The old man's name was Aldric, and he had been a soldier once, in the wars that had come before the war that broke the world.
He sat across from Kaelen and Theron in his hut, the fire between them casting long shadows on the walls, the Echo resting on the table between them like a third presence. His hands were steady, his eyes sharp, and there was something in the way he looked at Kaelen that spoke of old memories, old wounds, old things that had never healed.
"You were there," Kaelen said. "At the Ironheart Massacre. I see it in your face."
Aldric nodded slowly. "I was there. I was one of the ones who survived."
The words hung in the air between them. Theron sat very still, his eyes fixed on the old man's face, his hands clenched in his lap.
"How?" Kaelen asked. "I burned that field. I burned everything. There was nothing left."
"There was nothing left," Aldric agreed. "Nothing but ash and bone and the memory of fire. But some of us—some of us had made other pacts. Older pacts. Pacts that the Skylords didn't know about. Pacts that protected us when your fire came."
He reached up and pulled back the collar of his tunic, revealing a mark on his chest that was different from the ones Kaelen carried. It was older, faded, the lines worn smooth by years of healing. But the shape of it was unmistakable.
A Firstborn rune.
"You made a pact with the old things," Kaelen said. "The things I was sent to destroy."
"The things you were sent to destroy, yes." Aldric pulled his tunic back into place. "The things that had been protecting us for a thousand years before the Skylords ever set foot in this world. The things that saved my life when your goddess told you to burn us all."
He leaned forward, his eyes bright in the firelight.
"You want to know what happened that day, Kaelen? The real story? Not the one Valkara told you. Not the one you've been telling yourself for five years. The truth?"
Kaelen's hand tightened on his knee. "I was there. I know what happened."
"You know what you did. You don't know what you destroyed."
Aldric reached into his tunic and pulled out a small object, wrapped in cloth. He unwrapped it slowly, carefully, the way a man might unwrap something that had been buried with the dead.
It was a piece of stone, smooth and black, the same black stone that had lined the walls of the chamber beneath the Frostfangs. But there was something carved into it, something that moved when the firelight caught it, something that seemed to shift and change with every breath.
"The Firstborn were not like the Skylords," Aldric said. "They did not take. They did not bind. They gave. They gave us knowledge, and power, and the tools to build a world that was not built on chains and oaths and the hunger that comes from serving gods who do not care."
He held the stone out to Kaelen, and Kaelen took it, felt the warmth of it, the weight of it, the memory that was pressed into its surface like a scar.
"They gave us this. A map. A key. A door to a place that the Skylords have been trying to reach for a thousand years. And when you burned the city, when you killed the Firstborn, when you destroyed everything we had built, you buried that door. You buried it so deep that no one has been able to find it since."
Kaelen stared at the stone in his hand, at the symbols that moved and shifted, at the memory of fire and ash and the screams of a thousand dying things.
"I didn't know," he said, and the words were hollow, empty, the words of a man who had said them so many times that they had lost all meaning.
"No," Aldric said. "You didn't know. That's the tragedy of it. You didn't know, and you didn't ask, and you didn't care. You were the Fist of Valkara. You did what you were told. And the world has been dying ever since."
He took the stone back, wrapped it in its cloth, tucked it into his tunic.
"But you're here now. And you have the Echo. And maybe—maybe that means something. Maybe it means you're ready to know the truth. The truth that the Skylords have been hiding from you since the day they chose you."
He looked at Kaelen, and his eyes were old, older than anything Kaelen had ever seen.
"The Echo was not made to kill gods. It was made to bind them. To chain them. To make them into something that could serve the world instead of consuming it. And the only one who can use it is the one who has been broken by them. The one who knows what it means to be a weapon. The one who has chosen, finally, to be something more."
He stood, and his joints creaked, and his breath was a cloud in the cold air of the hut.
"Rest tonight. Tomorrow, we'll talk more. But tonight... tonight, you should think about what you're willing to sacrifice. Because the Echo will ask for more than you know. And if you're not ready to give it, you should turn back now."
He left them there, in the firelight, with the weight of his words pressing down on them.