a silver fir. Beside her, three Stornir trackers sat on their haunches, their heavy furs smelling of rancid fat from the previous night’s meal. None of them looked at the forest canopy or the pine pollen drifting through golden shafts of light. Their eyes were fixed entirely on the girl kneeling in the dirt.

She was the second Elowyn scout taken from the Lorath mud several nights earlier. Her wrists were cinched tight with raw hemp, a filthy strip of linen bound across her eyes. Unlike the first who remained locked in the subterranean cages of Azdam, this one’s skin bore only faint, dormant tracings of Vorik’s lightless ink along the base of her skull. To an Elowyn healer, the blackened scratches would look like crude interrogation burns, the clumsy cruelty of raiders seeking coin. They would not see the sleeping hook buried in the bone.

Behind them, Iskar paced a narrow goat path with the prowl of a starved predator. The plates of his hauberk clinked against the haft of his broad-bearded axe. He spat into the brush as if to spite the quiet of the woods.

“You say there could be dozens of miles of mountain and timber between us and their valley, Dark Caller” Iskar growled in a low gravelly scrape across the glade. “If we throw the meat into the ferns, she dies in a ditch. With my axe and fifty men, I could carve a road straight through the trees, and bask in the boiling blood of Storn’s enemies before nightfall.”

Vorik did not turn. He stood motionless at the edge of the drop, his long coat of shadow-leather grounded by the ancient white fur he wore, undisturbed by the light breeze slipping over the ridge. His pale hands remained folded behind the small of his back.

“An army marching twenty miles through their wood is merely a large target for silent bows,” Vorik replied in his soft voice, mimicing the dry rustle of old parchment. “An Elowyn scout running for her life is a pup looking for the den of wolves.”

He turned and stepped forward, the frosty moss crunching lightly beneath his boots. Reaching down, Vorik severed the captive’s bindings with a single flick of a stone blade. He left the blindfold and shoved her forward with the blunt pommel.

The scout gasped, stumbling on hands and knees across the exposed rock. Her fingers clawed desperately at the cloth over her eyes, tearing it free. The sudden glare of the midday sun forced her to shield her eyes as she cast a single, terrified glance at the towering brutes on the ridge behind her. Scrambling to her feet, she fled down the slope toward a roaring creek. Qianna watched as her ragged, uncoordinated gait slid across the wet scree.

Vorik turned his single, pale blue eye upon Qianna. The dark cabochon ruby hanging around his neck drew her attention. She watched the slow, hypnotic pulse of the crimson ember.

With each dull flare, the attuned ruby pendant resting in the hollow of her own collarbone suddenly felt like an invisible cage closing around her. The phantom ache beneath her linen tunic throbbed with a cold, familiar pressure—the memory of the ink used to carve away her childhood.

“She will run until her heart stops…or until her kin find her,” Vorik said, his gaze pinning Qianna in place. “You carry their blood, little bird. You move through the canopy without snapping branches. Shadow her. Map the ravines, find the tree bridges, and the breach where their ward thins.”

He reached out with a long, skeletal finger, tapping her ruby.

“Keep unseen to their sentries,” Vorik commanded. “When you have found the settlement and the bitch has found her den, tell me through the stone. You need only think about your discovery while holding it. A single spark. Only your truth will pass. We will immediately break camp and bring the host forward.”

Each time he touched the cold stone at her collar, a surge of the dull, phantom throb rushed down her spine. She met his unblinking gaze and offered a single, shallow nod, allowing the flat, obedient mask of the tool to settle over her face.

“I will find the door,” she said, her voice quiet and level. Inside, she groaned about Twenty miles of deadfall and mountain brush. A casual morning errand for the leashed girl while forty hulking zealots sit on their haunches and wait for the trail to break itself.

Without waiting for Iskar’s dismissal, Qianna turned, caught the low bough of an ancient fir, and hauled herself into the green canopy, leaving the stench of the vanguard behind.

        †                                          †                                          † 

After a week traversing the dark trees of the island, the canopy of the Lorath woods seemed like a kingdom unto itself. Ancient iron-pines and silver firs locked together in a massive, unbroken, undulating sea of needle and moss, wide boughs stretching out like the timbers of a sunken fleet. The mild spring air moved gently through the upper crown, but the work of navigating it was unforgiving.

Qianna’s muscles burned with a persistent ache. Though her shandaryn blood gave her the light balance and keen depth perception native to her kind, her youth had not been spent leaping across sylvan walkways. She had been reared in the frozen pens of Stornheim and the rain-slicked alleys of Kourvan, where walls were straight, stone was level, and footing did not flex beneath a boot.

Every leap between the ancient firs demanded absolute concentration. Like she had in Garrick’s hut, she felt the rhythm of shadowslipping—timing each vault to the natural sway of the wind-stirred crown, melting into the dense curtains of beard-lichen that hung from the boles, and planting her soft leather soles only on the thickest, moss-padded wood to avoid the sharp crack of dead kindling.

Down on the forest floor, the traumatized Elowyn woman stumbled desperately.

Weakened by days in a cage, the scout moved like an animal fleeing a slaughterhouse. She waded through waist-high fern brakes, scrambled over rotting nurse logs, and repeatedly fell in the boggy mud, only to drag herself upright with sobbing gasps.

She is running in pure panic, Qianna observed, pausing in the fork of a massive hemlock to let the scout gain distance. If she falls in a ravine and breaks her neck before she’s found, the Stornir will have come all this way for a dead girl in a ditch.

In steady pursuit, the sun arched across the open patches of blue sky above the crown, its light shifting into the rich, slanted gold of the afternoon. The terrain steepened, dropping into a succession of ravines where the rushing roar of mountain water rose over the sigh of the wind.

The Sister reached the steep embankment of the gorge, sliding down on her heels until she hit the gravel strand at the water’s edge. At the bottom, she collapsed beside a mossy boulder, splashing into the foaming current to drink with frantic gulps.

Poised on an overhanging branch forty feet over the water, Qianna crouched into stillness.

Then, the silence broke.

From the dense crown of an ancient spruce, a sharp, clean sound sliced through the roar of the creek:

Tseee-wit... krr-lee.

The whistle was light, liquid, and melodic, mimicking the territorial call of a mountain falcon with flawless precision. It rose against the prevailing wind, piercing and deliberate, twice more.

Qianna froze, her hand locked around a rough spruce branch.

The sound struck like an unexpected gust. Rather than conjuring a memory of a wild bird, the subterranean damp of the Azdam crypts rushed back to her—a captive Sister, a body on a stone slab, a warm glob of bloody saliva on her cheek, melting through her winter. The question muffled by a crude gag:

Floridyn li palyn cariel?

It was never a prayer to a dead god, Qianna realized, her breath catching in her throat as she pulled herself flat against the bark. It was a signal.

The Lorath woods were not asleep. The forward sentries of Sythandril were already in the trees.

The whistle of the cariel bird had barely faded into the roar of the mountain torrent before the shadows across the creek began to move.

Down on the gravel strand, the terrified Elowyn remained collapsed against the mossy boulder, her hands still trailing in the foaming water. She did not hear the footsteps approaching over the rushing creek.

Two figures broke from the dense fern-brake on the northern bank.

They did not scramble down the muddy embankment like the starved scout; they descended the steep slope with effortless, predatory grace, stepping lightly from slick boulder to submerged river-stone without splashing a drop of spray.

The first was a young warrior clad in mottled sylvan leathers. He was tall, his dark hair bound back with leather cord, moving with the coiled balance of a seasoned border warden. At his belt hung twin bone-handled daggers, and across his shoulder was slung an unstrung recurve bow of polished silver fir.

Qianna’s breath locked in her throat at the sight of the second man.

He was older and yet ageless, much like Loryssa, commanding a quiet stillness that commanded the very air of the gorge. Long hair that reflected the dappled sunlight like spun silver spilled in a tail over one shoulder. But it was the weapon slung across his back that pulled Qianna’s attention from the remarkable Elowyn.

Secured in a worn harness of dark leather hung a greatsword with a blade that must have been long enough to skewer Qianna lengthwise from heel to head. The metal, partially exposed through the harness, did not reflect the nearby stream like common steel; it held the inner clarity of a virgin glacier that looked like quicksilver. The crossguard cradled a dark gem revealed in liquid luminosity as the color of the deep sea as he passed through a sunbeam. Even from a height stretching ten times the length of the blade, she could see the soft pulse within the stone—nothing blinding, just a cool, starlit radiance that vibrated with the vitality of a rich artery. Very nearly the opposite of Vorik. Never had she seen anything like it.

The younger warden reached the collapsed scout first. Dropping to one knee, he caught her shoulders before she slipped forward with the current. He murmured to her in a low, urgent voice made unintelligible by the rush of the water.

The scout’s head rolled weakly, revealing swollen, bloodshot eyes that suddenly widened in apparent stunned recognition of the man who caught her. A ragged sob broke from her chest, and she clawed at his leather sleeve as if unsure if he were of flesh or only mist.

The warden drew a small skinning knife and carefully sliced the hemp cords binding her wrists. He pulled his own cloak around her trembling shoulders, his face hardening as he noticed the blackened scratches scored on the nape of her neck. His thumb grazed lightly over the runes, but Qianna doubted this Elowyn vanguard could truly understand the marks as anything more than the cruel handiwork of raiders making sport of a beaten captive.

A soft rustle in the branches directly across the gorge caught Qianna’s attention.

Above the water, not quite as high as her own perch, she saw a shadow slip between the needles nestled in the fork of a leaning hemlock.

It was a girl.

Crouching on a branch like a wild cat, her dark eyes scanned the gorge with a fierce, feral intensity. She appeared no older than Qianna—barely fifteen winters—with wild, sun-bleached brown hair tangled with dry moss and pine needles. Her leathers were unadorned and patched with raw deer hide, her feet completely bare, with blackened, calloused soles. She crouched on the branch like a wild cat, balanced on the balls of her feet, her dark eyes scanning the gorge below with fierce, feral intensity.

Between two fingers, the girl raised a small hollow reed to her lips and blew:

Tseee-wit... krr-lee.

The whistle was soft, directed toward the riverbank.

Qianna pressed her spine against the trunk of the fir, her lungs barely daring to expand. She watched the feral girl’s gaze sweep the canopy. And for a single, terrifying heartbeat, she looked right at the lichen curtain concealing Qianna, sending a freezing shock through Qianna’s marrow.

She was looking into a mirror reflecting the life she might have had. The girl in the hemlock appeared Elowyn, but while Qianna had been dragged to the coast, chained to a shadowmancer’s staff, and taught to calculate survival through blood and poison, this girl had found a place to live wild and unbroken in the high canopy.

Below, the dark-haired warden looked up at the hemlock and offered a single, sharp nod in response to the whistle. He lifted the collapsed scout into his arms, supporting her weight as she struggled to find her footing on the wet gravel.

“Cariel has the western boughs clear,” he said in a crisp Elowyn dialect to the elder warden standing at the water’s edge. “I will take her back to Sythandril and find aid. She will not last the night without.”

The silver-haired shandaryn did not look at his younger companion. He remained standing on a spit of gravel, staring intently downstream toward the outer woods.

“Go,” the elder replied, his voice deep and resonant, carrying the unhurried authority of an ancient oak. “Leave no trace behind you. The woods are uneasy today.”

The younger warden nodded, turned the shivering scout toward the western slope, and began the slow ascent into the dense thickets, with the feral shadow in the hemlock melting soundlessly through the upper branches to shepherd their retreat.

Qianna exhaled a slow, silent breath, preparing to trail their ascent.

Suddenly, the silver-haired man stopped moving entirely.

Standing alone on a gravel bar fifty feet below Qianna’s perch, he tilted his head slightly toward the west and his nostrils flared against the gentle breeze blowing up the gorge. The veteran warden did not reach for the greatsword slung across his back. Instead, his posture collapsed into a low, predatory crouch. His eyes narrowed and she watched the impossible.

In an unbroken ripple of motion, the warden’s frame dissolved into an abundance of fur that appeared like liquid silver. The leather harness nor the two-handed greatsword clattered against the rocks. They merely melted directly into the shifting mass, swallowed whole by a surge of radiant muscle that mocked every law of iron and bone  

The man who had stood on a strand of round river stones was replaced by a massive wolf.

His coat was the brilliant silver of winter starlight, tipped with blinding light that caught the afternoon sunlight. His broad chest heaved with a steady, unhurried breath, a storm brewing in his eyes.

The silver wolf lowered his snout, drew a single, deep breath of the mountain air, and leapt.

The beast cleared the rushing torrent in a single bound, landing soundlessly on the mossy boulders of the southern bank. He did not follow his companion’s trail toward the western ridge; he turned downstream, bounding up the steep wooded incline.

Pressed tight into the fork of the silver fir as he grew closer, Qianna held her breath until her ribs ached.

She dissolved into the bark, drawing in close until her outline vanished behind the grey beard-lichen. The wolf passed directly beneath her, moving through the fern brakes without disturbing a single frond. Like a phantom of pure silver and muscle.

Qianna remained still until well after the silver blur vanished into the distant timber.

Only when the ambient murmur of the creek once again reasserted itself did she dare to loosen her grip on the rough wood. She shifted her footing, stepping lightly along the bough to gain an unobstructed line of sight toward the western ridgeline where the warden had carried the scout.

Half a league beyond the gorge, the forest ended—or appeared to end.

To an untrained eye, the western slope looked like an impenetrable wall of dead-end briars and tangled brush. But as Qianna focused her gaze, the true nature of the boundary presented itself: a veil made from the environment itself.

It was not like a physical wall of stone or wood. Looking directly at it caused her attention to drift. She forced herself to stare at the impenetrable vegetation;  a challenge compared only to staring down the sun. And there it was. The bent light, a distortion that made looking directly at the grove an optical blur, inducing a vertigo that tricked the mind into believing she beheld the thick growth climbing a wall of rock.

Yet, through the thinned fringe where the Warden had breached the dizzying illusion, Qianna caught a fleeting glimpse of the truth.

In so many ways like the hidden approach to the Jagged Cove, the distortion gave way as she approached. Beyond lay a breathtaking expanse of living architecture. Colossal iron-wood trunks, wider than dragonship’s length, supported sweeping walkways of woven root and bridges wrapped in pale moss. Platforms hung suspended between ancient boles, catching the golden shafts of the afternoon sun—a city grown from the living marrow of the forest rather than hewn from dead stone.

Sythandril.

The sight sent a shuddering shock through Qianna’s perception of the world.

The living city mockingly defied everything carved into her bones. These titanic iron-wood boles were not dying fuel; the silver beast running the ridgeline was no fleeting error. 

Vorik is no master of the dark, Qianna realized, her fingertips digging into the bark until the resin bit raw skin. He’s just a thief trying to steal the souls of others to fill the endless void of his own.

Then, the full, grotesque shape of Vorik’s siege fell into place.

The Sister she tracked had been delivered; safely now inside Sythandril’s living roots, carrying black marking up the base of her neck. And at Azdam, the one she had created remained chained in the dark—the banshee whose severed soul Qianna left as an open, screaming wound.

In three days, on the moonless night, Vorik would march his host to this very ridge and let the tormented soul of the second Sister wail. Very few emotions consume the whole of someone more than helpless rage. He did not need to make the world around him vibrate with the pain Qianna had seen deep within him. No, he created pain in others and aimed it at his targets. Their future became her burden. The hook was set.

The settlement was already doomed. Her own helpless rage simmered beneath her frosty winter. 

For a time, she watched how the light moved through the boughs over the Elowyn village. Slowly, she began to see the way the shafts bent and blurred, almost like sunlight through water. Only once the light grew dim did she catch a glimpse of faint aquatic glow in the woods beyond. It faded with the rest of daylight.

Qianna touched the dark cabochon ruby resting on her collarbone by a worn leather strap. The stone was smooth and cool against her soot-stained fingers.

She closed her eyes, gathered her intent into a single, sharp spark, and pressed her will into the gem with every bit of tempered fury she felt in her gut.

Beneath her thumb, the ruby flared with a deep, pulsing crimson warmth—an invisible chord connecting her stone to the collar at Vorik’s throat twenty miles to the southwest.

Found it.

She released the pendant, watched the red glow fade into dark crystal, and turned her face back toward the western woods to find a safe place to rest and then begin the long trek back.

Dusk was swallowing the Lorath forest by the time Qianna reached the Stornir forward camp.

The afternoon warmth had faded into the bruised indigo of twilight, casting long, sharp shadows through the iron-pines. Her limbs burned from leagues of travel, her palms blackened with pine pitch and soot from traversing the canopy, but as she crested the final rocky ridge, the sickly rot of the forest was violently replaced by the familiar stench of rancid mutton, musty wool, and wet iron.

In response to her message, Vorik had broken camp without waiting for her return. More than two score towering Nottsver warriors readied for an eastward march through the ferns, where their iron-shod boots would surely churn the forest floor into a trench of dark mud. Lashed between two heavy poles near the center of the host was an iron cage holding the motionless body of the remaining Elowyn Sister. The vacant look of her void-blackened eyes staring through the boughs caused Qianna to briefly lose her footing as she finally approached Vorik.

Vorik halted. He stood under a crude canopy, his bone-white staff resting against the loam, his shadow-leather coat hanging motionless in the cooling mountain air. Beside him, Iskar stalked forward like a caged beast, his bearded battle-axe resting across his broad shoulder.

“Report, little bird,” Vorik said, his voice a dry, rasping whisper that cut through the murmur of the march. “Did the pigeon find her coop?”

Qianna dropped her gaze to the damp soil, allowing the flat, obedient mask of the tool to settle firmly over her face.

“She reached the water,” Qianna answered in a quiet, steady voice deliberately stripped of fatigue. “Five leagues west, where the creek cuts a deep gorge through the bedrock. A patrol intercepted her at the crossing. Two wardens. One carried her through a thicket on the ridge. The settlement is nested behind the great roots, half a league past the water.”

Vorik’s thin, pale lips pulled into a faint, skeletal smirk. “How do they hide? Did you feel the anchor?”

“It hides within the light itself,” she reported, keeping her eyes fixed on Vorik’s boots. “It bends the light and turns the balance of outsiders. But the prey passed through without resistance. She is inside the roots now.”

“Good,” Vorik murmured, his single pale blue eye gleaming with the triumph of inevitability a glacier reserves for its scar carved into the land. “The seed is planted.”

Iskar stepped forward and spat into the moss, the iron plates of his hauberk rattling with aggressive impatience. Towering over Qianna, the sour reek of unwashed skin rolled off his massive frame.

“Who was the other sentry?” Iskar snarled, his hand tightening around his axe haft until the leather binding creaked. “You said two wardens came to the creek. One took the meat inside. What happened to the second?”

“He remained on the outer bank,” Qianna said.

“Then give me his path,” Iskar demanded, his voice a low, vibrating rumble of impending slaughter. “Give me twenty men. I’ll cross the gorge under the dark, slip behind the thicket, and pin his flesh to an iron-pine before the moon turns. We will take the outer sentry by tomorrow tonight.”

Qianna looked up, meeting the savage warlord’s glare with wide, unblinking clarity. 

“You can’t ambush him,” Qianna said, her voice sharp and level.

Iskar’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. “You tell me what my axes can kill, alfling?”

“I am telling you that he will butcher your men and leave you nothing for it,” Qianna countered, stepping directly into his shadow without flinching. “He is not bored and distracted like a common sentry. He has no path. While the other carried the girl, that one dropped into the ferns and ran the entire western ridgeline. In the shape of a massive wolf.”

Iskar betrayed his fear with a breathless pause before pasting over it in feigned disbelief. Second-guessing was a new look for him.

“A beast?” the warlord sneered, though a subtle flicker of unease crossed his scarred jaw.

“A wolf the size of a warhorse, coated in a pelt of starlit silver,” Qianna stated with unwavering certainty. “He moves through the brush without snapping a twig. If you send twenty armored Night Swords into those ravines, he will smell the grease on your furs and the forge on your blades before you ever know he’s there.”

Iskar’s jaw clenched in furious debate, his bloodlust striking against the tactical reality. He opened his mouth to roar a rebuttal, but a pale, ink-stained hand rose from the shadows.

Vorik raised two fingers, silencing the warlord in an instant.

“She speaks the truth, Iskar,” Vorik whispered, his voice deadly calm. “The White Wolf does not fight on our terms in the brush. If you stumble into his territory with twenty axes, you merely sound the horn for the entire valley to scatter into the mountains with the blade.”

“He will lead your pack into deadfalls, pick your men off in the dark, and bring their entire garrison down on you before ever reaching the creek.”

This time, she saw Vorik’s hand slicing through the air before the rings of his backhand struck her cheek. The cold sneer he wore said enough, shrinking her back into obedient compliance.

Satisfied, Vorik turned his gaze toward the east, where the last light of dusk was fading into black.

“We do not waste blood on skirmishes in the dark,” Vorik declared. “We march the host as one. Let them find our tracks. Let them try to harry our flanks, drop deadfalls across our path, and turn our boots toward bogs.”

He gestured with his staff toward the caged banshee, locked in silent, frozen agony.

“Let them try,” Vorik said once more, a chilling confidence lacing his dry voice. “The little bird’s work will lead us straight through their illusions. We will march, and we will stand at their gates on the eve of the moonless night.”

Vorik thrust his staff into the loam. “The Nottirbar is within reach.”

Qianna let their shifting attention hide her as she slipped into the solitude of the shadows.

Beneath her linen tunic, her fingers brushed the gem at her collar. She knew she had mapped the approach to Sythandril. She knew Selyne’s absence would leave the sanctuary weak. But by speaking the truth, she had turned Iskar's axes and bought the silver beast three days of borrowed light. 

She wore a stone mask while she wondered why it mattered.

I am the rust.