Chapter 23 | Part 3 | The Conversation

They made camp in a depression between two ridgelines where the volcanic soil gave way to something almost resembling dirt. Scrub vegetation clung to the edges, pale roots gripping stone the way old hands grip a cane. Talryn built the fire. Srietz inventoried what remained of his supplies after the crossing, muttering figures to himself with the quiet intensity of a priest counting sins.

Drusniel sat apart and pretended to study the terrain ahead.

Talryn positioned herself on the western ridge. Far enough to seem respectful. Close enough to hear anything above a whisper. Drusniel had learned to measure those distances over three days of walking, to map the guide’s hearing range the way he mapped spell ranges at the academy. Twelve feet for normal speech. Twenty for raised voices. Beyond twenty, you had a chance, though Talryn’s ears were better than they had any right to be.

Elion appeared beside him the way Elion always appeared. One moment the shapeshifter was somewhere else, the next he was here, sitting on a flat stone with his knees drawn up and his strange eyes reflecting the distant fire.

“You froze,” Elion said.

No preamble. No softening. Just the fact, laid down between them like a stone.

“I froze.”

“When Srietz fell. You reached for something. Not magic. Not your hands.” Elion tilted his head. The motion wasn’t quite human, a degree too far, held a beat too long. “You reached inward.”

Drusniel said nothing for a while. He watched Talryn’s silhouette on the ridge, measuring the distance. Twenty-three feet. Maybe twenty-four. The wind was moving east to west, which meant it carried their voices away from the guide, not toward her.

Maybe.

“I expected help that didn’t come,” he said.

“From what?”

The question hung between them. Below, a Scorchshell picked its way across a fissure in the campsite’s edge, eight legs finding holds in stone that looked smooth from a distance. Drusniel watched it navigate. The creature had no concept of help. It had shell, legs, and instinct. It didn’t expect assistance from invisible things in its skull.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. Which was true. “It speaks. It offers. It has terms. It called itself nothing, named itself nothing. It just arrives.”

Elion was quiet. Not the polite quiet of someone formulating a response, but the deep stillness of recognition. Drusniel had seen animals go still like that, prey animals hearing a sound they knew from some ancestral memory.

“How many times?” Elion asked.

“How many times what?”

“Has it spoken to you.”

Drusniel counted. The first time in the deep cave, alone and starving. The second in the passage, when he’d accepted the debt for the goblin settlement’s location. The third after the nightmare sea, when the Voice had offered direction. The fourth at the black garden’s edge, a brief murmur about Nyxara’s nature. Small ones after that, half-formed impressions, nudges that might have been the Voice or might have been his own instincts echoing its patterns.

“Four times clearly,” he said. “Others that I’m less sure about.”

“The unclear ones are worse.”

Drusniel looked at the shapeshifter. Elion’s face was steady, his jaw set in a way that meant he was choosing his next words with the care of someone crossing a mined field.

“You have one,” Drusniel said. Not a question.

“I have something.” Elion’s voice dropped to its lowest register, barely louder than the wind. “It doesn’t speak the way yours does. No words. More like knowing. I’ll reach for a shape I’ve never held and the knowledge of how to hold it will be there, waiting, as if someone left the door open.”

“Does it have terms?”

“No terms. No debts. Just the knowing, and then the gap afterward where I can’t remember choosing.” He paused. “That’s worse than terms. Terms mean negotiation. This doesn’t negotiate. It just provides.”

Drusniel found a crack in the stone beside him and pressed his thumb into it. Cool stone, rough edges, real. He traced the line of the fracture until it branched.

“How many times?”

Elion held his gaze. Whatever reluctance lived in him dissolved in that moment, replaced by the flat honesty of someone who needed to say the number out loud at least once.

“Forty-three.”

The word landed in Drusniel’s chest like a physical blow. Forty-three. He had four, maybe six if he counted the uncertain ones, and he was already building reflexes around it, already reaching before thinking. Forty-three meant Elion’s version wasn’t an occasional visitor. It was infrastructure. Load-bearing. Woven into the shapeshifter’s abilities so deeply that removing it would be like pulling threads from a net and hoping the net still held.

“Forty-three,” Drusniel repeated.

“I stopped counting for a while. Picked it up again after the nightmare sea. The count might be higher.” Elion’s hands were flat on his knees, fingers spread. Controlled. “I’ve never told anyone the number.”

“Does it know you’re telling me?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part that keeps me up.” Elion watched the fire below, where Srietz had finished his inventory and was arranging small bottles in the order he always arranged them, tallest to shortest, labels out. “Yours has terms. Mine doesn’t. Yours announces itself. Mine just opens doors. Neither of us chose this.”

“No.”

“And neither of us knows how to stop it.”

They sat with that between them. The wind shifted, carrying the smell of sulfur and cold stone. On the ridge, Talryn adjusted her position, a minor movement that could mean she’d heard something or could mean her leg had cramped. No way to tell.

“We should assume she caught some of that,” Drusniel said.

“She caught all of it.” Elion’s certainty was absolute. “But she won’t understand what she heard. We didn’t name anything. We didn’t describe anything useful. Just two travelers comparing nightmares.”

“Nyxara will understand.”

“Nyxara understands everything. That’s a separate problem.”

Below them, the Scorchshell reached the far side of the fissure and disappeared into a crack between two stones. It carried nothing. Owed nothing. Expected nothing from the dark.

Drusniel envied a creature the size of his fist, and wasn’t sure whether that was funny or just accurate.

“Forty-three,” he said again, quietly. The number sat in his mind like a weight on a scale, measuring the distance between where he was and where Elion had been for a long time already.

Elion nodded once and stood. He walked back toward the fire without looking at Talryn, without checking the ridge, without any of the careful awareness he usually carried.

He walked like someone who had just set something down and wasn’t sure yet whether it felt lighter or just different.

End of Chapter 23.3 —> 23.4: The Debt Anticipated: The Crystal Trade Truth