I stared at the ground.

I heard the commotion around me start. I heard a deafening crackle rip through the sky, like the bone-break bleed of marrow exploding from its vessel, and the snap-splinter echo of a crack bursting down the length of an iceberg. Salt, copper, and metal choked the air with the scent of blood, and the people around me whirled.

The distant rift vomited a torrent of corruption into the world.

Vin screamed into his echo-channeler. The two princes stood and their Fae beasts bristled. Cannon fire erupted in the distance. Explosions, ships breaking, crashing into the swamp.

The advantage Caereith had over the blight began to collapse.

Still, I kept staring at the ground.

Comatose.

The word prickled across the surface of my scalp; ants crawling on skin. It echoed in my mind, reverberating, repeating, telling me once again who it was that I’d come back for:

Elanah, who’d finally drowned under her work.

And now she was going back to father and Kerban, unconscious and weak, with no telling of when she’d wake again. I was too late, too tardy to find the perfect ending. On my way to the battlefield, I’d created a plan. Now it was breaking apart. In front of that failure, the expanding rift in the distance seemed like such a small issue. It was trying to swallow everything.

And yet, even if it did, what would it change?

I was still nobody. Elanah was still comatose. I still stood there, in the middle of the tainted swamps, involving myself in a war for the sake of a woman that might never wake again. In that moment, I felt it in me.

A thought, bubbling in my mind, worming across my heart.

I’m tired.

Exhaustion was what it was. I was so weary, so lacking, so purposeless. I couldn’t come back to see my family after this. Not after I’d said goodbye in my heart, and not after I’d failed to get Elanah back in one piece. Not after this. I couldn’t bear to come back and feel the loss of things all over again.

I knew that if I stayed standing for any longer, I would make the right choice. I would turn back, help my family evacuate, and try to keep helping.

So I took a step forward. Toward the rift splitting the sky.

Lightning flashed under my feet. A mile passed in an instant, passing me at the speed of crackling electricity. I landed on a branch and took another step and like lightning, I speared through the air, straight towards the distant swarm, gathering on the ground.

I was tired. And now, I wanted nothing more than a chance to run away.

So I ran.

Not from the battles ahead of me, or the responsibility of joining the war, or the looming sense of doom hovering over my head for interfering without a weave. No. I felt no fear towards those things. Instead, I was afraid to turn around and come back to Felzan—afraid of being responsible for any longer.

My feet brought me to the first of the rising crimson beasts. I reached inside of myself, at the countless threads branching out from my core, winding around the essence of storm and bringing it under control. At the center of it all was a ball of color and oldness and warmth, of red leaves and a hill in the summer, of the scent of wet earth and fresh grass. It was the sound of the wind, the twang of strings, and the ring of hammer against steel.

It was the image of a rowan tree in the summer.

It was my Name.

And I burned it. Like fuel, like charcoal, I urged it on, feeding the embers, letting it blaze and feed and consume. I planned to use a bit of it, at first, so that I would be able to intervene without Traveler’s weave. No more. Now, I would use it all. I would burn it with the bridges I had left. My existence drained out of me, wrangling my essences and throwing them under my control. The memories drained away once more—but it was not temporary.

The loss was permanent.

It should have left me devastated. My impulsive decision should have sent me into a spiral of regret, cursing at myself for breaking free of the only anchors I had left. My family. My life. My burden.

But I felt no sadness. Only relief.

…Because I was always more like mother than I liked to admit.

The only difference was that it took me eighteen years to find my excuse.

This war—and the sacrifice I made with it—would be the last thing I’d do in the Name of Rowan Kindlebright. Then I would finally be free. I channeled my control, and the overhead sky darkened. Lightning flashed. I looked up towards the horde of blighted abominations unending…

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And I finally allowed myself to feel the relief of reaching the end.

----------------------------------------

Endless.

The battlefield was a purgatory. Mindless slaughter, easy as breathing the blood-choked air drenching the swamp. It was no fight for my life. It was an unthinking task, passing with the seconds, the minutes, the hours. I didn’t kick and punch and run like I did against the drownstalkers, nor did I fear for my life like when I fought Vivian in the swamp.

Back then, I thought of saving Venti. I thought of home, I worried for Aami, and I hoped that my loss of a Name wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it was.

Now, I thought of nothing.

I drifted along a sea of grey vapor. Inside of the storm clouds, there was nothing but thunder and lightning, deafening me. Still, I played my lute without thinking. I flew and channeled my immortal power.

Lightning struck. It bombarded the ground below, where I couldn’t see.

Blighted fell dead. Scorched.

And with every second that passed over the slaughter, I felt myself lose a little more of what I’d chosen to burn away. The tones of grey around me deepened. Where they were grey before, they were slowly beginning to turn colorless. It was a small change, but it made all the difference. Like stone and static, there was a lifelessness to the latter that the world around me began to take on. The faint cold in my fingertips began to fade. The sounds in my ear lost their pop and vibrance. The taste of ozone in my mouth dissipated like smoke.

My Name continued to smolder. And like my existence in the minds of others, the rest of my connection to the mortal world burned away with it.

Where immortals lived in the middle, I was headed somewhere else:

The end.

Avnlasce.

There, I would feel no burden. I would be in the darkness, the void, having nothing but my music as a companion. I would always have the essences around me, docile and peaceful, letting me listen to every note and chime of their existence. There would be no family there. No reminder of loss, or the urge to stay and watch over them.

I strummed my lute again. Thunder boomed and the ground shook as spears of lightning burst the waters over the swamp. I heard the roars of dying monsters echoing below me. I felt the magic gather up at a single point. The gazerstalk beneath my cloud aimed, and—

Light exploded around me.

The blast of magic seared away the clouds.

And yet, it missed. I saw the trickle of light dissipate over a hundred meters away. The ray of destructive force failed to even strike my general vicinity. I watched the rain of attacks shoot holes into my bastion of storms, destroying clouds that I could easily reform. They attacked, but they could do nothing.

In this moment, I was untouchable.

Here, in the clouds, I was invisible. I burned my Name to infuse the storm with my control, and so the storm and I were one. In the murky sea of clouds, I was the single fish that no hunter could spear.

With another chord, lightning roared again. It scorched trees into ash and evaporated hundreds of gallons of swamp. It killed hundreds.

There were a hundred thousand more.

But unlike the rest of the people fighting below me, with their cannons and their Fae, I never intended to win. I was simply here to do what I could. To buy time and help—to justify my cowardly plan with the notion of doing my best with what was available to me. I sent another barrage of electricity into the blighted swarms. The sound of it muted even the exploding cannons of the RWA.

And with every bombardment I sent into the corruption, a little more of my senses faded away. Minutes passed. Hours.

Soon, I could no longer feel the skin on my flesh. My sight blurred and darkened and the scents of the sky vanished. Ringing filled my ears and deafened me, and it continued to fade until the ringing, too, disappeared.

Everything fell away, and then there was nothing. Only darkness.

I floated there, in the void, where everything was nothing and everywhere was nowhere. Titanic presences surrounded me, floating in the abyss. But unlike before, their presence didn’t press against me. There was no pressure. No weight. Because unlike before, I no longer had anything they could push against.

I was formless. I was no longer a simple visitor to their realm like I was before. No, now I was a part of it. I was like them.

Behind me, a voice rang.

“Welcome back, chief.”

I turned to him, to Traveler. He stood in the darkness of his cloak, his face hidden save for the perpetual grin splitting his face in two. He had his arms spread out in a grand gesture, as if welcoming a guest into his home. I stared at him.

“You’ve been silent, lately,” I said. “I thought I’d come visit.”

He smirked.

“That’s real thoughtful of you, chief. But next time you show me concern, you could at least not lie about it straight to my face, eh? We both know the real reason you’re here.”

“And what reason is that?”

“Asking questions you already know the answer to is a bad habit, chief. Now stop yapping and go on ahead, eh? You wanted a break. Here it is.”

Traveler turned to the side, gesturing me forward. I stared out into the open blackness ahead. It was vast. Infinite in the truest sense of the word. Avnlasce stretched out into the distance far, far away, in all directions that a space could stretch and even farther beyond.

I closed my eyes and relaxed. I took a step forward, past Traveler and into the infinite abyss. Distantly, I heard him speak, but I couldn’t make out the words. I was fading further, and all my senses were embers. Barely alive.

And soon, everything would be no more.

It was what I wanted.

A break.

Rest.

If I was to live in a world with no connections, where no one could see me without a mask, or where there were no people that knew who I was, then this was what I wanted. Here, the very nature of existence would eat away at me. It would be painless. I wouldn’t see it, nor would I hear or feel or taste or touch even a moment of it.

It was an easy, peaceful death. The only way out that I wanted now, after Felzan. After Elanah.

I stared ahead.

“You never did tell me about the two other lives I was supposed to save,” I said, and Traveler stepped up beside me. He shrugged.

“Didn’t need to. You already saved ‘em, chief.”

“Elanah?”

“Aye.”

“And the third one?”

“Ain’t it obvious?”

I looked at him, at his grin, and nodded.

“It is.”

Traveler turned around with a wave, “See you at the tree, chief. I’ll be back after you’ve gone a little more senile from all the walking in this dreadful place. So later. Or never. Or now. Things get tricky when time don't exist here, eh? But I will be back, just as you will too.”

He took a step forward, and Traveler vanished. Only darkness remained, and the small, echoing remnants of what were once my senses.

They returned on static, now. Errors. I took a step forward, and even as I walked, I felt more drain away from me. My existence, my thoughts, my voice. All murky. All fading away. Such was the nature of Avnlasce. In my journey onward, my thoughts traveled back to what I’d decided to leave behind. To Caereith, with its sky shattered by a rift, its lands corrupted beyond recognition, and Elanah’s silverplague at the risk of running rampant without me.

Nothing I could do would save it.

Because now the world was broken, and all I could do was walk in silence.

End of book 1.