The transition from the Iron Forest to the Grey Barrens was like moving from a scream into a whisper. The clattering of metallic leaves died away, replaced by a silence so thick it felt like velvet against the skin. The ground here was composed of fine, ashen sand—not the remains of fire, but the remains of forgotten things. In the Barrens, the sky was a permanent shade of bruised lavender, and the only landmarks were the "Hollows"—massive, skeletal structures of white stone that looked like the ribcages of fallen gods.
Mira walked at the front of the small group, her hand tightly clutching the dark mahogany leaf Aryan had gifted her. It pulsed with a rhythmic warmth, a tiny, living ember against the biting cold of the Barrens. Behind her, Rhea and Sarah moved in a daze, their feet sinking into the ash. They were no longer being hunted by silver moths or metallic giants, but by something far more insidious: the weight of their own history.
"Do you hear that?" Sarah whispered, stopping in the shadow of a great white arch.
"I hear nothing," Rhea replied, her voice sounding hollow in the vast emptiness.
"That's it," Sarah said, her eyes wide. "It's the sound of people forgetting."
As they rounded a jagged cliff of obsidian, they saw them. The Discarded Toys.
There were dozens of them. They weren't the "perfect" puppets of the Weaver, nor the "monsters" of the Collector. They were simple, human-sized dolls made of pine, cedar, and birch. Some were missing faces; others had limbs that didn't match. They sat in small circles in the ash, staring at their own hands with a vacant, terrifying curiosity.
"Who are they?" Mira asked, her voice trembling with a new, human empathy.
"These are the ones the Carver has already visited," a voice croaked from a nearby hollow.
An old puppet, made of cracked willow wood and wearing a tattered red scarf, limped toward them. His left eye was a blue glass bead; his right was a dark, empty socket where a memory had been gouged out.
"I am Pintu," the old puppet said, bowing stiffly. "Once, I was a baker in a village near the foothills. I had a wife who smelled of cinnamon and a son who liked to catch crickets. But the Carver came. He took my cinnamon. He took the crickets. Now, I am just... willow."
Rhea stepped forward, her heart aching. She saw herself in Pintu. She saw the years she had spent as a battery in the Loom, her own humanity slowly being siphoned away. "He didn't take everything, Pintu. You still remember that you had a family. That is a seed."
"A seed that cannot sprout in ash," Pintu sighed, the wood of his chest creaking.
Mira looked at the mahogany leaf in her hand. It began to glow with a soft, urgent amber light. She felt a vibration—a "First Echo"—traveling up her arm and into her mind. It wasn't a word; it was a sensation of mountain rain.
"Rhea," Mira said, her eyes turning to her friend. "The leaf... it's telling me something. Aryan wants us to help them. He says that a forest isn't made of one tree, but of many roots holding onto each other."
"How?" Rhea asked. "I don't have the Seed of Restoration anymore."
"You have the Song," Mira replied. "The Carver uses his chisel to cut the threads of memory. But a song is a thread that can't be cut by glass. It's air. It's spirit. If you sing their stories back to them, the wood might remember the flesh."
Rhea looked at the dozens of hollow-eyed puppets. The task felt impossible. How could she remember the lives of strangers? But then, she looked at Pintu's tattered red scarf. She reached out and touched it.
Closing her eyes, Rhea reached into the "Collective Sap"—the supernatural connection all puppets shared. She didn't look for her own past; she looked for Pintu's.
She began to hum. It was a low, earthy melody, the sound of grain being ground in a stone mill. Slowly, the hum turned into words—not her words, but Pintu's.
"The oven is warm... the flour is white... your mother is waiting... in the morning light..."
As Rhea sang, a miracle occurred in the Grey Barrens. The blue glass bead in Pintu's eye began to glow. The cracks in his willow skin didn't disappear, but they filled with a warm, golden resin. He stood taller. His wooden fingers began to move with a newfound purpose.
"The cinnamon," Pintu whispered, a single wooden tear carving a path down his cheek. "I can smell the cinnamon!"
One by one, the other Discarded Toys began to look up. They crawled toward Rhea, drawn to the light of her Song like moths to a flame. The Barrens, for the first time in centuries, was filled with the sound of human history being reclaimed from the ash.
"This is what the Master fears," Mira whispered, watching the transformation. "He wants us to be objects. But as long as we can sing our stories, we are a family."
However, the beauty of the moment was short-lived. The amber light from the mahogany leaf suddenly turned a sharp, warning red. The ground beneath the Discarded Toys began to vibrate with a familiar, clinical rhythm.
Chink. Chink. Chink.
From the purple mists emerged The Carver. He wasn't alone. Behind him marched a troupe of "Blank Puppets"—beings made of featureless, white marble, their hands ending in jagged obsidian scalpels.
"How touching," the Carver sneered, his black frock coat fluttering in a wind that didn't exist. "The Life is trying to resurrect the dead. But you are only making the wood more delicious for my collection. A puppet with a memory is a much more valuable vintage than a hollow one."
He raised his obsidian chisel toward Rhea. "The Song ends here, little bird. I shall carve the melody out of your lungs and turn it into a music box for the Master's bedside."
Mira stepped in front of Rhea, the mahogany leaf now glowing like a miniature sun in her palm. "You won't touch her. I am the shadow that has found its substance. And I remember how to fight."
Suddenly, the leaf in Mira's hand grew. It didn't turn into a branch; it turned into a Scythe of Living Timber, the blade made of the same dark mahogany as Aryan's body. It was a weapon of pure memory, a tool that didn't cut flesh, but severed the lies of the obsidian.
"The Discarded Toys are no longer discarded," Mira cried out to the army of wooden dolls. "Pintu! Brothers! Sisters! The Carver wants your cinnamon! Will you let him take it?"
Pintu stood up, his willow limbs snapping into a combat stance. "For the cinnamon!" he roared, a sound like a forest breaking.
The Grey Barrens erupted into a battle of soul versus stone. The white marble puppets lunged with their scalpels, but they were met by an army of wooden bakers, blacksmiths, and mothers—beings who were fighting not for power, but for the right to remember their names.
Mira swung the mahogany scythe, and every time the wooden blade hit a marble puppet, it didn't just break the stone; it released a burst of "First Echoes," the stolen memories of the victims inside. The Barrens was no longer silent. It was a cacophony of a thousand lives being shouted at once.
The Carver's eyes widened in a rare moment of genuine shock. "The Seed... he is communicating through the leaf! He is giving them his own strength!"
Aryan's voice, faint but resolute, echoed in Mira's mind: "Hold the line, Mira. The Valley is close. Look for the 'Mirror of the Past'... it hides the truth of the Mother."
The clash of obsidian and mahogany lit up the lavender sky. In the heart of the Grey Barrens, a writer's sacrifice was turning into a revolution of the forgotten.