Two days beyond Ildaren's violated gates, the world bled into grey monotony.
The city's crumbling stonework, the shadowed alleys, the cloying scent of incense and blood – they faded into memory, replaced by endless plains of ash-scarred soil under a perpetually somber sky.
Each step sent up tiny puffs of grey powder, a gritty crunch underfoot that grated on the nerves. Brittle, colorless grasses whispered mournfully beneath a biting wind that carried the faint, metallic tang of old burning and deeper decay.
Kallum glanced back only once. Ildaren was now an indistinct silhouette against the encroaching dusk, a smudge of black against bruised twilight purple.
Home, he thought with a pang of bitterness that quickly soured into anger. A place built on lies, ruled by corruption masquerading as light. Leaving it felt less like exile, more like escape.
He shifted the satchel on his shoulder; the Vestige within felt like a cold, dead weight, occasionally pulsing with a faint nausea that resonated with the land's profound sickness. The scar on his forearm throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, a constant reminder of his unwanted connection to the encroaching darkness.
Beside him, Elyria walked with a steady, ground-eating pace, her gaze fixed firmly forward, seemingly unaffected by the desolation. Her silence was profound, yet Kallum felt the weight of unspoken words hanging between them, fragments of the secrets she guarded so closely.
Once, crossing a particularly bleak, windswept ridge, their eyes met briefly – a shared, silent acknowledgment of the oppressive emptiness surrounding them, before she looked away towards the horizon again.
Still, there was undeniable strength in her quiet resolve, a calm certainty that resonated within him, a strange counterpoint to the ever-present thrumming agony of his scar. It tempered his doubts, even as it fueled his suspicions.
They walked mostly without speaking, keeping to narrow, winding animal trails and the spectral remnants of abandoned caravan paths. They deliberately avoided the wider, more established roads where patrols loyal to the Order, or worse, might congregate.
Survival now meant obscurity, fading into the desolation.
Only faint traces of civilization, or its death throes, appeared now and then: an overturned cart, looted down to its broken axles, skeletal remains bleached white by sun and wind; a roadside shrine weathered down to nothing but crumbling stone nubs, symbols of forgotten gods or failed kingdoms; faded banners bearing unrecognizable crests flapping weakly above nameless ruins like dying prayers.
The world felt old, tired, and sick.
Eventually, dwindling supplies forced them towards risk. Elyria consulted a frayed, hand-drawn map, pointing towards a faint mark on the parchment. Valek's Rest. A necessary stop.
They approached under the cloak of dusk, the settlement emerging slowly from the grey haze like a scab on the wounded land. It was a ramshackle cluster of low buildings, huddled together as if for warmth against the ceaseless wind, protected by crude walls cobbled together from salvaged lumber, rusted metal sheets, and sharpened stakes.
A few figures lingered near open cookfires, their faces gaunt in the flickering light, wary eyes tracking the newcomers' arrival with undisguised suspicion. The smell of woodsmoke mingled with unwashed bodies and desperation.
"Careful now," Elyria murmured, pulling her hood further forward to shadow her face. "Places like this trust no one. Least of all travelers looking like they came from Ildaren."
Kallum nodded, mirroring her action, ensuring the wrap around his scarred forearm was secure beneath his thick sleeve. He felt the familiar tension coil in his gut, the instinct to assess threats. His eyes scanned the layout – the shadowed gaps between buildings, the number of armed figures, the flimsy gate. His hand rested lightly on the hilt of his dagger.
The memory of the bandit attack, the sudden explosion of violence, was still fresh. He wouldn't be caught unprepared again. He noted the guards near the makeshift gate – rough men wielding crude weapons fashioned from scrap iron and sharpened bone – their eyes holding no welcome, only calculation.
A woman stepped forward as they reached the gate. Her expression was hard, etched with the lines of past hardships, yet her eyes held a flicker of sharp curiosity. Scars laced her forearms, not like his own Abyssal brand, but the rough marks of survival. Tattooed runes, crude wards against ill luck or perhaps the whispers from the dark, darkened her knuckles. Kallum recognized the symbols – common superstitions meant to repel the very song that echoed within him.
"What brings you north?" the woman asked bluntly, her gaze flicking between them, sharp and appraising. "Not many travel this way willingly these days. Not unless they're running from something, or hunting something."
"We seek quiet passage," Elyria replied, her voice even, soft yet carrying an unmistakable steadiness that drew the woman's attention. "Towards the mountains."
The woman raised a skeptical eyebrow. "The Silent Peaks? That's no place for quiet passage, friend. You've picked dangerous paths to walk."
Kallum sensed Elyria's careful diplomacy. "We understand the risks," Elyria said smoothly. "A night's rest, some supplies – we can pay fairly."
"Fairly?" A harsh, mocking chuckle erupted from the fire's shadows nearby. A broad-shouldered man swaggered forward, clad in battered leather and iron, his armor scarred and blackened by conflict. His eyes, cold beneath a dented helmet's visor, held a predatory gleam. "Fairness vanished from these lands years ago, little bird. Now we take what we need, and travelers like you often have things we need."
Kallum tensed further, subtly shifting his weight, ready to move. His gaze flicked to the other figures near the fire, noting how they shifted, anticipating trouble, their own weapons held loosely but ready. His focus narrowed on the mercenary leader, calculating the man's reach, his likely speed.
But Elyria raised a calm hand, a simple gesture that somehow silenced the growing murmurs. Her voice, though quiet, cut through the tension.
"We are no threat to you," she spoke firmly, her pale eyes never wavering from the mercenary's cold stare. "But neither are we prey. Do not test what lies beneath our silence."
There was an unnerving weight in her words, a hint of power held carefully in check. The mercenary studied her, his bravado faltering slightly under her unwavering gaze. Doubt flickered in his eyes. Finally, with a dismissive grunt and a scowl, he stepped aside.
"Mind your path carefully then, strangers," he growled, spitting onto the dusty ground. "Place is crawling with Abyss-walkers these days, spreading their madness like plague." He glared at Kallum's cloaked form for a moment longer before turning back to the fire.
Hours later, huddled in the relative privacy of a rented stable corner, the air thick with the smell of stale hay and animal dung, they spoke quietly while sorting their meager provisions by the dim light of Elyria's lumen-sphere.
"Abyss-walkers," Kallum echoed, breaking the heavy silence. He looked at Elyria, whose composure hadn't slipped since the confrontation. "Cultists?"
"Some, yes." Elyria paused, choosing her words with characteristic care. "Fanatics twisted by the echoes, forming profane covens. But many others…" Here, her voice faltered almost imperceptibly, a shadow passing through her pale eyes before her usual composure returned. "…many are just ordinary folk who heard the song too clearly. Like you, perhaps. Like… others. The Abyss's whispers grow louder, Kallum, more insistent each passing year. It finds cracks in hearts, breeds paranoia, turns desperation into madness."
"You've seen much of this, beyond Ildaren?" he prompted carefully, sensing the weight of experience behind her words, the flicker of hidden pain.
"Enough," she admitted, her voice barely audible. Her eyes held a distant, haunted look for a moment. "There's fear everywhere now. Settlements like this… they exist on a knife's edge. Desperation breeds cruelty. Superstition turns neighbors hostile overnight. They sense a storm coming – something the Order denies publicly, yet fears privately in their hidden labs."
The completed song, Kallum thought grimly, the Threnody she'd named.
"Yes," Elyria murmured, as if hearing his unspoken dread. "If the Threnody fully awakens… everything will change." She didn't elaborate, letting the chilling implication hang in the air.
Sleep, when it came, was fitful, huddled beneath thin blankets in the drafty stable. Kallum's dreams were haunted by visions of labyrinthine tunnels beneath black suns, of crowns shattering in echoing silence, of lost kings screaming mutely into an all-consuming darkness.
When dawn's dim, grey light filtered through the stable's splintered wood, they departed quietly, leaving the uneasy truce of Valek's Rest behind them like a bad dream. Another brief refuge lost beneath the horizon's shadow.
By afternoon, the landscape grew harsher still. They crossed abandoned farmlands littered with bones – animal and perhaps otherwise – half-buried in earth long hardened by neglect and poisoned by ashfall. At a desecrated roadside shrine, Kallum paused abruptly, dropping to one knee. He motioned for Elyria.
Fresh tracks marked the dusty earth clearly. A large group, shod boots mixed with something else, something heavier. They had passed recently, heading north. Towards the Silent Peaks.
Elyria joined him, her expression instantly wary. "Another party travels ahead," she observed, her voice tight. "And not long past."
"Competitors?" Kallum questioned, tension gripping him as he rose.
"Likely." Elyria knelt, tracing the edge of a deep boot print, her expression hardening into sharp focus. "Could be Order agents, mobilized now they know the Vestige is loose. Could be cultists, drawn by the same whispers we follow." She looked up at him, her pale eyes grim. "Either way, our journey just became significantly more dangerous. Our secrecy is compromised."
Kallum stood, gazing ahead grimly towards the dark, brooding mountains that loomed ominously closer on the horizon. Their peaks seemed sharper now, like jagged teeth waiting to devour them. He remembered fragments of old Delver charts, whispers about the unnatural hush that fell upon travelers nearing those peaks, how sound itself seemed to thin and die there.
The Silent Peaks.
"Then we move swiftly," he said, his voice low and determined. "We reach those peaks first. Before anyone else claims whatever waits on that shattered throne."
She nodded sharply, the shared urgency a palpable thing between them. "Agreed. We press on. Hard."
As they moved forward again, the relative quiet of their journey was replaced by a pressing sense of being watched, of being pursued. The landscape itself seemed to twist subtly, paths growing rockier, the terrain shifting into craggy hills and sharp, unforgiving ridges.
The earth beneath their feet felt increasingly uneasy, as if saturated by traces of an ancient darkness creeping upwards from unseen chasms far below.
Onward lay the Silent Peaks: a place of whispered legend and chilling myth, where silence itself was said to sing the Abyss's song loudest, and where darkness crowned broken kings on shattered thrones.
They traveled forward into the gathering shadows, their quest now truly begun – and the Abyss's ever-present threnody echoing softly, patiently, hungrily, beneath each careful, urgent step.