INTERLUDE: The Oracle Beneath the Ice
Beneath the glacier of Hollowdeep, where no sun has touched since the world was young, the oracle stirs.
Her body is older than stone, her hair a river of frozen starlight tangled with bones. The glacier pulses with her breath, and those who dare whisper her name do so with ice on their tongues: She Who Knows the Uncarved Path.
Tonight, she speaks.
Not in words—but in blood that weeps from the walls, in the creaking of old ice, in the dreams of dying kings.
“He walks,” she murmurs, as her blind eyes open. “The one with no name. The stallion who broke the rune.”
The winds howl above, as if the world shudders at her voice.
Around her throne of glacial bone, the spirits of ancient seers shift—silent, translucent, bound by oath and frost. Their mouths move without sound, echoing her prophecy through the cold dimensions of time.
“He walks with fire not born of man. The old jaguar. The ember made flesh. The shadow of the First Flame.”
She lifts her hand. Upon her palm flickers an image—not of flesh, but of fate. Jasper, wreathed in smoke and snow, walking between gods and graves.
“The godbinders feel it. The goblin rune-forgers dream of his tread. The Iron Choir sings his return.”
A ripple stirs through time.
Far away, in a tower carved from the bones of sea serpents, a warlock screams in his sleep. In a temple of blind monks, every candle gutters out. A child in the marshes wakes speaking in tongues.
And in the deep, frozen dark, the Oracle smiles.
“He has remembered,” she breathes. “And the chains of the world tremble.”
Then the light fades.
The glacier groans. The spirits fall still. The Oracle slumps upon her throne, and silence claims Hollowdeep once more.
But the words hang there, written in the air like cracks in a blade:
“He rides to the mountains. The name waits. The storm comes.”
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CHAPTER SEVEN: The Riverlands Remember
Where Ghosts Speak and Fire Hunts
The river was swollen with meltwater from the northern peaks, a silver serpent winding through valleys once green but now gray with the weight of winter’s retreat. Jasper moved along its banks in silence, his breath forming clouds that danced above the frost-bitten reeds. The jaguar stalked beside him, low and soundless, its golden eyes never blinking.
Here, in the riverlands, the air felt different. Heavy with ghosts.
He knew the signs. Trees bent the wrong way. Birds circled but never sang. The wind sometimes whispered in voices that didn’t belong.
At night, the fire crackled low, but the shadows loomed higher. Jasper slept with his back to a stone and his blade within reach. The jaguar never slept. Its eyes flickered with ancient memory—watching, remembering, guarding.
It was on the third night that the river spoke.
Not in language, but in image. A face beneath the water—long-snouted, pale-eyed, weeping tears of light. It was not there, and yet it was. The jaguar growled low, its hackles rising. Jasper leaned forward.
And the vision came.
A child with antlers running through grass. A tower split by lightning. A sword swallowed by black roots. And behind it all… a flame. A face in the flame. His own—but older, and terrible.
He woke gasping, the taste of smoke in his mouth.
The river had shown him something. Not a warning. A memory. One he did not yet possess.
INTERLUDE II: Those Who Stir
Far away, in the Rot-Court of Vezzigul, the goblin rune-forger gnaws his own fingers, blood mixing with ink as he sketches Jasper’s face over and over on cracked parchment. “He broke the bind,” he mutters. “He broke it with will alone. No, no, no, no—this cannot stand.”
He sends a raven—black-feathered, rune-eyed—to the east. A summons. A request for the Unbinder. A living curse.
In the mountains of Wrothgar, the Iron Choir—men of steel and sacrifice—sing a dirge that shakes the stones. Their leader, a woman with a blade fused to her spine, listens to the wind.
“The horse returns,” she intones. “The fire walks. We must remember our vows.”
They light their forge with blood.
And deep in the Thrice-Entombed Spire, where sorcerers live without name or skin, a red flame dances across old sigils. One among them rises. His mouth is sealed shut, but his eyes blaze with the script of an older tongue.
He will not speak.
But he has heard.
The Riverlands Remember
Where Ghosts Speak and Fire Hunts
The days grew colder as they followed the current southward. The jaguar hunted well, its kills clean. Jasper’s silence deepened with every step. He had begun to sense something beneath the trees—too still, too quiet. The woods listened.
At night, the fire dwindled quickly, as if the very air devoured it. The river murmured low secrets in a tongue older than the Runiverse. Jasper pretended to sleep, but his mind did not rest. He lay with one hand beneath his cloak, fingers wrapped around the hilt of his dagger. The jaguar rested too, its breathing slow, deliberate. But they both knew.
They were not alone.
Something followed.
It moved with the river, neither upstream nor down, but with it, as if born from the water’s will. It kept its shape in the corner of the eye—sometimes a bird too black to be real, sometimes a ripple that never settled. But on the seventh night, the mask dropped.
The coals sputtered. Frost clung to Jasper’s boots. He didn’t move.
Then, a drip.
Too loud.
Followed by another, and another—closer now. A squelching sound, half-liquid, half-bone. Something slithered up from the water. It breathed wrong, like a death rattle stretched into a melody. The jaguar’s ears flicked, but it stayed still—waiting for Jasper’s cue.
Jasper opened his eyes.
What emerged was not a beast, but a shape—a thing of reeds and flesh, its body half-swamp, half-drowned man. Its mouth gaped with waterweeds. Its eyes were stones, literal stones, stuck where vision should be. It did not see in the way others saw. It felt breath, heat, the shiver of fear.
But Jasper had lived too long in the cages of men to give off fear.
He played dead.
The creature crept closer, dragging slime and bone across the snow. It reached for him with fingers like hollow branches. The jaguar’s muscles tensed.
And then—
Steel flashed.
Jasper’s dagger buried in its throat, twisting with a practiced savagery. The thing shrieked—not from pain, but betrayal. Its body thrashed, dissolving into a hiss of steam and black oil. The jaguar pounced, finishing the remnants with a bone-crunching roar.
Silence fell again.
Jasper wiped his blade and looked toward the river. More would come. The world was sending its worst. Testing him. Tempting him.
He whispered, not to the jaguar, but to the fire.
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m not done bleeding.”
The jaguar growled softly in agreement. The night held its breath.
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