SINEUS: Forbidden Truth

For a long moment, the only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the whisper of the wind through the high pines. Fedor had moved to the far side of the fire. He pulled a whetstone from his belt pouch and began to sharpen his axe. The rhythmic scrape of stone on steel was a harsh, grating counterpoint to the quiet of the woods. Scrape. Scrape. A sound that promised violence.

Alani watched the flames, her dark eyes reflecting the flickering light. The pain had not left her face, but something else was there now. A deep, weary knowledge.

“The Blight is not an army,” she said, her voice barely louder than the fire.

Sineus paused, his hands still resting near her bandaged arm. He looked at her, waiting.

“It is a wound.”

The words settled in the cold air. A wound. He thought of the high-pitched rasp he heard in his mind whenever a memory was cut, the sound of tearing reality. He thought of the creature dissolving into foul mist, its mismatched parts returning to the nothing that had birthed them. It was not a force that conquered. It was a force that unmade. A wound fit.

“A spirit in pain,” Alani continued, her gaze still lost in the fire. “Crying out with all the memories the world has thrown away.”

Sineus felt a familiar ache sharpen behind his eyes. He saw the fire not just as flame, but as a shimmering overlay of all the fires that had burned in this spot before. He saw the ghost of the pine log as a living tree, its memory clinging to the burning wood. He heard the whispers of the Blight, the chorus of forgotten things. She was giving a name to the noise that lived always at the edge of his hearing.

It was the sound of pain.

Across the fire, the scraping of steel on stone did not stop. Fedor worked with a grim focus, his head bowed over his work. He did not look at Alani. He did not acknowledge her words. He was a man of the physical world, a world of clear threats and tangible answers. Her talk of spirits and pain was the talk of the Forest Folk, strange and unreliable. Superstition.

The edge of his axe caught the firelight, a thin, hungry line of white.

“Pain I understand,” Fedor grunted, his voice a low rumble that seemed to come from his chest. The scraping continued, a steady, grinding rhythm. “And I know how to answer it.”

He tested the blade with his thumb, a small, precise movement. Satisfied, he slid the whetstone back into its pouch. His answer was sharp. His answer was final. He looked up, his gaze meeting Sineus’s over the flames. His expression was clear. This was weakness. This talk would get them killed.

Sineus finished tying the knot on Alani’s bandage. The task was done. Her arm was protected, the bleeding stopped. But the space between his two companions had become a chasm.

He looked from Fedor, solid and unyielding as the granite at his back, to Alani, wounded but seeing a truth deeper than the physical world. The warrior and the mystic. The hand that strikes and the heart that feels the wound. He was the Knyaz. He was their leader. And he was standing between two opposing worlds.

He needed the axe. He knew its worth on a field of battle, its simple, brutal honesty. He had seen Fedor hold a broken gate against a dozen raiders in the northern wars. That strength was real. It was necessary.

But he had also seen the Blight consume a watchtower, not by breaking its stones, but by unmaking the memory of its form until it was just a pile of dust. An axe could not fight that. A shield could not block it. Fedor’s certainty was a shield, but it was a shield with a hole in the center, a hole shaped exactly like the truth.

Alani’s truth. She saw the world as a living thing, its memory a part of its flesh. The Blight was not an invader, but a sickness. A cancer born of their own actions. To her, Fedor’s axe was not a solution; it was just another cut, another wound inflicted on a world already bleeding.

The fire popped, sending a brief shower of sparks into the darkness. High above, the stars were cold and clear.

He needed to forge one path from two opposing truths.

The Golden Road

The trees thinned, then gave way completely. They left the last of the sparse woodlands behind and stepped into a new world, a sea of pale green grass that rolled to every horizon. The sky was immense, a hard, bright blue swept clean by a wind that never stopped. It smelled of dust and distance. It pulled at Sineus’s cloak and whispered of emptiness. For three days they had walked this open land, the great wall of the Echoing Blight a constant, shimmering grey stain to their east.

Alani’s arm was healing, the wound closing cleanly, but she was quieter now. The energy of the forest was gone, replaced by this endless expanse. She navigated by the sun and the stars, her senses finding little purchase on the uniform landscape. Fedor was more at ease here. He could see for kilometers in every direction. No trees meant no ambushes. He walked with a lighter step, his axe resting easy on his shoulder.

Sineus felt the openness as a lack of shelter. The ache behind his eyes was a low, constant thrum, a reminder of the Blight some eight kilometers away. He scanned the horizon, his gaze sweeping from north to south. He was looking for threats, for water, for any sign of life.

He found one.

It was a smudge of dust in the south, a faint brown cloud rising against the blue sky. It was too large for a handful of riders, too steady for a dust devil. It was moving toward them.

Fedor saw it a moment later. He stopped, his hand going to the grip of his axe. He squinted, his eyes accustomed to judging distance across open ground.

“Caravan,” he said. His voice was flat. “A big one.”

They waited. The dust cloud grew, resolving itself into a long, slow-moving line. It was a river of commerce flowing north across the steppes. Sineus could begin to make out shapes. Tall, lurching camels laden with goods. Stocky steppe ponies. Men on foot, and armed guards on horseback. The faint, rhythmic sound of bells carried on the wind.

The caravan was a hundred strong, perhaps more. A moving town of traders and guards, animals and wagons. As it drew closer, the smells reached them: sweat, dust, animal musk, and the faint, exotic scent of spices. The guards were professionals, clad in layered leather and dull grey steel. They rode with an easy confidence, their eyes constantly scanning the plains.

The entire column halted a hundred meters away. A single rider detached from the front and trotted forward. The man who led them.

He was a study in contradictions. He wore robes of fine, deep blue silk that billowed in the wind, but beneath them were the scuffed leather trousers and high boots of a man who lived in the saddle. Gold thread glittered at his cuffs, but his hands, resting on the reins, were calloused and brown. His face was weathered by sun and wind, a map of fine lines around sharp, intelligent eyes. A trader’s smile touched his lips, but it did not reach his eyes. Those were the eyes of a predator.

He stopped his horse ten meters from them, his gaze taking in all three of them in a single, swift appraisal. He noted Fedor’s axe and warrior’s stance. He saw Alani’s simple hides and the fresh bandage on her arm. Then his eyes settled on Sineus. They lingered on the heavy fur cloak, a garment of the north, and the small, silver clasp that held it. The clasp was fashioned in the shape of a wolf’s head, the seal of the Knyaz of Belogorod.

The man’s smile widened, becoming a fraction more genuine. The encounter had just changed. They were no longer three ragged travelers. They were a political reality.

“Knyaz Sineus Belov,” the man said. It was not a question. His voice was smooth, cultured. “You are a long way from your white walls.”

“And you are a long way from the markets of the south,” Sineus replied, his tone even.

“The Golden Road is always long,” the man said with a slight bow of his head. “But it is always profitable. I am Timur Makhmudov, of the Golden Road Consortium.”

The name was known even in the north. The Consortium was a power in its own right, a web of trade and influence that spanned half the continent. They were not a nation. They were richer.

“We are traveling south,” Sineus stated, offering no more.

Timur’s gaze was knowing. “Of course. There are few other destinations in this direction. The direct road to the Sunken Scriptorium is long. And it passes through the mountains of the Khevsur.”

The merchant lord’s words were casual, but they were a clear display of power. He knew their destination. He knew the dangers. His information was current. Pavel Orlov’s warnings about the reach of southern powers echoed in Sineus’s mind.

“The Khevsur are not fond of northern lords,” Timur continued, his eyes twinkling. “Their honor is a complicated thing. They might offer you hospitality. They might demand a toll in steel. It is hard to say.”

He let the silence stretch, the wind whistling over the grass. Fedor shifted his weight, his hand tight on his axe. He did not like this man.

“There is another way,” Timur said, his voice dropping to a more confidential tone. “A faster way. A shortcut my own caravans sometimes use. It passes through the Blight-touched hills to the west.”

Alani, who had been silent, stiffened. The movement was small, but Sineus saw it. Her hand went to her bandaged arm, her fingers tracing the edge of the cloth. She felt the wrongness of the suggestion, a psychic chill that had nothing to do with the wind.

“The hills are dangerous,” Sineus said.

“The world is dangerous, Knyaz,” Timur countered smoothly. “But every risk can be managed. Every ledger can be balanced. One simply needs the right tools.”

He gestured with his chin to his belt. Tucked beside a waterskin was a small, unadorned blade. It was not a fighting knife. The hilt was plain wood, the sheath simple leather. But the blade itself, where it met the hilt, was a line of perfect nothingness. It was a dark, non-reflective steel that seemed to drink the light.

An Oblivion Blade. A type of Sekach Pamyati. A tool for cutting memory.

Sineus felt the familiar, high-pitched rasp in the back of his mind, the shriek of torn reality that only he could hear. The blade was inert, but the memory of its purpose, of its countless uses, clung to it like a foul smell. He could see the shimmering wounds it had left on the world, a lattice of faint, ghostly scars in the Pod-sloy.

This was how Timur Makhmudov managed his risks. He did not fight monsters. He cut the memory of their existence from a stretch of road. He did not pay tolls. He erased the memory of the toll from the collector’s mind. His perfect reputation was built on a foundation of curated forgetting.

“My guides are the best,” Timur said, his smile confident. “We know how to make the path safe.”

Alani said nothing, but Sineus felt her warning as a cold knot in his gut. She was looking at Timur not as a man, but as a source of pain, a walking wound upon the land. Her silence was a shout.

A Traders Bargain

Sineus weighed the offer. The merchant lord’s words were smooth as river stones, polished by a thousand similar conversations. A faster way. A shortcut. The promise hung in the wind that swept across the endless grass, a tempting poison. He needed to reach the Sunken Scriptorium of Ur. Every day wasted was another meter of land lost to the Blight.

The memory of Pavel Orlov’s study surfaced, unbidden. The scent of cold tea and old maps. The earnest fear in his advisor’s eyes, a man who had served Sineus’s father.

Pavel’s warning felt heavy, even here, twelve hundred kilometers from the white stone of Belogorod. He had urged Sineus to trust no one beyond their walls, especially not the southern traders, whose contracts were knots and whose kindness was a blade. Pavel’s world was one of ledgers and fortifications, of tangible threats that could be met with high walls and full granaries. It was a sane world. It was also a world that was shrinking by the hour.

Sineus glanced to his left. Alani stood with her weight on her good leg, her wounded arm held close to her body. The guide from the Forest Folk, who navigated by the land’s pain, was pale. Her gaze was fixed on Timur Makhmudov. She gave a single, minute shake of her head. It was a gesture so small anyone else would have missed it. A flicker of denial. A silent scream.

Her senses, alien to him, had proven true. She had led them around a valley where the ground itself felt curdled with the memory of a massacre. She had felt the Blight-stitched wolf before they saw it. Her warning was not superstition. It was data.

On his other side, Fedor had not moved. His feet were planted wide, his knuckles white on the haft of his axe. The captain of his guard was a man who trusted only steel and stone. His eyes were not on Timur, but on the two mounted guards who flanked the merchant lord. Fedor was measuring them. Calculating angles of attack, the time it would take to close the ten meters between them. He was assessing the physical threat, and his stillness was its own kind of warning.

The guards were professionals. Their leather armor was worn but well-oiled. Their faces were impassive, their gaze distant. They were not watching the negotiation. They were watching the horizon, their hands resting near the swords at their belts. They were paid to see threats, not to understand bargains. Their competence was unsettling.

“A shortcut is often just a longer way to die,” Fedor rumbled, his voice low. He did not look at Sineus, his attention locked on the Consortium men.

Timur Makhmudov heard him. A flicker of amusement crossed the merchant’s face.

“Your man has a warrior’s caution, Knyaz. It is a valuable trait. But a warrior sees every problem as a foe to be struck. A trader sees a problem as a cost to be managed.”

He leaned forward slightly in his saddle, his silk robes rustling. The movement was casual, disarming.

“The Khevsur are a cost I choose not to pay. Their honor is a currency with a fluctuating value. One day they share their bread with you. The next, they demand your blood for an imagined slight. It is bad for business.”

Sineus thought of the council he hoped to forge. He needed the Khevsur. But he needed to reach the Scriptorium first. He could not lead from a shallow grave in a mountain pass.

“And the Blight?” Sineus asked, his voice flat. “Is that a manageable cost as well?”

The question was a test. A direct challenge to the merchant’s smooth confidence.

Timur’s smile did not falter. He gestured with his chin toward the unadorned blade at his belt, the Oblivion Blade that had made Sineus’s teeth ache. The air around the weapon seemed thin, wounded.

“Every tool has its purpose. We do not travel through the heart of the Blight. That would be foolish. We travel through lands that are merely touched by it. Sickened. Where the memories are thin and the creatures that spawn are weak. If we meet one, we unmake the memory of its passage. The path is cleared.”

He made it sound like sweeping dust from a floor. A simple, clean act of maintenance. Sineus felt the high, thin rasp in his mind again, the sound of reality being torn. Each cut Timur described was another small tear, another drop of poison feeding the sea of forgotten things.

“My guides are the best,” Timur pressed, his voice dropping to a confidential tone. “We know the safe paths. We know which memories have curdled into true danger, and which are merely whispers. We can have you on the far side of the hills in three days. The road through the mountains will take you three weeks. If the Khevsur let you pass at all.”

Three days versus three weeks.

The offer was a perfectly crafted trap, baited with the one thing Sineus could not afford to waste. Time.

He turned his head, looking east. The Echoing Blight was a bruise on the horizon, a churning grey wall that drank the afternoon light. Even from eight kilometers away, he felt its presence as a pressure behind his eyes, a low thrum just beneath the threshold of hearing. Every day they spent on this plain, it crept closer to the lands of the south, and to his own home in the north. It did not sleep. It did not rest. It only consumed.

The urgency was a physical weight. A fire at his back.

He brought his gaze back to Timur. The merchant’s eyes were patient. They had seen this moment before. The calculation. The weighing of risk against time. The silent debate of a leader trapped between a known danger and an unknown one.

He felt Alani’s fear. He felt Fedor’s distrust. He felt the memory of Pavel’s sensible, useless advice. They were all anchors, holding him to a safe path that was too slow. The world was dying faster than the safe path would allow.

Sometimes, the only path forward was through the sickness.

The ache behind Sineus’s eyes sharpened into a spike of pain. He made the choice.

He gave a single, sharp nod.

The offer was accepted.

Fedor’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. He served the Knyaz, not his own doubts. Alani closed her eyes for a brief second, a flicker of resignation and sorrow crossing her face. She had offered her truth. The Knyaz had chosen another.

Timur Makhmudov’s smile finally broadened, but it was a gesture that did not reach his eyes. It was the smile of a man who has just closed a profitable deal. The tightening of skin around his eyes was predatory. The bargain was sealed.

“An excellent decision, Knyaz,” Timur said smoothly. He raised a hand, signaling to his caravan. “My men will continue north. I will provide you with two of my best guides. They will see you safely to the southern road.”

He gestured, and two of the mounted guards detached from the caravan and trotted toward them. They were lean, hard-faced men with identical, empty expressions. They carried crossbows on their saddles and wore the same functional leather and steel as the others. They stopped a respectful distance away, awaiting orders.

“They are called the Silent. They do not speak, but they know the paths,” Timur explained. “Trust their lead. They will not fail you.”

He wheeled his horse around, the fine silk of his robes catching the wind.

“May your journey be swift, Knyaz Sineus.”

The merchant lord did not wait for a reply. He spurred his horse and cantered back toward his caravan, a river of wealth and influence flowing north. He had what he wanted. An obligation from a northern lord. A piece on the great board he could move later.

The two guides moved into position, one in front of Sineus’s party, one behind. They were bookends of grim efficiency. The one in front pointed his horse west, toward a line of low, brown hills that looked like knuckles on a buried hand. The land there looked wrong. Drained of color.

The wind blew from those hills, and it carried no scent of grass or earth. It smelled of dust and stillness. Of things that had been left to rot in a place without time.

The sun was warm on his back. The grass whispered around his boots.

The Blight-Touched Hills

Sineus followed, the choice a cold weight in his gut. The two guides from the Golden Road Consortium, the men Timur Makhmudov called the Silent, fell into formation without a word. One rode twenty meters ahead, a stark silhouette against the pale grass. The other fell in behind Fedor, his presence a constant, quiet pressure. They moved with an unsettling economy of motion, their faces blank, their eyes fixed on the horizon.

The transition was gradual, then sudden. The sea of grass grew thin, revealing patches of dry, cracked earth. The soil changed color from rich brown to a sickly grey. The wind, which had been a constant companion on the steppes, died completely. A profound stillness fell over the land, a silence so deep it felt like a sound in itself.

“The air is wrong,” Alani whispered. She rode closer to Sineus, her good hand resting on her saddle horn. The bandage on her left arm was a stark white against the simple hides she wore.

Fedor grunted in agreement. The captain of his guard had his axe off his shoulder now, holding it loosely in one hand. His eyes, accustomed to the open plains, narrowed as they scanned the broken terrain ahead. He did not like the blind corners and sudden dips in the land.

They entered the first valley. It was a shallow cut between low, rolling hills that looked like knuckles on a buried hand. The rocks were not the clean granite of the north. They were a porous, dark stone, stained with patches of greasy, grey lichen. The stuff grew in unnatural patterns, like spreading bruises.

Sineus felt the change in the Pod-sloy. The ghostly overlay of the past was thin here, frayed. He saw no clear echoes of men or animals, only faint, twisted smudges of fear. The memory of a panicked deer, the final terror of a snake caught by a hawk. These small agonies clung to the rocks, refusing to fade.

The cold deepened. It was not the clean, sharp cold of a northern winter. It was a damp, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature. It felt like standing near a wet cellar wall, a cold that seeped into the bones.

The guide in front raised a hand, and the small party halted. He pointed toward the valley floor. A stream had once run there. Now, the creek bed was bone dry, filled with a fine, grey powder that looked like ash. Nothing grew along its banks.

“The ground is dead here,” Alani said, her voice barely audible. “It has forgotten how to be earth.”

Fedor’s gaze swept the ridgelines. “I don’t like this. We’re exposed.”

“We keep moving,” Sineus ordered, his voice low and steady. He urged his horse forward, past the silent guide. The man did not react, simply falling back into position as Sineus took the lead. The Knyaz needed to feel the path for himself.

The ache behind his eyes, a constant companion since leaving Belogorod, sharpened. The Echoing Blight was no longer a distant stain on the horizon. They were in it. Not the churning wall of absolute unmaking, but the lands it had sickened. The borderlands of oblivion.

He could feel it as a pressure, a low thrum that vibrated in his teeth. The whispers were louder here. Not words, but the shredded edges of them. Fragments of forgotten prayers, a child’s cry, a lover’s promise – all torn and mixed into a meaningless, sorrowful hiss at the very edge of hearing.

The valley narrowed, the grey-stained walls rising on either side. The silence was absolute. No birds, no insects. The only sounds were the soft tread of their horses’ hooves in the grey dust and the whisper of their own breathing.

Then, a new sound.

It was a low, wet tearing. It came not from one direction, but from everywhere at once. The guide in front stopped dead, his head snapping up toward the western ridge.

Sineus looked. The grey lichen on the rocks was moving. It pulsed, a slow, sickening rhythm, and began to ooze a thin, black fluid. The fluid ran down the rock faces in thick, oily streams. It did not drip. It flowed.

“What is that?” Fedor demanded, his horse sidling nervously.

Before Sineus could answer, the flow quickened. From every crack and fissure in the hills, the blackness poured forth. It was not a fog. It was a liquid shadow, a sentient tide of forgotten things. It moved with a horrifying purpose, a river of despair flooding the valley floor.

Within the churning darkness, Sineus saw them. Faces. Thousands of them, appearing and vanishing in an instant. A face contorted in a silent scream, the slack-jawed face of a famine victim, the wide, terrified eyes of a soldier facing a rout. They were not ghosts. They were the raw stuff of memory, stripped of context and peace.

“Turn back!” Alani cried out, her voice sharp with psychic pain. She clutched her head, her knuckles white. The sheer volume of agony in the approaching tide was overwhelming her.