Sineus ignored the warlord’s claim. He knelt in the damp, rich soil of the Sacred Grove, the quiet of the ancient place a shield against the man’s voice. His only duty was to the seed in his hand. With deliberate care, he placed the Heart of Truth into the small hollow he had dug at the base of the oldest tree. The polished stone settled into the dark earth. The ritual had begun.
For a moment, nothing happened. The dappled sunlight shifted through the canopy. A leaf fell. Then, the Heart of Truth began to glow. It was not a harsh light, but a soft, internal pulse, like a slow and steady heartbeat waking from a long sleep. The light spread from the seed, not into the air, but through the ground, a wave of pale luminescence that illuminated the network of roots beneath the soil.
The light touched the base of the great tree, and the hum Sineus felt in the Pod-sloy deepened, becoming a resonant chord. The grove was acknowledging the seed. The light continued to spread, a silent question asked of the world. It washed over Sineus, over Alani, over the unconscious form of Kira. It reached the edge of the clearing where Fedor stood guard. Finally, it touched the steel boots of Rostislav Kurov.
The warlord’s armor of stolen despair flinched—a reaction of pure, metaphysical disgust. The shimmering layers of agony that clung to his steel writhed as if splashed with acid. The Heart of Truth was not a weapon of force. It was an instrument of order. It was asking for every memory to return to its rightful place.
— What is this trick? — Kurov snarled, taking an involuntary step back. His voice held a tremor of uncertainty for the first time.
The light from the seed pulsed brighter. It was calling.
A greasy, flickering film of memory tore itself from Kurov’s left pauldron. Sineus saw it all with perfect, sickening clarity. He saw images of blood on mountain snow, of a brother’s blade turning on a brother, of oaths broken and honor shattered. The raw, undiluted agony of the Kinslayer War, the foundational shame of the Khevsur, ripped free from the warlord’s armor.
It was not a whisper or a ghost. It was a missile of pure pain. It shot across the clearing, a streak of black agony, and slammed into Levan Dadiani.
The Khevsur warrior did not stagger. He was thrown from his feet as if struck by a battering ram. He landed hard on his back, a single, guttural cry of absolute horror torn from his throat. It was the sound of a man’s soul being flayed. He curled on the ground, his hands clawing at his temples, his body convulsing as a generation of his people’s buried shame flooded his mind in a single, brutal instant.
— Knyaz, what is happening? — Fedor’s voice was tight, his axe held ready. He did not understand what he was seeing, but he knew it was an attack.
Sineus was already moving. He crossed the clearing in three long strides and knelt beside the writhing Khevsur. He placed a firm hand on Levan’s shoulder, not to comfort, but to anchor. He could feel the storm of agony raging through the man, the chaos of a thousand betrayals screaming for release.
— A memory is a lesson, not just a wound, — Sineus said, his voice low and steady. He focused his will, not cutting the memory, but gripping it. He did not try to lessen the pain. He forced Levan to see past it. He wove into the chaos the memory of the survivors, the memory of the clans rebuilding, the memory of the new oaths forged from the ashes of the old. He showed him the strength that had grown from the wound.
Levan’s convulsions slowed. His ragged gasps evened out. He pushed himself onto his hands and knees, his head bowed. Sweat and tears dripped from his face onto the dark soil. The pain was still there, a terrible, burning weight in his eyes. But beneath it, a new foundation was settling. The foundation of a truth faced, not a lie hidden.
He slowly, painfully, got to one knee. Then to his feet. He looked at Sineus, his face a mask of terrible, newfound strength.
The process, once started, could not be stopped. A layer of spectral frost, the memory of a northern famine, peeled away from Kurov’s gauntlets. It did not fly to one person, but dissolved into the air, a cold sigh returning to the collective memory of the northern lands. Sineus felt a distant echo of it, a phantom chill, a shared burden his own people in Belogorod would now have to remember.
— It is returning, — Alani whispered from across the clearing. Her hand was pressed to the old wound on her arm.
The thorny shadows of a blight-scourge, the memory of her people’s greatest terror, unraveled from around Kurov’s greaves. The wave of fear washed over Alani. She braced herself, her knuckles white where she gripped the bark of a tree, but she did not fall. She met the returning pain with a grim acceptance. It was hers. It was her people’s. It was not a monster’s shield.
Kurov stumbled backward, his hands grasping at his chest as his armor of lies came apart. The stolen memories were abandoning him, answering the call of the Heart of Truth. The betrayals of the Golden Road Consortium, the despair of forgotten border towns, the shame of fallen lords—all of it bled from his armor in streams of shadow and greasy light, returning to the world.
His armor, once a terrifying tapestry of despair, was now just plain, dark steel, pitted and scarred. The power he had stolen, the horrors he had worn as a shield, were gone.
The quiet of the grove returned. It was a different quiet now, heavier, filled with the weight of remembered truths.
The air was cool and smelled of damp earth. The light from the seed at the base of the tree softened to a gentle, constant glow.
Stripped of his borrowed nightmares, Kurov was just a man. And he was no longer invisible.
