The northern hills were a cathedral of silence. No birdcall, no wind through grass. Only the crunch of frost under his boots and the high, thin whine in his ears left by the battlefield's scream. The Glimmer clung inside his collar, a shivering ember against his neck.
The cold pull in his tongue was not hunger. It was memory.
It led him not to a place, but to a moment. A pocket of frozen time his own damnation recognized.
He crested a ridge and looked down into a valley that shouldn't have been. A village nestled there, smoke rising from chimneys, fences intact. Unscathed. In a realm of wounds, this was an insult. A pristine lie.
His Brand ached. Not the dull throb of need, but the sharp sting of a scab torn open.
This was where he'd come after.
---
Memory, unbidden, rose like bile:
He stumbled from the feast of coherence, a leaking vessel. The world was too loud, too bright, too real. He needed silence, shadow, a hole to crawl into. He followed the smell of woodsmoke and dung, the basest smells of living. He found this valley. He was not Cassian then. He was a thing of trembling meat and a mouth full of cooked agony.
The villagers saw him at the edge of their field—a man in stained, fine leathers, swaying, a sword too heavy for him dragging in the dirt. His eyes were hollow sockets. He tried to speak, to ask for water. Only a gurgle of blood came out.
They didn't see a victim. They saw prey. A wounded animal. Something to use.
The big one, the one with the hammer—Garn—stepped forward first. "Look what the war spat out. Rich man's gear. That sword'll fetch a price."
They didn't ask his name. They circled.
---
Present.
Cassian descended into the valley. The silence deepened. The smoke from the chimneys didn't drift. It hung in perfect, unwavering pillars. No children laughed. No dog barked. The air was still and cold as glass.
He walked down the main path. Doors were shut. Windows dark. But he felt eyes. The same eyes from the memory, hungry and small.
He stopped in the center of the village, by the well. The same well.
This was where they had beaten him. Where Garn's hammer had shattered his knee the first time, the pain a bright, clean shock amidst the vast, formless horror of the Eclipse. It had been almost welcome. A pain he could locate. Own.
He had not fought back. He had been empty of fight. He had let them. He remembered the taste of dirt and his own blood, familiar as a lover's kiss. He remembered the feeling of his fine coat being torn from his back. The weight of Last Silence being pried from his numb fingers.
They had left him there, broken and bleeding, at the base of the well. Garn had laughed. "Leave him for the crows. He's got nothing left but his screams."
But Cassian couldn't scream. He only had the silent void where his comrades had been.
That night, something else had come. Drawn not by the blood, but by the leakage. The profound, echoing loss seeping from his Brand.
---
A door creaked open.
The man who stepped out was Garn. But not the brute from the memory. He was… inflated. His body was swollen, not with fat, but with a dense, earthy mass. His skin was the color and texture of dry river clay, cracked and seamed. In his hand, he didn't carry a hammer. His right arm was the hammer—a huge, stony maul fused to his shoulder.
His eyes were the same. Small, greedy, stupid.
"You," Garn's voice ground out like stones rubbing. "You came back. Came to get your shiny sword back?" He chuckled, a sound of pebbles in a tin. "I ate it. Melted it down. Made me strong."
Cassian looked at him. This was his first Apostle. Not born of a grand, intimate betrayal, but of petty, opportunistic cruelty. Garn had betrayed nothing but decency. He had seen weakness and chosen to exploit it. A simple, ugly sin. The Godhand's lowest form of art.
The other villagers emerged from their homes. They were not transformed. They were preserved. Their faces were frozen in expressions of blank complicity from that day. They moved like sleepwalkers, circling, blocking the paths out. They were part of his territory now. His audience.
"You made me," Garn rumbled, hefting his stone-arm. "Your… sadness. It tasted good. Filling. It's still here." He stomped a foot on the ground. The entire valley seemed to vibrate. "I rooted it. This is my place now. My quiet place."
Cassian understood. Garn had absorbed the leaking anguish of a freshly branded man. It had mutated his petty cruelty into something territorial, stagnant. He hadn't moved on. He'd become the valley. A petty tyrant of a petty hell.
The Glimmer peeked out from Cassian's collar, its light trembling over the frozen villagers.
"Give me more," Garn whispered, taking a step forward. The ground shuddered. "I'm still hungry. You have more silence in you. I can taste it."
Cassian did not draw his sword. He didn't know how, then. He only knew how to hurt.
He charged. Or tried to. His body, remembering the shattered knee, faltered. Garn's stone-arm swept down in a contemptuous, slow arc.
Cassian dodged, but the shockwave from the impact against the earth knocked him off his feet. He rolled as the maul came down again, cratering the spot where his head had been.
He was not fighting a monster. He was fighting the embodiment of his own lowest moment. The memory of helplessness threatened to swallow him. The villagers closed in, their empty eyes watching.
Garn laughed. "Still weak! Still nothing!"
The maul rose again. Cassian, on his back, saw his own reflection in the polished stone head—a hollow man in the dirt.
And in that reflection, he saw something else. A flicker. Not of his face, but of Elara's. A memory shard, sharper than the rest. Her voice, from a time before: "When you're in the dirt, Cass, you stop looking at the sky. You look at the dirt. You find a stone. And you hold on."
Not a lesson in fighting. A lesson in focus.
He stopped looking at the monster. He looked at the memory. The specific, tiny memory of Garn's face that day, leaning over him, lips wet with anticipation.
He didn't have his sword. He had his curse.
As the maul descended for the killing blow, Cassian didn't try to move. He reached out, not with his hand, but with the leak from his Brand. He focused the echo of that day—his helplessness, his pain—and aimed it not as a weapon, but as a mirror. A direct reflection of the moment Garn had been most himself.
He shoved the memory into Garn's crude consciousness.
The Apostle froze.
The maul stopped an inch from Cassian's chest.
Garn's clay face twisted. He wasn't seeing Cassian. He was seeing himself through Cassian's remembered eyes: a small, mean man preying on wreckage. Not a mighty monster. A vulture. A thief of misery. The pathetic truth of his own origin story.
"No…" Garn grunted, his voice crumbling. "I'm strong… I took it…"
"You took scraps," Cassian rasped, the words tearing his scarred tongue. A whisper of blood coated his lips. "From a broken man's floor."
It was the truth. A truth the Apostle's form could not withstand. Its grandeur was a lie. Its power was borrowed, second-hand.
Garn screamed—a sound of shattering pottery. The clay of his body fissured. Light, not his own, leaked from the cracks—the stolen, fading echo of Cassian's post-Eclipse anguish. The villagers, connected to him, began to crack too, fine lines spider-webbing across their frozen faces.
Cassian rolled away as the Apostle shattered inward, collapsing into a pile of dry dust and pebbles. The maul-arm clattered to the ground, inert rock.
The villagers stood for a moment, then blinked. One by one, they looked around, confused, as if waking from a long, cold dream. They saw the dust, the strange man with blood on his mouth, the crater in their square. Their memories of the years under Garn's stagnant rule were already blurring, becoming a vague season of unease.
They did not thank him. They backed away, fear in their now-living eyes, and retreated into their homes, shutting their doors against the truth he'd brought.
Cassian got to his feet. He walked to the pile of dust that was Garn. Among the pebbles was a small, dense lump—a Seed harder than granite. The crystallized essence of petty theft and cowardice.
He picked it up. It held no nourishment, no real story. Just the chill of a nullity.
He crushed it anyway. The memory that flooded him was cheap and thin: the gleam of stolen steel, the weight of a purloined sword, the hollow feeling of strength that wasn't earned. It was like swallowing ash.
It did nothing for the deeper hunger.
But he had learned. He could fight without a blade. He could use memory as a weapon. Not just consume stories—reflect them.
The Glimmer emerged, casting its weak light on the empty square. It seemed to look at the closed doors, at the villagers hiding from the world they'd allowed. It let out a low, mournful chime.
Cassian turned and left the valley. The silent cathedral of the hills felt different now. The quiet wasn't just absence. It was what remained after a lie had been broken.
His tongue tingled. Not an itch. A direction.
North. Further. Into colder, darker places. Where the stories were not petty, but profound. Where the betrayals were not of flesh, but of spirit.
He had passed his first test. He had survived his own aftermath.
Now, the real hunting would begin.