We left behind the bloody hill of the battle. Just like with my parents, I tried to push the memories of it behind me and look forward. Calk held the reigns of our wagon, and Rebert sat in the back nursing his wounds. He didn’t say much, but I could tell he kept an eye on the mage. He still didn’t trust the man, and I couldn’t blame him.

Shay and Clidale were quiet and hardly talked. Neither of them would look at me. Calk's magic seemed to have stopped any infection from taking root, but my friend had taken to wearing a scrap of cloth around his head to cover the scarred part of his face. He seemed a sunken shell of his former self.

It was then that I realized the death of the men in the bloody hill did not affect me like I thought it would. Perhaps I had seen too much death by then for such a young age, and my mind had accepted it as a new part of my life. But my friends had not been on the same journey as I had been--and they were different.

They had witnessed me kill men, and do unnatural things to them. In the quiet realm--in the void where I had gone, I did not experience any of the sensations of violence. There was no sound--only the sensation of it. If I heard a voice it was almost more like I felt instead of hearing the reality of it. I didn’t have to smell the stench of blood, to hear the squelch of a piercing body being thrown onto a tree or to hear the screams of a man having his life sucked out of him. But they did.

Some part of me wanted to tell Rebert to take them back to the coast, but I knew the old warrior would not leave me—and I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t run into more of the church’s men--especially since we had killed all of them.

Once Rebert caught me looking at them. He patted me on the shoulder with a calloused hand. "You did well." There was respect in his eyes, and it was the first time I could remember the man showing any warmth towards me. "They will be fine, in time."

I nodded, but I knew it was not true.

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We did not encounter anyone else on the road for some time and the quiet seemed to stretch far and wide up the mountain. After the first week of travel, we came upon a small clearing of trees.

In the middle was a large rectangular box, and in front of the box were five small skeletons. They hung from crude beams and swung in the small breeze from old ropes. They looked like the remains of children, but the bones were strange and unfamiliar, with big heads and smaller bodies still.

Calk shook his head at the display, and he pointed at a sign that was nailed to the bottom of the wooden box. The words were written in metal, in an odd script, one that I was not familiar with.

I could not read the common language of the Church, but I knew this was not it. The letters were small, written tightly together, full of strange marks of varying height and embellishments. In a way, I found the writing on the metal to be beautiful. I couldn’t fathom how someone had managed to write scripts into metal in the first place.

"Here are the traitors. Here are the traders. Here are the chain makers. Here they were hung." After he read the words we all stared at the stone in silence. A cold wind blew down from the mountain and it cut through my clothes in a sudden chill.

"What does it mean?" Clidale asked in a dry and tired voice. It was the first time he had spoken in days.

Calk rubbed his hand over the script. "Originally, no one knew about the mountain folk. They hid in the mountains for thousands of years. But then the Chantry found out about their gems.”

"The gemstones of the Gnomen mountains are unique in that they can act as reservoirs, or at times, conduits for magic." Calk rolled his neck and walked away from the post back to the cart. "But it is also what the gems are placed in, held in, that gives them their power…” He trailed off and pointed at the bones. "These bones are old. Perhaps two hundred years old."

Clidale went over to one of the swinging sets of bones and touched it. Then he touched it again and frowned. He looked back at Calk. 'How can a set of bones last two hundred years and not crumble?'

Calk shrugged. 'Gnomen bones are different from human bones. They are harder than rock or stone but even lighter than our bones.

'Let's keep going,' Rebert said in a gruff voice, then he spat on the ground. I could tell the sight of the bones and mention had put the fire back in his eyes.