The ache in my leg was a bright, hot spike with every step. I leaned heavily on a staff I'd fashioned from a petrified branch, the map feeling like a lead weight in my pack. The euphoria of surviving the abomination had faded, leaving only the raw, painful reality of my body's limits. The memory of the thing—the grinding stone, the pulsing green eye, the sickly silver glow of its dying core—was a fresh scar on my mind.
"We cannot travel far like this," Croft stated, a simple, grim fact. He soared ahead, scouting for shelter, our bond a thin, anxious thread stretched over the barren hills.
"I know," I grunted, my eyes scanning the grey, unforgiving landscape. The compass in my chest was a dull throb beneath the sharper pains of my injuries, its pull toward the eastern mountains now a painful lure.
Croft returned, circling once before landing on a lichen-crusted rock ahead. "There. A fissure in the hillside. It will serve."
A deep scar in the stone, but it was enough to offer protection from the biting wind and whatever else hunted in these lands. I half-fell, half-slid into the narrow space, my back grating against cold rock as I sank down. The process of lighting a fire was a lesson in agony: shredding a strip of my old tunic for tinder, carefully pouring a few precious drops of lamp oil, and striking a spark from a piece of flint I'd pocketed in the city. The flames caught, small and desperate, their warmth a mockery against the vast, chilling dark.
As I chewed on a piece of the enchanted waybread—it was bland but filling, and a faint, sustaining warmth spread through my battered muscles as I ate—I stared at the black ring on my finger. It was inert now, a simple band of dark metal, but I could still feel the echo of the shadow-blade's weight in my palm.
"It knew what I was," I said, the words quiet against the feeble crackle of the flames. "That thing. It didn't just see prey. It saw... a threat. It focused on me the moment I drew the blade."
"Or a rival," Croft suggested, his bead-bright eyes reflecting the firelight. "That was not a beast acting on mere hunger. It was purpose. Malice. A will made manifest in corrupted flesh and stone."
"The sphere... the way it pulsed." I closed my eyes, seeing it again. "It was like a heart. A corrupted heart. It was the same silver light I see around you, but... diseased." I looked up at him, the new question feeling heavier than my pack. "If the gods are gone, Croft, what is doing this? What is twisting the world?"
The raven was silent for a long time, the only sound the mournful whisper of the wind probing the entrance of our shelter. "I do not know," he admitted, and the confession felt like a crack in the very foundation of my journey. My guide, my living library of a dead world, had encountered something outside his records. "The knowledge is not there. It is a blank page. A silence where there should be an answer."
He hopped closer, the firelight catching the oil-sheen of his feathers. "But consider this, Cassian. The Aethelian Empire was not the world. It was merely the dominant power in this region. The map shows lands beyond the Spires. The Verdant Wastes, the northern coasts... If the cataclysm was not absolute, if pockets of the world were spared the worst of the divine fire... then perhaps the blight we see here is not universal. Perhaps there are others. Survivors. A world beyond this graveyard."
The idea was so foreign, so revolutionary, it left me breathless. I had only ever known silence and dust. The concept of other living people, of communities, of a world that was not entirely dead, was almost impossible to grasp. It was a tiny, fragile flame of hope in an ocean of darkness.
"Survivors," I repeated, testing the word. It felt alien on my tongue. "What would they be like, after all this time? Would they even be... human?"
"Adapted, perhaps. Changed, certainly. But if they exist, they would be a testament to life's stubbornness. And they may hold knowledge lost to these empty lands."
The thought was a catalyst. As it took root in my mind, something shifted within me. The constant, low-grade awareness of my own body, heightened by the pain of my injuries, suddenly sharpened into a terrifying focus. Beneath the ache of bruised ribs, behind the steady, reassuring beat of my own heart, I felt it.
Another presence.
A second, smaller, denser core of energy, nestled deep within my chest, adjacent to my physical heart.
My breath hitched. I dropped the piece of waybread, my hand flying to my sternum. "Croft..." The word was a strangled whisper.
"Cassian? What is it?"
I couldn't answer. I pushed past the pain, past the awareness of my own heartbeat, and focused all my newfound sensory power inward. And I Saw it.
There, glowing with a soft, steady, silver light, was a sphere. It was identical in nature to the one we had seen in the abomination, but where that one had been sickly and frantic, this one was calm, serene, and perfectly integrated. It pulsed in time with my heartbeat, a silent, symbiotic rhythm. It was a part of me. It had always been a part of me. The source of the compass pull. The wellspring of the ichor. The engine of my awakening.
I was not just an angel of death.
I had a core, just like the monster.
"My core," I breathed, my voice trembling with a mixture of horror and revelation. I looked at Croft, my eyes wide with the shock of the discovery. "I have one. Inside me. Just like that thing."
Croft went utterly still. The bond between us flared with his own shock, a sharp, electric jolt. For a moment, he seemed at a loss, an expression I had never seen on him. "Describe it to me. Exactly."
"It's... silver. A perfect sphere of light, nestled right here." I pressed a hand to my chest. "It's calm. It feels... foundational. It's what's been pulling me. It's what I am." The implications crashed over me. The abomination hadn't seen me as a rival. It had seen me as kin. A different kind of twisted thing. Was I just a more refined version of that horror?
Instinctively, my enhanced sight turned outward, focusing on Croft. I saw the familiar, steady silver aura that outlined his form—the soul-glow I had come to associate with him. But within that glow, where a core should be nestled within his small body, there was... nothing. No dense sphere of power. Just the uniform, gentle luminescence of his being.
"But... I don't see one in you," I said, the observation leaving me more unsettled. "You have the silver light around you, the soul-glow. But there's no core inside. Not like mine. Not like the monster's."
Croft studied me, his gaze intense and searching. After a long, agonizing moment, he spoke, his tone one of dawning realization. "No. You would not. What you are describing is a Soul-Spark. It is the source of magic, the wellspring of life energy in mortals and many creatures. It is what enables a mage to cast spells, what gives a beast its innate cunning. The Aethelian sorcerers spent their lives studying ways to refine and amplify it."
The revelation was so mundane, so utterly normal, it was disorienting. "A... Soul-Spark? This is... common?"
"Not common to all, but it is a natural part of the world's order. Or it was." He paused, his dark eyes fixed on me. "But I did not expect you to have one. You are an angel, Cassian. A being of divine function, not mortal biology. You are meant to be a concept given form, a servant of a fundamental force. You should be powered by faith, by divine mandate, by the will of your god... not by the same internal engine that fuels a hedge-wizard or a forest predator."
He glanced down at his own chest, then back at me. "And as for me... I am a guide. My knowledge is my essence. I do not require a Spark to be what I am. My light is a different thing. A purpose, given form."
"So what does this mean?" I asked, my mind reeling. "If I have a Soul-Spark, and that thing had a corrupted one..."
"It means the rules are not what I believed," Croft said, his voice laced with a new, profound curiosity. "It means your nature is far more complex, far more integrated with the fabric of this world than I ever imagined. That creature we fought... its Spark was corrupted, diseased, turned against its own nature. But yours... yours is pure. Ordered. It is the essence of what you are, Cassian. It is not a corruption."
The terror began to recede, replaced by a dawning, awe-filled understanding. I was not a victim of the world's sickness, nor was I a being entirely apart from it. I was something new, or perhaps something ancient that had been forgotten.
The compass in my chest pulled, an insistent, magnetic call toward the Spires. But now, I understood its nature. It wasn't a symptom of a disease or a simple homing instinct. It was one Soul-Spark calling to another, a piece of my own foundational energy seeking to be whole. It was a promise of power, a definition of self, and a mystery that went to the very heart of what I was.