Ash and Silence
**
He came home in song.
The cart rattled over stone, his fingers dancing on the strings, a bright tune spilling into the air. Illusions of birds bloomed above the cart. He smiled, already imagining the door flying open, his daughter charging out, his wife waiting with a pot steaming on the sill.
"Wait until you hear this one," he called, half to the road, half to the sky.
No answer.
Smoke met him first, thick and bitter, clinging low over the clearing. The shardlings balked, hooves skidding. The tune strangled in his throat. He snapped the reins and forced them forward.
"Witch?" His voice cracked. "Little one?"
Silence.
The hut's frame stood where home should have been, blackened ribs clawing upward. Ash drifted like slow snow, stinging his eyes, coating his tongue with soot. He dropped from the cart, boots crunching grit, and stumbled through the doorway.
Inside, where the bed had been, two figures crouched. His chest lurched in wild hope.
Then the truth crushed him.
Not moving. Not alive.
Charcoal shells, wrists bound, ankles tied, mouths frozen mid-cry. His wife. His daughter. The scar beneath the child's chin, the braid twisted just so. Every detail preserved in blackened plaster, horror made permanent.
His fingers shook as he reached. The surface flaked at his touch and crumbled to ash. Grey dust smeared across his hand. A thin sound escaped his throat, too small to be called a cry.
"No. No, no…"
He staggered back into the yard. The cart's wheel creaked in the wind. Grit burned his eyes. Near the fence, a neat stack of blackened logs waited. Habit pulled him closer.
Up close, he froze.
Not logs. Bodies.
Faces slumped together, limbs curled like roots, mouths open in silence. Men and women who had shared bread with him. Neighbours who had laughed with his daughter. A careless heap of what had once been lives.
Something inside him tore.
The world tilted. Light smeared into streaks. Vision broke into stutters, a face here, a hand there, then gone. At the edges of sight, shadows moved where none should. His body lurched with an alien rhythm, jerks and lunges too sharp to be human.
The music was gone. The man who came home in song was gone.
Only ash filled his lungs. Only the image of two bound figures remained. His wife. His daughter. The only melody that had mattered.
Loss hollowed him. In the hollow, something else rose.
Perception shattered. The busker was no more. What looked out through his eyes now was a predator.
**
The Slaughter
**
The world moved in jolts and flickers.
One heartbeat, he stood at the clearing's edge. The next, he stood within it, villagers whirling around a bonfire, their bodies painted in ash and Breath-burnt colours that bled into night. Red veins crawled over arms. Green light burned in eyes. Violet tongues flickered as they laughed.
Sound hit him as pressure, not meaning.
A rhythm of mouths. A chorus of certainty. The same pulse over and over until it stopped being language and became a bruise inside his skull.
They danced and leapt too close to the fire. Some threw themselves through it. Skin blackened. Breath bled from them in ribbons of gold and blue. They staggered out laughing, wounds glowing like living brands.
He did not understand them.
He did not care.
All he could see was rope-burned wrists. A child's braid. A mouth frozen open.
His fingers split. Silver prongs tore free from his flesh with a shriek of bone.
A flicker: his hand at his side.
Another: his arm slicing through a chest.
The next: a heart in his palm, still pumping, spraying arcs of crimson Breath-light across his face.
Screams rose, high and ragged. The predator gave no sound.
They scattered, his neighbours, his kin. In one moment they were whole. In the next they were blooming apart, ribs splaying like jagged wings, corecrystals tumbling free, glowing as Breath fled in clouds of colour.
A runner turned, eyes wide. A silver spike erupted from the ground and skewered her throat. She clawed at it, coughing shards of red light, body twitching like a puppet. Another flicker and she was gone, pinned in shadow, dripping.
Prongs lashed like whips. Flesh split. Bones snapped. Bodies folded backward at impossible angles. Breath streamed from mouths in every hue, painting the air with ribbons of light that curled and broke like storm waves.
One man fell to his knees and begged.
The predator did not hear begging.
The next moment caught him cleaved in two, halves steaming violet and gold. The pleading echoed, cut short, replaying in the air as if the world stuttered on his death.
Blood soaked the ground. Breath drifted like mist above it, red and green and blue, a shroud that clung to his skin and filled his lungs with every inhale. He moved through it like smoke, more shadow than man.
The bonfire roared, drunk on their deaths. Flames turned black-veined and clawed upward into the sky.
In the light, he saw his wife's outline, his daughter's smile. For an instant so vivid he reached for them, trembling, weeping.
The flames guttered. Faces broke apart. Only sparks remained.
His body shook. He fell to his knees, sobbing in the ruin, surrounded by corpses strung like harvest.
The predator had killed them all. The man inside wept.
Behind him, the bonfire shifted.
Not the way fire moves.
The way something wearing fire moves.
Heat folded inward. Embers drew together. A shape stepped out of the blaze, small compared to what it would become, but made of the same cruelty, ember-bone and living coal. A juvenile Titan, hiding inside the flames.
It moved without sound.
The Busker never looked back.
Grief had narrowed the world to two bound figures and an endless heartbeat.
The strike came from behind.
No warning. No time.
His head left his shoulders in a clean, brutal arc. For a fraction of a breath he was still kneeling, still weeping, and then the world went sideways.
His last sight was the clearing rolling away, his own body collapsing forward, ash spinning like snow, and the bonfire's heart burning far too bright.
The Busker was gone.
Only ash, colour, and silence remained.
**
Khalen's Trial
**
The vision shifted. He was himself again.
The bonfire burned before him. Villagers circled with laughter and scars. The predator's memory coiled within, urging him forward, promising release in blood. Rage pressed into his bones. His fire surged, wild, hungry to burn.
Khalen forced air into his lungs.
He looked at them, really looked.
Their eyes were too bright, too fixed. Their smiles did not reach their faces. Their laughter rose and fell in the same cadence, as if someone had taught their lungs one shared song and taken away every other.
Even their Breath moved wrong, not flowing like current through a body, but tugged in small synchronised pulls toward the centre.
Toward the fire.
Khalen stepped closer, heat licking his skin.
The bonfire did not burn like wood.
It watched.
Flame leaned in when the chanting swelled. It brightened when anger spiked. It fed on certainty. It drank fear as if fear were oil.
Khalen's stomach dropped.
He saw it then, not because a skull granted permission, but because Khalen had always been the kind of man who stared at a thing until it confessed its shape.
A Breathling inside the blaze.
Its limbs were the fire. Its teeth were the crackle. Its voice was the crowd's shared joy. It moved them. It fed on them. It twisted them until cruelty felt righteous.
Khalen staggered, grief closing his throat. He could have unleashed fire on the villagers and watched them blacken as the Busker had. His hand trembled, the predator's rhythm still pulsing in his veins.
He chose differently.
He drove his flame into the heart of the bonfire.
The blaze shrieked. Colours tore free, a torrent of stolen Breath, red and blue and green, streaming upward like blood ripped from veins. The villagers fell screaming, not in death but in release, as the thing inside split apart. Its body cracked in seams of light and unravelled into ash and silence.
Quiet followed.
The villagers lay ruined, broken by their own folly, but alive. Their scars would remain. Their shame would not leave them. Their chains were gone.
Khalen fell to his knees. His tears burned as they fell, sizzling in his own fire. His chest shook, his heart breaking for people who might never thank him, never forgive him, who might even hate him still.
"This is what mercy costs," he whispered.
The vision fractured. The clearing splintered into shards of light.
His hand was still outstretched, bloodied, reaching for the skull.
One last truth burned:
The predator had killed.
The Busker had lost.
Khalen had seen through the fire and struck the true enemy.
That enemy had not been the Titan. Not yet. It had been young. Weak. A mask of strength. Only rage would have fed it.
**
The cavern shook as if the mountain tried to rise. Breath boiled upward in streams of violet and red, torn from the Titan's ribs. For the first time in centuries it spent freely, bored of restraint, its arrogance cracking its own body.
The skull burned in Khalen's hand. He almost dropped it. The voice came jagged and bright, too large for his head.
"Now. Do you feel it? The waste. The pride. It has grown careless."
Khalen staggered, fire rushing uncontrolled through his veins. "What are you?"
Laughter answered, half-mad and half-exultant.
"What I have waited for. For you."
Words cracked through his bones. He could not tell if it was thought or flame.
"Alone, I was fragments, scattered and bled dry each time I rose. It drank me for a thousand years and built its palace of rot. I begged the stone to hold, pebble by pebble, quake by quake. I was never strong enough to close the jaws. Not until now."
The cavern heaved. Beneath the Titan, the floor split. Stone folded on itself, groaning like ribs that lock shut.
Khalen grit his teeth, vision breaking into blinks and streaks. The fire inside him was not his alone. The mind in the skull steadied the chaos, a hand on the tiller, guiding the storm.
"Your mind holds me. Your fire feeds me. You are the spine I lost. Together we are whole enough to drag it down."
The Titan shrieked. Its body split in seams of molten light. It clawed upward, massive arms flailing, but each strike sank slower, heavier, as if the earth itself clung to it. Breath roared from its core and flooded into a prison that yawned beneath.
The ground collapsed in layers. Walls folded like waves of stone and sealed over themselves again and again. Pebbles, boulders, whole slabs rolled in and locked the Titan deeper and tighter than even its skeleton had lain.
Khalen fell to his knees, fire pouring from his arms, not sure if he fed the skull or the skull fed him. For one heartbeat, their breaths were one.
The scream faded, swallowed by earth. The chamber stilled. Only the crystal in his hands pulsed faintly, a rhythm that was not his heartbeat but answered it.
"It is done," the voice whispered, triumph tempered by something older and raw. "I dreamed of this moment for ages. Rage kept me alive. Grief kept me sane. Now, linked to you, I remember what strength feels like."
Khalen drew air in ragged pulls, blood still dripping from his ruined hand. He stared at the sealed stone, at the quiet where a god-thing had stood moments ago.
"You buried it," he rasped.
"No. We did."
The facets glowed faint violet, as if smiling in the dark.
**
After the Sealing
**
Silence pressed in thick as stone dust.
Khalen crouched by the sealed pit, chest heaving, stump dripping into the cracks. His flame guttered weak, a dying ember licking the air. The ground still trembled faintly, as if the thing below had turned in its sleep. The smell of scorched crystal hung sharp and sweet, like burnt flowers.
The skull in his hand pulsed. Violet light shimmered across its facets, steady and deliberate.
The voice came again, not thunder now, but a weary exhale formed into words.
"Well. That was dramatic. Burying a god takes more flair than I manage alone."
Khalen blinked, eyes raw. "What are you?"
"Once, a thousand things. Now, call me the part of humanity that refused to die quietly. I was broken, harvested, siphoned like a keg to fatten the Titan. It fed on me while it jeweled its prison above. Rage kept me breathing. Grief kept me sane."
A pause. "Mostly sane."
Khalen's throat burned. "Why me?"
"Because you did not break. I watched men bleed themselves dry in fury, just as I did. They failed. I stopped waking. I stopped hoping. You…"
A flare like recognition. "You saw through the fire. You struck the true enemy. You reminded me what it is to choose."
He tasted ash. "I nearly killed them. The villagers. I wanted to."
"Of course. That is the trick. Make the thought feel like the crime. But the mistake is not that you imagined it. The mistake is doing it. You thought it, and you did not move. That tells me more than any prayer."
Khalen exhaled a cracked laugh. "You talk too much."
The crystal rippled like laughter. "And yet you listen."
Light deepened and curled up his arm like veins of molten glass. He tried to pull free. The presence pressed closer, curious and almost gentle.
"Easy. I am not stealing. Not this time. Only looking."
Heat shimmered behind his eyes. Images flooded in reverse. A city of living flame. Towers pulsing with Breath. People moving with impossible grace, stronger and brighter than anything he had seen.
The vision broke. The skull rifled Khalen's memories instead.
Elyas laughing under Caer' Syllen's arches.
Ayame steady in the storm.
Liren's scarred smile.
A father's hand on the tiller, fire hidden in his palms.
Silence followed, thick with surprise.
"Wait," the voice murmured. "That is all you have left?"
Disbelief frayed the tone. "Where are the strong? The Breath-bonded hunters who brought down Breathlings barehanded? You are small. Weaker than the ones I left behind."
Khalen's lips twitched in a bitter smile. "Story of my life."
A wounded laugh vibrated through the facets. "I do not understand. You should have been gods by now, Breath in your bones and crystal in your blood. Instead you are fractured, hiding behind walls. It sounds like a song with half the notes missing. Something pressed you down before you grew."
Khalen spat blood and kept kneeling. "You were trapped under rock a thousand years. Maybe the world above does not match your dreams."
Silence, then softer, amused, edged with irony.
"Maybe not. But you stared at chaos until it got self-conscious. The old ones called that Observer's Law. You would call it luck. I call it selective blindness with style."
Khalen's laugh was rough, but real. "Or I am too stubborn to stop trying."
"Perfect," the voice said, light and ancient at once. "Keep that. Gods lose because they think they are right. Mortals win because they know they are wrong and keep swinging."
Ash still clung to him. The echo of a lost song weighed his bones. His body shook. His voice stayed steady.
"You still talk too much."
The crystal flared, laughter faint and human.
"Oh, we are going to get along splendidly."
Light faded. Silence returned. Somewhere beneath the stone, the earth exhaled, a sound like the last breath of a buried god.
**