Kael left the tomb without looking back. The stone jaws shut on Dracel's silence and the cold that hit his face was sharper for having traded the dry heat of that ancient chamber for wind that wanted to chew flesh. He did not celebrate. Victory was a hinge, not a home. He only tightened the cloak around his shoulders and walked.
At his side, a small silver blur scuffed the snow and padded after him—no name yet, no title, only the quiet companion that had chosen him. The creature's fur gave off a faint glow, a living lantern in a world that had forgotten how to be gentle. Its paws beat a tiny rhythm against the frozen earth; each step sounded like persistence. Kael felt a small, awkward warmth in his chest because of that sound. He did not make room for sentimentalities, but he noticed them anyway.
They moved through a night that had the quality of a thing holding its breath. The fragment embedded in the mask hummed under Kael's fingers when he adjusted the strap. The spear at his back stayed silent; the katana at his hip whispered like a cooled storm. The mask's pulse was patient and steady, like a clock counting a war. Everything so far had happened with a dangerous ease. That made his senses prick the way a sailor senses a still horizon before a squall. Calm is not a finish line. Calm is a warning.
At dawn the world changed. The terrain went from forlorn plains to a horizon stitched with jagged white. A mountain rose like a thumb pressed under the skin of the world—an accusation of ice and stone. Clouds clung to its crest like stitched shrouds. Snow screamed in curtains down its face. The mountain did not invite. It tested.
Kael looked up and said nothing dramatic. "So that's the bad thing," he told the silver blur, and the creature blinked and cocked its head at him, as if to answer: fine. He stepped forward.
First hill. Second hill. Both were straightforward exercises in matching feet to breath. Kael kept his movements economical, the long, unshowy efficiency of someone who had learned to spend only the energy he needed. The silver blur—now only a stray that had adopted him—found footholds like it was made for the climb. It leapt and darted, a bright punctuation in a gray page.
The third hill was not a puzzle; it was a machine made to eject living things. The wind there had teeth. It grabbed his cloak, tore at the seams, reached under his collar like fingers trying to take his throat. The gusts were intentionally cruel, as if the mountain tested not just limbs but will. The silver blur's small body shrank under the lashings, fur flattened by the gusts until it clung to the earth like something ashamed to be light.
Kael had to do something foolish and tender both at once: one hand clamped around the creature's soft ribs while the other searched for handholds. He climbed awkwardly, one hand on stone while the other held the small beating life against his chest, and each time the wind threatened to pry it free he held tighter until his knuckles bruised white under the wraps. He did not allow himself to think about how easy it would be to lose this creature because the mountain took what was left of weakness and chewed it into salt.
Six hours of that business and every muscle in his body had turned to cold. The third hill spat him on to a hollow the mountain had been hiding: the fourth hill. It was a secret knuckled into the glacier—an odd, improbable pocket where the storm refused to enter. Light there was not from the sun but from pale fruits that glowed like pockets of captured day. Trees—small, stunted things—hung with lantern-bright berries whose perfume smelled like warm bread and better days. The air in that hollow tasted like a memory that hadn't yet been corrupted.
He allowed himself to sit. He allowed the creature to crawl into his lap and curl a furred boll into a hot ball. For the first time that day, perhaps since Erik's hands had last trembled in his, Kael let his shoulders drop. He ate one of the pale fruits. It was ridiculous how something as small as sweetness could unclench years of hardness. He swallowed slow.
He named the creature there—on that sheltered hill, with the cold far enough away to be polite.
"Silfur," Kael said, because the sound fit: silver, small, resilient. He pressed the name to the creature's fur and it blinked as if it understood its own life had been given a shape.
Silfur did not have a past. Names were fashions and fates; the creature had arrived, small and indignant, as if it had always planned to follow him. Now it had a name because Kael wanted to give it one, and that unremarkable act of naming tightened a knot of duty in his chest. He promised Silfur he would come back. He promised it he would take it somewhere that did not try to rip life from small bodies. The promise hung between them like another weight that Kael would have to carry. He tucked a handful of glowing fruits into his pack for the climb ahead, slid Silfur to the roots of a tree which would, he judged, keep its warmth and fed it one last berry as if giving a child breakfast before school.
He left Silfur on the fourth hill.
The truth of the moment had teeth: there was no time to carry a little life through the mountain's final test. He could not keep everything. He could not be everything for everyone. He could only pick the things with the will to hold the world steady. He forced himself not to watch as he took the first steps toward the fifth hill.
The fifth hill was a jagged thing, more stone than snow, a final column the mountain thrust like a bone. The wind there screamed with purpose. Ice scoured the face and pulled at any soft thing that stood near it. Rocks were knife-edges. The climb took a kind of patience reserved for people who have already decided the alternative would be worse.
Kael's palms bled. Tiny ribbons of red darkened the snow where he had used his hands as anchors. He lost his footing more than once and had to catch himself on crammy ledges with fingers that felt like someone else's. The cold was not abstract; it crawled into tendon and thought. When breath left him, it left as steam that crystallized moments later on his lashes as if his face wore frost spectacles. But he did not stop. He had been raised by scorn and steadied by Erik's hands. Both had taught him to go on.
Hallucinations began to pick at the edges of his vision—not vast, delirious things but small, dangerous whispers. He saw, for a second, Alison on the lake folding her hands, blue flower in hair; he saw Erik stooped at the shore mending a net. Those images were like coastal phantoms reaching toward him, tugging at every soft place with a hunger to be held. Kael shoved them away. Memories were heavy anchors that could either steady or drown you, and his mission required the latter.
At one point, on a narrow ridge so exposed he could smell the sky, a gust nearly tore the spear from his back. He clamped down with his teeth and saved it. The spear was more than wood; it was the last shape of something Erik had trusted into his care. Losing it would have been a kind of erasure, and he could not afford that.
Midnight arrived as a thin, bright edge on the horizon. The stars were cruel diamonds above him. When he finally reached a level ledge near the summit, the mountain seemed to sigh in a way that could be read as expectation or appetite. Kael squatted, caught his breath, and felt something like fatigue—not of bone but of the soul. You do not get tired of the world and still wake to fight for it; you get tired of being the only one who remembers why.
And then he saw the man.
The sage sat on a slab of stone as if this had always been his place. He was not a grand figure; his body looked spent—ribs like the outline of a map, hair like frost shaken from cloth. He wore a threadbare cloak, and when he lifted his head the pale white of his eyes looked like lantern-glows in a skull. It was not a casual magic that whitened them; it was an old and particular light, like a man who had watched centuries grind together and been made bright by the friction.
Kael did not rise theatrically. He dropped to one knee out of axle-deep habit; respect is a habit not meant to be thought about. "Wise man," he said, his voice carrying a wire of cold, "what are you doing here?"
The sage's mouth moved into a smile that was not warm. "Waiting for you," he said. Then he spoke Kael's name and it landed like a bell. "KAEL."
Hearing his own name said with such slow certainty felt like a calibration. The man couldn't have known the name by human means. Kael's hair rose at the base of his skull.
"How do you know me?" he asked.
The sage's laugh was thin as dry leaves. "Because I have sat through the turning of ages," he said. "Because I have listened to the stone talk when the rest of you pretended not to hear. Names travel like currents. Your sound arrived a long time ago."
Kael made the choice to be direct. "You are with the Veldurs. I can feel the shadow in your words. You are sent by the civilization I must stop."
The sage's white eyes narrowed in a way that was not quite displeasure. "You are blunt. Good. We have little time for dances," he said. "Now let me tell you the real deal. After tonight, your life will be a different shape. You will see things that remake the map in your head. I would not have your questions haunt this mountain if death is on the menu. So listen."
Kael listened. He expected threats, some weary boasts, or perhaps a bargain. He did not expect a deep, slow voice that carried the cadence of myth—an old man speaking not as a teller of tales but as an instrument of memory.
"Millions of years," the sage began, and Kael felt the words drop into the earth itself, "before your kind learned to count seasons, the Veldurs walked a world that taught them everything: cities that grew like organisms, knowledge folded upon knowledge until they believed they were architects of fate. Their world was not poor; it was rich to the point of rot. Then a ravenous desire to remake what they claimed to own broke them. A faction wanted dominion, not stewardship. War bloomed. Their planet burned from the inside out."
The sage's hands painted landscapes in the air with fingers like thin roots. His voice changed like a slow drum: "Those who could run left. They crossed void and cold and found another planet—new, green, full of oceans, a world tender as a wound. They settled here first, before the hairy ones who would become your species crawled upright. They named their lost origin Courage Star—Tyr in the old tongue. Your scholars have other names. Names shift like weather."
Kael thought of the petty, frightened faces in Eldershore that had spat and whispered at him. Putting the Veldurs' coming into a timeline made him dizzy with the scale: elders and gods and foreign empires. The story the sage spun did not make the Veldurs reduce to cartoon villains; it made them a civilization with a memory the size of an ocean.
The sage's voice went low. "They did what advanced things do when they are wounded: they embedded themselves in the world, and they guided it. Humanity was small, pliable. You were tools at first, then more, then inconvenient. When the first Valeryan rose—a soul born from sea and set afloat in a crate—the rules broke. The Valeryan drove the Veldurs from the surface and into the deep. Since then, your people have lived mostly unknowingly under the sky, while the Veldurs seethed in the dark. They did not die. They repaired. They plotted. They remembered to be hungry."
The sage paused like he had opened a seam in the world and let the cold truth spill out. "We live under the skin of the planet now. We whisper through stone. We wait. Patience is our craft. The gods sent Valeryans to keep balance once before; now you are the instrument they sent again. If you succeed and assemble that mask, you will be more than a man. You will be a machine of will and fire—a thing that could either lock the Veldurs away again or hand the world back to them. You will become key or lock."
Kael had the sense that the sage did not speak to persuade him but to plant seeds that could bend a future. The old man's next words were not argument but decision. "I am one of them," he said, quieter. The cloak did not hide the literal hunger in his voice. "I am a Veldur that escaped the deep and wore the skin of human patience until I could stand in the open air. I took human guise because waiting under the earth for an age dulls certain sensors. Prophecy pointed here. I know where fragments sleep. I know what the whole mask will do."
The mountain seemed to lean in. The wind held its breath like a thing with ears.
"So," the sage said, and his voice emptied of softness, "if you succeed, the world will be returned to its first hand. If you do not, disorder will spread. We reclaim, not by malice but by right."
Kael's pulse did what pulses do when a fight is inevitable; it slowed in the place that gave clarity. He had been raised among fishermen who called fate a weathercock and gods a rumor. He had watched Erik die and had been pushed into a path he had not chosen. The sage presented the world as law and order, not as cruelty. That made the choice not simpler but heavier.
"You call us evil," Kael said, because the word wanted to be said in as plain a tone as a blade.
"One's evil is another's order," the sage replied. He stepped down from his stone as if the old bones had stiffened with decision. "Yes. In your tongue, we are evil. But labels do not change the arithmetic."
For a breath that lasted like a year, the mountain was quiet. Kael felt the bite of loneliness in his mouth. He thought of Alison waiting with lunar patience in a city that would never be safe from the ripples of empire. He thought of Erik's rough hands and the way that man had taught him that kindness was the only currency worth keeping. He thought of the small, soft body of Silfur on the fourth hill, and his promise to return tightened like a noose with hope.
The sage spoke again, and the sound of the syllables struck like iron on ice: "Now die, Kael."
The sentence dropped into the snow and the mountain held it like a blade. There was no flourish. There was no theater. It was a command, a judgment, a certainty.
Kael tightened his grip on the stick that would be a spear, felt the carved runes under his fingertips like a heartbeat. He had not come to the mountain for invitations. He had come because a world needed collecting. He had not come to be polite to bargains from buried empires. Yet the photograph of the moment—the sage's white eyes, the stars crowded like witnesses, the name Silfur whispered into the cold—made the choice crystalline.
The old man repeated the words, quieter this time, as if to make them final: "Now die, Kael."
For a last second the mountain listened. The air around them tasted like iron and a promise. Kael breathed out, a slow plume that vanished into the dark, and he stood.
He would not die here because a man with the patience of an empire told him to. He would stand because Erik had put a staff into his hands and said protect. He would stand because Alison had given him a warmth he had not known to ask for. He would stand because Silfur waited in a hollow, a small life that had trusted him enough to be left behind.
The sage folded his hands like an old ledger closed. Lightning cracked somewhere lower in the range. Snow fell. The mountain held its breath as if the world could be measured in a single, bloody choice.
"Now die, Kael," the sage said, and the night swallowed the syllable like it had always been there.