- - Shout End Hill - -
It existed. That was the first, overwhelming truth. The second was a vast, echoing question: Why?
It rested in its stone, a nexus of unfamiliar sensation. The world poured into its newborn awareness not as a coherent picture, but as a series of vivid, overlapping impressions. It had asked a question of the void, and now the void was answering in a language of texture, memory, and light. It barely understood what it was—spear, weapon, thing-of-wood-and-iron—and had no conception of why it was there on this silent hill. So, it began the only way it knew how: it observed.
Its panoramic sense swept the crown of Shout End Hill. It saw, but its sight was coupled with a deeper, more tragic knowing. It perceived the many broken, half-submerged relics of final moments. There were bones, so many bones, bleached to the color of old ivory by relentless suns and cleansed by howling winds. Some were long and straight (femurs), others domed and hollow-eyed (skulls), still others a fragmented puzzle of ribs and vertebrae. They were scattered in a chaotic, peaceful detritus. Among them lay the corpses of purpose: swords notched and snapped like rotten teeth; shields warped and rusted into abstract sculptures; plates of armor caved in by forgotten blows, now serving as tiny shelters for beetles and moss. Farther afield were other remains—larger, stranger bones with too many joints or elongated skulls—that spoke of creatures not human, beings who had also met their end on this contested ground.
The spear could tell what they were. This knowledge did not come from logic, but rose unbidden from the very core of its being, from the woven tapestry of a thousand purified soul-echoes that comprised its consciousness. An echo whispered soldier. Another sighed warhorse. A third, fainter and more bestial, growled urgath, a name for a forgotten nightmare. The echoes told the spear the why: they were here because of conflict, because of pride, fear, territory, survival. They died for causes.
But what made them them? That was lost. The spear could feel the ghost of a laugh that once belonged to a man who loved the smell of rain, but could not hear the laugh itself. It sensed the fierce loyalty of a horse to its rider, but not the rider's name. It touched the primal hunger of the urgath, but not the color of its scales. The essential spark of individuality, the unique flame of each life, had been scoured away in its own birthing crucible, leaving only the vague after-image, the emotional fingerprint. This left a hollow ache within it, a sense of profound debt to identities it could never restore.
Shifting its focus from death to life, the spear's awareness settled on a single, vibrant green leaf sprouting from a low, thorny bush that had taken root between two stones. It watched, with a timescale perception that was neither fast nor slow, as the leaf unfurled. It saw the delicate veins branch like tiny rivers, saw the dewdrop clinging to its tip catch the early light and shatter into a prism. The spear felt the photosynthesis humming within it, a silent, vital song of conversion—sun to sugar, air to growth.
Then, deeper, into the thickness of the grass. Here was a teeming, miniature kingdom. Ants moved in disciplined lines, carrying bits of seed ten times their weight, their communication a language of touch and scent. A fat, armored ground beetle scuttled through a tunnel of its own making. A spider, patient as stone, waited in a web jeweled with morning dew. The echoes in its soul provided names—ant, termite, beetle—and identified them as insignificant, the background noise of the living world. But to the spear, they were a revelation. They were not echoes. They were now. They were alive with a present-tense urgency the bones lacked. They built, they hunted, they lived, and they died, all within a span of time so brief it was a flicker in the hill's long memory. This fascinated the spear endlessly. Here was purpose without grand cause, life without the burden of echoing history.
Curiosity, a bright new thread in its consciousness, strengthened. If the echoes could tell it of the dead and name the living, what else did they contain? It turned its focus inward, away from the hill and the insects, and plunged into the core of its own being.
It was met by a cacophony.
The soul-space within was not a quiet library of memories, but a turbulent sky full of shouting stars. A thousand fragmentary voices, the raw emotional residue of the cleansed souls, overlapped in a deafening psychic chorus. It was not language, but the pure essence of feeling: a burst of terror so sharp it was like cold steel; a wave of homesickness so thick it choked; a flash of battle-joy, fierce and ugly; the warm, soft glow of a remembered hearth; the desperate, final clutch of a loved one's name; the numb void of despair. They shouted all at once, a symphony of ultimate human and non-human experience, stripped of context but vibrating with undiminished power.
The spear did not recoil. It was fascinated. This chaos was its composition. With an effort of nascent will, it began to filter. Not to silence, but to listen. One by one, it isolated threads from the tapestry.
It focused on the terror, followed its contour, and learned the shape of a cavalry charge from the perspective of the man who saw the wall of horseflesh descend.
It sat with the homesickness and saw, not a specific cottage, but the universal concept of a safe place, a haven against the storm.
It absorbed the battle-joy and understood the terrible, addictive release of surviving another moment when all around you fell.
It cradled the warmth of the hearth and felt, for the first time, a sense of loss for something it had never possessed.
Each voice, each echo, was a lesson. It learned of loyalty and betrayal, of courage and cowardice, of love that could spur men to greatness or twist them into monsters. It began to understand the why in a deeper, more visceral way. Wars were not just about land or kings; they were about these feelings amplified to a breaking point. The hill of endings was a monument to shattered love, to defended homes, to provoked terrors. The knowledge settled into it, not as a history book, but as an emotional atlas of conflict. It was becoming, moment by moment, an archive of war's true cost.
- - The Nameless Village - -
In one of the unnamed villages that dotted the hinterlands between Northgard's formal protection and the wilds, life followed a simpler rhythm. This settlement was a patchwork of hope and trauma, built not by architects but by survivors. Its inhabitants were those who had crawled from the ashes of the latest northern war—farmers whose fields had been salted, shepherds whose flocks had been slaughtered, merchants whose carts had been burned. With no ancestral home to return to, they had claimed this scrap of land, building rough-hewn timber and wattle huts along a cheerful, shallow stream. The soil was stubborn, but they were more so. The place had no name; it was simply "the village," a defiant placeholder for a future they dared not fully envision.
On this cool, breezy morning, a young boy named Kaelen—though everyone just called him Kae—was a bolt of unrestrained energy tearing through the world. He was ten, all scabbed knees, bright eyes, and a mind that collected wonders. His current mission was of paramount importance: to catch the greatest, greenest, most impressive grasshopper in the entire paddies, thereby winning the unspoken contest among his friends.
He dashed between the flooded rice terraces, his bare feet slapping the muddy berms, his eyes locked on the zig-zagging flight of a particularly elusive insect. "Come back!" he yelled, laughter in his voice. The grasshopper, a veteran of such chases, led him on a merry dance, landing on a stalk, waiting until Kae's shadow fell over it, then springing away with a whir of wings.
Driven by curiosity and the burning need for peer-group glory, Kae chased further than he ever had before. The thatched roofs of the village shrank behind him. The warning of the elders, repeated like a bedtime story to keep children in bounds, faded from his mind: "Do not go to Shout End Hill. The ground is sour with old blood. The spirits there are not at peace. They are angry, and they remember the living."
- - Shout End Hill - -
He scrambled up a rise, pushed through a final screen of scrubby bushes, and stopped dead.
The haunted hill was gone.
Before him stretched a landscape from a dream. The earth, which stories described as bare and stained, was covered in a lush, rolling carpet of grass so vibrant it seemed to glow from within. It was tall, as high as his waist in places, and even taller where it caught the sun, rippling in the breeze like a soft, green sea. Wildflowers—dashes of blue, yellow, and crimson—dotted the expanse like scattered jewels. The air was not cold and grave-still, but cool and sweet, carrying the scent of damp earth and growing things. A profound, deep serenity lay over the place, a silence that was not empty but full, like the moment after a beautiful piece of music ends. It felt... blessed. As if a powerful, kindly being had laid a hand on the cursed soil and whispered, "Grow."
Kaelen's mouth hung open. All thought of grasshoppers vanished. He took a tentative step forward, the soft grass whispering against his legs. "Whoa," he breathed, the word barely a sigh. Then, louder, his voice filled with innocent confusion that echoed the spear's own first question: "What an amazing place! How come the adults said this place to be haunted?"
The spear, deep within its soul-chamber, felt a new presence—a vibration unlike the echoes, a bright, singular note in the present tense. It pulled its consciousness back from the storm of memories, recentering itself on the hill.
Now fresh with knowledge—with the tactical understanding of a hundred soldiers, the love of lost families, the stubbornness of farmers—it turned its expanded senses outward with keen curiosity. It felt the boy's footfalls as gentle tremors in the earth, a rhythm of life. It saw him not as a shape, but as a constellation of warm vitality against the cooler backdrop of the hill. It heard his question, the clear, high sound of it carrying on the breeze, untouched by the cynicism or fear that colored the voices of the adults he mentioned.
The boy's words, "How come the adults said this place to be haunted?", hung in the serene air. And within the spear, something stirred. It was an impulse, not from any single echo, but a new synthesis of them all—a spark of mischief, of playful challenge, of a desire to interact with this bright, living thing that had stumbled into its domain.
It reached out, not with a physical shaft, but with a tendril of its consciousness. It connected the roiling, complex tapestry of its soul—the very source of the hill's haunting echoes—to the boy's untarnished mind. And it spoke. The voice was not a sound in the air, but a clear, direct thought that formed in Kaelen's head, calm, ancient, and faintly amused.
Kaelen froze. His breath caught in his throat. The voice was inside his skull, but it felt as vast as the sky above the hill. It wasn't his own thought. It was smooth where his were jagged, old where his were new. He spun around, his heart hammering a frantic tattoo against his ribs. The hill was empty. Just grass, flowers, and the distant, watching trees.
"Who's there?" he squeaked, his earlier bravado crumbling. He took a step back, the lush grass now feeling like a trap. "Show yourself!"
the thought-voice replied, and now Kaelen could sense a ripple of laughter within it, a sound like wind chimes made of distant swords.
Kaelen's eyes widened. He thought of stories—of spirits that stole children's voices, of phantoms that led the curious into bogs never to return. He should run. His legs felt like wet clay. "I... I didn't mean to disturb you!" he stammered, his voice trembling. "I'll go! I'm sorry!"
"Echoes?" Kaelen whispered, his fear now tangled with a burning, irresistible curiosity. He was a child who took apart cricket cages to see how they worked; a voice in his head was the ultimate mystery. "What echoes?"
"Stop! That's... that's too much!" he cried, clutching his head.
The sensations ceased immediately. The presence in his mind pulled back, becoming smaller, less overwhelming.
The apology was so plain, so oddly formal, that it cut through Kaelen's fear. The voice didn't sound like a monster. It sounded... lonely. And new. "Who are you?" he asked, his voice small but steady. "What are you?"
There was a long silence. The spear was weighing its answer, sifting through the fragmented voices for a truth it could offer. The mischief was gone, replaced by something more vulnerable.
it finally said. As it spoke, Kaelen's gaze was irresistibly drawn across the hilltop, to the dark rock at its crest, and the simple, upright weapon planted there. He hadn't even noticed it before.
Kaelen took a hesitant step toward the stone, then another. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but it was now wrapped in awe. He stood before the spear. It looked ordinary. Well-made, but ordinary. Yet it hummed with a presence he could feel on his skin, like the static before a storm.
"You're... the spear?" he said, incredulous.
the voice clarified.
"You scared me," Kaelen accused, but there was no heat in it.
the spear replied, and the chime-like laugh was back, softer now.
Kaelen stared at the spear. A talking weapon. A newborn thing made of old memories. The haunted hill that was now beautiful. The world had just become infinitely larger and stranger. He slowly sat down in the grass before the stone, cross-legged, as if settling in for a story.
"Okay," he said, taking a deep breath. "If you're new... what do you want to do?"
The spear considered this. The wind rustled the tall grass. A ladybug landed on Kaelen's knee.
it said, its voice in his mind quieter than ever, filled with a yearning so deep it made the boy's heart ache.