Sineus followed, the choice a cold weight in his gut. The two guides from the Golden Road Consortium, the men Timur Makhmudov called the Silent, fell into formation without a word. One rode twenty meters ahead, a stark silhouette against the pale grass. The other fell in behind Fedor, his presence a constant, quiet pressure. They moved with an unsettling economy of motion, their faces blank, their eyes fixed on the horizon.
The transition was gradual, then sudden. The sea of grass grew thin, revealing patches of dry, cracked earth. The soil changed color from rich brown to a sickly grey. The wind, which had been a constant companion on the steppes, died completely. A profound stillness fell over the land, a silence so deep it felt like a sound in itself.
“The air is wrong,” Alani whispered. She rode closer to Sineus, her good hand resting on her saddle horn. The bandage on her left arm was a stark white against the simple hides she wore.
Fedor grunted in agreement. The captain of his guard had his axe off his shoulder now, holding it loosely in one hand. His eyes, accustomed to the open plains, narrowed as they scanned the broken terrain ahead. He did not like the blind corners and sudden dips in the land.
They entered the first valley. It was a shallow cut between low, rolling hills that looked like knuckles on a buried hand. The rocks were not the clean granite of the north. They were a porous, dark stone, stained with patches of greasy, grey lichen. The stuff grew in unnatural patterns, like spreading bruises.
Sineus felt the change in the Pod-sloy. The ghostly overlay of the past was thin here, frayed. He saw no clear echoes of men or animals, only faint, twisted smudges of fear. The memory of a panicked deer, the final terror of a snake caught by a hawk. These small agonies clung to the rocks, refusing to fade.
The cold deepened. It was not the clean, sharp cold of a northern winter. It was a damp, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature. It felt like standing near a wet cellar wall, a cold that seeped into the bones.
The guide in front raised a hand, and the small party halted. He pointed toward the valley floor. A stream had once run there. Now, the creek bed was bone dry, filled with a fine, grey powder that looked like ash. Nothing grew along its banks.
“The ground is dead here,” Alani said, her voice barely audible. “It has forgotten how to be earth.”
Fedor’s gaze swept the ridgelines. “I don’t like this. We’re exposed.”
“We keep moving,” Sineus ordered, his voice low and steady. He urged his horse forward, past the silent guide. The man did not react, simply falling back into position as Sineus took the lead. The Knyaz needed to feel the path for himself.
The ache behind his eyes, a constant companion since leaving Belogorod, sharpened. The Echoing Blight was no longer a distant stain on the horizon. They were in it. Not the churning wall of absolute unmaking, but the lands it had sickened. The borderlands of oblivion.
He could feel it as a pressure, a low thrum that vibrated in his teeth. The whispers were louder here. Not words, but the shredded edges of them. Fragments of forgotten prayers, a child’s cry, a lover’s promise—all torn and mixed into a meaningless, sorrowful hiss at the very edge of hearing.
The valley narrowed, the grey-stained walls rising on either side. The silence was absolute. No birds, no insects. The only sounds were the soft tread of their horses’ hooves in the grey dust and the whisper of their own breathing.
Then, a new sound.
It was a low, wet tearing. It came not from one direction, but from everywhere at once. The guide in front stopped dead, his head snapping up toward the western ridge.
Sineus looked. The grey lichen on the rocks was moving. It pulsed, a slow, sickening rhythm, and began to ooze a thin, black fluid. The fluid ran down the rock faces in thick, oily streams. It did not drip. It flowed.
“What is that?” Fedor demanded, his horse sidling nervously.
Before Sineus could answer, the flow quickened. From every crack and fissure in the hills, the blackness poured forth. It was not a fog. It was a liquid shadow, a sentient tide of forgotten things. It moved with a horrifying purpose, a river of despair flooding the valley floor.
Within the churning darkness, Sineus saw them. Faces. Thousands of them, appearing and vanishing in an instant. A face contorted in a silent scream, the slack-jawed face of a famine victim, the wide, terrified eyes of a soldier facing a rout. They were not ghosts. They were the raw stuff of memory, stripped of context and peace.
“Turn back!” Alani cried out, her voice sharp with psychic pain. She clutched her head, her knuckles white. The sheer volume of agony in the approaching tide was overwhelming her.
But there was nowhere to turn. The black flood was pouring down the slopes behind them as well, cutting off their retreat. The two silent guides drew their swords, their blank faces for the first time showing a flicker of something. Not fear. Resignation. They had seen this before.
“Knyaz, to me!” Fedor shouted. He spurred his horse to Sineus’s side, raising his heavy round shield. The steel glinted in the dim, hazy light. He planted himself between Sineus and the advancing darkness, a bulwark of northern iron.
The tide of shadows did not slow. It was a hundred meters away, then fifty, then ten. It made no sound but that constant, wet tearing, the sound of reality coming apart at the seams.
It hit them.
The darkness was cold, a shocking, absolute cold that stole the breath. But it had no substance. It flowed around Fedor’s shield like water around a stone. It passed through his horse, which screamed and reared. It washed over Sineus, a non-physical wave of pure misery.
For a heartbeat, he was drowning in the memories of a thousand strangers. The pain of a broken leg, the shame of a lie, the grief of a lost child. It was a violation, a force-fed meal of human suffering.
The storm of memory ignored Fedor. It paid no mind to the guides, who stood frozen, their swords held uselessly. It swirled past Alani, who had slumped forward in her saddle, overwhelmed.
It did not pass Sineus.
The liquid shadow converged on him. The tide did not wash over him and move on; it stopped, swirling around him in a tight, suffocating vortex. The screaming faces in the darkness turned toward him. The whispers at the edge of his hearing focused, coalescing into a single, piercing thought that was not his own.
You.
The Blight was not attacking him. It was not trying to kill him. It was drawn to him. His sight, his ability to perceive the Pod-sloy without a lens or a blade, made him an anomaly. A light in the endless grey. A point of order in its chaos.
He was a contradiction it could not resolve.
