Chapter Nine: What the Ash Left Behind
They came down from the snowline under heavy clouds, the wind slower now, but not warmer.
Ellien had never seen so many colors before.
She had been born in a palace of ice, raised among white marble, grey stone, and pale blue glass. But here, below the Clayr’s Glacier, the world was muddy and living — full of brown woods, red stone, dead leaves, and moss clinging to everything like memory.
Maen pointed toward a shallow ridge. “That’s Nestowe valley. Three days if the roads are clear.”
“Are they?” Ellien asked.
Maen just gave her a look. The kind that didn’t answer anything.
They walked in silence for a while, boots crackling over frozen grass.
Ellien’s Sight had been quiet — too quiet — since the moment they crossed the River Rire. It felt like a blanket over her thoughts. As though the future had been cut from her, and something else had slithered in.
Turn the spiral. Open the gate. Wake the below.
The voice was not hers. Nor was it the Charter.
She hadn’t told Maen yet.
They passed a ditch by mid-morning. Maen stopped suddenly and knelt.
Ellien joined her.
“Burn marks,” Maen murmured.
There were circles in the snow. Not made by firewood or campfires, but concentric scorch lines, as if something had burst out from inside.
Ash littered the edge of the ditch. Too dark for wood. Too fine for coal.
Maen touched it and hissed. “Dead magic.”
Ellien’s chest went tight. “Is it fresh?”
“Yesterday. Maybe the day before.”
She looked around — and then noticed it:
Small footprints.
One set large and booted. The other… smaller. A child’s. One print had the distinct, sharp indent of a wooden toy dropped into snow.
“They were attacked,” Ellien whispered.
“But they survived,” Maen replied. “And they weren’t Abhorsens.”
They walked slower after that.
By the second evening, they found a barn burned black from the inside out. The animals inside had not fled. Nor had they been killed in the usual way.
They had turned to ash mid-motion, like shadows caught in firelight.
Ellien stood silently, holding her Charter marks like they were a shield. She could feel it now — a tug beneath her ribs, like something ancient and awake, pulling.
Maen watched her carefully. “What do you see?”
Ellien’s eyes clouded.
A spiral tower. A boy holding a dog carved from starlight.
A girl walking into a field and never turning back.
The Ash Man bending to kiss the ground.
The world blinking.
The Cairn blinking back.
She blinked hard and nearly fell over.
Maen caught her. “Easy.”
“We need to move faster,” Ellien said.
“Toward the cairn?”
Ellien nodded, eyes flaring briefly with golden light. “Toward the boy. I think he’s… not like the others.”
“Not Abhorsen?”
“No,” she whispered. “But close. Or something else entirely.”
As they moved onward into the darkening woods, neither saw the grey moth watching them from the trees, its wings lined with writhing ink.
It fluttered once and vanished into shadow.