The peace of the walled garden was shattered by the crisp, urgent steps of a guardsman. The man halted at the entrance, saluting Kaelen. "Captain. Castellan Vor's compliments. Your presence is required in the council chamber immediately. A… priority communication has arrived."
The timing felt like a physical blow. Kaelen's gaze snapped from the wonder of the fused medallion in Lyssa's hand to the guard's tense face. Council summons were common, but "priority communication" had a specific, grave weight. His mind raced—had news of Lyssa's nature leaked? Had the Gentle Dark struck elsewhere?
He gave a sharp nod. "I'll be there directly." He turned to Lyssa, Torvin, and Maren. The moment of transcendent learning was over, cloaked once more in secrecy. "Take that inside. Don't speak of it."
Lyssa's calm fractured, the World-Speaker's certainty replaced by the survivor's wariness. She clutched the warm medallion to her chest, the golden veins glowing faintly against her dress. Torvin and Maren exchanged a look—the proud mentors transforming back into discreet accomplices.
Without another word, Kaelen followed the guard, leaving the garden and its fragile magic behind. As he strode through the stone corridors towards the central keep, the familiar sounds of Saltmire felt like the noisy surface of a deep, still lake where monsters swam.
The council chamber was thick with a different kind of tension. Castellan Vor, looking more wearied than Kaelen had ever seen him, gestured to a courier still covered in road dust. On the table lay a single, sealed dispatch, its wax imprinted not with a royal seal, but with the stark, simple symbol of a closed eye—the sigil used by frontier watchers in the contested lands east of the Serpent's Spine.
"This came by fast rider from the Eastwatch," Vor said, his voice gravelly. "Read it."
Kaelen broke the seal. The message was brutally concise.
To Saltmire Command. Eastwatch reports cessation. No attack. No sickness. Settlers at Brambleford simply stopped. Stopped working, stopped speaking, stopped eating. Sit in fields, in homes. Refuse to move. Respond to no stimulus. Like breathing statues. No sign of coercion. They seem… content. The quiet spreads. One farm each dawn. Cannot fight what does not resist. Request instructions. Urgent.
Kaelen's blood ran cold. It was the Stillwater pattern, but refined. More efficient. Instead of a centralized siphon in a city, it was a creeping tide, a passive wave of oblivion rolling across the land, farm by farm. The Gentle Dark was adapting, decentralizing. It was becoming a weather, not a siege.
"The 'northern melancholy,' you called it, Captain," said Lady Cera, her voice sharp with accusation thinly veiled as concern. "It seems this melancholy is highly contagious and marching towards our most fertile eastern valleys."
Lord Orin, the old general, slammed a fist on the table. "What are our military options against people who just sit down?"
"There are none," Kaelen said, the words tasting like ash. "You cannot garrison every farmhouse. You cannot arrest apathy. The weapon you need isn't a sword. It's a reason for them to want to get back up."
"And what reason is that?" Bishop Evander asked, spreading his hands. "If they have found a peace our faith cannot offer..."
"It's not peace!" Kaelen's control snapped, his voice echoing in the chamber. "It's surrender! It's the peace of the grave! The enemy isn't killing them. It's convincing them to die!" He took a steadying breath, forcing the image of Lyssa's medallion—the harmony of steel and thyme—into his mind. "We need to fight with better ideas. With louder life. We need to send not just soldiers, but…" He almost said a mage. "…healers. Storytellers. People who can remind them what they're giving up."
The council stared at him as if he'd suggested fighting a dragon with poetry.
Castellan Vor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Your points are noted, Captain, if unorthodox. However, the immediate concern is containment and observation. You are the only senior officer with direct experience of this phenomenon. You will take a company of your choosing to Eastwatch, assess the situation, and implement whatever practical measures you deem necessary to halt this spread. You leave at dawn."
It was an order. A exile from the fragile sanctuary he'd built. He would be ripped away from Lyssa's side, just as her training was bearing fruit, and sent to face the very horror that made her necessary.
"Dawn," Kaelen repeated, his voice flat. He saluted and turned on his heel, the council's worried arguments already rising behind him.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Far to the north, in the Sentinel's Spire, Arden Valen perceived the shift not as a dispatch, but as a change in the world's pulse.
Seated in the center of the stone floor, he felt it through the ley lines—a new pattern of silence blooming in the east, not as a single, deep wound like Stillwater, but as a scatter of shallow, precise punctures. A net of stillness being cast.
The Gentle Dark was learning. It was becoming agile, diffuse. It was no longer trying to convert cities; it was pacifying the land itself, one heart at a time. A slow, strategic asphyxiation.
His lips thinned. Kaelen and his kingdom would be looking for an army. They would find only contentment and dust. They would be useless.
A colder, more familiar calculus took over in Arden's mind. The Warden's calculus. The problem was not in Saltmire or Eastwatch. The problem was the source. Stillwater had been a temple. Where was the seminary? Where were the new Speakers being trained, the new doctrines being written? The cult's resilience pointed to a center, a heart of the ideology that could survive the loss of any single node.
He had been thinking like a guardian, reacting to threats. It was time to think like a hunter. The Stillwater Speaker had escaped. She had fled somewhere. She would return to her source, to report, to regroup.
He stood, walking to the southern window. His gaze swept past Saltmire, past the immediate crises of men, towards the older, darker places on the map. The mist-shrouded valleys of the Whisperfen, where sounds died strangely. The sunken ruins of Hollowheim, where the Unmaking had left scars that never healed. Places where silence wouldn't be noticed. Where a new, quiet faith could grow in the rot of the old world.
The war had entered a new phase. Let Kaelen fight the symptoms with his soldiers and his speeches. Arden would hunt the disease.
Turning from the window, he began to gather the few things he would need—not for a vigil, but for a journey into places where the dawn's light was a forgotten rumor. The Warden was going to find the library where the book of silence was being written. And he was going to burn it to the ground.