Chapter 28: The Road to Severen

THE WORLD WAS WRONG, and I could feel it in my teeth.

Not a metaphor. Not a poet’s conceit. There was a wrongness in the air that settled into the jaw like a cold ache, the kind you feel before a storm that never comes. My horse felt it too—she kept tossing her head, nostrils flared, testing for something she couldn’t name.

I left Imre on a morning that should have been warm. It was the tail end of Cendling, after all—the season when farmers’ children run barefoot and the trees hang heavy with the drowsy weight of summer. But the sun was thin. Watery. It cast light without warmth, the way a candle throws shadows without substance.

It was too cold. It shouldn’t have been that cold.

But it was.

The first day out, I passed a greystone.

I’d seen greystones before, of course. Everyone has. They dot the landscape like the teeth of some buried giant, rising from fields and hillsides with the patient indifference of things that were old when the world was young. Most people walk past them without a second thought. Farmers build fences around them. Children climb them. Lovers carve initials into their surfaces, not knowing—not caring—what they’re defacing.

This one stood at a crossroads where the road from Imre met an older path, a track of packed earth that wound away into hills that seemed too steep for the surrounding terrain. The greystone was perhaps twice my height, wider than my arms could span, its surface worn smooth by millennia of wind and rain and the slow patient grinding of time against time.

I felt it before I saw it.

A hum. Not sound—not exactly. More like the memory of sound, the ghost of a vibration that had been singing since before there were ears to hear it. It resonated in that deep place behind my breastbone where the sleeping mind lives, where names are known before they are spoken.

I stopped my horse.

I stopped my horse and dismounted, walking toward the greystone the way you walk toward a fire on a cold night—drawn, compelled, knowing the warmth might burn you but unable to resist.

I pressed my palm against the stone.

The hum intensified. Not louder—deeper. It crawled up through my hand and into my arm, settled into my chest like a second heartbeat. For a moment, standing there with my hand on that ancient stone, I felt the shape of something vast and terrible lurking just beneath the surface of the world. Like standing on ice over a frozen lake and feeling the water shift beneath your feet.

The stone was singing. And the song it sang was a warning.

I pulled my hand away. My fingers tingled.

Something waking up. Something that had been sleeping for a very long time.

I didn’t look back at the greystone as I rode away. But I felt it watching me, the way you feel eyes on the back of your neck in an empty room. The hum faded slowly, reluctantly, like a voice calling after someone who was walking too fast to hear.

I wondered how many other greystones were singing. I wondered if anyone else could hear them.

I suspected I already knew the answer.

The second night, I stopped at a waystone inn.

Not the Waystone. A different one—smaller, older, nestled in a valley where two rivers met in a rush of brown water. The innkeeper was a heavy woman with flour-dusted hands and eyes that had seen too much and decided to stop looking.

“A room,” I said, setting coin on the bar. “And dinner, if you have it.”

“Got stew. Got bread. Got ale that’s better than it looks.” She swept the coins into her apron. “Rooms are upstairs. Don’t touch the shutters on the east wall—they’re warped, and the wind gets in something terrible.”

“Wind shouldn’t be a problem this time of year.”

She gave me a look that said I was either stupid or foreign or both. “Wind’s been a problem every time of year lately. Everything’s been a problem.” She began ladling stew into bowls. “Where you headed?”

“Severen.”

“Long road.” She set the bowls before us. “Getting longer, from what I hear. Bridges out near Tinue. Soldiers on the highway past the border. And things in the countryside that—” She stopped. Shook her head. “Never mind.”

“Things like what?”

“Like nothing you want to hear about before eating.” She slapped a loaf of bread on the table. “Eat. Sleep. Leave at dawn. And don’t go walking at night.”

“Why not?”

She looked at me the way my mother used to look at me when I asked why the sky was blue—patient, fond, and faintly exasperated.

“Because the nights aren’t what they used to be,” she said, and walked away.

The stew was better than it looked. The ale was worse. But both were warm, and warmth was becoming a thing I didn’t take for granted.

I sat at the bar nursing my mug and listening. Every good innkeeper knows that a bar is a confessional, a crossroads, a place where stories collect like rainwater in a hollow stone. And every good traveler knows that the best information comes not from asking, but from being quiet enough to hear what others volunteer.

There were a handful of locals scattered through the common room. Farmers, mostly. A few tradesmen. A woman who might have been a tinker, though she lacked the traditional cart—just a heavy pack leaned against the wall and eyes that darted like startled birds.

The farmers were talking about the weather.

“Frost in Cendling,” one said, shaking his head. “My grandfather’s grandfather never saw frost in Cendling. The barley’s dying. Half the crop, maybe more.”

“It’s not just the cold,” another replied. He was older, with hands like knotted rope. “It’s the feel of it. The air tastes wrong. Like metal. Like blood.”

“You sound like old Marten, rest his bones.”

“Marten was right about more than we gave him credit for.” The old farmer took a long pull of his ale. “He said the greystones would sing before the end. Said his gran told him, and her gran told her. Said when the stones start singing, the roads aren’t safe anymore.”

My ears pricked. I kept my eyes on my mug, my posture casual.

“Roads haven’t been safe for months,” the first farmer grumbled. “Between the soldiers and the taxes and the—” He lowered his voice. “You heard about Trebon?”

“What about it?”

“Gone. The whole village. Every man, woman, and child.” He leaned closer. “My cousin’s boy was delivering grain there. Arrived to find it empty. Not burned, not raided. Just… empty. Food still on the tables. Fires still smoldering. But no people. Not a single soul.”

“Bandits, maybe.”

“Bandits don’t take everyone. Bandits don’t leave the silver. And bandits don’t leave…” He stopped. Wet his lips. “The boy said there were marks on the walls. Symbols. Burned into the stone like someone had pressed a brand against it.”

“What kind of symbols?”

“The kind you don’t talk about. Not in a place like this.” He looked around the room, and for a moment his eyes met mine. I saw fear there—the deep, honest fear of a man who has encountered something beyond his ability to rationalize. “The kind from the old stories. The ones our mothers told us to make us behave.”

I thought of the Chandrian’s signs. Blue flame. Rusted iron. Rotting wood.

I thought of Trebon, where I had once fought a draccus and nearly died. Where the Chandrian had already left their mark, years ago.

They were still at work. Still moving through the world like poison through blood.

The tinker found me.

I was outside, standing in the inn’s small courtyard, looking up at the sky. The stars were wrong—not missing, but misplaced. Shifted slightly, as if the entire dome of heaven had been nudged a fraction of a degree off true. It was the kind of thing most people wouldn’t notice. Most people don’t spend their nights staring at the sky the way I did in my years with the Edema Ruh, when the stars were the only constant in a life of perpetual wandering.

But I noticed. And the wrongness of it made my stomach clench.

“You see it too.” The tinker’s voice came from behind me, soft and scratchy like a fingernail on dry wood. “The sky’s moved.”

I turned. She was younger than I’d thought—maybe thirty, though her eyes looked centuries older. Her hair was wild, shot through with grey that looked premature. Her hands trembled, and she kept them wrapped in the edges of her shawl.

“You’re a tinker,” I said.

“Was. Am. What does it matter?” She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “The roads aren’t safe anymore. Not for tinkers. Not for anyone.”

“What happened to your cart?”

“Lost it. North of here, near the border. The road just…” She made a gesture with her hands, spreading her fingers apart. “Broke. Like ice on a river. One moment there was solid ground beneath my wheels, and the next—” She shuddered. “I’ve been walking since. Walking and not sleeping, because the things I see when I close my eyes are worse than anything the road can throw at me.”

“What kind of things?”

She looked at me—really looked, the way people look when they’re trying to decide whether to trust a stranger with something dangerous.

“I’ve been walking the roads for fifteen years,” she said. “Tinker’s trade. I know every mile between Tarbean and Ralien, every inn, every shortcut, every farmer’s field where you can sleep without being run off. I know the roads the way you know your own hands.”

“And?”

“And they’re changing.” Her voice dropped. “The distances are wrong. Miles that should take an hour take three. Turns that should lead to familiar places lead to… somewhere else. I walked the road from Marton to Tullic last span—a road I’ve walked a hundred times—and there was a forest where no forest has ever been. Old trees. Thick. With shadows that moved wrong.”

“Moved wrong how?”

“Against the light.” She pulled her shawl tighter. “Shadows should follow the sun. Everyone knows that. But these shadows… they went their own way. They reached for things. For me.” She held up her hand—I could see scratches there, thin red lines across her palm and fingers. “I ran. Left half my stock behind. And when I looked back…”

“What?”

“The forest was gone. Just fields again. Barley and corn and empty sky.” Her eyes were bright with the particular terror of someone who has seen something impossible and knows that no one will believe them. “The world is coming apart, young man. Whatever held it together is failing. And the roads—the roads were always the seams. The places where things meet. And the seams are splitting.”

I thought of the greystones. Of the hum I’d felt.

“You should stay here,” I said. “Off the roads. Until this passes.”

“Does it look like it’s passing?” She gestured at the sky—at those subtly wronged stars. “My grandmother used to say the roads were the world’s bones, and the inns were its joints. That the tinkers were the blood moving through it all, keeping it alive.” She looked at me with those too-old eyes. “The blood is stopping. The joints are seizing. The bones are cracking. And no one—no one—is doing anything about it.”

She was right. And I had nothing to offer her but platitudes and a destination that might hold answers.

“Severen,” I said. “There might be help in Severen.”

“There might be nothing left in Severen by the time you arrive.” She turned away. “Safe travels, if such a thing still exists. And if you pass any greystones on the road—don’t touch them. Don’t listen to them. Don’t let them tell you their names.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re lonely,” she said. “And lonely things will swallow you whole if you let them.”

She disappeared into the inn, and I stood alone under the wrong stars, feeling the wind that shouldn’t have been blowing, tasting the metal-and-blood taste that the old farmer had described.

The world was fraying. I could feel it—not just with my sleeping mind, but with my body, my bones, my blood. Something fundamental was coming undone, some thread in the weave of creation pulling loose, and everything connected to it was distorting. Shadows. Distances. Seasons. Stars.

And somewhere, behind all of it, the doors were opening.

I should tell you about the third day, because the third day was when I stopped pretending things were normal.

I rode hard that morning, wanting distance between myself and the waystone inn, between myself and the tinker’s wild eyes and the farmers’ stories of empty villages. The road was good—paved stone, Aturan-built, the kind of road that had been keeping the Four Corners connected for centuries. My horse’s hooves rang against the stone in a rhythm that should have been comforting. The sound of civilization. The sound of a world that worked.

But the rhythm was wrong.

I noticed it first in the way the hoofbeats echoed. On a normal road, the sound bounces off the surrounding terrain in predictable ways—off hills, off buildings, off the flat plane of open fields. You learn to read the echoes the way a sailor reads the waves, and they tell you what’s around the next bend.

These echoes came back wrong. Too fast. Too slow. From angles that didn’t match the landscape. As if the sound were bouncing off something I couldn’t see—walls or structures or spaces that existed just beyond the edge of perception. Whatever was happening to the world, it was happening below the threshold of ordinary perception. You needed trained ears. Or frightened ones.

I stopped for lunch beside a stream that should have been running clear—it was fed by mountain snowmelt, and mountain streams in summer are cold and clean as glass. This stream ran brown. Not muddy-brown, not the honest brown of stirred silt. This was a deeper discoloration, as if the water itself had changed its nature. As if it were carrying something dissolved in it that had no business being there.

I bent to fill my waterskin, then stopped. The water smelled wrong—faintly metallic, with an undertone of something organic that reminded me, horribly, of the smell of old blood.

I drank from my own supplies instead, and rode on.

That afternoon, I passed through a village that should have been thriving. Market day. The square was empty—baskets of produce sitting uncollected, a dog tied to a post, whimpering. No people. I rode through quickly and didn’t look back.

The refugees started appearing on the fourth day.

Not many at first. A family with a handcart, their faces blank with exhaustion. An old man walking alone, carrying nothing. A group of young men with the haunted look of soldiers who had seen something they weren’t trained for.

By the sixth day, the road was thick with them.

They came from the north and east, mostly. Small villages. Farming communities. The kind of places that exist in the space between maps, too small to be named, too poor to be noticed, too far from anything to matter to anyone except the people who lived there.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked a woman leading a donkey loaded with household goods—pots, blankets, a small wooden cradle strapped to the top with rope.

“Lastings.” She didn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, as if looking back might turn her to salt. “Or what’s left of it.”

“What happened?”

“The soldiers came.” Her voice was flat, drained of everything except the mechanical need to put one foot in front of the other. “Blue and white. The Penitent King’s men, they said. Needed our grain. Needed our horses. Needed our boys for the army.”

The Penitent King. I’d heard the name before—whispered in taverns, muttered by merchants who traded in rumors as readily as goods. A new power rising in Vintas. A nobleman who claimed divine authority, who wrapped his ambitions in the language of penance and holy duty.

“What penitent king?” I asked.

“No one seems to know,” the woman replied. “Just that his soldiers wear blue and white, and they take what they want, and they don’t answer to the Maer or to anyone else.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Months. Started small—patrols on the highways, tax collectors in the market towns. Then the conscription started. Then the…” She swallowed. “The burnings.”

“Burnings?”

“Of people who wouldn’t comply. Who asked questions. Who—” She stopped walking. For the first time, she looked at me, and I saw the thing behind her eyes that she had been trying to keep contained. Not grief. Not anger. Something older and more fundamental.

Disbelief.

The particular, devastating disbelief of someone whose world—the ordinary, comprehensible world of seasons and harvests and children growing up—has been revealed as a thin shell over something vast and dark and utterly indifferent to human suffering.

“He burned the temple,” she said. “In our village. The one to Tehlu. Said it was corrupt. Said the church had been lying for centuries. Said the real Tehlu would want us to kneel to the Penitent King.”

“And the people who wouldn’t kneel?”

She looked at the cradle strapped to her donkey.

She didn’t answer.

I spoke with others. A merchant from Ralien told me the trade roads were dying. “Something’s wrong with the distances. My driver got lost on roads he’s traveled a thousand times.” A pair of Cealdish traders told me about scrael—small, black, fast. “Like spiders made of iron,” one said, showing me scars on his arm. “They appear when the world is thin.”

On the seventh night, I camped in the open.

No inn for miles—or if there was one, I couldn’t find it. The road curved through a stretch of countryside that didn’t appear on my map, and the fields on either side had a windswept, abandoned quality that made me uneasy. I made a small fire in the lee of a stone wall that might once have been part of a farmhouse, though nothing else remained of whatever structure it had supported.

I lay on my back, staring up at the sky, counting the stars that had shifted and trying to calculate how much the celestial dome had rotated since I’d left Imre.

Three degrees. Maybe four. A tiny shift, in absolute terms. But stars don’t move. That’s the point of stars. They’re the one fixed thing in a world of constant change—the sailor’s guide, the farmer’s calendar, the last reliable truth in a universe that loves to lie.

And they had moved.

The implications were staggering. If the stars were shifting, it meant the relationship between the mortal world and whatever existed beyond it was changing. The sky wasn’t just a dome of light—it was a boundary, a ceiling, the outermost wall of the room we lived in. And the room was warping.

I thought of the tinker’s broken road. The brown stream. The empty village. The refugees walking toward destinations that might not exist.

I thought of the greystone, humming its ancient warning.

I thought of the Cthaeh, sitting in its tree in the Fae, watching all of this unfold with the patient satisfaction of something that had been planning for three thousand years.

And I pulled my cloak tighter and stared at the wrong stars and didn’t sleep.

On the eighth day, I saw the soldiers.

They were camped at a crossroads—perhaps two dozen men in blue and white, their banners limp in the windless air. The banner showed a figure kneeling, hands raised, face hidden. The Penitent King’s sign.

I gave them a wide berth, but even at a distance, I could see things that troubled me. The soldiers’ equipment was too good for provincial conscripts—gleaming armor, well-maintained weapons, horses that had been bred for war rather than farming. And their formation was wrong. They weren’t guarding the crossroads. They were guarding something behind them—a cluster of wagons, heavily loaded, with canvas covers that had been nailed shut.

Nothing good in those wagons. Nothing that needed daylight.

I rode past without stopping. The soldiers watched me go. None of them spoke. None of them moved. They stood at their posts with the rigid discipline of men who follow orders without questioning them, because questioning has been beaten out of them by something worse than authority.

Something like belief.

The road to Severen grew stranger as I entered Vintas proper.

The countryside was beautiful—rolling hills, ancient forests, farmland that had been tended for centuries—but the beauty had a feverish quality, like the flush on a dying man’s cheeks. Colors were too vivid. The green of the grass was luminous, almost painful. Wildflowers bloomed in profusions that belonged to spring, not summer’s end. And the shadows…

The shadows were wrong.

I noticed it first in the late afternoon, when the sun hung low and the world stretched long. The shadows of trees fell at angles that didn’t correspond to the light. They were too long. Too dark. And they moved—not with the wind, because there was no wind, but with a subtle, purposeful shifting that reminded me horribly of the tinker’s story.

The shadows were wrong. They’d been wrong since I crossed the border, and I’d been telling myself it was my imagination.

It wasn’t.

I thought of something Wil had told me once, an old Cealdish saying his grandmother taught him—that shadows are the memory of things that have been removed from the world. That every shadow is a door to where the missing things have gone.

If she was right, these shadows were saying that something was pressing through. Trying to come back. From the Fae, or from wherever the doors led.

Whatever was happening to this world, it was accelerating. Worse today than yesterday. Worse tomorrow than today.

I spurred my horse and picked up the pace, riding hard through a landscape that grew more beautiful and more terrible with every passing mile.

On the twelfth day, I saw Severen.

The city appeared on the horizon like a white crown set against a sky the color of bruised plums. Its walls gleamed—they’d always gleamed, built from the pale stone quarried in the hills north of the city—but there was something different about the gleam now. Something sharp-edged and desperate, like the smile of a man who knows he’s dying but refuses to admit it.

Severen was beautiful. Severen had always been beautiful.

But beauty, I was learning, was no protection against the things that were coming.

It looked the same from a distance. But it didn’t. Not really.

There were more guards on the walls than last time. Twice as many. Maybe three times. And the banners—the Maer’s colors, green and grey, still flew from the main gates. But among them, scattered like weeds in a garden, were other banners. Blue and white. The kneeling figure with raised hands.

The Penitent King’s soldiers were already in Severen.

If there were soldiers from both factions in the city, I was riding into a war. Or the moment before one.

I looked at the walls that held secrets older than any living memory. At the Maer’s estate, visible on the hill above the river, where Stapes was waiting with fear in his eyes and a bone ring’s worth of debt in his pocket.

I was on whatever side kept the doors closed. It wasn’t a comforting allegiance. But it was the only truthful one I had.

I entered the city through the western gate.

The guards recognized the Maer’s seal on the letter I carried. They let me through with the kind of exaggerated deference that comes from uncertainty rather than respect. They didn’t know whether I was important or dangerous or both, and they erred on the side of caution.

Smart of them. I was both.

The streets of Severen were the same and different—the same elegant architecture, the same well-dressed nobles walking to wherever nobles walk, the same artisans and merchants and servants going about the business of a city that didn’t know it was standing on the edge of an abyss. But the tension was everywhere. You could taste it in the air the way you taste lightning before a storm. Conversations died when strangers approached. Doors closed a fraction too quickly. Eyes lingered a fraction too long.

And above it all, the banners. Green and grey alongside blue and white, hanging side by side in a display of unity that convinced no one.

I rode toward the hill, toward the estate, toward the answers I hoped were waiting and the dangers I knew would be.

Behind me, the road I’d traveled stretched away to the northeast, winding through a countryside that was slowly, inexorably coming apart. Shadows moved wrong. Stars shifted in their courses. Greystones hummed with songs no one wanted to hear. Refugees walked roads that couldn’t be trusted, fleeing horrors they couldn’t name, traveling toward destinations that might not be there when they arrived.

The world was fraying.

And I rode into Severen alone, with a cold knot of dread in my belly, knowing that the fraying had a source, and the source had a name, and the name was waiting for me behind doors that had been sealed for three thousand years.

I just didn’t know yet how badly those seals had already failed.