They buried Sera in the snow.
It was not a kindness—Kaelen had no kindness left for the things that served the Skylords. But he had learned, in the long years of his life, that the dead had power over the living. Leave a body unburied, and the wolves would find it, and the crows would eat it, and the memory of it would linger, poisoning the ground for years to come.
So they dug a grave in the frozen earth, and they laid Sera's body in it, and they covered it with stones and snow and the last of the prayers that Kaelen remembered from a life he had left behind.
"What happens now?" Theron asked.
They were standing at the entrance to the pass, the mountains rising on either side, the wind howling through the narrow valley. Beyond them, somewhere to the south, was the world Kaelen had left behind.
"We keep moving," Kaelen said. "There's a village, a day's travel from here. Hunters, trappers, people who don't ask questions. We can rest there, get supplies, plan our next move."
"And then?"
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. He had been asking himself that question for five years, and he had never found an answer that did not end in fire and blood.
"There's something I've been looking for," he said finally. "Something that might help us. Something that might give us a chance."
"What is it?"
Kaelen reached into his tunic and pulled out a small object, wrapped in leather and tied with cord. He had carried it for five years, never looking at it, never speaking of it, never letting himself believe that it was anything more than a dead man's dream.
He unwrapped it, and the firelight caught the surface of the metal, sending shadows dancing across the walls of the shelter.
It was a coin, old and worn, the markings on its face worn smooth by centuries of handling. But in the center, still visible, was a symbol that Kaelen had seen a thousand times in his dreams.
The Echo of the First Pact.
"It's a map," he said. "Or part of one. There are three pieces, scattered across the world, hidden in places that the Skylords cannot reach. Together, they lead to something that was lost a long time ago. Something that can kill gods."
Theron stared at the coin, his face pale in the firelight. "You've been looking for this. All these years, when we were running, hiding, surviving—you were looking for a way to kill them."
"I was looking for a way to end it. To make sure they could never hurt us again."
"But you never found the other pieces."
"No. I never had the chance. The Hounds found us first, and we ran, and I buried the coin and tried to forget." He turned the coin over in his hands, feeling the weight of it, the weight of five years of running from something that he should have faced long ago. "But I can't forget. I can't pretend that the world outside these mountains doesn't exist. And I can't keep running forever."
"So we find the other pieces," Theron said. "We find this thing that can kill gods, and we use it."
Kaelen looked at his son, saw the fire in his eyes, the same fire that had burned in his own heart for five years.
"It's not that simple," he said. "The pieces are hidden in places that the Skylords have claimed as their own. Places that are guarded by things that make the Hounds look like children playing at war. And even if we find them, even if we find the Echo itself, using it will cost more than you can imagine."
"You used it before."
"No." Kaelen shook his head. "I never used it. I never had the chance. The war ended before I could, and by the time I understood what it was, what it could do, it was too late. The pieces were scattered, and I was running, and your mother—"
He stopped. The words caught in his throat, the way they always did when he tried to speak her name.
Lyra. His wife. The woman who had believed in him when no one else did, who had loved him when he had forgotten what love was, who had died because he had been too slow, too weak, too afraid to save her.
"She would have wanted this," Theron said quietly. "She would have wanted you to fight."
Kaelen looked at his son, and for a moment, he saw Lyra in the boy's face—the same stubborn set of the jaw, the same fire in the eyes, the same refusal to give up when everything was telling him to let go.
"She would have wanted us to live," Kaelen said. "She would have wanted you to have something more than a war that isn't yours to fight."
"It is mine." Theron's voice was steady, unshakeable. "They killed my mother. They killed my sister. They took everything from us and left us to die in a frozen wasteland. And now they're hunting us again, and they won't stop, not ever, until we're dead or they are."
He looked at his father, and Kaelen saw something in his eyes that he had never seen before. Something that looked like him.
"I'm not going to run anymore," Theron said. "And neither are you."
Kaelen looked at the coin in his hand, at the symbol that had haunted his dreams for five years. He looked at the fire, at the shelter, at the mountains rising against the grey sky. And he looked at his son, the boy who had become a man in a world that had no mercy for anyone.
"You're right," he said. "We're not going to run anymore."
He closed his hand around the coin, feeling the weight of it, the weight of the choice he was making.
"There's a man," he said. "A scholar, or so I've heard. He lives in the southern reaches of the Ash Wastes, in a place called the Sunken Dominion. He studies the old things, the things that were lost when the Skylords took power. If anyone knows where the other pieces are, it's him."
"The Ash Wastes," Theron said, and there was a note of something in his voice that might have been fear. "The maps say there's nothing there. That the land is dead, poisoned by the wars of the Skylords."
"The maps lie. There are people there, things there, places that the Skylords have forgotten. And the Echo—the first piece of it, the one that can lead us to the others—is there. Hidden in the ruins of a city that was old when the Skylords were young."
He stood, ignoring the pain that shot through his body, the marks on his chest burning with every movement.
"We leave at dawn," he said. "South, through the pass, into the Frostfangs. From there, we find a way across the Ash Wastes, and we find this scholar, and we find the other pieces of the Echo."
"And then?"
Kaelen looked at his son, at the fire in his eyes, at the determination that had carried him through five years of running and hiding and surviving.
"And then we end this," he said. "One way or another."