Chương 100: Burdens

Vera's Resonance surged up on instinct. It barely made it past her skin before it stuttered, frayed, and shredded into pale tatters. The silence around her pressed in harder. Her expression tightened. She knew this silence. It wasn't of House Hollow or the familiar hush that could come with her own Resonance. This was the empty silence she'd fought on the front lines beside the Covenant's forces. That almost devouring quiet drawn from the Forgotten Throne known as The Silence Between.

Back then, her Resonance had crushed the scraps of Silence wielded by Unraveled easily enough, but what surrounded her now wasn't scraps. This was the thing itself. Or close enough. It felt like she had been dropped into the Silence's own throat, caught somewhere in the folds between existence. In front of her was a literal nothingness, stretching forever. Even then, something was looking at her. It wasn't a person. Not a god or even an aspect either. She'd felt those before, and this was clearly different.

It didn't feel like the Graven Daughter either, alien as that thing had been. Instead, Vera might have gone so far as to call it a mindless force. A power of some ancient, warped nature. One that pulled toward her specifically. She closed her eyes, steadying her breaths into slow, even pulls. Then she simply waited. She felt her sense of self start to blur at the edges, slowly thinning as not even her body could endure the nothingness closing around it. Her fingers went numb, then her hands.

The sigil-scars etched into the skin of her hands and arms burned as the connection to what they represented was eroded, but the pain only made the absence of her fading limbs sharper. The Silence meant to fully erase Vera, and her main weapon—her Resonance—had no way to contend with it outright. Soon enough, it would be all over. There was a shift. For one instant, Vera lived inside grief. She remembered countless sorrows that lingered and welled up inside her, unresolved and maybe not even her own.

Her identity hung in a stillness of loss that wouldn't end. Then the Silence blanketing her was gone. The grief faded. She opened her eyes again, and now she was staring out at an ocean of faintly white nothing that she was no longer part of. Below, stretching in a vast expanse, lay a field of ash split through with fractures. It was from one of those very fractures that the emptiness of the Silence seeped upward. Vera took the sight in for a moment, then she glanced down at her own body.

She drew at the memory of herself. From a distant place, a power answered, and the shape of her fingers, her sigil-scars, and her limbs came back into their proper places as pale Resonance diffused through her entire being. Her gaze lifted again, focusing on the manifestation of the Silence. If she hadn't undertaken the Rite of Stillness back in Marrowfen, she would have been dead now. Without a doubt. What had pulled her out just now was the power of He Who Sleeps Without Name.

The Unremembered One, hidden under Marrowfen. She was connected to him because of her role as Chosen. Suddenly, Vera felt another pull at her, but softer this time. She recognized it as a thread of House Veilborn's Resonance. It was the Resonance of the Glassway, searching for her after losing its hold. She let it take her. There wasn't anything she could do about the Silence here. What restrained it had already broken, and that wasn't the kind of thing where you just slapped the lid back on the jar.

But she would have to come for it eventually. That was part of what she had accepted when agreeing to remember her role as Chosen. Shards like dark glass gathered out of the House Veilborn Resonance and closed around her, forming a narrow shell. Vera pressed a palm to the dark surface, feeling its faint vibration. Then there was a dull crack that sounded from the glass, and a strange warmth pressed against her palm through it. Vera's brow furrowed.

She leaned closer, and her Resonance moved, helping her peer through the dark pane. Her gaze caught on a dark, undefined figure floating outside it, one hand pressed against the place where her hand was. Vera's eyes narrowed. This wasn't the Silence. It was one of the things that had escaped from the other fractures below. Those were also her responsibility now. The figure seemed to meet her gaze. She could have sworn it smirked. The glass shell around her collapsed inward, and Vera's world changed again.

The next second, light assaulted her eyes as her foot hit empty air, and she stumbled off a short ledge, hands flinging out to the sides as she barely managed to recover her balance. In front of her was an annoyed-looking Yria, arms crossed. The woman freed one hand and signed. I said three breaths. What took you? Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Vera looked past her, taking in their new surroundings.

They were near the edge of a broad overhang in a mountainside, above a deep gorge where a river rushed through the stone far below. Dense growth covered the cliff faces, thick-rooted vines, tangled bramble, and wide outcroppings breaking the walls into natural paths and staggered ledges. Some jutted into terraces like the one beneath their feet, while others linked one stretch of the gorge to the next, forming a winding vertical maze.

Above and below, large birds rode the updrafts between the cliffs, their calls carrying on the wind like thin, bending whistles. This was the Kestrel Gorge, then. If she remembered correctly, they could follow it through a good stretch of the Ashen Spine to reach Darnelle. Vera looked back at Yria, eyeing her for a few seconds. Then she smiled.

"Whoops. Did we say three? I must've had something in my eye, because I could've sworn I saw you sign three hundred." Yria watched her. Finally, she turned. Let's go. The woman drew her sword and opened a Hollow Reach tear, stepping through it without waiting for Vera. Vera's smile gradually faded. She glanced back, seeing nothing there but a tiny ledge and bare ground, then moved to follow.

Vera opened her eyes and stared up at the tent roof, letting out a tired, irritated sigh that barely covered a fraction of her mood. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the dark, the tiny crosshatched threads of the canvas sharpening into focus, and she started counting them out of sheer boredom. Turns out, that was even more boring. She lifted a hand to her forehead, pressing her palm against her skin before dragging it through her hair and sitting up on the bedroll. The quilt slid down to her waist.

A chill brushed over both her exposed arms, but she welcomed the cold and the brief clarity it brought, chasing away the thin, useless tiredness she had spent hours trying to build. With a small flare of Resonance that moved through her body like cinders catching in dry grass, the rest of her exhaustion was burned away for now. She shoved the quilt aside and rose, bending her head so she wouldn't hit the tent roof, then stepped over to the exit and pushed the flap open, breathing in the fresh outside air.

It was even colder here, but she ignored it as she headed toward the low fire burning a short distance from the tent, stretching her neck as she walked. They'd made good progress throughout the day as they moved through Kestrel Gorge, which stretched north for a frankly unreasonable distance.

Vera had been wondering why Yria had them running so much earlier in the day, but she'd realized the woman had deliberately held back on how much they used Hollow Reach until they reached the gorge, where traveling by foot became much harder. Vera wasn't sure how many Hollow Reaches they had both invoked throughout the evening, but it had been enough that it might count as some sort of record. They had kept them mostly short-range, though.

The Mark didn't scale with distance too efficiently, and Vera had already drained herself dry yesterday. Unless she wanted to dose herself full of Echophials just to stay upright—and truly make this journey an exercise in misery—it was better if they kept it to a more reasonable pace. Even then, Vera wouldn't be surprised if they arrived at Darnelle in a couple of days or so. Using the Glassway really had cut a decent swath of distance out of the trip.

Though she wasn't too sure it would be wise for her to use one of those again. As Vera approached the flickering fire, Yria looked up at her. The woman was seated with her back against a boulder, just a pace from the edge of the Kindlehearth Ember and close enough that her bare feet almost touched the scorched logs near the magical hearth's edge.

Her ash-blonde hair was loose, falling over her shoulders in uneven waves, and her arms were bare, revealing sigil-scars similar to Vera's, though hers stopped slightly above the wrists. Yria's sword lay across her waist, one hand idly touching the chain that linked it to her wrist. Vera's gaze caught on that chain for a moment before she lifted it to meet the woman's eyes.

"I can take over if you want to catch a few hours before sunup," she said.

"We don't really need to do this whole switching between nights." Sitting down beside another rock, she picked up a nearby branch and used it to stir the wood in the fire. A Kindlehearth Ember could easily burn through a night without any fuel, but the flame grew larger if you fed it, and Vera had also learned during her trip from Marrowfen to Caer Virell with Serel and Elaria that it was cozier that way.

When she'd coaxed the flame a little higher, she set the stick aside and leaned back against the rock, drawing her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them as she stared past the fire. The gorge was almost completely black at night.

They were deep enough inside it that the moonlight barely reached this far down, but there were at least scattered points of light throughout the stone and growth around them in the form of faintly glowing moss hidden near various cracks and thin blue blossoms clinging to the walls. That helped make it feel like they weren't sitting inside the same kind of nothingness Vera had found herself in earlier that day.

She sat like that for a while, simply listening to the crackle of the fire and the low rush of wind through the valley. Eventually, she turned to Yria.

"You're not going to sleep?" Yria studied her, then stopped toying with the chain. She signed a few quick words. You didn't sleep. Vera's gaze lingered, then she looked back at the fire.

"Sure I did. What do you think I spent all that time in the tent for?" You were too quiet. Vera only caught the movement of the woman's hands from the corner of her eye, but it still made her stiffen.

"…What's that supposed to mean?" She forced a quiet chuckle.

"People are supposed to be quiet when they sleep. Even big slugs like you know that, don't they?" Yria kept studying her. How many nights has it been since you last slept? Vera stayed silent, eyes fixed on the flames. Answer me, Vera. She pretended not to see the woman's hands move. Resonance stirred at her side. Suddenly, a blade of meaning cut through the air. You can't ignore me. Vera blinked, eyes widening as she turned to stare at Yria.

The woman had used her Resonance to speak to her, just like Erelseth, the Keeper of the Beneath, had when Vera met her. She drew on her own Resonance to respond. You know how to do this as well? I do, Yria signed.

"Then why don't you use it all the time?" Because I don't like to. A somber look flickered over Yria's face, then she signed again. Don't avoid the question. When did you last sleep? Vera frowned before looking away, though she kept Yria's hands in the edge of her vision.

"What does it matter? Both of us could keep going for a full month without sleep if we had to." She'd even heard from Elaria that the woman had almost been doing exactly that only a few weeks ago because too much had been going on along the fronts. It really wasn't anything strange in this world for Kindled to use their Resonance to keep themselves going when they didn't have the luxury of proper rest. I am not asking if you can keep going. I am asking when you last slept.

Vera bit her lip, keeping quiet for another moment before shrugging.

"I've gotten a couple hours here and there this past week. Before that, at least a few hours most nights." Before the Rite of Stillness, she'd still had the occasional night terror, but it hadn't been unbearable. She had long since grown used to a broken sleep schedule. But after the Rite… Well, there wasn't much she could do about it. She had been warned that being the Chosen and remembering her role came with its burdens. She had accepted them, and that was that.

Now and then, she'd had to pretend to sleep in front of Serel, but losing rest wasn't as bad now as it had once been. As long as she had her Resonance, she could recover from most things by taking it easy for a few hours. She would have to find a more permanent solution eventually, but for now, this worked. The silence around the Kindlehearth Ember stretched, and Yria stopped signing. Both of them remained that way, just listening to the crackling. Until Vera's curiosity finally got the better of her.

"Do you know what my dreams are about?" she asked, turning to Yria. The woman met her gaze. Her hands moved. The same as always.