Chapter Forty-Seven: What Silanof Left Behind
Chapter Forty-Seven: What Silanof Left Behind
Freya insisted on Dorne's escort as far as the Witherwood's edge, over Kael's polite protest, and it was that stubborn insistence, more than anything else.
It finally convinced Kael Berlin's territory had given him something genuinely rare. "Not charity," Freya said, standing at Ashenreach Hall's gate in the grey pre-dawn light, breath fogging in the cold.
"House Ferrengard doesn't offer things it expects nothing back for. Consider it an investment. Whatever you're actually chasing north, London boy .
I'd rather have a favor owed by something this unusual than a debt of hospitality that expires the moment you cross my border."
A ghost of genuine warmth cracked through her composed features despite the words. "Come back through Ashenreach when this is finished, whatever 'this' turns out to be.
I find I'm curious how the story ends." Dorne fell in beside them without complaint, his Earth affinity a steady, grounding presence at Kael's sensing's edge.
The party pushed north into country side that grew, mile by mile, increasingly, unmistakably corrupt. The Witherwood announced itself the way rot always did.
Subtly at first, a corruption in the color of the trees, bark gone grey-black and brittle where it should have carried winter's honest white frost.
Then more openly, the deeper north they traveled, as the forest floor itself began to show signs no natural blight could account for.
Patches of ground lay scorched in perfect, unnaturally geometric circles. Animal bones, picked disturbingly clean, littered clearings in configurations.
they did not feel like scattered remains, to Kael's unsettled sensing, they felt more like some vast, patient hand had arranged them deliberately.
This is not simply a dying forest, Starlight said, quiet and grave, its usual careful analysis threaded through with something more like genuine dread.
This is corruption with intent behind it. The same signature I felt in the pods' vision, the night of your Awakening, a bit diluted, spread thin across a wide area, but unmistakably present.
I believe we are approaching something connected, however distantly, to what happened at the Ruin of Silanof. Dorne's steady pace faltered, just slightly, at the name. "You know of Silanof?"
"Only what the world knows," Bren said. "A team sent in, most of them never came out." "I knew one of the survivors," Dorne said, quiet, something old and pained moving behind his composed features.
"Distantly. A cousin's friend, before the expedition. She wasn't the same after. None of the two who came back were, from what little word ever properly circulated."
He was quiet a long moment, boots crunching against frost-blackened undergrowth. "Word in Berlin's territory says one of them wandered north afterward.
Unable to settle anywhere that felt properly safe again. Some say she's still out here somewhere, in a country side exactly like this. I always assumed that was simply grief talking, dressed up as rumor."
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I would not assume that so quickly, given where we currently stand, Starlight said, grim. They found her two days later, in a clearing at the Witherwood's blighted heart.
The sight of her stopped every one of them cold. She had been beautiful once — that much was still visible beneath the ruin of what remained.
But her eyes had gone entirely white, the same terrible blankness Kael remembered from Reven Ashcroft's puppet-body beneath Thornwick's cache.
Her Spark signature registered, to Kael's horrified sensing, as something barely tethered to human at all, flickering and fracturing like a candle guttering in a wind it couldn't fight off.
"Careful," she rasped, voice like grinding stone, before any of them had spoken a word. "Careful, careful, it hears when you get too close, it always hears—"
"We're not here to hurt you," Kael said, stepping forward slowly, hands visibly empty. "My name is Kael. We're travelers, heading north. We didn't know anyone still lived out here."
The woman's white eyes fixed on him with sudden, terrible focus, and something in her ruined expression shifted — not recognition.
A flicker of the person she must once have been fighting up through whatever corruption had claimed the rest of her. "You," she breathed.
"You're — I can feel it on you, the same as I felt it on the ruin's walls, the same shape, the same — oh, by the old Gods they're already looking for you too, aren't they. It's already started."
She is perceiving something about your nature directly, Starlight said, urgent. Corrupted, fragmented, but not entirely wrong. Be careful what you confirm, novice, even here.
"What happened to you," Kael asked instead, gentle. "At Silanof." The woman's face crumpled, decades of grief compressed into a single, terrible expression.
"We went in looking for old-world knowledge. Weapons, maybe, or answers about the Cataclysm. We found —" Her voice broke entirely, and when it returned.
It carried a rawness that made every hair on Kael's arms rise. "We found something already awakened down there, and had been waiting patiently.
For someone foolish enough to disturb it. Eight of us didn't come back at all. I only did, because it let me, because it wanted a witness.
It wanted the world to know it was coming and be too afraid to properly stop it." She lurched forward suddenly, white eyes wide with a fear that had clearly never once let her rest in the years since. "It's not finished sleeping, boy.
Whatever's under Silanof — it's only the first one. There are others. I've felt them, walking these dead woods for years now, searching for a way to warn someone who would actually listen.
The pods aren't just seeds. They're outposts, waiting for the King to finish gathering enough strength to wake them all at once."
She would not, or could not, offer more than that — the effort of the warning seemed to cost her dearly, her fractured Spark signature guttering further with every word.
Until she finally collapsed into an exhausted, muttering heap, curled protectively around herself in the blighted clearing's center.
"We can't just leave her out here," Lira said, quiet, horror and pity warring plainly on her face. "We can't safely move her either," Bren said with a grim.
"Whatever's happened to her mind, it's beyond anything I know how to properly treat, and I don't think dragging her deeper into danger serves her any better than leaving her on familiar ground."
I believe she has found, in her own broken way, a kind of equilibrium here, Starlight said, quiet and sad. I do not think we possess the means to properly help her today. Painful as it is to witness.
But her warning matters more than either comfort demands. The pods are outposts, not merely seeds. That single fact changes the shape of everything ahead of us.
Dorne knelt beside the ruined woman for a long moment, something old and grieving in his broad, weathered face, and finally laid a small ration pack and a warm cloak within her reach before rising, silent, to rejoin the group.
"I'll send word to House Ferrengard," he said, low. "Someone should know she's still alive out here, even if none of us can properly help her today."
They left the clearing as the light began to fail, carrying a warning heavier than anything the road had offered yet, and it was Kael, walking in troubled silence at the group's rear.
He had felt Starlight's presence settle into something graver than he'd heard from it in weeks. Outposts. Not simply seeds waiting to be planted.
Sentinels, already positioned, already watching, waiting only for a signal to wake in coordination rather than isolation. If that is to be true.
Then every ruin scavenged across this broken world these past twenty years may already carry something considerably more dangerous than broken pre-Cataclysm technology.