The morning didn't arrive so much as it loosened. Bronze bled out of the sky a shade at a time, and the basin below unclenched from black to iron gray. Torian stood at the bluff's edge where he and Skarn had camped and watched the night unhook itself from the earth. The air tasted like cooled metal. His Spiral thrummed once—out of time with his own pulse, then settled into a steady, watchful beat.
Skarn nudged him with the ridge of his skull. Not a question. Just a weight, reminding him the day had to be carried.
"I know," Torian said.
They left the overhang as the first thin light hit the glassed flats. Skarn walked carefully, spreading his weight across his paws so the crust didn't break; Torian threaded the cracked lace of black stone in his wake. Out on the pan, the heat of yesterday still lived inches under the skin of the earth. Every few paces a breath of warm air rose and brushed Torian's ankles. He pretended it was merely weather.
It wasn't.
Some distances impress by sheer width. The basin impressed by refusal. It went on and on, and yet never stepped aside to let them through. Each hour looked like the last. Each horizon promised a living line of hills that turned to mirage once they reached it. The only changes were small and mean: a patch of fused sand that curled like a dead petal; a rib of obsidian standing up like a blade; the white powder where stone had gone to ash and then gone to memory.
By midmorning, the bronze had thinned to pewter. Torian let his fingers trail along Skarn's shoulder as they walked. It grounded him when his Spiral threw off those anxious syncopations—like it was listening for a second heart in someone else's chest.
Kaelgor's last words rode between them like a third traveler.
Too dangerous to kill now.
Let the world believe in you.
I'll be waiting at the end.
Torian didn't argue with the silence. He had learned the silence didn't lose arguments—it simply remembered them until it mattered.
⸻
They found water in the least likely place: a vein of it lying open to the sky, fat as a rope, sliding along a shallow groove through the rock. No silt. No insects. The stream just appeared, ran twenty yards in a soft glass curve, and vanished into a seam. Skarn stepped in to his knees and stood there with his eyes half-closed like an old soldier feeling heat in his bones. Torian knelt and cupped his hands.
Cold. So cold it hurt his teeth.
He drank until the ache became a kind of relief.
A shape flickered in the corner of vision, and Torian's hand went to the hilt on his back. He didn't draw. Not yet.
"Traveler?" a voice called.
A woman in a sun-bleached cloak stood a dozen paces upstream, one boot in the water, a pole balanced across her shoulders with two cloth-wrapped bundles hanging from it. She had the look of someone who had learned to be uninteresting on purpose: everything plain, everything quiet, nothing to steal.
Torian lifted a hand. "We'll leave the flow clear."
"It's not mine." She nodded at Skarn as if you nodded at storms. "Yours?"
"His name is Skarn."
At his name, the beast cracked one golden eye and then ignored both of them again. The woman's mouth twitched.
"Better than most men I've met."
She crouched and rinsed the dust from her hands, glancing once at Torian's chest. The Spiral did not show on his skin unless he called it, but people had learned to look for marks anyway—scars, talismans, tiny betrayals. She must have seen something in the way he held himself, or the way the air turned when he breathed, because her face shifted from merchant's carefulness to something like grief.
"You carry it," she said, quiet.
Torian didn't lie. "I do."
"Is it kinder, this time?" She didn't look at him. She stared at the water like it would answer for both of them. "My brother followed a bearer once. He said the flame was a door anyone could walk through if they were brave enough. He burned his house down trying."
"I'm sorry," Torian said.
"That was years ago." She stood. "He wasn't cruel. Just wrong." She balanced the pole across her shoulders and started along the line of water. "If you're heading east, keep the wind at your left. The stone bites less that way."
"Thank you."
She walked three steps, stopped, and looked back. "The air feels… heavier ahead. Like a storm that learned to breathe. If you can go around it, go around it. Sometimes holes in the world don't want filling."
Torian nodded. Skarn made a noise that could have been agreement or hunger. The woman smiled at that, a brief human thing in a place that had forgotten them, and moved on until the sun ate her shape.
They didn't speak for a while. The stream disappeared. The pan rose and fell in breathless waves. When Torian finally glanced at Skarn, the beast flicked an ear as if to say: yes, I heard her too. We're going anyway.
"Yeah," Torian said. "Me too."
⸻
By noon they began to find tracks.
Not footprints. Not hooves. Something like the sigil of a fern pressed into the earth, repeating—not in a line, but in a scattering of spirals that never touched. The prints weren't indented; they were raised from the stone as if the pressure had grown the ground up instead of down. Torian traced one with his finger. It was warm. Not with sunlight. With purpose.
Skarn sniffed and sneezed like a cruel joke had been told in a language he hated.
"Verdant," Torian said.
The Spiral in his chest curled, listening. Verdant magic always felt wrong around flame—too wet, too green, like a vine tightening around a throat. He stood and scanned the basin. The spiral-tracks led nowhere and everywhere. The wind shifted. For an instant, an after-scent of crushed leaves moved across the flats, then vanished like a story someone was ashamed to tell.
"We're close," Torian said.
Skarn dipped his head and they cut a diagonal through the spirals. Not to follow them. To refuse them.
The ground began to change. What had been black glass went charcoal, then gray, then a sickly green that threw a sheen in the light. Here and there, a sprig pushed through—something that looked like grass if grass had been drawn by a child with only knives. It sliced Torian's boot leather when he tested it with his toe. Skarn stamped a patch with his weight and the sprigs hissed like they were alive.
"They're not for us," Torian said. "We're not for them."
He thought of Kaelgor's helm and the long crack running across it—like a river on a map that led nowhere.
Too dangerous to kill now.
He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until Skarn touched his hand with the edge of a tusk. The beast's eyes were unblinking, patient as hunger. I'm here. Don't talk yourself into being somewhere else.
"I know," Torian murmured.
They climbed a low rise of green-black stone and the basin fell away on the far side, replaced by a field of pillars as tall as towers. Obsidian ribs in long colonnades leaned at angles that would have broken lesser rock. Some were melted in the middle as if a giant hand had gripped them and squeezed until they softened. At the far edge of the field, half-swallowed by a crescent ridge, a low structure sat—a fused mass of stone and bones of old metal, skin rippled with heat-scars.
A seal should have been there. Torian felt for the pulse inside his chest that had answered each time he'd come near the others. There was only a faint ache, like touching a scar that had healed badly.
Wind carried a thin chime through the pillars. Skarn went still. Torian held his breath. The chime came again, but not from metal. From stone cooling too fast.
They walked.
⸻
It began with a child's laugh.
Not close—a thin thread of sound caught on the wrong side of the wind. Torian's body moved before his mind did. He sprinted between the pillars, Skarn's shadow flowing beside him. The laugh came again, panicked at the edges now. Torian rounded a black column and found a boy crouched inside a shallow ring of knives-grass, both hands over his mouth. He couldn't have been more than eight. Dirt streaked his face. A coil of twine hung around his neck.
Torian dropped to a knee, palms open, every muscle shouting at him to move slow.
"Hey," he said softly. "It's alright."
The boy's eyes flicked to Skarn and then back again, as if he'd seen a sunrise and decided not to tell anyone.
"They're sleeping," the boy whispered, pointing to the ring. "If I step wrong they wake up. They don't like feet."
Torian looked. The blades weren't blades; they were the tops of something else. The tips quivered in time with the boy's breathing. He glanced at Skarn. The beast skimmed the edge of the ring with a claw and the tips turned toward him like mouths. Not plants, then. Or not just plants.
"What's your name?" Torian asked.
"Rin."
"Rin, I'm going to lift you out. I'll move slow. You keep your toes where they are until my hands are under your arms, and then breathe out. Can you do that?"
Rin nodded like he'd been waiting all day for someone to tell him how to breathe.
Torian slid his hands in. The grass-things turned toward his skin and then turned away as the Spiral in his chest warmed his blood. He felt the heat spread down his arms, not flame, not light—just the clarity of it. He raised the boy, an inch at a time, until Rin's feet came free. Skarn stepped close enough to make shade and the things relaxed, as if the promise of a larger predator calmed them.
Rin clung to Torian's neck like drowning might be contagious and this was the only cure. Torian set him on his feet behind a pillar and crouched again, hands on the boy's shoulders.
"Where are your people?"
Rin pointed with his whole arm the way children point—east, toward a crumble of low walls and three patched tents.
"They told me not to run," he said, eyes wide. "But the ground made a noise and I wanted to hear it and then it didn't stop making the noise and then—" He looked down. Shame came quick as rain. "I forgot."
"It happens," Torian said.
Rin studied him the way the woman at the stream had, as if answers might be visible if you knew where to look.
"You're the one the old men talk about," he said. "The one who makes fires stand still."
Torian had no idea what to do with that sentence, so he nodded once as if it were a question and stood. "Let's get you home."
Skarn bent low. Rin looked at the beast's back, looked at Torian, looked at the distance, and made the bravest decision of his day. He climbed.
They delivered the child like a letter addressed only to relief. A woman came out of the nearest tent with a shout that had all the pain of a lifetime and all the gratitude of a second chance. She wrapped Rin in both arms and then her eyes hit Torian and slid off—not because she didn't see him, but because seeing had cost too much already.
"Thank you," she said to the ground.
"You're welcome," Torian said to the same ground.
A gray-bearded man stepped out of shadow and studied Skarn with a tradesman's stare. "We used to hunt things like you." His voice held the ghost of laughter that remembered how not to be cruel. "Good thing we got old."
Skarn showed a line of teeth and then closed his mouth on the impulse.
"Are there others?" Torian asked.
The gray-beard shook his head. "Just us. We keep near the pillars. Wind's less mean here. The boy…" He glanced at Rin and the woman and decided not to finish. "You're headed toward the ridge."
"We are," Torian said.
The man's eyes flicked to Torian's chest as if he could read a secret under bone. "There was a light there. Once. A square of it, straight as a coin's edge. Men came and stood around it and did not speak for three days. On the fourth day, the light went out. One of the men sang after. I've never heard a song like that—something a throat shouldn't know how to lean on. It cracked the air."
Torian felt the Spiral lean forward in him. Not a flare. A listening.
"When was this?" he asked.
"Six winters." The man scratched his beard as if time could be itched back into shape. "Or sixteen. The seasons lost their names when the rivers did." He nodded past Torian toward the pillars. "We don't go there anymore. Sometimes it hums. Sometimes it smells like the way a green branch does right before it breaks."
"Thank you," Torian said.
"For what?" The man gestured at the tents. "You brought the only thing I had back to me."
"For telling the truth," Torian said. "When it would've been easier to tell me a story."
The man smiled like someone remembering honey. "My wife says I don't remember how to lie."
"Keep listening to her," Torian said.
They left before gratitude tipped into balance. Torian didn't want to owe them anything more, not even the weight of his presence. He and Skarn crossed the remainder of the pillar-field as the light turned from pewter to pale copper. The ridge was closer than it had looked. It always was, once you decided to be brave.
⸻
The structure was not a seal-house. Torian knew that instantly. Seal-houses were deliberate. Their lines breathed. Their stones held the memory of hands. This thing was the opposite of made. It had been boiled into existence—a swell of fused strata with a face smoothed by heat and fast wind, a mouth cut into it by a force that wasn't interested in doors.
He stood at the threshold and felt his Spiral reach for the voice that had met him at the other seals. He found echoes—shells of warmth, a laughter that had forgotten the joke, a scolded silence. And beneath all of it, a bruise.
Skarn's hackles rose. The beast's head lowered. He inhaled, long and slow, then backed a half step away from the opening and stood like a boulder that had decided to be a wall.
Torian stepped inside.
The air didn't change temperature so much as intention. It pressed at the skin of his forearms and slid between the hairs at the back of his neck like a small creature looking for shelter.
The chamber had been a room once. He saw the suggestion of a bench fused to a wall, the shadow of a low table, the circle where a fire pit might have sat. Everything was glassed over now, curves softened to a strange, sea-born grace. In the center, a square of stone lay slightly raised, its edges still too perfect to be nature's work. Torian crouched and pressed his palm to it.
Nothing.
No answering pulse. No flare. No ancient welcome. Just the hollow impression where a thing had been.
"The man was right," Torian said. "Someone stood here. Many someones. Long enough to make the air remember. And then they took what the room was built to guard."
Skarn's reflection looked back at him from the glassed wall—grotesque and loyal. Torian stood, and for a moment he saw his own reflection beside Skarn's: a boy wrapped in a man's patience, a man wearing a boy's promises like armor. He reached up. The glass Torian lifted his hand when he did. They were not the same person. That was new. He didn't know if he liked it.
He went back to the square, knelt again, and let the Spiral warm his palm until the skin glowed with a buried coal's color. He pressed that warmth into the stone. It took. The square drank and held it. For the first time, the room answered—not with fire, but with a wordless hum. The glass sang back. Hairline cracks spidered the walls.
"Not too much," Torian whispered. "Not here."
He didn't want to break what didn't belong to him. He didn't want to announce they'd arrived when the one person in the world who didn't need announcing might already be listening.
When he stood, the hum slowed to a lazy heartbeat and then to nothing. He dusted his palms on his trousers and went out into the collapsing day.
⸻
They camped at the lip of the ridge with their backs to the dead room. Torian built a small fire from a traveler's bundle of twig and resin he'd kept wrapped in oilcloth since the forest days. He lit it without calling the Spiral. He wanted the humble mechanics of spark and tinder, the small dignity of making heat happen with human stubbornness. The little flame had to be asked, convinced, fed. It was a better teacher than the wild, bright answers the Spiral gave him when he begged.
Skarn ate meat he wouldn't admit he liked and drank from a skin like he wasn't thirsty. Torian watched the west burn down into blue. The boy Rin flashed through his mind—the way his weight had felt, all knot and nerve and absolute belief that being held in the right arms might be enough to keep the earth from making decisions without you. Torian had been that weight once. He had been those arms. He wasn't sure which job was heavier.
When he slept, it was under the long scrape of stars across a sky that couldn't remember if it was clear or broken.
⸻
He dreamed he was walking beside his father in the old village market. There was bread in the air. Not the bread they could afford, the other kind—the kind that painted the street with its smell even if you didn't touch it. His father's hand was on his shoulder, steering without making a child feel steered. They stopped at a stall where a man sold small carvings: birds, fish, a wolf with a chipped ear. Torian reached. His father's hand tightened. Not a no. A lesson.
"We take only what the day gives us," his father said.
"What if the day gives us nothing?" Torian asked, not yet learned enough to put anger in the question.
"Then we make a different day," his father said.
The dream folded. Torian stood in front of Malvorn's black gates again. Only this time they were not a city's teeth—they were his ribs. He could see his own heart through them, beating like a trapped bird. When he touched the gate, his fingers burned and the bird went still.
He woke with his hand flat on the dead room's stone. It was warm under him. Singing, quietly, like a swallowed bell.
Skarn slept with one eye open. Karnis's absence was a shape Torian had learned to recognize—like the shadow a hawk leaves on a field after it passes. The feline had promised to meet them north and hadn't yet. Torian didn't put worry in his mouth. Worry had a way of turning to prophecy if you said it slow enough.
Dawn came gray. Torian stamped the coals and stood. "We go along the ridge," he told Skarn. "Find the other mouth."
The beast stretched like a hill deciding to be a mountain again.
They were twenty minutes from camp when the air changed.
It didn't grow colder. It grew deliberate. Every grain of dust seemed to choose where it wanted to hang. Sound went two steps farther away and then stopped. Skarn's head came up. His lips peeled back. The fur along his spine lifted in a wave.
Torian didn't need the Spiral to tell him who had arrived. His body recognized it in the way children recognize the difference between a house settling and a door opening.
Kaelgor didn't drop from the sky this time. He didn't erupt from earth. He stepped from behind a pillar that hadn't been there and which, when Torian looked later, wasn't there at all. The god's cloak hung like a drowning night. The crack in his helm gleamed a dull green in the morning light.
Skarn moved to take the space between them before Torian had time to decide what bravery was supposed to look like today. The beast crouched, shoulders bunched, wings tucked, ready to ruin and be ruined. Kaelgor didn't so much as turn a wrist in his direction. He simply took in Torian with that slow, total attention that made you realize you hadn't been paying attention to yourself at all.
"Still alive," Kaelgor said, voice a measured grind.
Torian felt his hands want to shake. He set one on Skarn's shoulder and put the other on the hilt across his back to give them both something honest to do. "Still walking."
"You mistake distance for accomplishment," Kaelgor said. He stepped sideways. The ridge seemed to step with him. "Three seals and already the world wants to name you. The world loves names. They make it easier to bury the right guilt in the wrong graves."
Torian's jaw ached. "We came for the fourth."
"You came for a grave," Kaelgor said. "And you found one. Be grateful. Graves are kinder than doors."
"Someone took it," Torian said. "Six winters ago. Or sixteen."
"Time is drunk here," Kaelgor said. "Don't trust anyone's count, not even your own."
He lifted one gloved hand and traced the air. The line he left behind glowed green for a breath and then went black, like a vein sketched on skin from the inside. "Do you know what a seal is, bearer?"
"A promise," Torian said before he could stop himself. His father's voice said it with him.
Kaelgor's helm tilted—approval from a cliff's edge. "Once. But promises rot when they do not get used. The seals were not built to lock power away." His voice thinned, almost tender. "They were built to teach you how to carry it."
"And someone used this one to teach themselves to steal," Torian said.
Kaelgor's hand closed. The green line snapped. "That is the other lesson men learn when you show them a door that opens. They can't bear not knowing what is on the other side."
Torian took a half step forward despite every wise thing Skarn's body was saying. "If you mean to keep me from the rest, you'll have to do more than talk."
Kaelgor didn't turn. He didn't need to. The world turned for him. "If I meant to stop you, there would be no more east." He gestured at the line of the ridge without looking away from Torian. "Walk. Burn. Gather belief. Let the children say your name instead of the prayers they forgot. When you reach the sixth, I'll be there. We'll see then whether you are a bearer or a bonfire."
"You could end this," Torian said, and the not-boy in him surprised himself at how steady his voice sounded. "You could end me."
Kaelgor touched the crack in his helm the way a man touches a scar to confirm it is still his. "You are not finished becoming the thing I need you to be."
The Spiral flared under Torian's sternum, an instinctive snarl. Kaelgor's head cocked like a hound's at a new sound.
"You hear it," he said. "Good. Keep listening. It isn't a sword you swing, boy. It's a choir you learn not to conduct."
He took one step back into nothing and the nothing swallowed him. No smoke. No heat. No noise. Only the way the world remembered having been heavier a moment before.
Skarn stayed braced three heartbeats longer. Then he let breath out in a rough gust that smelled like animal and iron and relief that was embarrassed to be caught being relief. Torian pressed his palm to the beast's shoulder and felt the tremor there—not fear. Rage leashed out of love.
"I'm not him," Torian said into the fur. "I won't be."
Skarn's ear flicked against his cheek. I know.
⸻
They ate what could be eaten and walked until the day thinned. The ridge led them along the basin's curve to a narrow saddle where the stone softened underfoot and the Verdant smell returned—bitter and green, a garden gone wrong. Torian paced out a circle with the heel of his boot and then paced it smaller until it felt like a place they could sleep without inviting the wrong dream.
He didn't light a fire. Not the little kind. He sat with his back to Skarn and let the Spiral warm his palms instead. He cupped that warmth over his face like water, then poured it into his chest in slow breaths until the frantic edge dulled.
The quiet of the seal-house hummed in his bones. His father's voice spoke out of a market that was gone. Kaelgor's patience bent without breaking. Somewhere to the north, Karnis cut a path only he could find, and the stars slid along their fixed tracks like old men who had walked the same road their whole lives and finally knew where it ended.
Torian closed his eyes—and opened them inside himself.
He didn't slip into fire. He stepped.
The Spiral didn't flare bright. It settled into the shape of a room. He was a boy again, small and hungry for instruction. A dozen voices spoke at once—not a chorus, not chaos. Layers. The First Bearer telling him to keep his wrists loose. The Fifth saying there would be days when the world asked nothing of him and those days would be the ones that proved who he was. A woman's laughter—he didn't know which bearer she had been, only that she had found a way to hold flame without letting it hold her.
He stood there in that made-room and listened until each voice became a thread he could touch.
When he opened his eyes, the dark had turned the world simple. Sky. Ridge. Breath. Skarn's warmth at his back. He looked down at his hands. The lines of the Spiral moved under the skin like something alive, and for the first time since Kaelgor had looked through him, Torian did not feel small. He felt exactly the right size for his own bones.
He slept.
⸻
Dawn broke like mercy.
They were up before it, moving the way soldiers move when they've stopped pretending they aren't. At a bend in the ridge, the world dropped away again, but not into pillars this time. A shallow bowl lay below—a crater with a floor of pale stone, a ring of darker rock around it like a lip. At the center, something sat half-buried in the white: a circle of metal the size of a cartwheel, charred to matte black.
Skarn loped down the slope without waiting. Torian followed, his heart already measuring. He knew what it would be before he touched it. He knelt anyway and set his fingers to the edge.
Cold.
The char clung to his skin. He brushed a patch clean with his thumb and found the Spiral engraved beneath. Not the true spiral. The broken one—the same cruel, open-mouthed shape Malvorn's men had branded into their armor. But beneath even that, faint and stubborn, the true lines could still be read if you had learned how to see them through ruin.
"Someone built their own lesson here," Torian said.
Skarn snorted, disgust rough as sand on teeth.
Torian set his palm flat on the metal. He didn't ask for light. He asked for memory.
The ring obliged.
Heat walked up his arm and climbed his shoulder into his neck. His jaw locked. He let it. The bowl around them filled—just an instant—with a crowd that was no longer there. Hooded figures. A voice droning, then singing, then breaking. A flare of light like a door, then an absence like a mouth closing over it. He saw the moment the seal's promise was overturned. A hand like his pressed to the metal and a second hand pressed over it and the second hand forced the first one down until the first let go of what it should never have tried to own.
He pulled his palm away. The cold rushed back in so fast it made his teeth ache.
"Gone," he said. "But not undone."
He stood, wiped his hand on his trousers, and looked east. The day had cleared to a high, empty blue. Distance felt possible again. He breathed that into his ribs and let his shoulders settle where they wanted to live.
"We keep moving," he told Skarn.
The beast dipped his head, and they climbed out of the bowl and into the strip of morning that had laid itself across the ridge like a banner.
⸻
They met no more strangers that day. The basin quieted, as if satisfied it had told them everything it meant to. Near dusk they found a ledge of rock that pretended to be softer than it was. They pretended to believe it. Torian ate meat and dried fruit in the order that made his mouth forgive him. Skarn drank like a river and then pretended he hadn't. The wind shifted once, bringing a smell like rain with it, and then remembered where they were and changed its mind.
He did not think of Kaelgor until the stars. Then he thought of nothing else.
You are not finished becoming the thing I need you to be.
He hated the grammar of it. The way it made him an object in someone else's sentence. He turned the thought over until the edges blunted and then set it down beside the fire like a tool he might use or might not.
He held his hands over the coals and let the heat go into his knuckles. "I'm not your lesson," he said to the dark. "I'm my father's promise. I'm Skarn's choice. I'm the weight of a boy named Rin who got to go home."
The Spiral under his sternum pulsed once, steady as a drum at the start of a march.
"Good," Torian said, surprising himself with the smallness of the word.
He slept the way tired men do when they know morning has work in it.
⸻
They were walking at first light when the ridge unfolded to show them a different country—low hills braided with dry riverbeds, stands of stone the color of old bone, a haze far off that might have been dust or might have been a town that still remembered what cooking smelled like. The wind had mercy in it now. It pressed their clothes, not their bones.
Skarn picked up his feet the way he did when he decided the day might be worth his time. Torian smiled without knowing he had. He put two fingers to the hilt over his shoulder and felt the sword's old patience answer back.
"Fourth's gone," he said, not to argue with it, just to admit it. "Then we find the fifth."
Skarn huffed. The sound meant: and the sixth.
"And the sixth," Torian said. He touched his chest. "He'll be there."
He didn't add the rest. He didn't need to. Skarn knew. The Spiral knew. Even the ridge seemed to nod and then move its long body to let them pass.
They walked on into the day that waited, not because it would be kind, but because it would be honest. And that was enough for now.