Leaving the Shattered Lyre felt like surfacing from a deep, cold ocean into a world that no longer made sense. The ancient, resonant hum of the ruins faded behind Kael, leaving a hollow ache in its place, a phantom limb of knowledge and purpose. He had found answers, truths that had fundamentally re-written his understanding of the world, of his own power, of the lie his entire society was built upon. But knowledge was not a shield. It was not a meal. It was a weight. The journey down from the high valley was a slow, agonizing descent back into a world that was ignorant of its own slow death, and he was its unwilling prophet.
The Obsidian Peaks were no more forgiving on the way out. Every careful step on the treacherous scree slopes, every controlled slide down a crumbling cliff face, sent a jolt of sharp, grinding pain up his wounded leg. The silvery scars that now traced a path up his calf, which had pulsed with such strange and vibrant life in the ruins, were now a constant, humming reminder of his ordeal, a quiet, dissonant companion to his own internal song. He was no longer just a boy running from his past; he was a custodian of a terrible, forgotten history, a truth that made the cold, silent, and uncaring mountains feel even more hostile, more alien.
After days that blurred into a single, painful memory of careful steps, aching limbs, and dwindling supplies, he finally emerged from the last dark shadow of the peaks. He stepped out from between two final, towering pillars of black glass into the light, and the world changed so abruptly, so completely, that it stole the air from his lungs.
Before him stretched a vast, blindingly white expanse, a landscape so flat and uniform it seemed to have been drawn by a divine, uncaring ruler. It was the Glass Salt Flats, a desert made not of sand or dust, but of fine, corrosive, crystalline salt that glittered and flashed under the unwavering gaze of the sky-crystal. It was like standing on the shore of a frozen, silent ocean, a sea of broken glass that stretched to an impossibly distant, shimmering horizon.
The heat was a physical blow, a solid wall of force that hit him the moment he left the mountain's shadow. It rose in shimmering, visible waves from the salt-crusted ground, distorting the air, making the horizon tremble and dance. After the deep, unnatural cold of the obsidian mountains, the sudden, oppressive heat was a suffocating blanket that threatened to smother him.
Kael knew at once that this new environment presented a new, more fundamental kind of threat. His supplies, already perilously low after the journey through the peaks, were now dangerously inadequate. The flats offered no shelter, no shade, and a quick, experimental taste of a small, salt-encrusted rock confirmed his deepest fear: no water. The land itself was poison.
He found a few small geodes scattered near the edge of the desert, their interiors filled with a beautiful, clear liquid that promised relief. But when he used his power to carefully tap one open, the water that trickled out was thick and oily with salt, a hyper-saline brine that was more dehydrating than thirst itself. His hard-won survival tricks, the skills of the Grey Wastes and the Chime-Wood, were useless here. This place was actively hostile to life.
His journey across the flats became a desperate, torturous ordeal. The uniform, blindingly white landscape was profoundly disorienting. With no landmarks to aim for, no features to break the soul-crushing monotony, he had to rely solely on his own innate sense of direction and the memory of the resonant map from the Healer's Tablet. The silence was different here, too. It wasn't the heavy, absorbing silence of the peaks or the empty silence of the wastes. This was a high, thin silence, broken only by the faint, dry crunch of his own boots on the salt crust and the whisper of the hot, dry wind, a sound like dying breath.
The sun, the great sky-crystal, was a cruel, burning, unblinking eye. Its light reflected off the million facets of the salt, creating a glare so intense it made his eyes water and his head ache until he was forced to tear a strip from his ruined pack to tie around his eyes, peering through a narrow slit. He began to see things. Shimmering pools of cool, blue water would appear on the horizon, oases of hope that would vanish into heat haze as he stumbled desperately toward them. He saw distant figures, tall and wavering, that would resolve into nothing but pillars of distorted, shimmering air. He wasn't sure if they were natural mirages, a simple trick of the heat and light, or if the strange, sterile resonance of the salt crystals themselves was beginning to affect his mind, prying at the edges of his sanity.
Days bled into one another in a delirious haze of heat, thirst, and ever-increasing exhaustion. His waterskins had been empty for what felt like an eternity. His tongue was a dry, swollen thing in his mouth, a piece of leather that made speech impossible. His thoughts became fragmented, disjointed, feverish dreams projected onto the white canvas of the world. He thought of Elara, of her small, cool hand in his. He thought of the gurgling stream in the Chime-Wood where he had met Silas. He thought of the promise he had made, a vow that now seemed like the foolish, arrogant babbling of a child. What good was a world-changing truth if you died of thirst before you could use it?
His vision narrowed to a shimmering, painful tunnel. The world became nothing but a white glare and a crushing, dry heat. He stumbled, his legs no longer obeying the frantic, desperate commands from his fracturing mind. He fell to his knees, the sharp salt crystals digging into his skin, but the pain was a distant, unimportant thing, an echo from a body that no longer felt like his. He tried to push himself up, to take one more step, to crawl if he had to, but he found he no longer had the strength.
This was it, then. His quest, which had survived dissonant curses, monstrous predators, and treacherous mountains, was about to end here, in this sterile white hell, defeated by something as simple and absolute as thirst.
The sky-crystal above seemed to swell, its light impossibly bright, burning away the edges of his vision. As the world began to fade to a merciful, welcoming black, the last thing he saw was a dark, wavering shape on the horizon. It was just another mirage, he thought, his final, fading thought a bitter one. The final, cruel trick of the desert, an angel of death coming to claim him, a promise of salvation that was really just another lie. His head hit the salt-crusted ground, and he knew no more.