Evoker Kalo, the Last of the House of White Heather

“Grief is a root that flowers when no one watches.”

Two hundred years since the fall of the House of White Heather, the high-born line that once guarded the moorlands of the Windmere Vale, a lone figure kneels in a forgotten grove. His cloak is silver-threaded and moss-stained, the color of mourning woven into noble cloth. Beneath him, the earth breathes slowly, the way old things do—half-asleep, dreaming in green and gray.

Around him, the white heather blooms still. It has taken root upon the graves of his family, growing thick and gently trembling in the wind. These small white blossoms—pure, frail, and quietly defiant—shroud the stone-carved names of his bloodline: Father. Mother. Sister. The boy who once played beneath their gaze is now a man, gaunt with centuries of loneliness, a faded crown tucked deep within the folds of his hood.

This is Evoker Kalo, the last koopling of his house, heir to a vanished line. He does not speak. The wind carries his breath. The heath stretches outward like an ocean of pale green, a quilt of moorgrass and memory. A faint mist hangs over the vale, luminous in the slanting sun, as if time itself had decided to linger here in silence.

But silence never lasts in cursed lands.

From the edge of the grove, a noise—soft at first, almost like the chirrup of a bird, then guttural, erratic. A grunt. A shriek. A shuffle of limbs against moss-covered stone. Kalo turns, the heather brushing his knees.

From the tangled brush of bramble and fern, a stoat emerges—lithe and small, but horribly changed. Once a friend to the kooplings of the vale, this creature—perhaps called Timmis in its former, peaceful life—now shambles with unnatural strength. Its fur is clotted with sores, eyes wild and foaming, teeth gleaming wet and bared as if laughing through rot. One paw drags behind it, twisted backwards. The Gloom Fang Plague has taken him.

Kalo, slow to his feet, does not draw his weapon yet. “Timmis?” he asks—softly, disbelieving. There is hope in his voice, foolish and brief.

Timmis answers with violence.

The infected stoat lunges, jaws wide, shrieking like a wind torn loose from the earth. Kalo stumbles back, boots slipping on moss. The stoat slashes, claws raking at Kalo’s side, sending threads of blood through the air like lines of red ink. The magic in Kalo’s veins trembles.

He speaks a single word into the air—a spell tied to grief and memory.

From the sky, as if the stormclouds themselves had remembered their duty, a floating broom streaks down, spinning and humming with a silver light. It lands in his hand with a clap of wind—and transforms, unfolding with elegance and vengeance into the Heather Blade. Its handle is woven wood, the same as the white heather’s stems. Its edge gleams like frost at dawn.

They fight in the grove. Sword and tooth. Magic and madness. The stoat moves with inhuman speed, but Kalo knows this land like a heartbeat. They circle the graves. The wind howls. The white heather is trampled.

Then—a sickening crack. The stoat’s backleg kicks loose a burial stone—his sister’s. It topples, crashing to the ground, breaking apart the careful arrangement of flowers laid there just hours ago.

Something in Kalo breaks.

He lets out a sound—not a scream, but a kind of wordless vow, rage wrapped in sorrow. He swings the Heather Blade in a wide arc, its silver edge burning through the mist. But the stoat keeps coming, jaws snapping, eyes unblinking, as if possessed by more than plague—by spite, by grief, by some unseen hunger the Gloom Fang births.

Finally, Kalo calls on the last of his strength. Magic flares from his fingertips—runic sigils drawn in air with trembling hands. The blade shimmers. The grove pulses.

He strikes.

A burst of white light, threaded with violet magic, explodes through the grove. The infected stoat is cleaved in two, ash and fur dissolving into the wind. The wind itself carries the creature’s final sound—not a growl, not a shriek—but something eerily familiar… almost like a child’s laugh, remembered too late.

Silence returns. And with it, the loneliness.

Kalo drops to his knees again, in the ruin of the flowers, beside his sister’s stone. He places his hand on the cracked marker. The white heather, resilient as ever, begins to grow again—tiny buds sprouting from where his tears land.

He is lost. But not broken.

The Gloom Fang has come. And Evoker Kalo, last of his line, will rise—not just for vengeance, but for memory. For those who bloom no longer. For those who once called him brother, son… prince.

Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3