The name hung in the air, a specter given voice. My brother.
Kaelen felt the world tilt. The cold ache in his chest flared, a sympathetic echo to the sudden chill in his soul. He stared at the woman, at Corbin's eyes set in a stranger's face. The resemblance was uncanny, a brutal mockery of the kind, weathered features he had loved. This woman's face was a blade, sharp and dangerous.
"Corbin…" Kaelen breathed, the name a question and a plea.
"My name is Morwen," she said, her voice devoid of his master's warmth. It was the sound of grinding stone, cold and practical. Her gaze was a physical weight, assessing him, stripping him down to his raw, exhausted core. "And you are the boy who was with him when he died."
It wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
The survivors watched, a frozen audience to this new drama. Hemmet looked ready to faint. Roric watched with a warrior's suspicion, his grip tightening on his rock. Elara's eyes darted between Kaelen's pale face and Morwen's intense stare, her earlier story about the betrayer's twin suddenly feeling terrifyingly relevant.
"He… he saved me," Kaelen managed, his throat tight. The memory of Corbin's last stand, of the stone barrier and the consuming green light, flashed behind his eyes, vivid and painful.
"He was always sentimental," Morwen replied, a flicker of disdain twisting her lips. She took another step into the cave, her movements economical and sure. "It was his greatest weakness. He hid from his purpose, playing mason in a backwater village, pretending the old wars didn't matter." Her eyes scanned the cave, the frightened huddle of people, the crack Kaelen had failed to mend. "It seems he passed that weakness on to you."
Anger, hot and sudden, cut through Kaelen's exhaustion. "He was a good man! He taught me—"
"He taught you parlor tricks!" Morwen snapped, her composure cracking for an instant to reveal a bottomless well of bitterness. "To mend a wall? To sense a fracture? He was a Stone-Singer of the Sky-Anvil, and he wasted his gifts on mortar." She spat the last word. "While the real work was left undone."
Kaelen recoiled. This wasn't just grief. This was a lifetime of resentment. "What real work?"
Morwen's stormy eyes locked with his again, and the intensity in them was frightening. "The work of winning the war, boy. Not hiding from it. The Blight isn't a force of nature. It's a weapon. And it can be broken. Corbin chose to preserve a dying past. I choose to forge a future."
She looked at the crack in the wall he had been unable to heal. With a dismissive flick of her wrist, she gestured at it. A pulse of power, sharp and utterly controlled, flowed from her. There was no gentle asking, no communion. It was a command. The stone of the wall rippled, and the crack sealed itself shut, not with the gentle harmony of Kaelen's mending, but with a brutal, seamless fusion, as if it had never existed. The song of the wall was now… louder, but rigid. Forced.
It was a display of power far more direct and potent than anything Kaelen had seen, even from the Warden. And it was utterly devoid of the music he had come to love.
"He sent you to the Warden, didn't he?" Morwen stated, her voice dropping, becoming conspiratorial, yet no less dangerous. "To learn the old, pacifist songs. To become an anvil." She said the word like a curse. "Tell me, did he teach you how to fight? Or just how to endure?"
Kaelen was silent, his mind reeling. The Warden's teachings, the philosophy of the Anvil, felt sacred. In Morwen's mouth, they sounded like a confession of failure.
She saw his hesitation and smiled, a thin, predatory expression. "I am not my brother. I will not coddle you. The world is burning, and you have a spark within you that Corbin never had. I can feel it, even stunted as it is." Her eyes narrowed. "I can teach you what he would not. I can show you how to not just withstand the Blight, but to break it. To use its own power against it."
The offer hung in the air, a dark, seductive counter-melody to the Warden's serene hymns. It promised agency, power, vengeance. Everything his exhausted, fearful soul craved.
But then he looked past her, at Elara, who was watching him with a desperate, warning intensity. He remembered the cold whisper of the Blight, the feeling of his own life being unmade. Morwen's power felt… similar. Not in its effect, but in its nature. It was about dominance, not harmony.
"The Blight's power is a poison," Kaelen said, his voice quiet but firm. "I will not drink it to cure my thirst."
Morwen's smile vanished. The air grew cold. "Then you will die with the rest of these cattle, a testament to my brother's foolishness." She turned to leave, then paused, glancing back over her shoulder. Her final words were a soft, chilling promise that slithered into the silence of the cave.
"When you are ready to stop being the student of ghosts and become a power in your own right… you know where to find me. I will be in the place where our family's legacy was born… and where it will be reborn."
She melted back into the forest, leaving behind a silence more profound and terrifying than any that had come before. She had been there for only minutes, but she had shattered Kaelen's understanding of his master, of his purpose, and of the war he was fighting.
He was caught between two legacies: the Anvil's resilience, and the Hammer's brutal strength. And the ghost of Corbin was no longer the kindly mentor, but a man with a secret, bitter history—a twin sister who saw his greatest virtues as fatal flaws.