The gate of Cirol slammed shut behind them with a boom that seemed to rattle the road beneath their boots. Wind knifed in from the east into their faces, carrying the smell of rain on stone, and something older, something wrong. Dry grass crackled underfoot as the company pressed on, their shadows stretching long toward a horizon studded with stormclouds. Boaz didn’t look back. Thorne did though. The lynx paused, shoulders high, ears pricked toward the city as if to make sure the echo had truly died. Then he came alongside Boaz again, paws silent, tail twitching with a steady, irritated rhythm.

They took the southeastern road, what remained of it: two pale tracks cutting through a field that had been green months ago, then gold, then ashen. They were on their way to the Terran underground city of Durn-Kelmar. Jaxson walked near the front with his longbow unstrung but in hand, eyes lifted to where Kestel carved the sky in searching circles. Lyra moved a few paces behind him, Mika ghosting her steps, all quiet muscle and intent nose. Kiera kept a measured pace, mace swinging slightly by her thigh, sling coiled at her belt. Theo trudged in a long, loping stride that said fatigue and stubbornness in equal parts, Tink draped over the curve of his satchel like a scarf that occasionally sighed.

Telen and Shaye fell in at the rear, Aguan eyes taking everything in. Telen carried a riverwood spear as if it were an extension of him, with his throwing spears on his back. Shaye bore a curved short sword, a hooked knife, and an expression Boaz had come to trust in the short time he knew her: patient, alert, unimpressed by theatrics. The pair spoke little, and when they did, it was in short, practical phrases that felt like notes passed between sentries.

The land bore burn marks, cracked soil, and rock extrusions like bones poking through thin skin. In places the stones showed black veins, thin as hair, crossing and recrossing at odd angles. They looked like black lightning captured in granite. Or like something trying to draw a map where maps didn’t belong.

“Black Fungus Rot and memory magic,” Aldryn said, almost idly. He walked in the middle of the line, staff tapping a contemplative beat. His hood was up, though there was no rain, yet.

Boaz glanced over. “From Vortannis?”

Aldryn’s mouth tightened. “Possibly.” He did not elaborate.

The wind overtook whatever else they might have said and gave it up to the gathering storm. Conversation shrank to gestures and the occasional pointing finger to warn of dangers. “Beware that sink.” “Skirt the char.” “Mind the fissure hidden under brittle grass.” This was the work of moving forward through this grim, broken land.

They took the long slope south of the old mill fields. Once there had been fences here: Aldryn remembered wooden slats nailed true, gate-posts straight, a border between field and the road. Now every fence they passed lay sprawled and forgotten, as if each had decided, one by one, that standing was no longer a reasonable thing for a fence to do.

Lightning pulsed inside the clouds, muffled and distant. The sound arrived late, a low growling thunder that raised the hair along their forearms and necks and gave the very air a feeling of power restrained.

Kestel broke his slow sweep and pitched toward a thrust up outcrop ahead, shrieking once. Jaxson lifted a hand to shade his eyes, then lengthened his stride to see what it might be.

“What is it?” Lyra asked, quickening with him.

Jaxson didn’t answer. He just dropped to a knee at the rise and brushed away the powder-dry topsoil with careful fingers. Boaz arrived as the pale curve revealed itself. It was a human skull, half-buried. The jawline traced with a brittle lace of black fungus. No one spoke.

Kestel landed on a sunken fence-stake and ruffled herself as if the air had become heavier. Mika’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a silent grimace. Thorne paced a slow half-circle behind Boaz, tail flicking. Through the bond came not words but the shape of a feeling: sour earth, held breath, watchfulness without eyes.

Kiera crouched. “Same as Forlon with the animals,” she said softly. “The color, the veining.”

“And the stink,” Lyra murmured, though the wind was trying to take it away. “Like wet sacks left to rot.”

Shaye squinted at the ground around the find. “No bootmarks. No sign of digging. Time, dust, and wind did the covering.”

“It’s not ancient,” Aldryn said. He didn’t kneel down, but studied it. “Recent enough to matter, old enough to be comfortable here.” His gaze touched the thin black strands. “Memory magic, the bad kind: when a thing refuses to end and the ground tries to remember it.”

Theo swallowed. “You think the Black Fungus, or, whatever it is…this memory magic, is spreading faster?”

“Maybe. It’s certainly spreading faster than I would expect,” Aldryn said, and his voice carried in the wind.

Jaxson brushed soil from his palms and stood. “We should move on from here.”

They left the skull as they’d found it, a small hill of trouble in a whole world of trouble. The road curved east, then southeast again, and the storm line grew closer, gray clouds becoming black. The air cooled a notch. Somewhere ahead the land dropped into a shallow fold where the old Traveler’s Rest should be, if the map in Boaz’s head remembered straight.

“Your hawk’s jittery,” Theo said to Jaxson, eyes flicking to Kestel’s restless arcs.

“She doesn’t jitter,” Jaxson said. “She recalculates.”

“Like you do,” Lyra said, a whisper of a smile.

“Like I do.” He didn’t look away from the sky.

The rocks grew stranger as they walked: black-veined slabs shouldering up through dust, pitted as if from old heat, slick in places with a sheen that wasn’t water. Telen broke a flake from one and turned it in his fingers. “Not river-stone. Not bedrock.”

“Not wanting to be touched,” Shaye added, wiping her fingers on her cloak with a quick, practical distaste.

Thorne angled out from the line, patrolling wide, cutting the perimeter into tidy arcs. He stopped twice, head high, drawing in the air with slow, deliberate breaths, his tail still. A few more deep breaths, then the tail resumed an irritated sway as he moved on.

“Anything?” Boaz asked through their link. The answer he received was the sense of smells where there shouldn’t be smells, and pockets of cold in warm air, currents where the wind felt strained as if pulled tight through a needle’s eye. Not danger. Not yet. A prelude to danger.

They topped a shallow ridge. Below, the land settled into a basin mottled with brush and the broken crowns of trees. In the distance, the outline of a stone circle showed itself, slumped, root-lifted, but still there. A Traveler’s Rest that the land was trying to forget.

Boaz felt the Sigil answer, a tiny brightening under his sternum. Not welcome, but recognition. He breathed once through the nose and kept walking, wondering what would happen this time. The company began to angle toward the basin, their pace shifting into the long, careful gait of people saving their strength for the end of the day. The wind built and pushed their cloaks against their legs, trying to take their words and throw them back over the wasted plains.

“The storm’s hitting early,” Kiera said, voice clipped.

“It was farther away in the last hour,” Lyra agreed. “Or slower.”

“Or, this land hurries things that it likes,” Aldryn said, not smiling. “And slows things that it doesn’t.”

Theo snorted. “I’d like to put in a request to be liked.”

“Get in line,” Jaxson said, but his eyes were still on Kestel, swerving and swooping in the growing wind.

They crossed a skein of cracked soil where the fissures ran like writing. Boaz stepped over a long split and felt, absurdly, the urge to apologize to the earth for the weight of his foot. The thought came from nowhere, or maybe from the Sigil. His jaw tightened.

“The black,” Shaye said, pointing with her chin at a low rock blistered with thin dark strands. “It follows the fractures.”

“Like it teaches the cracks to remember their breaking,” Aldryn said. “That’s one way this rot works.”

“Is it from Vortannis?” Boaz asked, feeling like the question had to be asked. The mage’s eyes stayed on the stone. “He is not the magic, but I think he is the hand that abuses it.”

They walked in silence after that. Any words felt heavy. The storm rolled overhead quickly and flashed another cold, low-lighting glare that showed them the Traveler’s Rest more clearly: a circle of stones, a fallen lintel, a half-swallowed trough where water might have been once. The basin’s grass moved in uneven waves, broken by roots pushing upwards and old cart ruts that came from the west and went to the east.

Thorne returned to Boaz’s side without looking at him, like a soldier reporting with a stance rather than a speech. Their bond felt tense, and with a question Boaz couldn’t quite fathom. “Not far now,” he said to no one in particular.

No one answered. The road narrowed into a path that chose to be hard just where their feet would prefer soft, and the wind found a way to whistle through a notch of rock so it sounded, for a step or two, like the calls of some foul beast. They descended toward the Traveler’s Rest. The storm followed.

By the time they reached the basin, the rain had grown sharp teeth. The first drops were fat and cold, each one finding a seam in cloak or collar, or top of boot. Then came the sheets, heavy enough to bend the grass flat, followed by a wind that shoved and clawed from the east. Lightning split the clouds wide above the hills, and the thunder ran in their bones and the soles of their feet.

They all quickened their pace. Ahead, at the center of the shallow bowl of land, rose the half-fallen circle of the Traveler’s Rest. From this distance, it looked no better than the others they had passed: stones slumped and root-lifted, a roofline that sagged like tired shoulders, a trough choked with vine and dead reed. But still, the sight of it lit a spark in Boaz’s chest.

Kiera glanced at him through the curtain of rain. “It’ll wake for you.”

Jaxson’s voice came from behind her, clipped short by the wind. “It always does.”

They believed that much. What none of them expected was what came next. They crossed the basin’s floor, water splashing underfoot. Thorne bounded ahead and slipped inside the circle first. Boaz followed, one hand going to the Sigil beneath his tunic.

The instant he stepped between the stones, the air changed.

It was as though the Rest drew a long breath: walls straightening, roots loosening their chokehold. The leaning lintels groaned as stone shifted against stone. Cracks thinned before his eyes, lines sealing like wounds healing under warm hands.

The roof above them shuddered, then knit itself tighter, the gaps closing until the rain no longer drove in sideways. Shaye, halfway to unrolling her oilcloth, stopped still with it in her hands, staring upward. “By the deep…” she murmured.

The trough shivered. Vines pulled back, their roots slithering free of the channel. Water burst through in a sudden, clean gush, splashing against the stone rim and spilling into the overflow as if it had never been stopped.

Light bloomed.

Not from the lightning above, but from four spaces in the ring where rusted lanterns had hung for who knew how many seasons. Their glass cleared as if wiped by unseen hands, and their wicks took flame without spark or match, casting a warm, steady, homey glow.

Theo gawked openly. “Lighting the lanterns? That’s… new.”

A dull thump came from the far wall: an old cast-iron stove coughing to life. The vent pipe rattled once, then gave a satisfied sigh as a flame licked inside. The air took on a growing, welcome heat.

Boaz kept walking toward the center of the Rest. He laid his palm on the main standing stone. The Sigil pulsed hard once, twice, then settled into a rhythm that felt like two hearts beating together.

The others were still watching as the last of the water ran from the roof, dropping outside the repaired wall instead of inside the circle. The wind still howled beyond, but here it bent around them like a river around a large, immovable boulder.

Even Aldryn looked momentarily taken aback. “You’ve woken them before,” he said, stepping forward, “but never like this.”

Boaz glanced at him. “Maybe it… wanted to, or maybe it responds more strongly when the need is greater?”

The storm still raged outside, but inside the Rest it was calm, peaceful, comfortable. The lanterns flickered in time with the stove’s fire, and the steady burble of water from the trough was as soothing as any hearth song.

The company moved without needing orders. Telen and Shaye set their packs down near the walls and began checking the seams where stone met stone. Kiera leaned her mace and sling within easy reach, then wrung out her hair over the trough, where the plumbing drained it away. Lyra coaxed Mika toward the stove, where the hyena circled twice before curling up in a dry patch of warmth. Jaxson laid his bow carefully near the vent to dry, making sure his bowstring could dry too.

Theo, regaining his composure after his awe, started digging in his pack for supper supplies. “Now this,” he said, “this is what I call traveling in style.”

“Boaz,” Aldryn called, motioning him over to the mossy flagstone in the center. “While it’s listening.” Boaz came, his steps echoing faintly now that the wind wasn’t stealing the sound. He sat opposite Aldryn, the moss cool under his palms. “Don’t think of the storm,” the mage said. “Think of this place, the Sigil, the land.”

Boaz closed his eyes, set his hands on the floor, and let the warmth from the stove and the lanterns settle around him. He could feel the Sigil in his chest syncing with the quiet pulse in the stone under his hands. The Rest was awake; more so than any others that awoke before now, and it was listening.

The first thing he felt was the water, running fast and clean through the trough. Then the shelter itself: its stones leaning tightly together, its beams steady and strong against the wind. And beneath all of that, the living hum of connection, the way the Sigil’s power threaded into the place and back into him.

He didn’t push, or force anything, but still, something stirred in answer. Heat pooled in his hands. The moss beneath them steamed, then hissed, a small flame blooming where his fingers rested. He pulled back instinctively. The fire winked out, leaving a darkened mark already turning green again at the edges.

“Power answers intent,” Aldryn said, his tone even. “Even when intent is unclear.”

Boaz flexed his fingers. “I wasn’t trying.”

“Exactly.”

A pleasant warmth of the Rest’s environment spread through the circle, and soon the air smelled of broth, and drying cloaks. Theo stood proudly over the stove, stirring. “Alright, Tink. Guard the soup.” The raccoon straightened, ears perked, and took up position beside the pot with all the solemnity of a sworn sentinel.

“Think she’ll manage?” Lyra asked.

Theo grinned. “She’s got discipline.”

Five minutes later, when he went to serve, the pot was mysteriously lighter. Tink sat with her paws folded smugly over a scrap of dried fish. “You were guarding it from us,” Theo accused. Tink chattered once, entirely unrepentant.

From across the circle, Telen laughed; a short, surprised sound that drew a glance from Shaye. Shaye checked the lantern nearest the door, then looked to the sky beyond. “The storm’s still moving faster than it should.”

“What do you mean?” Kiera asked.

“Maybe it’s being pushed,” Aldryn said, but offered nothing more.

They ate together in a loose circle, their dim shadows moving across the newly lit walls. Boaz sat with his back to the main stone, glancing east between mouthfuls, the Sigil’s faint pulse matching the distant growl of thunder.

Outside, the storm hurled itself against the basin and the Rest. Inside, the Traveler’s Rest stood whole, lit, and warm. Wind moved through the cracks high in the wall, soft now, almost careful, and in it Boaz thought he heard something like a voice calling from very far away.

The wind’s voice followed him into sleep. It certainly wasn’t words, at least, not ones he could understand, but a rise and fall like breath, a tone pitched low enough to make the stone under his shoulder hum. Every time the thunder faded, he thought he could almost catch the meaning of it. Almost.

The storm had shifted to a steady rain, drumming against the newly mended roof. Thorne sat near the door, tail curled tight around his paws, eyes fixed outward. His tufted ears swiveled like antennas when Boaz rose.

He crossed the circle, stepping over Theo’s pack and the bundle of Telen’s spears. Outside, the rain was fine and cold, the kind that slicked every surface and pulled the heat from your bones. The basin smelled of wet earth, stone, and the sharp, sweet tang of woodsmoke from the Rest’s chimney.

Thorne padded ahead, his paws soundless on the slick grass. They hadn’t gone far, when, at the base of the southern slope, the lynx stopped. His tail lashed once, twice, then he began to dig: not like he would for prey, but in short, irritated swipes, as though the ground itself offended him.

The first clawful of earth came away soft, wet, and dark. The second revealed something pale beneath. Boaz crouched, brushing back the soil with his fingers. Bone. He scraped more away until half a skull showed, its surface blotched with black growth. The fungus clung in raised, oily ridges, following the line of the jaw and curling into the hollow of one eye socket. Even in the rain, it seemed dry, brittle at the edges, but when he touched it lightly, it clung to the skull with a grip like old leather.

The sight turned his stomach, though he didn’t really know why. He’d seen it before. They all had. Footsteps squelched behind him. Jaxson’s voice came low, wary. “Found something?”

Boaz shifted so he could see both the skull and Jaxson’s face. “Another skull, and the Fungus.”

Jaxson crouched beside him. His jaw tightened. “Same rot we saw in Forlon. Remember the fields, all the farmer’s harvests? The calves?”

Boaz nodded. The black veins creeping over corn stalks, the sweet-sick smell of dead roots. It had started in patches back home, slow enough that people thought it might pass. It hadn’t. Farmers had rushed to pick their remaining crops to get them to market before they lost it all. And here it was, far from those farms, far from Coralhaven’s marshes where Shaye and Telen had seen it bloom on the gills of dead fish.

Aldryn arrived next, rain beading on his hood. His gaze went from the skull to the fungus and stayed there. “This wasn’t here before Vortannis rose,” he said quietly.

“You’re sure?” Boaz asked.

“Yes. The old plagues were many, but not this one. This is… newer. A byproduct of his working, his twisting, or of the things he summons.” He didn’t reach for the skull. “Memory magic and corruption feed each other. If the land remembers death, it grows more of it. Vortannis knows this.”

Now Lyra joined them, Mika keeping a wary distance from the fungus. Lyra leaned on her knees to peer closer. “Then this is more than just rot, or a Fungus. It’s… what? A seed?”

Aldryn’s mouth tightened. “Perhaps.”

They didn’t move it. Even touching the skull felt wrong, like the fungus might climb skin the way ivy climbed stone. Instead, Boaz used the heel of his boot to push the loose earth back over it. The rain would undo his work, but for now the sight of it was gone.

When they turned to go, Thorne lingered, his gaze still fixed on the mound. Boaz caught the edge of his thought, not in words, but in the restless flicker of his tail.

Danger. Not done.

Back inside the Rest, the lanterns threw their light in soft arcs across the walls. Kiera, sitting near the stove, glanced from their faces to the door. “What was it?”

Jaxson shook his head. “More rot. Nothing we could fix tonight.”

Shaye’s eyes narrowed slightly. Kiera didn’t ask more questions. They all settled back into the quiet. The rain’s steady hiss on the roof filled the silences between the occasional pop of the stove, and the gurgle of fresh water. Tink had wedged herself onto a dry ledge near the chimney, the picture of contentment.

Boaz took his place near the standing stone again. He could still feel the faint pulse of the Sigil through it, but now it seemed slower, cautious, as if listening beyond the circle to the thing buried outside. The wind in the cracks whispered again, softer this time. Not words. Not yet.

Night deepened until even the lightning seemed reluctant to split the dark. The lanterns swayed slightly in their hooks, their light a trembling amber against the stone walls. Outside, the rain shifted from a steady sheet to a more erratic, whispering patter, like hands brushing across the roof.

The company each settled into their sleeping areas of the Traveler’s Rest.

Jaxson and Lyra traded the last of their jokes in low voices, Mika occasionally giving a short, amused chuff. Kiera sat cross-legged, polishing her mace’s head, her motions slow and deliberate. Theo had curled in his blanket with Tink sprawled across his chest, her little paws twitching in sleep as though chasing something in a dream.

Telen lay near the door, a spear across his knees, eyelids half-lowered but never fully closed. Shaye was a shadow near the eastern wall, the blade across her back glinting when the lantern light caught it.

Boaz didn’t try to sleep right away. He sat near the central stove, the Sigil leaf resting against his chest. It was quiet now, its surface cool, but every so often he thought he felt the faintest pulse: slower than a heartbeat, deeper than breath. Thorne lay beside him, head on his paws, eyes half-open. The lynx’s ears swiveled with every change in the wind. The cracked stonework of the Rest was whole again, but in the shifting lamplight, Boaz thought he saw the seams between the repaired blocks… like the faint outlines of an old scar.

He looked east. Past the doorway, the night was a black wall, pierced only when lightning split the clouds. Each flash revealed the scarred ground beyond, the cracked earth, the veined rocks, and then darkness took it all back.

A gust moved through the gap in the stones. For a moment, it didn’t sound like wind. It sounded like a voice calling from a great distance: low, patient, and certain it would be heard.

Boaz froze.

Thorne’s head lifted, ears forward, a low rumble building in his chest. And then it was gone. Just rain. Just wind. Boaz let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He rubbed the leaf once between thumb and forefinger, and it gave no answer. By the time he lay down, the others were asleep, their shapes softened in the warm lantern glow. The storm’s rhythm had settled again, but he kept his eyes on the eastern doorway until they blurred. Somewhere beyond that black horizon, something was moving toward them.

The company slept soundly under a roof that hadn’t stood whole in decades.

Where once there had been holes yawning to the wind, now stones sat tight and true. The warped timbers of the walls had straightened themselves, their joints knitting flush until not a thread of moonlight could slip between. Lanterns hung in their hooks, their glow steady and warm. A little iron stove on the side radiated heat, its fire fed by wood stacked neatly beside it, though no one had stacked or split it.

Boaz lay on the floor against the far wall. Thorne was curled at his feet, the dire lynx’s flank pressed to his boots, golden eyes half-lidded but always watching. Across the room, Jaxson slept on his side, bow within arm’s reach. Lyra was bundled under a blanket Mika had claimed as her own, the hyena’s steady breathing louder than Lyra’s. Theo snored softly into the crook of his arm, while Tink had nested inside Theo’s hood. Kiera had taken the area nearest the stove, Eira’s pale form ghostlike in the rafters.

The only sound was the low crackle from the stove and the occasional sigh of shifting timbers, as though the cabin were still remembering how to stand.

Sometime in the deep hours, Boaz woke. It wasn’t a noise so much as a feeling: the subtle drop in the air when a storm passes close. The lantern nearest the door flickered. Boaz’s eyes drifted to the heavy planks of the threshold. For a moment, he thought he saw a shadow moving under the crack, but it never crossed. A trick of his mind. The warmth of the Rest seemed to press outward, like a living thing guarding its occupants. Thorne’s ear twitched, but he did not rise. Boaz let his head sink back to the pillow, listening until the flicker steadied.

Morning came quietly. The stove’s fire had burned low but not out, and the lanterns still glowed with a steady, amber light. The water trough and overflow was still filled with fresh, clear, cold water. The smell of rain-washed wood and the ash from the stove filled the air.

One by one, the company stirred. Kiera roused first, pulling her hair back and stamping her boots. Jaxson got up from where he lay, already strapping on his quiver. Lyra blinked sleep from her eyes while Mika gave a toothy yawn, and a small whine to go along with it. Theo muttered about wanting to sketch the runes on the hearth before they left, earning a groggy snort from Tink.

Boaz took one last look around the room. By day, the place looked sound enough to last another hundred years. Still, there was a weight to the air, a sense that they’d been guests of something older than the cabin itself.

They stepped out into a world washed clean by rain. The air held that sharp, bright clarity that comes only after a night-long storm. Drops still clung to every blade of grass and thorn, scattering the early light into a thousand tiny suns. The sky to the west was a deep, rolling gray, retreating over the hills like an army in slow withdrawal, while to the east, pale gold gathered at the horizon.

Thorne padded out beside Boaz, sniffing the wind and shaking a few droplets from his whiskers. His paws made no sound on the wet ground. Behind them, Eira glided low under the clearing clouds, stretching her great wings, and stirring the mist where it clung thickest.

The cabin door swung shut on its own with a soft thump, the latch settling into place as if it had never been opened. Boaz glanced back just once. Already, the edges of the Traveler’s Rest seemed to blend into the slope behind it, timbers darkening, rooflines softening, until it looked more like a large, abandoned shed than the warm refuge they’d slept in, lit by lanterns, warmed by a stove, and a fresh-water trough and overflow. He wondered how many travelers had passed within sight of it before now without ever knowing what it had been, and now what it had become again. He hoped it would be used by many new travelers when they saw it, taking advantage of its many comforts.

“Best keep moving,” Aldryn said, already striding toward the ridge. His cloak flared in the wind, the old wizard apparently impervious to the chill. “The hills here don’t hold their welcome long.”

Jaxson adjusted his bowstring and fell in beside Telen, eyes sweeping the slopes. “Feels too quiet,” he muttered.

“After last night?” Shaye’s smile was thin. “Quiet’s a blessing. Don’t ruin it.”

Lyra kicked at a pebble, sending it skipping down the wet path ahead. “Still,” she said, “it’s the sort of quiet that’s listening.” Mika padded close to her heel, ears flicking at every distant drip and birdcall.

Theo was last to leave the cabin’s shadow, turning back to sketch one quick set of runes into the margin of his notebook. “You never know when you might need a door that opens itself,” he said. Tink poked her head out of his collar and chirruped as if in agreement.

The road ahead slanted upward toward the ridgeline. Mist clung in the hollows, but the higher slopes caught the first touches of sun. Water ran in thin, bright ribbons down the shale, tracing lines that glimmered underfoot. The storm had left its mark, and changed the landscape. The land had needed a good soaking, and it had received it from that storm. Perhaps now good things would grow here. Perhaps.

Boaz fell into step with Kiera, their boots squelching in the soft earth. “That place—” he began, then stopped. “It felt like it wanted us to leave rested, comforted, not just sheltered.”

Kiera nodded slowly, her breath misting in the cool air. “Some places… they still remember what they were built for.”

Boaz glanced down at Thorne, who stalked close, head low, eyes forward. The lynx didn’t look back at the cabin either.

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