Chapter 28 – The Weeping of the World
The shadow didn't just cut Kaelen. It edited him.
The Knight of the Blot roared a sound that shook snow from the pine trees as the Eclipse's dagger severed the shadow of his arm.
On his physical body, a deep, invisible gash opened up on his bicep. No blood flowed. Instead, Null-Ink the thick, black substance that now coursed through his veins hissed from the wound, smelling of ozone and burning paper.
"Back!" Uzo commanded, his voice cracking against the wind. "Don't let them touch your shadows!"
It was a nightmare order. The sun was high. Shadows were everywhere.
The Silent Legion, usually fearless, wavered. They could crush boulders and catch spears, but they couldn't fight the geometry of light.
Another Mute warrior fell, his shadow decapitated by a flicker of movement on the ground. He hit the snow, eyes wide and empty.
"We can't fight here!" Ronnie screamed, throwing a smoke bomb.
POOF.
Gray smoke billowed out, covering the ground.
For a second, the shadows vanished. The Eclipse's laughter echoed from the smoke, frustrated. Without light, there is no shadow.
"The Falls!" Uzo pointed North, toward the roaring sound that gave the pass its name. "Get to the water! The mist will scatter the light!"
[The Retreat: The Graveyard of Giants]
The army ran.
It wasn't a rout; it was a desperate tactical withdrawal.
They moved past the tree line and into the mouth of the Weeping Pass proper.
And here, the history of the world revealed itself, ancient and terrifying.
The pass wasn't natural. It was a wound in the mountain.
Centuries ago, this had been the stronghold of the First Men the giants from whom Kaelen descended. Now, it was a monument to their genocide.
On either side of the freezing river, massive statues of ancient kings stood carved into the cliffs. They were five hundred feet tall. But they were wrong.
Their faces had been melted off. The stone dripped like candle wax, frozen in time. Massive craters pockmarked the canyon walls scars from a war fought with magic so potent it had boiled the rock itself.
"The Graveyard of the First Men," Kaelen rasped, clutching his smoking arm as he ran beside Uzo. "My grandfather said the House of Magic burned this place during the Great Editing."
"Keep moving!" Ronnie urged.
They reached the base of the Great Falls.
Water thundered down from a height of three hundred feet. The spray was immense, creating a permanent, thick fog that hung over the valley floor.
The sun couldn't penetrate it. The light here was diffuse, soft, and gray.
"Form up!" Uzo ordered. "Backs to the cliff! Weapons out!"
The Legion formed a phalanx against the wet stone wall.
They waited.
The mist swirled around them, cold and heavy.
There were no sharp shadows here. Only the gray haze.
They listened.
But they didn't hear the Eclipse. They only heard the water.
[The Lore of the Lost Song]
Hours passed. The adrenaline faded, replaced by the bone-deep chill of the mist.
Uzo sat on a piece of rubble a giant stone hand that had broken off a statue centuries ago. He looked at the details of the carving. The fingers were thick, wearing rings with strange, geometric runes that matched nothing in the modern Eins Kingdom.
This culture was wiped out, Uzo realized. Lazarus didn't just conquer them. He tried to delete them.
Ronnie was tending to Kaelen's wound.
It was ugly. The flesh around the cut had turned translucent, fading into nothingness.
"It's not healing," Ronnie whispered, applying a salve made of crushed herbs. "The tissue isn't damaged. It's just... redacted. It's missing context."
Kaelen didn't flinch. He looked at the melted statues above them.
"This is the way of the King," Kaelen rumbled, his voice low. "He does not break. He revises."
"Who built this?" Uzo asked, gesturing to the ruins.
Kaelen looked at the stone hand Uzo was sitting on.
"The Singers. Before the Seven Houses. Before the Words were chains."
Kaelen pointed to a carving on the cliff wall that was half-melted. It showed a giant holding up a mountain, not with strength, but with an open mouth Song.
"We used to sing the world into shape," Kaelen said softly. A look of profound sadness crossed his obsidian face. "We sang the stone to be soft. We sang the ice to be warm. But then the Scribes came from the South."
"They brought the Lexicons," Uzo guessed.
"They brought Definitions," Kaelen corrected. "They wrote that Stone is Hard. They wrote that Ice is Cold. They trapped the world in rules. And when we tried to sing... our voices had no power against their Ink."
He looked at Uzo with his glowing white eyes.
"That is why we hate Words, Uzo. Words are the cage that killed our song."
Uzo felt a chill that had nothing to do with the water.
This wasn't just a rebellion. It was a clash of reality systems.
Fluidity (Song/Freedom) vs. Definition (Text/Law).
"The Eclipse," Uzo said, turning the thought over in his mind. "She is a creature of pure definition. A shadow cannot exist without an object to cast it. She is bound by the rules of light."
He looked at the mist.
"And we are hiding in the gray. The place where definitions are blurry."
Ronnie looked up, wiping black Null-Ink from her hands.
"So how do we kill her? We can't stay in this waterfall forever. We'll freeze."
Uzo stood up. He walked to the edge of the phalanx.
He looked at the mist. He looked at the massive, melted face of an ancient king staring down at them.
"We don't kill her," Uzo said. "We over-expose her."
He turned to Ronnie.
"You still have the flash bombs?"
"Three left."
"And the smoke pellets?"
"A dozen."
Uzo looked at Kaelen.
"Can your Redaction Armor expand?"
Kaelen frowned. "It protects the skin. To expand the Null-Ink... weakens me."
"I don't need it to protect you," Uzo said, his eyes flashing with that dangerous static. "I need it to protect her."
"Protect the enemy?" Ronnie asked, thinking he had lost his mind.
"A shadow dies in total darkness," Uzo explained. "But it also dies in Total Light. If we surround her with so much light that there is no angle for a shadow to fall... she has nowhere to exist."
Uzo pointed to the melted crater in the cliff wall a concave depression like a giant bowl, polished smooth by the ancient heat.
"That's the kill box."
He looked at his army. They were cold, wet, and terrified of the invisible assassin.
But they were looking at him. Waiting for the rewrite.
"We aren't running anymore," Uzo declared. "We're going to light a fire that this valley hasn't seen in a thousand years."