CHAPTER 34: THE PRICE OF GRIEF

After Kairen’s victory at the waterfall, Vanamali took him from the deafening thunder to another area of the Sanctum. T

hey followed a serpentine trail, further into the valley, until they arrived at an open space where the mists were light, and a completely still, mirror-like lake glimmered in the distance.

The water was so limpid that it picked up the glowing moss of the cliff faces, creating the illusion that a second, inverted valley existed below the surface.

"You have learned to be still in the midst of outer turmoil," Vanamali spoke, his voice the only noise, hardly breaking the deep silence.

He motioned for Kairen to sit on the shore, where weathered, moss-coated rocks created a natural meditation mat.

"Now, you must learn to sense the currents beneath that stillness. The waterfall was a loud, conspicuous power. The Essence is quieter, more subtle, and infinitely greater."

Kairen settled in, his eyes closed as Vanamali directed. The quiet here was nearly as daunting as the roar had been.

"Breathe," the Sage coached, his own voice a soothing anchor. "Reach out with the consciousness you’ve developed. Sense the life in the water, the power in the rocks, the association with the air. Sense the great Essence Web that connects them all."

Kairen did, his perceptions widening. He sensed the cold, sleeping power of the lake, the sluggish beat of life from the trees, the weak sting of the mists along the edge of the valley. He sensed the beat of his own heart, a reliable cadence in the stillness.

"Good," Vanamali whispered. "Now, sense that web as it moves inside you. Locate the Seal. And this time, slowly, intentionally, stretch your awareness beyond it. Don’t pull, don’t draw. Just... sense the ocean behind the dam."

Kairen concentrated, shifting his awareness in. He touched the cold, familiar sense of the Garuda Seal, the delicate, unyielding lock between his shoulders. He breathed slowly, centering, and pressed his awareness, not against it, but through its convoluted latticework, as mist dissipated through a grate.

He touched the enormity on the other side. The immense, vibrating, ever-silent potential of the Cosmic Essence.

And then he heard it.

"Kairen... help me..."

It was the whisper. The same whisper from the nightmares, the same whisper from the island. But it sounded clearer now, more desperate, tinged with an ancient bone-deep grief. It was not a fragment of memory; he knew with a shiver of icy fear that it was coming from the Essence itself. It was an echo, a hurt, ingrained within the very energy that was trapped within him.

He jerked back, withdrawing his senses, his eyes snapping open. His heart pounded against his ribcage.

"It spoke," Kairen panted, his tone unstable. "The whisper. it’s inside."

Vanamali’s face became serious. He had been expecting this. "I had guessed," he replied, his tone serious. "The Essence is the remembrance of existence, Kairen. It contains the reverberations of everything that has left a profound mark on reality—the bliss of creation, the anger of destruction, and, as you have discovered, vast, old sorrow."

The Sage countered Kairen’s troubled stare, his eyes themselves wary. "You have to be careful. You have touched the echo of a grief older than your own. Do not confuse the troubles of the universe with your own, or they will overwhelm you. You need to learn how to move through these echoes without being engulfed by them."

As Kairen learned how to travel through echoes, Ilya Veyne was hard at work creating them.

She stood in the upper-level arcane room, the air icy, crackling with unstable shadow magic. Her skin was white and tight, but her silver eyes flamed with a fevered, victorious radiance. She was pushing herself once more, trying a complex, outlawed shadow-weaving spell—one not meant for fighting, but to rip a temporary stabilized tear between dimensions.

Her teacher, Serena, had prohibited it. Ilya didn’t care.

"Ignis. Umbra. Connect. Apertio!" she chanted, her tone crisp, compelling the unstable powers to submit.

The shadows in the room’s corner didn’t merely writhe; they ripped. A gash of pure, non-reflective blackness rent in the air, a foot wide, then two. It coalesced, a flawless, whispering tear in the fabric of reality.

She had succeeded. A three-year-level spell.

But victory came at a price. The instant the schism set, a fierce backwash of shadow energy, untempered and wild, rebounded back through the spell-tether.

Ilya shrieked, a noise of shocked agony, as the power struck her. She was hurled back, slamming into the wall across the room. She fell to the cold, hard stone floor, gasping, a mist of dark, shadow-stained blood spraying out across the obsidian. Her head swirled; her energy channels felt scraped raw by jagged glass.

The door of the chamber hissed open. Instructor Serena burst in, her face a mask of horror and rage. She glimpsed the whispering rift, the stable hole that seemed to freeze in place; she saw Ilya on the ground, and her face went hard.

"You idiot!" Serena snarled, going down beside her, already casting healing magic through her hands. "Is this what you wanted? Evidence?"

"It... worked... didn’t it?" Ilya gasped, a sick smile wiping across her bloody lips.

"At what cost?" Serena rebutted, her anger shaking in her voice as she struggled to calm Ilya’s wildly unbalanced internal energy. "This is not power, child, this is suicide! Power that is seized at the cost of destroying yourself will only have you in shards when you need it most. You are fueling your own soul!"

Ilya turned her head aside, gasping as the healing magic struggled against the shadow corruption within her. The victory was sweet no longer, lost beneath the burning agony and the icy chill of the bones. But the other choice, the recollection of powerlessness on the ship... that was terrible.

In the scorching heat of the Academy armory, Dain Ragnor was paying the price for his own uncontrolled temper. He wasn’t drilling; he was on duty punishment, handed down by Captain Vorlag after his foolish display of temper in the sparring pit had hurt another student.

His enormous shoulders throbbed, and sweat dripped from the tip of his chin as he deliberately polished a breastplate, the rote, mindless labor a stark comparison to the pent-up energy he craGved to unleash. Oil, whetstones, and his own anger filled the air.

"Rage is a hammer, Ragnor."

Dain did not glance up as Captain Vorlag’s gruff voice interrupted the silence. The scarred warrior occupied the doorway, arms crossed, observing him.

"It shatters things," Vorlag went on, striding into the armory, his boots clattering on the stone floor. "Shields, swords, bones... shield walls."

He came to a halt beside Dain, his eyes weighed down. "Discipline... is the forge. It won’t shatter. It constructs. It takes unshapen, useless pig iron and beats it, folds it, quenches it, until it can stand something. Something that can save the man to your left."

Vorlag slammed a heavy, weighted training sword onto the workbench. It boomed.

"You want to honor your friend? You want to keep your oath?" he snarled. "Don’t move like a hammer. Move like a forge. Practice the simple forms. Again. And again. Until your arms drop off."

He struck the plain sword. "Then repeat it. But this time, repeat it with control. Fury is simple, boy. Control is difficult. That is what your friend possessed."

Dain gazed at the plain sword, Vorlag’s words more painful than any blow. Discipline is difficult. He remembered Kairen’s peaceful forbearance in the face of Kaelan’s jibes, his unwavering concentration in the Gauntlet. He hesitated and then took hold of the training sword’s hilt, his knuckles clenched.

Sunlight, passing through the tall, vaulted windows of the Academy infirmary, cast soft shadows on clean white sheets. The ward was peaceful, the air motionless, bearing only the subtle, sterile aroma of antiseptic herbs and the soft buzz of monitoring charms.

Lia’s eyelids flickered. Once. Twice. Then, agonizingly, slowly, they crept open.

Her vision swirled, white and gold. White ceiling. Gold light. She blinked, the haze in her mind slowly clearing. She was weak, as if she had been filled with lead, and there was a dull, deep pain in her chest.

"Easy now."

The voice was soft, uncertain. Unprofessional, unlike the healers’.

Lia’s head turned slowly. Kaelan Brightblade sat in a plain wooden chair next to her bed. He appeared... wrong. Worn. His golden hair was greasy, his uniform disheveled. His arrogant flame of passion was gone, extinguished by a hollow, haunted remorse.

"Kaelan...?" Her voice was a parched rasp, cracking with lack of use. "What... what did happen?"

Memory flooded back in a hurt, jagged blast. The island. The fogs. The ambush. The ghastly crunch as the Razorclaw’s talons ripped through her.

"Kairen!" she cried out, attempting to sit up, a searing agony shooting through her chest. "Kairen! Is he—"

"Don’t, Lia," Kaelan winced as though pierced, his hands flying up reflexively, though he didn’t actually touch her. "Just. lie still."

She gazed at him, her heart stopping, his response true to her worst fear. "Where...?" she breathed, ice-cold dread twisting in her belly. "Kaelan, where is Kairen?"

Kaelan dropped his gaze to his clenched hands, gripping and releasing them in his lap. He couldn’t look at her. The silence hung heavy with unuttered tragedy.

"Kaelan?" Lia’s voice shook. "Tell me. Please."

He drew a shaking, ragged breath before he looked up at last. His gold eyes, so bright and full of pride normally, were dull, red-rimmed, and filled with a guilt she did not understand.

"You’ve been out, Lia," he started, his voice jerky, uncertain. "For... for nearly a month."

A month? Her mind spun. It seemed like hours.

"The mission... it was a trap," Kaelan went on, gritting the words out, his voice grating. "Hellhounds. More demons than they reported. They were all around."

He swallowed, his eyes still tracking across the horizon, the memory obviously pained. "You... you saved him. You saved me. You took the hit that was for Kairen." His voice cracked on Kairen’s name.

Lia recalled the claw, the burning pain. But Kairen... "Is he injured?" she cried out. "Where is he? Is he in some other room?"

Kaelan couldn’t meet her eyes. A solitary tear slid from his eye, following the path of a white streak down his pale face. "He... he forced me to take you," he muttered. "He forced us to retreat. He remained behind, Lia. To hold them at bay. To give us time."

She glared at him, her blood cold, her mind unable to believe the words. "No."

"The entrance of the cave collapsed," Kaelan whispered, his words almost inaudible, his body shaking. "We reached the ship. But. there was an explosion. A huge, blue light. It engulfed the whole island."

He came into focus finally, his own eyes shattered with a sadness and shame she’d never believed him capable of. "Vorlag’s retrieval team... they searched. There was nothing left. Just... just a bit of his jacket. And his father’s charm."

"He’s... gone, Lia," Kaelan whispered, as his own hold slipped. "They tagged him Missing in Action. They had a funeral. He’s gone. And he... he saved us."

Lia’s world disappeared. The white ceiling, Kaelan’s guilty expression, the soft hum of the healing runes—everything shrank back into a howling, colorless nothing. No. Not Kairen. He said he would. He vowed to his mother he’d be back.

She didn’t scream. A single, shattered utterance slipped from her lips. Tears welled, spilled, and ran silently down her cheeks, wetting the pillow under her head. She gripped the sheets, her knuckles white, drinking in the entire, awful, crushing burden of Kairen’s sacrifice. The sacrifice he had made for her. For them.

Kaelan did not go away. He did not provide hollow reassurances or false promises. He simply sat, head down, suffering the exposed, wordless power of her sorrow, embracing his role in her pain as the first, slight portion of an unattainable penance.

Under Aethelgard’s twin moons, Kairen’s mind was on Lia. He stood in the clearing by the great crystal, its surface dark and quiescent. He remembered Vanamali’s warning about forcing a connection, but the faint warmth he’d felt before haunted him. What if it was real?

Vanamali had assigned him a new, seemingly easy task. He indicated a bed of the Sanctum’s special, glowing flora, the pale blue flowers shut hard in the night air.

"The Essence moves through all living," the Sage had said. "Don’t push it. Don’t control it. Nudge it. Use the harmony you’ve gained. Sense its relationship to your own energy. Let it bloom."

Kairen shut his eyes, grounding himself, seeking out the quiet he’d learned at the waterfall. He reached out with his sense, touching the damp, cool soil and the gentle, living force of the sleeping blooms. He concentrated his will—not on strength, but on communion.

On life.

He thought of Lia, directing his frantic, earnest desire for her healing into that concentration. He wanted the flower to bloom, a metaphor for her awakening.

He sensed a subtle movement, a vibration. He extended his will, softly, as a sigh.

A solitary, tightly furled bud in the patch trembled. Uncertainly, slowly, its petals spread, throbbed with a soft, fleeting flash of blue light, just in rhythm with his own calm breathing.

A tiny, breathless whoop of triumph escaped him. It worked. A small victory, but genuine.

As he maintained the concentration, relishing the sense of tender contact, the mournful whisper came back. Not as indistinct echo, but sharper than ever, almost in his ear, tinged with a tearing, icy urgency.

"Help me... Kairen... Please..."

It wasn’t the voice alone this time. A transient, broken image, keen and gory, superimposed his inner vision: Dreary, famished red eyes, unreally wide... the hooked, sinister silhouette of a black axe descending...

The vision from his oldest, darkest nightmare.

He stepped back, breaking the contact at once, gasping, his heart pounding with a cold, sudden fear. The flower’s light fell, its petals folding. The whisper was gone, but the hair-raising clarity of the visions lingered, burned into his brain.

Vanamali appeared at his side from the mists, his face solemnly serious. He had sensed the disturbance, the jarring spike of fear that had cut through Kairen’s concentration.

"Touching the web," the Sage stated, his tone low, putting a stabilizing hand on the quivering shoulder of Kairen, "stirs the spiders that spin it. The echoes."

He faced Kairen’s open, frightened eyes. "Your training is not only about mastery, Kairen," Vanamali said, his tone grave. "It is about facing the memories, the old sorrows, imprisoned in the very power you now wield. That horror is not your terror alone. It is the Essence’s."