The interior of the cabin grew heavy with the suffocating warmth of the hearth as night swallowed the limestone ridge. Outside, the frozen wind clawed at the logs like starving fingers, but inside, the air stagnated into a thick reek of salted grease, old tallow, and dying pine.
Tucked away in the shadowed corner of the room, Ronan sat hunched over a rough wooden shelf that held Fergus's meager collection of salvage. By the dying, flickering embers, his calloused fingertips traced cracked leather spines and yellowed, grease-stained parchment. Most of it was illegible, dense, scrawled notations and dead languages that looked like scratches left by claws. But interspersed among the rot were texts written in the jagged, severe strokes of old Gothic, the exact script carved into the crude wooden markers over his mother and father's shallow graves.
He sounded the words out in a silent, hollow cadence. Histories of kingdoms devoured by the ash-tides; records of wars where thousands died nameless in the mud; and wild, bleeding myths of sun-drenched lands far across the southern sea, places that sounded less like reality and more like dying fever dreams.
The weight of the past week pressed down on his skull. His eyelids grew heavy, his vision blurring until the dark lines of text dissolved into swirling expanses of ash, black oceans, and distant, unreachable horizons. With his head resting awkwardly against a stack of rotting folios, Ronan surrendered to a deep, dreamless exhaustion.
Across the room, old Fergus sat motionless by the fire, a weather-beaten parchment scroll unrolled across his scarred knees. He stared into the ink with pale, tired eyes, tracing lines that spoke of ruined frontiers and debt collected in blood.
From the opposite side of the hearth, Mordren’s dark, fathomless gaze lifted from a whetstone. The dark elf stared at the sleeping, defenseless human boy for a long, calculating moment before shifting his cold obsidian eyes back to Fergus.
"So you taught him your little trick," Mordren said, his voice a low, gravelly hiss that barely stirred the air. "You know that path is tethered to the gallows. Every step of Faelun is paid for in shortening breath and broken fate."
Fergus did not look up from the scroll. He gave a slow, indifferent shrug, his calloused thumb casually smudging a line of ink.
"Fates are cheap out here on the rim," Fergus muttered, his voice like grinding stones. "Most of them end in a shallow trench behind a burning barn anyway."
Old Fergus rolled the parchment shut with a dry snap, tossing it aside onto the timber floor. He stared into the dying coals, the orange light carving deep, brutal lines into his weathered face.
"I'll be riding south next month," Fergus said flatly. "A contract with the Guild. Blood-money errand. I won't be back for two, maybe three moons."
Mordren tilted his head, his pale white hair falling forward over his bruised-slate collarbone. "You want me to watch the carcass?"
"Nah," Fergus grunted, rising stiffly from his stool and cracking his aching joints. He cast a sideways glance at Ronan, who shivered faintly in his sleep against the pile of books. "Keep him breathing. And if he survives the cold... try teaching him your blade technique. Just the baseline. The ugly stuff."
Fergus spat into the ash, his eyes narrowing into cold, unyielding slits.
"Let us see if the boy has the stomach to carve a path through this wasteland, or if he's just another ghost waiting for the dark."