The white stone beneath Gildaun’s castle had darkened to blue from moisture. Ayube made an effort to avoid large cities during his travels to prevent the spilling of innocent blood; even so, he knew from first sight that the stonecrafters of Gildaun had struck a magical balance between strength and beauty. Yet, even in their expertise, water still plagued the dungeon that held him.

There was no energy emanating from the stone, he could feel its coldness on the palm of his hand. Its white glow was entirely natural. A tiny stream glistened from the small, barred window high in the wall of his cell. Ayube had never seen the inside of a dungeon cell before. He assumed it would be entirely devoid of any natural light. The trickle of water snaked toward a small metal grate in the centre of the room.

Fascinating, Ayube thought. That such a people would think to dig a drainage system under the castle. In his own homeland, The Republic of Sadanu, groundwater, dew, and rain were not frequent hurdles his people needed to climb. It would never have occurred to him—not that he was an architect himself—to account for the damage that water could cause. Already, through his short time in the High Kingdom, it was clear its peoples were not the bumbling slow folk that his own had rumoured. Indeed, they showed just the same ingenuity, despite their vehement obsession with monarchs and rulers.

The reservoir of energy weighing down his shoulders ached. Though the sleepless nights had disrupted the roaring rivers of magic that flowed through him, it had still been days since his last reprieve.

“Hello!” Ayube called out. His shout clapped empty against the cool stone walls.

“I need help!” he called again. He worried they could not understand his thick Sadanu accent. Through the heavy wooden door at the dungeon’s end, a shadow shifted. There must have been a guard stationed there. Perhaps they were listening for signs of real trouble, perhaps they were trying to understand him, or perhaps the flicker of the torchlight tricked his mind. In any case, if Ayube could not find a vessel to unleash his pent-up energy, disaster would strike once again.

A wooden bucket sat in his cell. Could Ayube use it? He had only ever worked with charcoal, but from his experience in Fiamór, he knew his abilities were still far beyond his understanding.

“Please!” he shouted. “I feel pain!” It was partially true. Magic weighed down like heavy rainfall on good days but like an icy waterfall on bad ones. Today was a bad day, and the frigid pressure burdened him sore. Again, a shadow moved human-like through the gaps in the wooden door. Finally, a guard entered.

“What is it?” the guard asked, serious in her tone, as if concerned for Ayube.

“Yes! Please, I beg of you! I must speak to your captain!”

The dungeon guard wrinkled her brow, searching Ayube for deception. “You can talk to me.”

Ayube’s mind was weak, too weak, he thought, to be persuasive. “I… I wish to confess!”

Again the dungeon guard stood motionless. “You don’t need to confess. There’s no doubt about yer guilt.”

“I-if I can speak to your captain, I will confess to how it was done, how I killed all those people.” The stout woman did not respond. Her eyes teetered left and right as she stood in thought. Without a word, she turned and left the empty echoing room, latching the heavy door behind her. Though no real indication was given as to whether he would speak to the guard captain or not, Ayube relaxed for a moment. He had at least spoken to someone, and that simple interaction rested his mind.

The gap in time during the woman’s absence should have allowed Ayube to conjure up the words necessary to convince the captain of his request, but the task proved nearly impossible. In any other moment of his life, the bulk of thoughts that scattered through Ayube’s mind were random, make-belief arguments that he’d rehearse incessantly. If they said this, then I would say that. Occasionally, he’d find himself musing on the sciences and philosophies of life, but as he aged, those thoughts became equally confused and scattered. If only he could return to such a state. Instead, he saw horrors: men, women, and children screaming; bloody piles of meat, bone, and cartilage, so unrecognizable, you would hardly know they were once human.

Tears were streaming steadily down Ayube’s pockmarked face when the dungeon door opened once again. He wiped the tears, stripped of their salt in his malnourishment, and tried to calm his nerve.

It was the captain who detained him on the road, the man with the high voice. The captain, the one his men called “Cian,” stood arms crossed in front of Ayube. He was tall and thin, svelte even. He was also old, possibly nearing his seventies, though Ayube had noticed the frail-skinned folk of the High Kingdom wore their ageing more visibly than people of the south. Ayube’s gaze remained low, staring at Cian’s freshly shined boots, devoid of the dirt that coated them only hours previous. The female guard stayed at Cian’s side. He eventually waved her off, leaving the two alone along the wall of prison cells.

“Now young man, I’m told to you wish to confess. Wasn’t sure we needed it, but I’d be doin’ myself a disservice not listening to what you have to say.”

“Please, you may not believe me, but I am in great need of charcoal. A single lump is all that I need.”

Cian ducked his head, an eyebrow raised. “And why should I do that?”

“Because, if you do not…” Ayube knew how this would sound. “Everyone here may die.”

“Listen, boy,” Cian’s voice quickly soured. “You’re not in any place to be making threats!” Cian snapped sharply to his left, billowing his short cape. How dare this criminal mock me after all he’s done, he thought.

“No! Please! I am not making a threat! I will tell you all you wish to know, but I need this thing, if you can bring it.”

Cian’s upper lip curled in disgust as he looked down through the thick iron prison bars, but the quaking man before him softened his malleable heart. Cian was not a man of hate or revenge. Any attempt to hold these feelings twisted his stomach. He would not taint his values so late in his life.

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Cian retrieved the charcoal himself, there was a small pile kept in a metal container in his room high in the castle. Not everyone serving the Lord Daithi kept chambers within the castle walls, but Cian had watched Gildaun grow. Seeing the sun’s orange rays kiss the humid cool air every morning felt like a reward for his and everyone else’s hard work. He ruminated on those thoughts as he fetched the prisoner’s request; thoughts of the hard workers Gildaun would mourn. Fifty souls, lost.

A single lump of charcoal clicked to the floor outside Ayube’s cell. Without thought, he quickly snatched it and clasped it firm in his hands. He held it almost as if he were praying. His breath was sharp and deep, his eyes closed. For a moment there was nothing, and for a moment longer, nothing still. Cian scrunched his grey, thin brows, about to take leave once again until he saw it. At first, it was subtle, but soon light seeped between Ayube’s fingers like a hand over a white flame. With each deep breath, the charcoal grew brighter, it’s dusty, matte blackness paling into an ashen white.

The charcoal clicked as Ayube placed it on the ground outside his cell. The sound was higher pitched, as if it were lighter. Cian crouched, ignoring the pain in his ageing knees. The charcoal’s glow was bright; not strong like the sun’s, but soft like the moon’s. Cian looked away to stave the urge to touch it. Before he could even know it, however, the seemingly living material was held delicately in his fingers.

There, in a damp dungeon at the furthest reaches of the High Kingdom, Cian held the legendary element with a simple name.

“Whitestone,” he marvelled.

Ayube dropped to his backside, exhaustion washing over him. Without knowing it, Cian was one of the richest men in the world, even if only for a moment.

“We call it, ‘Gamohtuug.’ It means ‘a stone which has been set alight.’ It is forbidden in my country.” Ayube’s accent was thick, but his Clisten was perfect in its diction and grammar; years of study had seen to it. Speaking, however, was something he’d only practised in the most recent weeks. It was pointy and forced his mouth into strange shapes. It seemed to change vastly between small regions of Clistetír as well, testing the limits of his listening skills.

“Illegal, you say? Now why would you go making something so grand illegal?” asked Cian, still infatuated with the shining stone.

“It is magic, and magic kills people.”

Cian’s expression turned. He remembered who he was speaking with, and his fascination with the whitestone vanished; it might as well have been any other lump of charcoal.

“That’s where you’re wrong, lad. You kill people. And now you owe me an explanation.”

Fiamór was within a three-hour walk, but Worne’s cumbersome frame was not well suited for long distances. He found its location easily using Madwen’s suggestion: Take out your anger on some sorry city guard if you must. His horse stamped in place with a tug of the reins. Worne dismounted, leaving the creature untied; the mare would not go far in this now-peaceful place.

Emerging from the forest’s edge, the mark left by Daithi’s men on the land in and around the hamlet was obvious. The ground had been thoroughly trampled and the bodies had been cleared, mostly. Some scraps of flesh still corrupted the otherwise serene surroundings. There was something strange about how the grass had been pressed down, however. Worne crouched and roughly combed it with his thick fingers. The grass was uniformly compacted to one side.

Previous to working with the Omeness, Worne would never have paid any mind to such an obscure phenomenon as the direction of grass. Madwen, however, worked in subtleties—in fact, she thrived in them, and Worne knew an experienced warrior when he saw one. If this strategy had worked for Madwen, so too would it work for him.

He stood, straight-backed, following the sheen of the grass as it curved around the mix of dwellings and functional buildings. He followed the unnatural curve all the way around the village, meeting back at his starting point. Where would the centre of the circle lead him, he wondered.

Worne entered the first building on his path inward. It had been split in two; one room for cooking, eating, and working, and the other room for living, leisure, and rest. Like any building he’d seen in Gildaun, the building was well constructed with both form and functionality in mind. This home had children, perhaps quite a few. There were dolls made of straw, wicker, and cloth sprinkled about both rooms, as well as piles of smaller clothes and shoes. Worne could still smell the blood-iron in the air.

The other nine dwellings that formed Fiamór likely told a similar tragedy. They had been built in relatively close proximity to one another. Each was large, built of the same pale concrete as was used in Gildaun, though it seemed Fiamór still maintained the traditional thatched roofing seen across most of the kingdom. Some of the buildings appeared to serve other purposes: a fursman’s workshop, a communal storehouse, a granary; but the most prominent structure was a long, L-shaped alehouse with rectangular wooden tables and benches both indoors and out.

This is where it happened.

The alehouse had seen the brunt of the carnage. Crimson coated the ground, the tables and benches, the walls. Flesh flies buzzed loud, laying their eggs and feasting on the morsels of flesh strewn about. Plates and tankards still lay scattered across the tables, food still rotting and staling. Worne knelt, examining long marks in the dirt. They were claw marks—no, these were human scratch marks. Someone had dug their nails into the dirt, not to hold themselves in place, but to crawl forward. These were not the only ones either.

Placed centrally next to the L-shaped building was a stone well. More marks scored the earth—toward the well. As Worne drew closer, the disturbances grew larger, more pronounced. He could make out divots in the dirt where someone had dug in their foot, like a foothold in a cliff-side. An axe lay on its side, the blade covered in dirt, the ground next to it chipped in the same shape. The blood seemed more congealed the closer Worne approached the well until suddenly, nothing.

Like a bloody battlefield around a walled city, at the centre of everything: the circle of grass, the pieces of meat, the pools of blood, the human claw marks; the well sat undisturbed, clean. Except—

Worne’s horse huffed and whinnied outside the hamlet. It came trotting to him but quickly veered at the scent of death, coming to rest nearby. Greycrows cawed and scattered amidst the treetops. A familiar breeze caressed him, bringing about a tingling chill. Deep in the corners of Worne’s mind, something reached out for him; a memory begging to be recalled, like an itch on a severed limb. Something was watching—studying him.

His heartbeat still calm, but ready to pump, Worn turned his attention back to the well. Something had embedded itself in the undisturbed dust. He struggled to free it from the ground at first. It was small and exceptionally smooth. Once in his palm, however, he noted its abnormal density. Worne held it close to his face, the sun’s unobscured light bouncing unnaturally. He’d seen this colour before; held this material before.

Straw, wicker, and cloth.

This was it. The pieces had fallen in place. All the signs were there. Worne had already suspected it, but this was the proof he needed.

This was dark magic, powerful magic, familiar magic. Omen magic.

Cian’s breaths were deep, calm. In all his years crime was seldom an obstacle he needed to face, and yet there he stood, listening to a man recite the cruellest, most heinous crime he could ever imagine. It was still day outside the castle. The birds still chirped, the breeze still blew. Even in the dungeon, he could feel it all. But it all felt grey.

“I never meant for it to happen, but it happened all the same. As it always does. As I fear it always will. Now when I feel I am in the place I need to be, I will be sentenced to death. A part of me thinks this may be for the best. I have caused too much pain. Too much suffering.”

Cian turned to his left, slowly, his short cape barely swaying.

“Folk are surprised to hear that Lord Daithi and I don’t agree on much. He’s a fair man, I’ve always thought so, but sometimes I fear he puts the needs of the many too far above the needs of the few. It pains me to say it, lad, but I’m afraid he’s right. We can’t have someone like you around.”

Ayube heard the heavy latch of the dungeon’s door lock behind Cian as he left.