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 Heart of Truth at the base of the tree softened to a gentle, constant glow. Stripped of his borrowed nightmares, Kurov was just a man in plain, dark steel, pitted and scarred from battles he had actually fought. The power he had stolen, the horrors he had worn as a shield, were gone. He was no longer a void. He was visible.
He stood alone at the edge of the clearing, ten meters from where Sineus knelt. The warlord’s face, once a mask of cold command, was now twisted with a raw, animal fury. The loss of his power had not broken him. It had uncaged him. He was a predator stripped of its camouflage, left with only its teeth.
— You, — Kurov snarled, the word a piece of gravel torn from his throat. He drew a dagger from his belt. It was a simple weapon, its blade short and practical. A tool for cutting throats in an alley, not for unmaking worlds. He lunged.
— Knyaz! — Fedor’s warning shout was a crack of thunder in the quiet grove. The big warrior started to move, his axe coming up, but he was too far away.
Levan Dadiani, his face a mask of pain and newfound clarity, took a single, solid step to place himself before the unconscious form of Kira Zaytseva. He was a shield again, but a shield forged of truth, not pride.
Sineus did not move. He rose from his knees, turning to face the charge. He did not draw a weapon. He did not brace for the impact. The man rushing toward him was a storm of simple, physical violence. Sineus would not meet it with steel. He would meet it with memory.
He reached out his hand, palm open, not to block the blow, but to give a gift.
As Kurov closed the distance, his face contorted in a final, desperate snarl, Sineus focused his will. He did not search for a memory of honor to reframe the man’s hate. He did not look for a wound to mend. He reached past the warlord, past the thief of histories, past the man in scarred armor. He reached back through the years of lies and stolen power, to the one memory Kurov had spent his entire life trying to cut from himself. The one memory he could not steal, only bury.
Sineus found it. A small, pathetic thing, shivering in the deepest, darkest cellar of the man’s soul. He gripped it with his mind. And he gave it back.
The act was a release, a final push. A spike of pain shot through Sineus’s own skull, and the world swam for a second. The taste of cold iron filled his mouth.
Kurov was a meter away, the dagger raised to strike. He froze. The snarl on his face slackened. The dagger slipped from his fingers and fell into the soft, dark soil with a dull thud. His eyes, which had held the cold certainty of a god, widened with a very human horror.
The memory hit him. Not as a whisper, but as a physical blow. He was no longer in the grove. He was a boy of ten, small and thin, standing in a muddy village square. He was surrounded by the laughter of bigger boys. He felt the sting of a thrown rock against his cheek. He smelled the sour stench of his own fear. He heard his father’s voice, not a warlord’s command, but a drunkard’s slur, calling him weak. Useless. A shame.
The entire constructed identity of Kurov, the invincible warlord, the master of despair, imploded. The man who had worn the agony of nations as a cloak could not bear the weight of his own small, pathetic shame. He staggered back, his hands flying to his face as if to claw the memory away. A choked, broken sound escaped his lips. It was the sound of a boy weeping.
— No, — he whispered.
Sineus watched, his face grim. He saw the change not just on the man, but in the world around him. In the Pod-sloy, the ghostly layer of the past, Kurov had always been a blind spot, a hole shielded by his stolen pain. Now, that shield was gone. The man was just a man, full of ordinary, miserable memories.
And the Echoing Blight, for the first time, could see him.
It was no longer a distant wall of fog on the horizon. A single, curious tendril of grey mist, thick as a man’s arm, detached from the distant mass. It slid through the trees of the grove, silent and purposeful. It did not disturb a single leaf. It was not a physical thing. It was a question mark made of oblivion.
The tendril stopped a few feet from the broken man. It seemed to study him, to taste the scent of his fear, his shame, his sudden, profound weakness. It had found a flaw. It had found a man.
Kurov looked up from his hands, his eyes wide with the terror of a child seeing a monster in the dark. He saw the tendril of grey fog. He opened his mouth to scream.
No sound came out.
The fog enveloped him. It did not burn him or tear him apart. It simply touched him, and where it touched, he began to unmake. His steel armor frayed at the edges, turning translucent like sun-worn glass. His hands, his face, the very substance of him dissolved into a smooth, edgeless void. He was being erased, not with a blade, but with the quiet, absolute logic of forgetting.
In three seconds, he was gone. The tendril of fog lingered for a moment, then retracted, melting back into the distant, grey wall.
The quiet in the grove was absolute.
The ritual was complete. The Heart of Truth, nestled in the earth, pulsed one last time, brighter than before. A shimmering wave of pure, unfiltered memory expanded from the grove. It was not light or sound. It was a wave of knowing. It passed through Sineus, a torrent of truth that was both painful and clean. It washed over his companions. It swept out from the grove, across the forests, over the mountains and plains, a silent tide of remembrance washing over the entire world.
Sineus turned his gaze south, toward the horizon. The great, churning wall of the Echoing Blight, the creeping doom that had defined his entire life, shuddered. Its relentless advance stopped. Then, slowly, impossibly, it began to recede.
The air in the grove was still and cool, carrying the clean scent of moss and damp earth. The soft, pulsing light from the base of the great tree settled into a steady, gentle glow.
The world was saved. But now, it had to remember.
