The air in the healer's tent was a stagnant brew, thick with the cloying scent of crushed yarrow, the sharp tang of burnt thyme, and the underlying, sickly-sweet odor of a body slowly losing its war for existence. It was a silence that pressed down on the ears, broken only by the ragged, irregular rhythm of Ciski's breathing. Each inhalation was a shallow, desperate gasp, a faint protest against the darkness steadily claiming her. The black veins, like spilled ink seeping through parchment, had spread from the crossbow wound, mapping a continent of decay across her neck and chest. She was a statue of fading life, and Retour stood before her, a monument to his own profound helplessness.
The victory at Elaron felt like a cruel joke, a prize won in a game whose rules had suddenly changed. He had felt the power to unmake stone and steel, to erase men from existence, thrumming in his very blood. Yet before this delicate, biological treachery, he was as powerless as the day he'd fled the ruins of his home. The mist coiled within him, a restless serpent, but it had no answer for this. Its language was annihilation, not healing.
The tent flap rustled, a sound like dry bones shaking. Ile entered, his posture slumped, his usually pristine scholar's robes smudged with soot and something darker that might have been blood. He moved with the grim purpose of a pallbearer. In his hands, he carried not the majestic Red Codex, but a collection of wounded parchment fragments, their edges charred, their surfaces scarred by their narrow escape from the fire. He arranged them on a small, scarred table with the reverence of one assembling a corpse.
"It is not a poison," Ile stated. His voice was flat, drained of all academic curiosity, leaving only a hollow core of dread. The words fell into the heavy silence like stones into a deep well. "It is a key. A precise and monstrous key, crafted for a single, terrible lock."
He used a sliver of charred wood from the Codex's binding to point at the largest surviving fragment. The diagram was unnerving, its symbolism esoteric and alien. It showed two figures in a state of violent, intimate merger. One was a being of pure, woven light, representing the soul of Asterfell, the land itself—ancient, vast, and eternal. The other was a detailed human form, shadowed and complex, the mortal king. They were not simply joined; their essences were interpenetrating, their boundaries dissolving to create a new, singular entity that was both and neither, something that transcended the definitions of 'man' or 'spirit'.
"The first king's pact," Ile began, his voice gaining a sliver of its old lecturing tone, now twisted into something funereal, "was never the simple act of tapping a ley line that the bards' songs suggest. It was an attempt at apotheosis. A desperate, arrogant gambit to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between the ephemeral stuff of mortal flesh and the timeless, undying consciousness of the kingdom itself. He did not want to be a steward of the land; he wanted to become it. To make the ruler a perfect vessel—as enduring as the bedrock, as unyielding as the finality that claims all lesser things."
Ile finally looked up from the fragments, and the raw, unvarnished horror in his eyes was more terrifying to Retour than any battlefield. "He failed. The ambition was too great, the methodology fatally flawed. He achieved only the binding, a parasitic, unstable connection. The Red Mist you carry is the living symptom of that glorious, catastrophic failure. It is the land's raw, immortal, and untamable essence, forever corrosive to the mortal vessel that contains it, precisely because the vessel was never meant to be only mortal. You are a wineskin trying to hold the ocean. The mist is the ocean's constant, furious pressure, and your humanity is the leak."
He then carefully shifted another, smaller fragment. This one was no less complex, but its message was brutally direct. It depicted a crowned figure, its features rendered with a serene and terrible ambiguity. One of its hands was outstretched in a casual, almost dismissive gesture. From its fingertips, a wave of invisible force radiated outwards. On one side, a line of armored soldiers was caught in this wave. They did not fall; they disintegrated. Their forms unraveled into clouds of fine, grey ash, their existence revoked in the space between one heartbeat and the next. On the other side of the image, other figures—the recently slain—were stirring. Their mortal wounds, gaping and fatal moments before, were sealing over without scar or blemish, as if the injury had been a mere illusion. Their eyes opened, but they held no relief, only a vacant, unquestioning obedience.
"Rotard," Ile said, spitting the name like a mouthful of poison, "does not want to steal your curse, Retour. He is not a common thief. He is a... completionist. He sees the flaw in the first king's design, and he believes he holds the blueprint to fix it. His ritual is not an act of theft, but of forced perfection. He intends to complete the merger, to slam shut the door the first king left agonizingly ajar. You will become the living, breathing soul of Asterfell. Not its king. Its eternal, unassailable heart. A being for whom the grave holds no dominion, because you would command the gate. Death would not be your end, but a servant awaiting your order."
The explanation did not feel like a shocking revelation, but like a final, sickening piece of a puzzle slotting into place. It resonated with a deep, instinctual dread Retour had carried since the mist first stirred within him. His "curse" was not some random affliction; it was a state of profound, cosmic incompletion. A divine instrument, monstrous and beautiful, missing its final, world-shattering string. The immortality Rotard offered was not a reward; it was the ultimate, horrifying culmination of his bloodline's sin.
"He isn't trying to kill me," Retour whispered, the truth a cold stone in his belly. The reality was far more insidious. "He's trying to... finalize me. To finish the sculpture the first king left half-hewn."
"To a state from which there is no return, and no possibility of defiance," Ile confirmed, his voice dropping to a whisper that seemed to absorb the very light in the tent. "The texts name the authority of this perfected state the 'Sovereign's Final Decree'—the absolute right of the perfected ruler over the transition from is to is-not within the boundaries of the domain they embody. To unmake a life with a thought, as easily as one dismisses a thought. To deny the ending its due, to tell the reaper to wait indefinitely, to reverse his work with a whim." His gaze, heavy with a grief that was both personal and vast, returned to Ciski's tortured, suspended form. "That... stasis holding her on this terrible threshold, preventing her from either healing or finding peace in death... it is a demonstration. A cruel, precise sample of the power he wields and now dangles before you. It is the power to command death itself to stand aside. And the first, most terrible lesson is that such a command never comes for free. The cost is always a piece of the soul that dares to give it."