The woods had changed again.
Riven felt it the moment they crossed a low ridge and stepped into the valley beyond. The soil turned to ash-mud, softer underfoot, and the trees thinned into skeletal things, branches long and bare, swaying without wind.
The sky overhead wasn't dark, but it wasn't bright either. Just a kind of colorless stretch of nothing.
The air here tasted of old smoke. Veyla slowed beside him, her hand resting near the hilt of her blade, eyes flicking to the trees like they were watching her.
"Something's wrong here," she muttered.
Riven didn't need her to say it. The pressure in his chest was back again, the one that had followed him since the Grace Site. The one that made the inside of his head feel stretched thin.
Still, something pulled at him. A tug beneath his ribs, same as before. Not Grace. Not even close. But it called for him. He didn't question it.
He walked until they reached the center of the grove, and there it was.
A tree. Or what had once tried to be.
It stood alone in the hollow, half-sunken into the ash-choked earth. Its trunk was bone-pale, cracked and coiled with dry gold veins like lightning frozen mid-strike.
Its bark was stretched too tight, groaning in places. From its limbs, no leaves dangled, only thin, sinew-like threads that shifted in ways they shouldn't. The wind didn't move them. But something else did.
At its base, the earth was scorched black, like the ground itself had burned just by touching its roots.
Veyla froze. "Is that?...."
"A Rootspire's sapling?" Riven said, voice hollow.
"No," she said. "That's what's left of one."
They stood in silence for a long moment, staring. The longer Riven looked, the more wrong it felt. Like the tree had once been something pure and golden, but now it wore its own corpse like a disguise.
Then came the whisper. Not aloud. Not in the air. Inside his head.
It slithered behind his ears, into the corners of his mind, like mold creeping along stone.
"Ash-caller... Name-lost... Flame-wrought... Come closer.."
He stepped forward before he even realized his feet had moved.
"Don't," Veyla said quickly. "It's not Grace, Riven. I don't know what that is, but it's not right."
"I know."
"So why...?"
"Because it seems to know me."
The bark cracked as he approached. Just one fissure down the center, small at first, then widening as he reached out. Light didn't shine from it.
Darkness did. But not the absence of light kind. This was thick. Textured. A shadow that seemed to breathe.
And then came the heat.
The second his hand touched the bark, fire erupted across his skin, but it wasn't real fire. It didn't burn flesh. It burned deeper.
Inside.
His chest arched, jaw clenched. He screamed once, raw and low, as something invisible carved into his skin.
Veyla lunged toward him, but the roots surged up around the tree's base. Not attacking, but reacting. The whole tree shuddered. Groaned. Then settled again.
He fell to his knees. Over his heart, the mark glowed.
A spiraling, thorned sigil, neither graceful nor divine. It twisted like flame and ash at war. The skin around it smoked faintly. It wasn't red. It wasn't gold. It was black and ember-lit, a slow, steady burn that didn't cool.
Veyla dropped beside him, eyes wide. "Your chest..."
"I know."
"What is that?"
He blinked. His breath was ragged, vision a blur, but in that moment, he remembered something.
Not a place. Not a person.
A feeling.
A throne of flame. A tower of bones. A voice whispering from beneath the world.
"Ash remembers.."
The brand pulsed again, and he tasted ash in the back of his throat.
"This isn't Grace," he whispered. "It's something older. Something deeper than Grace."
"A curse?"
He nodded. "Maybe."
"Why give it to you?"
He laughed once, dry and bitter. "I don't think I was given anything."
She looked at the tree again, then back at him. "Can you feel it?"
He looked down at the rune. At his hand. At the Grace-mark that had once shone so brightly… now barely more than a shadow.
"Yeah," he said. "It's like… one god let go."
"And another picked you up."
He didn't reply. He didn't have to.
The forest around them was watching now. The roots didn't move, but the air did. The fog felt thicker. Heavier. The world didn't speak, but it remembered.
Whatever the Ash was, it had marked him.
Not to save him. Not to bless him.
But to bind him.
As they turned to leave, the sapling behind them groaned once more. Riven didn't look back.
He didn't need to. He would carry its voice forever, wherever he went.