The village was smaller than Ash expected.
Just a scatter of moss-stained cottages, crooked fences, and a stone well that leaned like it had grown tired of waiting.
A thin mist hung low over the thatched rooftops, curling around window fras and muting the light of early morning.
Arya waved to a few people who glanced up from their chores, suspicious, tired, but not surprised to see strangers.
Travelers, perhaps.
Survivors, more likely.
Ash kept his hood low. Not in fear. Just… old instinct.
They passed a shrine on the outskirts, an old tree wrapped with faded ribbons and broken charms. Ash paused, staring at the offerings: bits of bone, carved feathers, wax-sealed letters never sent.
"Still believe in gods here?"
He asked quietly.
Arya shrugged.
"So do. So just need sowhere to put their hope. Even if it doesn't listen."
Ash didn't reply. He understood the difference.
They reached the inn, if it could be called that. It looked like a barn reimagined by soone who'd once seen a painting of hospitality. Inside, the warmth hit them like a sigh: firelight, stew, and the soft hum of quiet voices unwilling to speak too loud for fear of being overheard by fate.
A woman behind the counter looked up. Older, tall, and broad-shouldered, with streaks of silver in her braids and eyes that had long since stopped being surprised.
"Trouble?"
Arya gestured to Ash.
"Found him on the edge. Fell outta the sky."
The woman arched a brow.
"Not literally,"
Ash added.
"Probably."
She snorted.
"You breathing?"
"Yes."
"You bleeding?"
"No."
"You cursed?"
Ash hesitated.
"Not anymore."
She nodded.
"Then you're better than half the bastards in here. Room's upstairs, first on the right. Don't break anything I might miss."
Arya gave her a quick salute.
"Thanks, Marell.""
"Don't thank . Just don't bring the woods with you."
Later, when the room door clicked shut behind them, Ash let himself sag onto the edge of the cot. It creaked like it resented him.
Arya sat on the floor, cross-legged, absently carving a scrap of wood with a dull knife.
"You gonna tell what that thing really was?"
Ash rubbed his temples.
"A reflection. Left behind when I broke the mirror between who I was and who I wanted to be."
Arya blinked.
"You say that like it's normal."
"It's not,"
Ash admitted.
"But it's true."
They sat in silence for a while. The kind that settled like dust instead of tension.
Then Arya asked,
"Why now? Why here?"
Ash looked out the tiny window. The fog was lifting slowly, the first rays of true sunlight catching on dew-soaked roofs.
"Because I stopped running,"
He said.
"And the world… or whatever's left of it, noticed."
Arya frowned.
"That's not an answer."
Ash turned back to him.
"No. It's a beginning."
Outside, a bell rang in the distance.
Not alarm.
Not warning.
Just ti, moving again.
Ash stood.
"Co on,"
He said.
"We've got work to do."
Arya looked skeptical.
"Like what?"
Ash's mouth curled into sothing like a smile.
Sothing unfinished.
"Whatever cos next."
*****
The village had no na worth rembering.
Locals called it
"Edge," or sotis "Last Light" when they were feeling poetic.
To Ash, it felt like a place the world had misplaced and never bothered to find again.
But maybe that made it the perfect place to start over, or to prepare.
By the third day, the villagers had stopped glancing sideways at him.
Not because they trusted him, but because in a place where the forest sotis swallowed goats and spit back bones, you didn't waste suspicion.
You saved it.
Ash spent the mornings helping stack firewood, nding fences with borrowed tools, doing the kind of work that asked nothing but ti and sweat.
It grounded him.
Reminded him he had a body now.
A real one.
No tether to arcane engines.
No curse coiled in his blood.
Just bruises and calluses, and the welco ache of being.
Arya, anwhile, asked too many questions.
"You survive the fracture reality visons, didn't you?"
Ash didn't answer.
"You knew how to dismiss a Wraith-Tether without binding glyphs. That's not taught anywhere outside the Deep Vaults. And even then, only to—"
"Arya."
"What?"
Ash leveled a look at him.
"If you know that much already, you also know why I don't talk about it."
Arya frowned but didn't press.
Much.
Instead, he shifted to teaching Ash the local paths, how to avoid thistleknots, which mushrooms might not kill you, and how to read the subtle shifting of wind that ant the forest was watching.
It was on one of these walks, circling the outer tree line, that they found the roots.
Massive.
Blackened.
Pulsing faintly like veins too deep to bleed.
Ash knelt by one, brushing away the soil.
"This isn't natural."
"No kidding,"
Arya muttered.
"They've been spreading. Quietly. So nights they hum."
Ash looked up.
"What's beneath them?"
Arya hesitated.
"No one's gotten that far. Last one who tried ca back glassy-eyed, muttering about the Hollow Crown and 'the mouth that eats stars.' Then he walked into the river and didn't surface."
Ash stood slowly, brushing dirt from his hands.
"Then we don't dig."
Arya tilted his head.
"That scare you?"
"No,"
Ash said, gaze distant.
"It reminds ."
"Of what?"
Ash didn't answer.
Because so mories didn't echo, they howled.
That night, the wind ca from the north.
Cold.
Carrying with it the scent of ash and rot.
Ash stood at the edge of the village, fingers twitching unconsciously in long-forgotten spell patterns.
They left no trail.
No glyph.
Just muscle mory.
Behind him, Arya approached with cautious steps.
"You feel it too?"
He asked.
Ash nodded.
"It's not coming from the forest tonight,"
He said softly.
"It's coming through it."
A mont later, the scream tore across the sky.
It wasn't human.
But it had once been.
Ash turned sharply.
"Get them underground."
"What?"
"Now. I don't know what's coming, but it's not the trees that are hunting tonight."
Arya didn't argue.
That was new.
They ca as mist first.
Thick, acrid.
Crawling, not floating.
Then the shadows followed, slender figures, glass-limbed and jointed wrong, their faces smooth like frozen water, reflecting anything but what stood before them.
Ash moved before thought.
No spells.
No wards.
Just instinct.
He took a deep breath and rembered.
Not who he was.
But what he refused to be.
The mirror didn't return.
But sothing else did.
Sothing clean.
Sothing earned.
He raised his hands, and instead of power, he invoked.
Not magic.
aning.
"You don't belong,"
He whispered to the shadows.
"Not anymore."
The first of them scread.
And shattered.
*****
By dawn, the mist was gone.
The forest still.
The villagers shaken, but alive.
Arya sat on the steps of the inn, bleeding slightly from a shallow cut on his cheek.
"What were those things?"
Ash sat beside him.
"They used to be real. Now they're just the echo of hunger that didn't get what it wanted."
Arya looked at him.
"You're not just a survivor, are you?"
Ash didn't speak.
Didn't need to.
His silence was the answer.
And sowhere deep in the trees, the black roots began to whisper.
Not with hunger.
But with recognition.
Sothing old had returned.
Sothing that once broke the mirror.
And this ti, it wasn't alone.
*****
The roots pulsed again that night.
Ash didn't sleep, not out of fear, but because sothing under the soil was listening, and he could feel its attention like heat against his spine.
He sat outside the inn, a mug of bitter root tea cooling in his hands, watching the forest like it might blink.
Arya joined him near dawn, face pale in the light, his staff now etched with faint new marks, ones Ash hadn't seen him carve.
"You felt it too,"
Arya said. It wasn't a question.
Ash nodded.
"It's not just a presence,"
He murmured.
"It's a mory. Buried, but not dead."
Arya dropped beside him, exhaling.
"The villagers say the Hollow Crown was a myth. A story to scare children into staying inside at dusk."
"It was,"
Ash said.
"Once."
Arya turned.
"But you know it."
Ash didn't answer right away.
Instead, he stared out toward the horizon, where the roots had vanished back beneath the soil like veins slipping under skin.
"In the Academy, we were warned never to seek the Deep Pattern. The first spell-thread, the root of glyphs. The idea that every casting is just a flawed echo of one true design."
'And Ofcourse that is a lie. The academy never truly explains and teach anything about it int he first place. That was all the information from the Original Novel.'
"You believed them?"
"I didn't,"
Ash said.
"That was the problem."
He set the mug down slowly.
"I was 15 when I found a broken casting hidden in the margins of a forbidden to, barely readable. But there was a symbol at the bottom, one none of the instructors could explain. I traced it in chalk. Just once."
'I have no choice but lie about this.'
Arya watched him, silent.
"It spoke,"
Ash whispered.
"Not in words. In understanding. It showed the Pattern. The mirror wasn't the first door I opened, Arya. Just the last."
The younger sage looked pale now.
"And the Crown?"
Ash looked at him then.
"The Hollow Crown is what remains when soone follows the Pattern too far. When you forget your na and beco only what you know. No body. No soul. Just recursion and hunger. A will shaped like a labyrinth."
Arya swallowed.
"So what's it doing here?"
Ash's eyes narrowed, fixed on the edge of the forest.
"Maybe it never left. Maybe… it followed through the last shard."
A gust of wind stirred the trees.
And in it, faintly, ca a sound like glass grinding against glass.
A whisper:
"Welco back."
Ash stood.
Not quickly.
But with purpose.
"Arya,"
He said,
"I need you to gather the others. Quietly. There's a threshold coming."
Arya stood too, expression unreadable.
"You an a breach?"
"No,"
Ash said.
"A choice."
Behind them, the sun finally rose, amber and sharp, cutting the world in half.
Light.
And shadow.
And beneath it all, the roots kept growing.
*****
A/N: Yeahhh this arc's basically filler. I know, I know, why are we here? But I gotta introduce a new character who's important later, so… here we are. Quick detour, then back to the main story.
Speedrun mode: activated.
Reviews
All reviews (0)