Darkness. Boundless, without edge or weight.

  I was within it—awake, asleep, or dead, I could not tell. The thought of movement existed, but the body did not follow. No breath, no taste, no scent, no measure of space. Only stillness so complete it swallowed the notion of time.

  Even the Hum was gone.

  Memory came instead, piecemeal and fevered. My skin—raw from the heat, the taste of ash on my tongue, the weight of air too dense to breathe. Ahlia’s face burned into the void before me: her flesh blistering, bursting, blood boiling beneath the skin—then, impossibly, sealing again.

  And Malin—banishing the storm.

  It was all there, suspended like images caught beneath glass. Yet I was nowhere among them.

  I was memory without vessel. A thought that had outlived its form.

  “You.”

  The word tore through the dark like thunder made flesh. A voice vast, raw, cracked by centuries of silence forced open. It shook whatever shape my spirit still held.

  “You carry a presence. What hides within you?”

  A light flared in the black. Small at first—an ember adrift—then swelling as it drew near, pulsing with every syllable spoken. It bobbed toward me, unbound by distance, until its brilliance pressed against my eyes.

  And then it settled.

  Set down beside me, deliberate as a ritual offering.

  It was a head.

  Laid upon unseen ground, eyes level with my own. Skin like carved wax, veins faintly luminous beneath. The mouth was still—a wound closed by obedience—but the gaze cut through me like augury, stripping away pretense.

  Guitred. The Martyred Messenger. The Saint who had never spoken in his saintly life, not once in all the years of his witness. His severed head had preached only by its silence.

  Yet here, his eyes burned with speech—colored by the dim, impossible light of intent.

  His bearded mouth twitched, a fissure of motion across dead flesh. Then the lips parted, slow and deliberate, like an old wound reopening. The eyes roved over me—up, down, through—and a grin bared itself: yellowed teeth, cracked at the roots, shining faint in the impossible light.

  “Touched, you are.”

  The words rolled from him like stones dragged over metal.

  “I see it. I see it. What malformity graced you so? What settled within ye like cancer such?”

  Each syllable struck the dark like a blow, heavy with the rasp of old lungs that no longer existed. His laughter—dry, mirthless—followed, and it echoed without air, rippling through the void as if the black itself were forced to listen.

  “The darkness touched me,” I said. “The Void.”

  There was nothing else to offer—no pretense, no excuse. What can one conceal when one’s self no longer occupies the body? I felt no relief in the confession, yet no fear either. Perhaps I had already drifted too far from such things.

  “The dark.” His voice shook the void, reverent and terrible. “The darkness of hell, or further still?”

  His head lifted. From behind it came a shape—an arm, blackened and heavy, veins burning dull red beneath the skin. A hand cradled the severed head as though it were a sacred lamp, and the faint glow bled outward across the emptiness.

  “It stirs within ye, no? Threatens to upend you? Follows your thoughts? Proclaims what is to come?”

  “It does,” I answered. My voice sounded foreign in that place. “It lingers with me, day and night. It strengthens when the forces of this world upend us.”

  “It is the force.”

  Guitred said, cutting through me before I could shape another word. His tone was not accusation, but revelation.

  “It is. God knows this. God protects us. But the forces beyond—they stir ever more. They change, fester, kill and maim. They took you too.”

  The words fell like chains, clinking into the black. Each link heavier than the last.

  “We have only begun,” I whispered. The truth, spoken plain, without ornament or plea. The dark had named our doom, and I merely repeated it. “The dark spoke this to me. It has warned me.”

  “The dark speaks in unfulfilled riddles!” Guitred’s voice cracked the black like thunder shattering glass. “Its words are excrement and its intentions sin!”

  He spat the words as though to purge them, and blood followed—thick, black-red, spilling from the corners of his mouth in slow, reverent threads.

  “I have known the dark since my ascension,” he growled. “It fights me every moment. It torments me. It tells me I am dead, rotting, and worthless.”

  He began to circle me. I still could not see my own body—only motion, a sense of being turned. His hand now gripped his head by the hair, holding it aloft like a torch. The eyes no longer met mine; they stared outward, into the void, as though searching for the mouth of God itself.

  “I tell it this: it is an abomination. A hellhole. I would sooner have my head cut off a thousand times over than hear its whispers and call it wisdom!”

  His breath rattled—wet, uneven, drawn through a throat that no longer needed air. Every word scraped like a rasp through iron, a sound not of life but of defiance that refused to die.

  My head swam—caught in a fever dream stitched from dread and delirium, my only company the severed prophet before me, his holy bile turning the void sour. Yet for all the madness that clung to his words, something in them rang true. That truth was the worst of it; it made me sick to even believe I believed.

  “What would you have of me?” I managed. “Why am I here?”

  Guitred moved—closer now. The great shape behind him stooped low, and he placed his head once more before me, crouched so that our eyes met across the nothing. His gaze fixed on mine, unwavering, as if peering through me might reveal what still tied me to flesh.

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  “You have suffered burns,” he said, voice lowering to something almost human. “Your mind faltered, and you collapsed. The camp is in uproar. I came to speak to you.”

  Then came the smile—small, terrible. The lips drew back to show teeth slick with red, the color of confession and rot alike.

  “This is how I speak to all those who are Touched.”

  And with that—I awoke.

  Heat. First the memory of it, then the sting. My skin throbbed as though a forge still breathed upon it, every nerve remembering the flame that had kissed it.

  Then the cold came. A wind, thin and merciful, swept over me—tugging at my clothes, threading through the holes where the cloth had burned away. It cooled the flesh, drew the pain into something bearable.

  I opened my eyes.

  Above me, the sky loomed dark—clouds piled heavy upon clouds, choking the firmament. Yet their color had changed. No longer red, nor gold, nor sickly white. They were only clouds again: gray, swollen, imperfect, human.

  The storm had passed—or learned to hide its face.

  “Otto!”

  The voice reached me through the ringing in my skull—familiar, rough with urgency.

  Hands slid beneath my arms, hauling me upright, dragging my weight from the scorched earth. My body resisted, limp and foreign, but the grip did not yield. My head lolled, heavy as stone, and then—sight returned.

  Ahead, a fire.

  Not the calm of torches or campfire, but a living roar—a shrieking, twisting inferno that screamed like storm-wind forced through a narrow gorge. It clawed at the air, flinging sparks like shrapnel. The heat hit in waves so fierce it felt alive, a creature writhing on the soil, angry at being caged to earth. My skin remembered the burn and answered with a cry of its own.

  “Rise, you sorry fool!” Halvdan’s shout tore through the roar. “She’s not stopped burning since the heavens closed!”

  He dragged me back—step by step—until the heat dimmed enough for breath. Pain rushed in where numbness had ruled, a thousand needles waking flesh that would rather have stayed dead.

  I felt my feet return to their shape—numb giving way to weight, weight to pain. My legs kicked weakly in rhythm with Halvdan’s pull until, at last, I found the ground again. I staggered upright, wavering like a drunk, and he hauled me another pace from the blaze.

  “You fell,” he rasped, sweat streaking soot down his face. “Your heart raced, then you dropped like stone. What in God’s name took you? Only Ahlia’s grace kept you from roasting where you lay!”

  “The sky beckoned me.” I said. The words came flat, simple statement—no poetry left in me.

  “The sky?” His eyes darted upward, wild and uncertain. “What of the void?”

  “They are one and the same,” I answered.

  And the truth of it tasted like ash on my tongue.

  “You speak in riddles, as always—even with your skin singed and your mind failing,” Halvdan grunted, pulling me from Malin’s inferno.

  I shrugged him off, strength seeping back, conviction burning hotter than the pain.

  “There are no riddles!” I said. “The world is against us! Light, darkness—it is the same corrupted malice. It hates us. It wants us gone.”

  Halvdan faltered at that, recoiling when I pushed him away. He did not try to straighten me again.

  I looked around. Tents smouldered where Malin had walked. Men—soldiers and scholars alike—rushed with no direction, running from heat and noise rather than toward command.

  John had fallen too. Several men tried to raise him, but his bulk made their efforts useless.

  Renhard was shouting orders, helm on, pistol drawn, kicking those too slow and spitting on any he judged too weak to strike.

  Our expedition was in shambles. A storm had undone us—some voice from beyond thinking it could make us kneel.

  I almost forgot the pain in my skin as I strode to Renhard and held him by the arm.

  “Renhard! Your orders are to quench Malin’s flame by any means. She must be contained, lest we face the storm without her!”

  He looked at me, face blackened with soot, caught between striking me down or obeying. I spoke before he could decide.

  “Find the cook’s pot. The one of steel. Enclose her in it—see if it holds.”

  “You waste no time, Scholar,” he said, half a grin beneath the grime. “Dead one minute, then giving orders the next. Aye. Let’s hope the pot’s thick enough.”

  Halvdan followed close. I saw his confusion as I moved.

  “Should you not rest, Otto? Your skin bleeds.”

  “There is no rest. The Storm will not rest. I will not rest.”

  I looked to the clouds—those unassuming cloaks, hiding the eyes that would sunder us.

  Heat rose in me, not from the burns. Pain was nothing beside the fury twisting through my chest.

  I saw no sky now, no heaven. Only the malice of what hid beyond, unseen and stirring the world toward ruin.

  The wind caught my robe. Halvdan clutched at his hat to keep it from taking flight.

  I raised my hand to the sky, finger outstretched, accusing.

  “There, Halvdan,” I said, each word deliberate, shaking with contained wrath. “There lie the eyes that killed Iselin.”

  The air stilled for a heartbeat.

  “There,” I breathed, voice low, unyielding, “lies my Void. A foul thing—being, force, or spirit. An enemy of Man.”

  “What on God's good earth are you talking about, Otto?” Halvdan dragged me in by the collar, forcing my face toward his. He wanted my eyes—wanted to see what sickness or spite had lodged itself behind them.

  There was no malice there. Only the truth handed to me by unseen mouths and a headless saint still walking.

  I hauled him closer.

  “You think God is alone up in heaven? He is not. Undreamt of horrors and death lies there.”

  Around us, soldiers spread out, boards raised, forming a crude ring while some poor bastard crawled toward Malin’s roaring flame with the steel pot clutched to his chest. A laughable sight—covering a saint who had saved us and scorched half the camp raw.

  “Their presence seeks to kill us! End us!” I said, my voice cutting through the heat. “The storm is no accident, no anomaly, no natural phenomenon.”

  Halvdan’s color drained—white, then grey. He could not hold all this revelation in one breath. I had no concern for his comfort.

  “The Storm,” I said, the words landing like stone,

  “is our end.”

  A thought rose in me—sharp, unwelcome, undeniable.

  Another soul touched by the same foul malign.

  John.

  My hands slipped from Halvdan’s grasp. He did not stop me—only watched, silent now, his eyes searching for sense in the riddles I had thrown at him.

  I went to John. Helpers still clung to him, tugging uselessly at his limbs like children pulling at a fallen gate.

  “Move aside!” I barked, shoving their hands away. They scattered, startled.

  By will alone, I forced his great frame toward me—enough that my palms could grip his shoulders, enough that I could see his face.

  “JOHN!”

  The giant’s eyes opened. Slowly.

  Gone was the immovable stone, the certainty that once anchored him.

  What looked back at me was something strained—seeking, thinking, unsettled.

  “Did the Void touch you too?” I asked, breath tight. “What have you felt? What have you seen?”

  His eyes widened. His mouth hung open, searching for breath and words in the same broken motion.

  “Names,” he whispered. “Names. My mind is filled with them.”

  The strain in his voice made the air around us feel heavier, as if each syllable cost him strength he no longer possessed.

  “I remember my brother’s name,” he murmured, gaze drifting past me, toward the clouds that still churned with the storm’s afterbirth.

  “I remember the name of my friends.”

  Malin’s flame dimmed behind us, muted beneath the rounded steel pot, though its heat still throbbed through the metal like a distant heartbeat.

  “I remember…”

  A tear slid from the corner of his vast eye—thick, unbidden, weighted with something older than grief.

  “I remember the name of God.”

  God.

  Not ours.

  Not alone in heaven.

  Not almighty.

  A presence neither sung nor preached, now stirred awake in the mind of a Blemmye.

  John’s eyes slid shut again. His chest rose once—slow, heavy—and I let him be.

  I turned.

  Behind me stood a wagon.

  And atop it sat a form.

  A headless robed man, his severed head resting neatly upon his knees.

  His eyes were open.

  And they were fixed on me.