Kaelen ran like a hunted animal.

  The air in his lungs felt like inhaled fiberglass, tearing at his windpipe with every ragged pull, but he kept his legs pumping. He scrambled up the scree. His boots sheared off slabs of loose shale and his bare hands scrabbled blindly against the sun-baked limestone until the fingernails tore.

  The pain didn't register. What registered was the stink.

  Not a campfire, not a brush burn. It was a greasy, chemical slaughterhouse stench that coated the back of his throat and tasted like old pennies. It smelled like butchery.

  Please. He didn't even know who he was begging. The jagged teeth of the Asatay crags offered nothing back.

  He hauled himself over the final rise, the jagged lip of rock that had kept the sanctuary blind to the world for three hundred years. The fissure was supposed to be a trick of the light, a geographical ghost.

  Kaelen looked down into the ravine. His legs simply turned off.

  He dropped hard into the chalky dirt. The shadow was gone. The rock face that had sheltered them was pulverized, sheared off by a concussive force that had snapped the underlying bedrock like a dry twig. The hidden entrance was a gaping, jagged throat exhaling plumes of rancid yellow-black smoke.

  A pathetic, high-pitched noise leaked out of him.

  He threw himself down the slope. Years of drilled paranoias about checking the perimeter and scanning for traps evaporated. He hit the canyon floor running and threw himself through the breach.

  The ambient heat hit him like an open oven door. The shattered stones radiated a suffocating warmth that warped the air in the narrow canyon.

  Joric was the first. The old scholar lay near the splintered ruins of the meditation chamber, pinned from the chest down by a charred ceiling beam. One lens of his wire spectacles was ground into the dirt a foot away. His fingers were locked in rigid, agonized claws around absolutely nothing.

  Kaelen stumbled away, wiping sweat and grit from his eyes.

  "Elara! Brielle!"

  The ravine swallowed the sound.

  They were piled in the central courtyard. Merida was slumped obscenely over the well's stone rim, her back laid open. Tucked underneath her, pressed into the blood-slicked masonry, was Brielle. She looked like a discarded doll.

  Kaelen stopped walking. His diaphragm seized. The oxygen in the courtyard felt thick and unbreathable.

  Three days. The thought was utterly detached, circling his brain like a vulture. Tracking hares. Drinking from the creek. Sleeping in the brush. He hadn't even been rushing.

  He commanded his feet to step forward. He drifted past scorch marks on the masonry that didn't look like normal fire. They were impossibly precise, hexagonal burns melted directly into the granite. Thaumaturgy. The heavy iron-wood doors of the archive lay splintered in the dust.

  Right in the center of the yard, driven three feet into the hardpan, stood a blackened iron spear. A heavy crimson pennant hung from it, the fabric stiff and crusty. A black iron sword crossing a warhammer.

  The Iron Thalass.

  Some fanatic had taken the time to carve a word into the spear's wooden haft. Puritas.

  Kaelen just stared. He waited to feel furious, but his stomach just caved in on itself, leaving a sick, floating emptiness. They'd actually done it. After all these decades of hiding the histories, the Thalass had finally sniffed them out.

  Elara was crumpled near the archive steps. Face down. Her grey robes were half burned away and her oak staff lay splintered near her boots. One of her arms was extended, the fingers stiffly pointing toward the base of the archive's foundation wall.

  Kaelen dropped to his knees and grabbed her shoulder. The flesh was rigid.

  "Elara, come on."

  He hauled her over onto her back. Her face was slack, covered in soot, eyes half-open and glassy. She just looked dead.

  He traced the line of her stiffened arm. The fingers aimed at a specific foundation stone that jutted out maybe half an inch further than the rest. He didn't say anything grand. He just crawled over to the masonry on his hands and knees.

  His hands shook so badly he could barely grip the edges of the block. He dug his raw fingers into the mortar lines and wrenched the stone backward. It gave way, revealing a dark cavity. Inside sat a small, charred ironwood box. He dragged it out. It weighed like a solid block of lead.

  He pried the lid off.

  It was a rock, roughly the size and shape of a plum, colored a nauseating, bioluminescent green. Luminous veins swam sluggishly just beneath the surface like parasites in stagnant water. It was throwing off physical heat. Kaelen recognized the descriptions from the censored codices he wasn't supposed to read. The Whisper of Old Silence. The dead god's detritus.

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  This was what the Thalass had come to butcher them for.

  He put his hand over it. A low, sub-audible vibration hummed against his palm, making his molars ache. It exerted a bizarre magnetic pull on the iron in his blood. He didn't even make a conscious decision to grab it. His fingers just closed around the green surface.

  The physical world instantly ceased to exist.

  Reality sheared away into agonizing, absolute sensory overload. He wasn't in the courtyard. He was a colossal, subterranean root system stretching across thousands of miles of bedrock, and he was on fire.

  He felt continental plates shifting inside his own ribcage. Billions of microscopic energetic fibers began snapping violently, tearing like ligaments under tension. A singular concept blasted into his prefrontal cortex with the force of a physical blow:

  SEVERED.

  He tasted incinerated bone. A freezing, viscous sludge began pouring into the spaces where those fibers had snapped. Then his perspective violently jerked upward. He was suspended in a featureless grey soup. Something in the back of his skull wrenched his attention downward.

  The Worldroot. A sprawling, planetary nervous system of incandescent gold pulsing in the dark.

  Except it looked gangrenous. Massive swaths of the network were mottled with a necrotic, bruised purple. The light was flaking off into nothing. Clinging to the withered sections were thick, writhing clots of shadow. They pulsed rhythmically, gorging themselves on the network and excreting a trail of grey ash.

  His perspective was yanked forward at a nauseating velocity. He rocketed past the diseased roots, hurtling geographically Eastward until he slammed to a halt above a fog-choked valley he didn't recognize. In the dead center stood a petrified tree, its trunk turned entirely to porous grey stone. Embedded deep in the wood was a jagged, fist-sized chunk of silver.

  An Elderwood Heart.

  The thing was practically vibrating. A localized tsunami of raw, unfiltered agony hit Kaelen's brain. The Heart wasn't just glowing; it was screaming. It broadcast a frequency of pure, deranged sorrow so intense that the fog in the valley was actually swirling in response to the psychic pressure. The loneliness coming off the stone felt like a physical crushing weight.

  Kaelen's mind started to buckle under the sheer volume of the grief. He could feel his own sanity fracturing. Then a new impulse drove into his sternum like a spike.

  FIX.

  He snapped back to reality, gasping violently. The stone dropped from his hand.

  Kaelen scrambled backward in the dirt, rolled onto his hands and knees, and violently dry-heaved. He gagged until a thin string of yellow bile hit the soot-stained earth. His retinas were burned with flashing afterimages of rot and silver light.

  He collapsed onto his side. The tremors wracked his limbs for several minutes before exhausting themselves. He pressed his sweating forehead against the gritty dirt, desperately wanting to pass out. To just go to sleep in the ruins.

  He cracked one eye open. The green rock sat innocuously in the dust.

  He wiped a mix of saliva and dirt from his chin. This is what Elara carried. No wonder the old woman always looked like she hadn't slept in a decade. She'd been lugging around the knowledge of a terminal planetary diagnosis. The world was being eaten by parasites, and the only remaining defense mechanisms were driven completely insane by isolation.

  "Fix it how?" he rasped at the empty courtyard.

  He looked at his own blistered, ash-stained palms. He fixed leaky irrigation pipes and hunted small game. He didn't cure dying gods.

  The rock just hummed. It didn't care about his resume.

  Moving sluggishly, he tore a burnt strip of fabric from Elara’s ruined cloak and used it like an oven mitt to pick up the Whisper. He shoved the bundled rock deep into his tunic pocket. Even muffled by the wool, it pulled at him. A sickening, directional tug right behind his sternum dragging his center of gravity eastward.

  He staggered to his feet. The twin suns were tracking lower, and the high-altitude specks of carrion birds were already spiraling on the thermals. He grabbed a shattered section of oak shelving from the archives. He couldn't leave them out in the open.

  Digging into the hardpan with a splintered plank was hellish work. There was no solemnity to it. He hacked at the dirt frantically, driven by a panicked need to keep his muscles moving so his brain wouldn't process the screaming silver shard still echoing in his head.

  He scooped out a shallow trench for Brielle near the herb garden. She weighed nothing. When he picked her up, a stupid, mundane memory of her mocking his terrible trapping skills last winter elbowed its way into his thoughts. He laid her in the dirt and shoved a carved wooden toy back into her stiff fingers.

  "Dust to dust," he muttered, stumbling over the standard rites.

  Joric was dead weight. Kaelen had to drag the old man by his ankles, his shoulders burning while the rock in his pocket throbbed out of sync with his own erratic heartbeat.

  "Sorry," Kaelen panted as he kicked dirt over the scholar's face. He kept talking just to drown out the oppressive quiet of the ruins. "Knowledge is a burden, right? You happy now? I know the whole damn planet is infected."

  A harsh, ugly sound barked out of his throat. Something resembling a laugh.

  He buried Theron. Then Merida. Castor.

  The suns bled out over the horizon by the time he scraped out a hole for Elara. He knelt in the mud and dirt. He reached out to brush the hair out of her eyes but his hand was shaking so violently he just ended up smearing ash across her cold forehead.

  "I'm not doing this," he told her corpse. "I track game. I'm not a Mender."

  He sat there, half-expecting the dead woman to dispense one last cryptic lecture. The wind just rattled a loose piece of roofing iron. The rock in his pocket gave a sickening, heavy throb.

  FIX.

  Kaelen slammed his filthy fist against his own chest. "Shut up! I heard you."

  He threw the dirt over her and dragged a few heavy masonry blocks over the mound to deter the scavengers. He gathered what he could from the wreckage: his walking staff, an intact waterskin, some charred jerky, and Elara’s waterlogged journal. He shoved it all into a canvas sack.

  The magnetic pull in his chest was practically leaning him eastward. He needed to get out of the canyon.

  But his boots stayed glued to the dirt. He stood at the perimeter line of the old sanctuary, staring out at the darkening scrubland. Somewhere out in that scrubland, heavily armed fanatics were marching away from their handiwork.

  He took one step forward. He looked back at the ugly, uneven piles of dirt in the courtyard.

  He just couldn't make his legs work. Leaving right now felt like an obscene betrayal. Kaelen dropped his bag. He slumped down into the dirt beneath the sheared-off base of the watchtower. Half of his brain was violently demanding he march East to rip out whatever cancer was eating the world. The other half just wanted to lie down in the dirt next to Brielle.

  He pulled his knees up and buried his face in his filthy arms. The first stars poked through the greasy smoke canopy.

  He wasn't moving. Not tonight.

  The infected god-rock burned in his pocket, steadily demanding his attention.

  "I'm right here," he mumbled to nobody in particular. He sat paralyzed in the ruins of his life, listening to the wind, absolutely certain that he was losing his mind.

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