Master of the Spiral Way
The stones remembered.
They were cracked now, worn by flame and frost, stained by blood and lichen, partially torn by something darker, but they still remembered. Issar Rae'Velis moved between them in silence, his serpentine body gliding softly across the moss-dappled flagstones, four hands working with patient grace. One cupped a seedling. Another brushed aside a half-buried fragment of permacrete. A third tucked soil into a divot where plasma had once scorched through the ground. The fourth, holding nothing, moved only to rest upon the earth itself.
He did not speak.
The breath of the morning filtered down through what remained of the Temple canopy, painting shifting bars of pale light across the stones. Here and there, broken colonnades leaned at tired angles, overtaken by vine and time. It was quiet now, not the silence of emptiness, but the stillness after storm. The kind of silence that knew.
Issar had not been asked to help. He had simply come. Tython called to him, not in words, not even in visions, but in weight. Beneath its wounds, this world still sang, and where there was song, there could be healing.
He knelt beside the cracked base of an old meditation circle. The scorched grass around it had long since died. In its place, a small coil of wildflower had begun to push through the dirt, tenacious, imperfect, beautiful. Issar dipped two fingers into a bowl of water and let a single drop fall to the roots.
Then he exhaled. A low wind stirred the treetops. The faint scent of ash mixed with soil and green. He felt it then; a ripple, not from the stone or earth, but from the Spiral itself.
Someone approached.
