The forest east of the storm was colder.
It wasn't the kind of cold that bit the skin, but the kind that hung in the lungs and made memory feel like a burden. Trees leaned inward as Hatku and Tashina moved between them—tall, crooked things with bark like old stone and roots that whispered beneath the earth. It had been three days since they left the silver rain behind. Three days of silence, broken only by the soft crackle of Hatku's green flame at night and Tashina's occasional cough as she adjusted to her healed, but unfamiliar, body.
Hatku kept the obsidian shard close. It pulsed faintly whenever he touched it—never bright, but never cold. Like a heartbeat he couldn't place.
They were no longer being hunted.
Not yet.
But both of them felt it. The stillness before something shifts. The pressure in the bones when a blade is about to fall.
On the fourth morning, Tashina stirred early, sitting by the edge of a stream with the shard in her hands.
Hatku joined her.
"It's been glowing brighter," she murmured. "At night, when I sleep."
Hatku squatted beside her, watching the water. "I think it remembers you."
She looked at him.
"What if I'm not ready for what it remembers?"
Hatku didn't answer right away. Then: "Neither was I. The first time I lit my flame. The first time I saw what Mother had become."
Tashina's expression darkened.
"She's still out there," she whispered. "Somewhere."
"I know."
She tightened her grip on the shard. "If we find this path Father marked… what then? Do we find the Ultimate Being? Do we kill it? Save it? What if it's not even real?"
Hatku looked down at the rippling stream. "If it's not real, then we become what we were searching for."
Tashina exhaled slowly.
Then the shard flared.
Not bright—but different. A flicker of motion. A flash of symbols across its surface, like language too old for words.
And then—voices. Not around them.
Inside.
A man's voice, weary and low:
"They never wanted peace. Only obedience. I have failed. If you find this, know that they've begun choosing Judges. That means the final cleansing is close. The shard is not just a memory. It is a key."
Then silence.
Tashina dropped the shard, trembling. Hatku caught it before it hit the ground.
"Did you hear that?" she asked.
He nodded.
Another truth. Another warning.
They pressed forward, moving along what seemed to be nothing but wild terrain. But the shard pulsed stronger with every step eastward, guiding them—almost whispering in their hands. At night, Hatku would draw the symbols they'd seen on bark or stone, trying to understand what they meant. Some matched marks in his father's journal. Others were entirely foreign.
On the seventh day, they found something.
A doorway in the mountain.
Not a gate. Not a ruin.
A doorway—made of smooth obsidian, buried in vines, surrounded by statues with broken faces. Above it, carved deep into black stone, was a phrase in a language neither could read.
But Hatku felt it.
Not in his eyes.
In his blood.
Tashina stepped closer. "This is where the map ends."
Hatku nodded.
He ran a hand across the cold stone.
The shard in his pouch glowed warm—warmer than it ever had before.
The door didn't open.
It breathed.
A low exhale. Ancient. Heavy. Like something inside had just woken up after centuries of sleep.
Tashina took a step back.
Hatku didn't.
He turned to her, eyes hard.
"We've come this far."
And then, the stone beneath their feet shifted.
Not cracked. Not broken.
Revealed.
A glowing pattern spread out from beneath them, forming a spiral, symbols burning into the dirt.
The doorway pulsed once, then slowly began to open—not outward, not inward.
But upward.
Like a mouth unhinging.
And from within—
Whispers.
Not cruel. Not kind.
But familiar.
Like a voice from a dream you were never supposed to remember.
Hatku and Tashina stood still as the darkness invited them in.
And together, they stepped through.