Chapter 89 – Where Stones Remember
The wind shifted as they crossed the threshold into Southern soil.
Not with chill, but memory.
Tarn noticed it first. The trees were wrong—twisted, not by nature but by memory. Their trunks bore scars in shapes that once resembled words. Burned letters. Forgotten alphabets. The language of rebellion carved in roots.
"The forest itself doesn't want us here," he muttered.
Lysa dismounted and walked ahead alone. She moved without fear, yet every step she took seemed known—as though she had walked this path in another life. Or another war.
They found the first trap before noon.
A riderless horse, wounded and mewling, stumbled into their path. Behind it, smoke from a farmhouse still burning.
Hennel rode forward instinctively.
Too late.
A thunder-crack of twisted rope. A flash of flint. The ground exploded.
Tarn's horse reared and threw him. Caedren shielded his eyes just in time as shrapnel rained down.
When the dust cleared, the house was gone—and three silhouettes stood on the ridge above.
"Turn back, root-walker!" one called.
"Your dream died with Ivan. You wear his ghost like a crown!"
Caedren stood tall and unsheathed his blade. He did not raise it. Only pointed it to the earth.
"I do not come to rule you. I come to listen."
A spear flew.
Hennel caught it midair with his shield—but barely.
Tarn cursed. "We have to fight."
But Lysa stepped forward.
"No," she whispered. "Let me speak to them."
They let her walk alone.
The three rebels were boys. Dirty. Tired. Not killers, not truly. Just sons of lost fathers.
Lysa looked at them, and when she spoke, her voice was like winter—
Cold, precise, ancient.
"You speak of dreams dying.
But your fathers buried those dreams.
And now you dance on the grave."
One boy raised his bow. Hands shaking.
"You fight for a kingless king!" he spat.
Lysa tilted her head. Then removed her hood.
The boy's breath hitched.
"...You're the Blade of Irelyn."
"I was," she said. "Now I am only what you make of me."
They dropped their weapons.
Not out of mercy.
But fear.
By nightfall, the group had taken shelter in the ruins of a chapel half-swallowed by roots. Its altar had been scorched, the statue of the old gods decapitated.
Caedren knelt before the ruined idol. There was no reverence—only sorrow.
"We keep building new gods," he whispered. "And every one ends in ash."
Tarn sat beside him, nursing a cracked rib. "Maybe that's because we never listen to them. We just crown them. Then kill them."
Lysa sat apart, her blade unsheathed and resting across her knees.
She did not sleep.
She dreamed awake.
Far south, Lady Cireth received word of the ambush's failure.
She did not flinch.
She gathered her generals beneath the black banners.
"There will be no more warning shots," she said. "If Caedren enters Morvale, he dies."
The Remnant stood silent in the corner, shadows folding around him like wings.
Finally, he spoke.
"Killing him will only scatter his memory.
Memories, once loosed, never die."
"Then what do we do?" one of the generals asked.
The Remnant stepped into the torchlight.
His eyes were not angry.
They were grieving.
"We do not kill him.
We let him remember."
And in the Capitol, a message arrived by crow.
Short. Sealed in gold wax.
Lysa's name on it.
But no return mark.
Just a single line inside:
"You cannot outrun what you were forged to destroy."
She burned the message.
But not before memorizing every curve of the handwriting.