Chapter 8 | Part 1

The road from Zuraldi stretched through hills that had seen better centuries.

Dulint walked with the weight of sixty-three years in his bones and a pack that felt heavier with each league. The trade route was well-worn, carved by generations of merchants connecting the eastern settlements to the frontier towns, but they’d seen few travelers these past weeks. The roads felt emptier than they should. Quieter.

Behind him, his nephew Balin complained about everything. The dust, the heat, the lack of interesting scenery, the general injustice of being dragged across half the eastern lands to visit some mage neither of them had actually met.

“Another day of nothing,” Balin said. “Tell me again why we’re walking toward nowhere?”

“Not nowhere. Riverhold.” Dulint adjusted the pack’s straps. The thing inside shifted, and for a moment he could have sworn—no. He was imagining things. “And because I told you. Something’s coming. I can feel it.”

“You’ve been feeling it for three weeks, Uncle. I’ve been feeling blisters. Also hunger. Also profound boredom.” Balin kicked a stone off the road with unnecessary force. “The witch-woman in Zuraldi said a lot of things. Half of them didn’t even make sense.”

“She said to go to Riverhold. She said to find Xandor.”

“She also said the sky would weep and the mountains would remember. What does that even mean?”

Dulint grunted. The boy wasn’t wrong. Three weeks since Balin had pulled the cube from Stonehold’s ruin, and the thing had done nothing but weigh him down. And last night in Zuraldi, the witch-woman had looked at him with those hollow eyes and said words he couldn’t repeat.

The artifact. The cube. The thing Balin had pulled from a collapsed wall in Stonehold’s deepest ruin.

They’d been exploring the old mines—Dulint’s family had worked them generations ago, before the ore ran out and the tunnels collapsed. His great-grandfather Thrain had made his fortune there, had built the family name on the wealth that came out of those depths. Dulint had wanted to see what remained. History. Legacy. The bones of something that used to matter.

The cube had been buried behind a wall that shouldn’t have been there. Ancient stone, sealed with mortar that predated dwarven craft. Balin had found the seam, had pried loose the covering, had reached into the darkness and pulled out something that didn’t belong.

It had been cold when they found it. Cold and dead and unremarkable, except for the geometric perfection of its shape and the symbols carved into its surface. Dulint had wanted to leave it—his instincts told him some things were better left buried—but Balin had insisted. The boy was young. The young always thought old things were treasures.

“Now, the thing about walking,” Dulint began, falling into the comfortable rhythm of an old story, “is that your grandfather used to say—”

“Uncle.”

“—that the road reveals what a man carries. Not in his pack, mind you, but in his heart. And I remember once, during the second campaign against the minotaurs, we were—”

“Uncle.”

“What?”

“Your pack. It’s glowing.”

Dulint stopped. He turned, slowly, and looked down at the worn leather bag hanging at his side.

A faint, colorless light leaked through the seams—sharp and thin, like sunlight slicing through a crack in a mine shaft.

The weight shifted again. Not like something settling. Like something turning.

“Ancestors preserve us,” Dulint breathed. He reached for the pack’s clasp with fingers that had steadied ore-carts and swung pickaxes and once, long ago, held a sword in the defense of Granite Pass. Now they trembled.

The cube came out warm.

It had never been warm before. In three weeks of carrying it, through summer heat and cool forest nights, the artifact had maintained the temperature of tomb-stone. Now it radiated heat like banked coals, like something alive that had been sleeping and had finally opened its eyes.

And it was pointing.

“What did you do to it?” Balin stepped back, his hand dropping to the knife at his belt as if that would help against whatever this was.

“Nothing.” Dulint turned the cube in his hands. The symbols on its surface—once dark and indecipherable—now burned with a pale, steady luminescence. It wasn’t just light; it was pressure. One face glowed brighter than the others. When he rotated the cube, the glow stayed fixed, as if something beyond the artifact was pulling at it. North-east. Toward the distant mountains. Toward something he couldn’t see. “I didn’t do anything. It just…”

The cube hummed.

Not a sound exactly. More a vibration that bypassed his ears and settled directly into his bones. His teeth ached with it. His vision swam. The world felt wrong—not painful, but displaced. Like he was standing slightly to the left of where he should be.

“Uncle?” Balin’s voice came from far off. “What’s happening?”

Dulint stared at the artifact. Three weeks of dormancy. Three weeks of nothing. And now—

“Something changed,” he said. “Whatever this is—it wasn’t doing this before.”

End of Chapter 8.1 —> 8.2: The Road from Zuraldi: The Absence