CHAPTER 83: THE RETURN

Snow clung to the edges of Leon’s cloak as the wind met him again, this time on the open path descending from the monastery ridge. The sky above was bruised with the hue of a world still waking from memory, pale light stretching across the valley. Birds had returned. The silence of the mountain was broken only by the steady crunch of footfalls behind him.

Elena followed, her blade sheathed but her guard never dropped. Though they had left the chamber, neither of them had truly left what had transpired. The light might have faded, but the weight of the Eye’s mark still pulsed faintly on Leon’s palm.

At the ridge’s edge, they paused.

Below, like a scar carved into the valley, lay the remnants of the battle site. Burnt earth. Fallen banners. Tents torn as if by claws or storm. And scattered amongst the ruin—bodies. Some theirs. Some not.

Leon knelt.

A soldier’s hand stuck from beneath a shattered pillar. He brushed snow from the face beneath it.

Joran.

The young man who’d once stood guard outside Cohort Seven’s gate. Who had shared dry bread and restless laughter.

Elena stood silently beside him.

Leon closed Joran’s eyes. He did not speak. Instead, he drew the edge of his cloak and placed it over the body.

"It wasn’t just the Eye," Elena said softly. "This place... it draws endings."

"And beginnings."

Leon stood. His grip around the sword tightened.

The path down was longer than he remembered. They passed stone cairns and half-melted glyphs, old signs of a world that had always known ruin. But now, there was something new rising with the light: firelight, smoke—and the faint sound of hammering.

Stonewake had begun to rebuild.

When they reached the outer walls, the guards lowered their weapons with a gasp.

"Lord Thorne?" one stammered. "You’re alive?"

Leon didn’t answer.

He walked past them.

The village within had changed. Tents were replaced with beams. Fires were lit with purpose. Survivors moved like they had something to live for, not just endure. Yet when they saw him, silence fell.

A child ran forward. The same girl who had held a splintered doll during the evacuation.

"Did you find it?" she asked.

Leon paused.

"Not it," he said. "But a way forward."

The people began to gather, eyes filled with quiet questions.

He faced them, not as a noble, not as a witness—but as the one who had gone beyond the mirror and returned.

"The Eye still watches. The seals are breaking. We have time. Not much. But enough."

Elena stepped to his side.

"Stonewake doesn’t stand alone."

And in the hush that followed, something shifted.

Resolve.

And from above, the wind carried a sound they had not heard in days:

Drums.

Distant.

Approaching.

Leon looked toward the east, past the edge of the valley.

The real war hadn’t started yet.

But it was coming.

—

They gathered in the longhall before nightfall.

The fire crackled low, heat soaked deep into stone that had once been blackened by siege. The elders of Stonewake sat at the table’s edge—some wrapped in old militia cloaks, others in healer’s garb stained from too many wounds tended in silence. Even the children kept close, not for fear, but for what the firelight in Leon’s eyes might promise.

Elena stood against the wall, arms crossed, her gaze never straying far from the entrance.

Leon placed the sword—his sword—upon the table.

No flourish. No claim.

Just metal and meaning.

"It isn’t prophecy that binds us anymore," he began. "And it’s not the Eye that decides what comes next. It’s us."

They listened. Not as peasants to a lord, but as people to a man who had walked through death and come back with the truth, not glory.

"There are six seals. One is broken. Five remain." His voice didn’t rise, but the hall held its breath. "Each one will try to twist the world—bend it to what it fears, or what it wants."

An older woman—Maera, the apothecary who had lost her sons at Dreadshade Hollow—raised her chin. "And the child? The one they say sings in dreams?"

Leon nodded slowly. "She’s not a weapon. She’s not salvation. She’s a voice. One that was buried before it ever had the chance to speak."

"And the blade?" one of the younger men asked.

Leon glanced at it. "It simply remembers. That’s all. And that’s enough."

A hush followed. Then chairs scraped, boots shifted. No one clapped. No one cheered.

But someone lit a second torch.

Then a third.

And then the forge bell rang.

—

That night, they dug graves—not for mourning, but for honour. No pyres, no rites from distant cities. Just the earth, the names they still remembered, and silence.

Leon helped lower Joran into the ground with his own hands.

Elena didn’t stop him.

She just stayed beside him.

And when the last of the graves was covered, when the moon sat silver and high, Leon stood at the edge of the burial ground, his cloak swept back by the valley wind.

He spoke to no one.

But his voice carried all the same.

"Whatever comes next... I won’t bury this alone."

And as if in answer, the mountain breathed.

A low, slow rumble—distant, beneath the stone.

A calling.

The next seal had begun to stir.

—

By dawn, the scouts returned.

Three riders—dust-bitten, their cloaks stiff with frost—rode through Stonewake’s gate without need of signal. One dismounted before the longhall, his expression tight, and handed Leon a torn scrap of canvas dyed with a sigil they hadn’t seen in years.

A broken wheel wreathed in ivy.

Elena narrowed her eyes. "Velgrin’s mark."

Leon didn’t need to confirm it.

Velgrin, the eastern warhold once believed buried beneath the old wars, had not only survived—it had moved. Or something within it had. The Eye’s rupture had stirred more than ghosts.

"They’ve taken the outer barrows," the scout said. "Raised black banners. No heralds. No demands. Just silence. But it’s not the silence of peace."

Leon folded the cloth and slipped it into his cloak. "How many days?"

"Three, if they march. Less, if they ride."

A murmur stirred the courtyard. The forge bell had stopped ringing.

Inside the longhall, Maera was already boiling herbs over the central hearth. Children carried buckets. The hunters checked fletching by instinct, not order. The village had no walls worth naming, no standing army—but it had memory, and it had Leon.

He watched it all and knew what had to follow.

"We won’t meet them here," he said.

Heads turned.

"We draw them north. Away from the basin. Toward the Hollow."

Elena tilted her head. "Where the second seal lies."

Leon nodded. "If war is coming, we’ll meet it at the mouth of its cause."

—

They left by midday.

Only fifty rode with him.

Not the best fighters. Not the most trained.

But those who had stood when it mattered.

Farmers with woodcut axes. A smith who hadn’t raised a blade since the rebellion. Elena walked beside them all, her cloak shadowing the sun on their backs.

The route curved along the ridgeline. Snow began to fall again—not harsh, but steady. It masked their footprints, like the mountain itself wished them unseen. Beneath the stillness, the rumble they had heard the night before returned.

Faint. Rhythmic.

The seal was breathing.

Leon’s hand drifted to his side where the blade hung loose now, as if it, too, were listening.

Night approached fast in those lands.

When the fires were lit and tents raised in a sparse grove near the Hollow’s lip, no one asked for stories. They sat together, sharing warmth, not words.

Elena remained outside the ring of firelight, watching the trees.

Leon joined her.

"They’ll come by the old pass," she said.

"And when they do, they’ll expect fear."

Elena turned to him, her breath fogging the air. "And what will we give them?"

Leon looked past the trees to the Hollow’s dark mouth.

"Death," he said. "And fire."

The wind stirred the pine needles above them, scattering frost.

From the Hollow’s edge, a single raven took flight.

It simply watched.

And then it flew east, into the storm.