Chapter 160: The Scar and the Axe [1]
Morning came slow and green.
The sky brightened like a leaf filling with light. The moss road hummed underfoot, pleased with their weight and their purpose.
Once again, Clayton led.
Veyra walked at his right, bow coiled along her forearm like a sleeping vine. Soren carried his Emberblade on his shoulder. Kaelin drifted in and out of the Ashveil, a flicker here, a whisper there.
They did not speak much. They didn’t need to, the road spoke for them.
It guided them south and a little east, then curved to avoid a low valley. The valley felt wrong as the moss thinned there and refused to carry weight.
Clayton tested the edge with a root. The ground tasted dry and old, as if a fire had burned here long ago and the ash had decided to stay.
"The scar," Clayton said quietly.
They went down anyway.
The air changed as they descended. The bright green of Echoterra dimmed to a dull, bruised hue as the wind thinned.
The soil stopped answering like a friend and started listening like a judge. The plants were sparse here. The ones that did grow had hard edges and kept their distance from one another, as if they disliked touching.
They walked deeper.
Deeper, lines etched the earth. Not trails, trenches.
Root trenches burned black and glassy. In places, you could still see the patterns of defensive nets, anchor points, and circles of growth cut clean by something that hated circles.
Charred stumps rose at intervals, their rings fused into shiny plates.
Veyra touched one and hissed. "Hot."
"It shouldn’t be," Soren said. His breath fogged briefly and turned to cinders. He frowned.
Kaelin looked around, eyes narrowed. "This place remembers pain and keeps it fresh."
Clayton knelt and pressed his palm to the ground. The soil let him in, but only a little. He heard a low moan somewhere below thought. A wound that never closed, a cut that had become a rule.
His jaw tightened. "We’re close."
And then, a sound rolled from deeper in the valley.
Not thunder, not a beast, but a steady, hard rhythm; metal and root hitting something that did not want to move.
’Torren,’ Clayton thought.
He stood and moved, and the others fell in around him.
They crested a low ridge of slagged root and finally, they saw the fight.
Torren stood alone in a bowl of cracked earth.
His Pyreaxe flared with each breath, Flamevine roots curled from his boots into the ground, feeding his swings. Ember sprayed at every strike.
He faced a ring of shapes made of smoke and memory, Verdant echoes, their forms cut from old battles, their eyes empty and bright. Some were spears of grown wood, others blades of leaf-steel, and some cloaks of moss that moved like water.
They were not alive; they were the land’s pain.
It had learned to fight back by making the past repeat.
Torren roared and split one in half. It folded like paper and then rebuilt itself, pieces knitting with a hiss.
He ducked another’s thrust and answered with a backswing that cracked the echo’s spine. It fell and dissolved into a drift of spore-light that flowed back to the ground like tears.
Two more stepped in. Torren took them both on the haft and shoved, boots grinding, fire bursting from the seam of his teeth.
Clayton did not wait.
He planted three roots at the bowl’s edge and sent them like spears. They pinned one echo to the earth and nailed another’s feet to the dirt.
Soren vaulted down the slope and met the third echo with a cut that would have split a real man from hip to collarbone. The echo shattered, then tried to reform, but Soren stepped in and carved it again, faster than its memory could heal.
Kaelin slid into the ring and made four quick moves that unmade a spear, a throat, a hand, and a knee.
The echo stuttered, confused by a future it did not remember. Veyra’s arrow thudded through its skull and fixed it to a black stump. It broke like glass this time and didn’t come back.
Torren’s head snapped toward Clayton.
In his eyes, there was fire, then relief, then the grin he wore when death stood close and he wanted to bite it.
"About damn time!" He barked.
Clayton grinned as his roots curled and struck again. "Finish the ring!"
They did.
The echoes tried to adapt.
One grew thorns mid-swing, another changed a sword to a scythe and hooked for ankles. A third split into two thinner men and came at Kaelin from both sides, but the team moved as one.
Veyra called shots without shouting. "Left knee, hooked wrist, spine seam."
Her arrows found each target in turn. Kaelin flowed where her words pointed. As for Soren, he hammered anything that stood too long.
Clayton held the ring’s rhythm with roots that grabbed, tripped, and crushed.
Torren hunted the largest echo and did not stop until it learned the shape of his axe.
The last echo tried to flee the bowl.
It leaped the ridge and sprinted along a glassy trench, but Veyra put an arrow through its calf. Kaelin appeared in front of it and stabbed the void where a heart would be if a memory had a heart.
Soren hit it from behind with a vertical cut that drove it into the ground. Clayton pinned the paste of it with a root. Torren arrived and brought the Pyreaxe down like a bell.
Then...
BOOM!
The echo burst into a cloud of ember-dust that rained in a slow ring and vanished into the soil.
Silence fell as the wound in the ground hummed.
Torren stood tall, breathing hard, flame dimming. He flicked ash off the Pyreaxe and blew out a last strip of heat.
Then he looked at Clayton and stepped forward. They slammed forearms, the sound was sharp and clean.
"You look like a tree again," Torren said, grinning.
"You look like a fire that learned to walk," Clayton said.
Torren laughed once. "Feels that way."
He glanced at the valley walls, then back to Clayton, more serious now. "This place is bad. It brings the fight back if you let it, it keeps trying to make you fight the same hit again."
Clayton nodded. "Echo law, the scar remembers and replays."
Soren wiped his blade on a patch of tough grass that did not mind the heat. "How long?"
"Since I landed," Torren said. "The ground dragged me here. I think it smelled me, flame and root. It wanted a match."
"Did you hear anything?" Veyra asked.
Torren’s eyes flicked toward the far end of the bowl. "Once. There was a voice under the cracking, though I couldn’t make it out."
Clayton touched the earth again. He did not push, he asked.
The soil responded and gave him a thin thread. It tasted like iron and distance, and it ran from the bowl toward hills that rose in layered shelves, each one darker than the last.
He stood. "The scar runs that way, it deepens. The wound gets worse."
Torren rolled his shoulder and set the axe across his back. "Then we go cut it open and see what bleeds."
Kaelin chuckled. "Spoken like a surgeon with no license."
Veyra frowned at the black trenches. "Before we go deeper, we need to understand how it fights. The echoes came when you moved toward the center, Torren. When you step back, they thin."
Torren nodded. "They hate advance. They punish intent."
Clayton filed that. "Then we advance slower than it knows. We change our shape between steps, we make new intentions it hasn’t learned."
Soren sheathed his blade. "And if it learns fast?"
Clayton’s eyes cooled. "Then we teach it pain it hasn’t felt."
They grinned, and then they moved along the trench.
The valley opened in long ribs of fused root and slag, like the bones of a giant that had died and been polished by time. Between ribs, the ground was cracked and dry, a mosaic of plates that rang faint when stepped on.
In places, thin smoke rose from seams that never cooled.
The first shelf of hills lifted on their left. It was not a natural hill. It was a wall grown and burned and grown again, then frozen at half-shape. At the top, broken spires stuck out like teeth.
"The old front," Torren said, voice low. "Some Lord held here a long time ago".
Clayton tasted the air.
It was thick and metallic, but under it, there was a faint sweetness. Not honey, but sap, old sap cooked slow until it turned to glass.
They climbed to the shelf’s shoulder and looked down.
And there, they found the second bowl. It was bigger.
The echoes here were fewer, but harder. They kept their shapes even after breaking, and they learned faster. When Clayton’s root spears drilled up from below, the echoes started to jump before the ground flexed.
When Veyra feinted left and shot right, the next two anticipations were punished. When Soren set into a heavy swing, a pair split around him and cut short into his open side.
He took the hit, hissed, and burned the cut closed with a flare of light. "Noted," he said through his teeth.
’Torren just had to jinx it huh?’ Clayton sighed.