The memory of the Clearwater River faded behind them, replaced by the grim reality of the mountains. Finn's sacrifice had bought them passage, but not ease. The journey north was a brutal slog against steep inclines, biting winds, and a landscape that grew increasingly raw and unwelcoming.
Kaelen led them, a silent, grim figure. The constant, low-grade drain of using his power to sense the safest paths was a wearying burden. He could no longer draw on the deep, endless well of the Sky-Anvil. Here, he was a bucket dipping into a shallow, muddy pond. Every small use—smoothing a treacherous slope, reinforcing a crumbling ledge—left him a little emptier, the cold void in his chest a little hungrier.
He felt the group's dependence on him as a physical weight. Their eyes were always on his back, their silence a loud, unspoken question: Are we safe? Are we lost? He had no answers. He only had the fading impression of a lake and a name whispered by a ghost.
One afternoon, they stumbled upon a scene that made even Roric blanch. It was a small, high meadow that should have been bursting with wildflowers and grass. Instead, it was a patchwork of life and death. Half the meadow was vibrant and green. The other half was a grey, brittle waste, exactly like the lands touched by the Blight. But there was no clear border, no advancing front of corruption. The two states existed side-by-side, a stark, unnatural contrast, as if the land itself couldn't decide whether to live or die.
"By the stones," Elara whispered, her hand going to her mouth. "What happened here?"
Kaelen knelt, his senses recoiling. The song here was a mess. The healthy part of the meadow sang a weak, but coherent, melody. The blighted part was the familiar, agonizing silence. But along the border, the music was… confused. It was a jumble of both, a desperate, failed struggle where neither side could win. It wasn't a wound; it was an infection in a state of uneasy truce.
"It's not spreading," Kaelen murmured, more to himself than the others. "It's just… here. Like a stain that won't wash out."
He reached out tentatively with the First Note, offering a thread of mending energy to the blighted edge. The response was immediate and violent. The corrupted earth didn't just reject his song; it attacked it. A jolt of corrosive feedback, sharp and familiar, lanced up his arm. It was the same feeling as the blighted mend Morwen had left in the cave, the same essence as the Silt-Walkers' touch. But it was dormant. Trapped.
He snatched his hand back, his heart hammering. This wasn't the active, purposeful unmaking of the Blight-Knights. This was a residue. A poison left in the soil. And it was defending itself.
"Can you fix it?" a young boy asked, his voice full of a hope that felt like a knife in Kaelen's gut.
Kaelen looked at the boy's wide, expectant eyes, then at the twisted, half-dead land. He thought of Finn's brilliant, final act of cleansing, a power so far beyond his own.
"No," he said, the word tasting like ash. "I can't."
He saw the hope die in the boy's eyes, replaced by a dull acceptance of a broken world. It was a look Kaelen was seeing too often.
They made camp on the healthy side of the meadow, the proximity to the blight making everyone uneasy. The sight had shaken them deeply. The Blight wasn't just an army they could outrun or outfight. It was a disease that could seep into the very ground and remain, a permanent scar.
That night, as Kaelen took the first watch, he stared at the stark line between the green and the grey. A thought, cold and terrifying, began to form in his mind. Morwen believed the Blight's power could be controlled, used as a tool. The Warden taught him to endure it, to mend around it. Finn had shown him it could be cleansed, at the ultimate cost.
But this… this dormant, self-sustaining poison in the earth… it suggested something else. Something far more disturbing.
What if the Blight wasn't just a weapon or a force?
What if it was alive?
The question coiled in his mind, a serpent of doubt in the silent, wounded dark. And as the moon rose over the scarred meadow, a second, more immediate question followed, one that would haunt him long into the night: if the land itself could be infected, what was to stop the people living on it from becoming infected too?