Tidegarde: Lacuna

The Ashen Tract

The journey deeper into the Ashen Tract was a march into a world’s quiet grave. For two days they had moved through a landscape bled of all life, the low, discordant hum of the Orphic Compass in Sineus’s saddlebag their only guide. The escape from Kurov’s hunters and the French patrol had cost them time and the last of their nerve. Now, the forest itself was the enemy, a passive, suffocating presence that promised a slow, cold end. There was no sun, only a uniform, joyless grey sky that pressed down like a tomb lid.

They walked on a fine, pale dust that looked like ash but felt cold as grave dirt. It muffled their footsteps, swallowing sound and leaving only the crunch of their boots and the thrum of the black sphere. Sineus felt the vibration in his bones, a constant reminder that they were walking toward a hole in the world. He had spent his life making such holes, small and precise, in the minds of men. He had never considered where the excised pieces went. Now he knew. He was walking through the refuse of his own craft.

The trees were the worst part. They were not burnt, but simply… stopped. Their bark was grey and brittle, peeling away from the dead wood beneath. Their branches were skeletal claws reaching for a sky that offered no light. They snapped with no wind, the sharp crack echoing for a moment before the oppressive silence smothered it. Sineus reached out and touched the trunk of a withered birch. The bark crumbled under his fingers, turning to the same cold dust that covered the ground. This was not death. It was an unmaking.

– It’s like the whole forest has forgotten how to live, – Sineus said, his voice quiet and rough.

Alessandro paused beside him, his gaze sweeping the skeletal woods. – Forgetting is a passive act. This is not that. This is an excision. The memory of life has been cut out of the land itself.

A spider’s web, impossibly intricate, stretched between two dead branches. Its main anchor thread had been snapped. The whole structure drifted in the still air, a fragile, useless thing, no longer connected to its purpose. A perfect trap with a severed thread at its heart.

Alessandro stopped, pulling a strange device from his leather apron. It was a contraption of brass and glass, with a series of nested copper rings around a central crystal needle. An Aetheric Resonator, he had called it, a tool for measuring the world’s sickness. He held it up, the needle quivering.

– What does it say? – Sineus asked.

– It says we are walking through a paradox, – Alessandro muttered, his eyes fixed on the vibrating needle. – The energy here is high, but it is the energy of absence. Of contradiction. The script of this place is fighting itself. Reality is thin.

As if summoned by the words, the whispers started. They were faint at first, carried on a wind that did not stir the branches. A fragment of a lullaby, sung in a woman’s gentle voice. The sharp retort of a market haggle over the price of grain. A lover’s promise, spoken in the dark. They were the ghosts of conversations, the psychic garbage of a thousand lives, all cut loose from their context and left to drift in this grey wasteland.

Sineus froze, his head tilted. He had felt echoes before, in places of great trauma or importance. But this was different. This was a chorus of the mundane, a million tiny, severed threads of everyday life, all tangled together into a formless, meaningless noise. He could almost see them, faint and shimmering at the edge of his vision.

– You hear it too, – Alessandro stated. It was not a question. He tapped the Resonator. – These are the symptoms. The fever dreams of a dying world.

– What is this place? – Sineus asked, though he already knew the answer. He knew it in the cold that seeped through his greatcoat, in the ache behind his eyes that had been his constant companion since the monastery.

– This is the Echoing Blight, – Alessandro said, his voice flat and clinical, the voice of a doctor diagnosing a terminal illness. He gestured at the dead woods around them. – This is the cost. Every time one of your Lodge butchers performs a “clean’ excision, every time one of Napoleon’s dogs fires a Lethe Mortar, the memory they cut doesn’t just vanish. It can’t. Energy is never destroyed.

He began to walk again, forcing Sineus to follow. The Italian’s lecture was a low, angry counterpoint to the ghostly whispers.

– The severed memory becomes a poison. A fragment of reality with no anchor. It drifts. It accumulates. It curdles. Alone, it’s just a whisper, a cold spot. But when they gather like this… they become a cancer. They begin to overwrite the living script. The land forgets the sun. The water forgets it is meant to flow. The flora vitality in this region is less than 5%. Nothing grows because the very idea of growth has been erased.

Sineus stopped. The words hit him with the force of a physical blow. A cumulative poison. He thought of the thousands of memories he had personally cut. The secrets of spies, the loyalties of traitors, the inconvenient histories of nobles. He had seen it as surgery, a necessary act of purification to keep the Empire strong. He had never once considered the fate of the excised tissue. He had thought it simply dissolved.

He looked at his hands, gloved in black leather. They were the hands of a master craftsman, capable of the most delicate work. They were also the hands of a man who had been poisoning the world his entire life, one perfect, sterile cut at a time. The whispers seemed to grow louder, accusing. He saw the frayed thread on the cuff of his coat, torn during his flight from Moscow. It was a small, stupid detail, but it was no longer just a sign of his own fall from grace. It was a piece of this universal decay. A thread torn from the same great tapestry.

He looked out over the grey, silent valley. And for the first time, he did not just see it. He felt it.

He felt the profound, hollow ache of the land itself. It was a grief that went deeper than the roots of the dead trees. It was the feeling of a limb that has been amputated but still screams with phantom pain. He could feel the memory of sunlight, a warm and vibrant thread that had been brutally severed from the soil. He could feel the ghost of birdsong, cut from the silent air. He could feel the memory of running water, excised from the stagnant, oily creek at the bottom of the slope.

The abstract concept of the Blight, a strategic problem to be managed, became a raw, emotional reality. This was not a blighted land. It was a murdered one. And he was one ofthe murderers. The price of this new understanding was a sudden, crushing empathy. It was a weight in his chest, a cold sickness in his gut. He was no longer an observer. He was a participant. His isolation, the clean detachment that had been his greatest strength, shattered. He was connected to this ruin, bound to it by the actions of his past.

Alessandro had stopped and was watching him, his expression unreadable. The Italian’s cynicism was a shield, but Sineus could see the same weary grief in his eyes. Alessandro had not caused this, but he lived in its shadow, fighting a desperate, losing battle against the tide of ash.

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