The Fractured Mind

Moon-pale frost rimed the hollow as dawn staggered over the world. The blizzard’s rage had ebbed, but its ghosts lingered; the snow’s surface flashed with menacing motes, carving a white silence in which hopes and voices seemed to hang, unfinished. Eiran woke cold—so cold his breath felt thick and his limbs foreign—but alive. Mira’s face, hollow-eyed from her vigil, flickered at the edge of vision, taut with fatigue and mingled relief. She pressed her hand to Eiran’s brow, the gesture as much reassurance for herself as for him.

“Stay with me,” she murmured. “You’re here. You fought it off.”

Eiran managed a nod. Every sound—wind sigh, birdsong stutter, Mira’s rough whisper—struck oddly, as if heard through a veil. When he blinked, a ripple passed over the waking world: beneath the birches, figures stirred that ought not to, eyes like candles guttering in skulls of root and snow. Distantly, he heard the chanting of the cult, the howling of the wind, the seductive hush of sleep.

“Eiran?” Mira’s voice cut through—sudden, sharp. “Look at me. We need to keep moving.”

He did, though with an awkward stiffness. Each footstep left a tracing of after-images—copying, layering, shadows that did not quite match the snow’s shape. The star stone pulsed faintly at his chest, its warmth a pale anchor to the world’s solidity. But the journey since the night of the blizzard had unspooled something in him. His mind wandered, even as his body obeyed. He felt memory and present shatter like glass dropped on frozen stone.

The two pressed onward, Mira half-carrying Eiran in places, until the frail dawn burned away the worst of the storm. By midday, they stumbled upon a trail: the tracks of a deer, half-filled with fresh snow, winding east toward a stretch of low hills darkened by brambles. There, as the sun climbed, a distant shape became visible on the horizon—fractured standing stones, shaped by hand and time alike, their surfaces shimmering oddly in the chill.

“We head for that ridge,” Mira decided, voice iron. “There was a tale—a place called Tarn Wynn. They say the Sialen dwell there, if they dwell anywhere. Healers not of flesh, but of the wounds the world can’t see.”

Eiran said nothing. The star stone felt hot against his sternum, as if it had drunk the dream and was awash with its aftertaste: memory split, self at war with self. Each step came only with Mira’s urging, and several times he stumbled to his knees, gasping, vision dark. An agony throbbed at his temples, sharp as a sliver.

---

The land itself opposed them. With the snow melting in icy sheets, the path became treacherous. Halfway up the rise, a sudden stomach-lurch as the ground gave way—a sink, crusted over by powder. Mira caught Eiran under the arms, hauling him back onto solid earth, trembling with the memory of a fall no one could see.

“It’s not real,” Eiran muttered afterward, his voice strange to his ears. “The ground isn’t supposed to move. The dead aren’t supposed to sing. But they do. I see the village, Mira. I see Talin. Sometimes you’re not you.”

For a moment, terror flickered in Mira’s face—fear not of pursuit, nor failure, but of the dissolution of her only anchor in this swirling world.

“We’ll reach the stones. Hold on to me. Nothing’s taking you that I don’t fight tooth and fist.”

He laughed—a hollow, uncanny sound. They continued.

---

As the sun slid west, painting clouds with dying embers, they reached the base of the holy ridge. The standing stones loomed—dozens of them, set in spiral arcs, each a different height and color. Blue-green lichen crawled their faces; runes, half-obliterated, smoldered in lines of subtle fire. Wind whispered here, not with threat but with the hush of old prayers spoken low.

Mira led Eiran toward the spiral’s center, guided by stories she half-remembered: the Sialen came only to those who waited in peace, not haste or violence. She knelt, pulling Eiran to the moss, then sat folded-legged, bowing her head.

“We need healing beyond flesh,” she said aloud, daring any spirits to answer. “Come if you will, or leave us to the storm.”

Eiran heard everything as if from deep under water. He wanted to sleep—to close his eyes and let the snow drift down forever. Instead, Mira grasped his hand and squeezed, forcing him to anchor to her pulse.

As twilight thickened, figures slipped from between the stones. They wore robes stitched from dawn and dusk, faces shadowed by silver and amethyst veils. Their eyes—what could be seen of them at all—held the eerie, luminous calm of those who had looked deep into souls and survived.

The leader—a childlike figure yet ancient in bearing—stopped above Eiran, kneeling. Her hand—small, yet roughened by years—pressed over his brow. The pain in his head blazed, a star caught in glass. Eiran groaned, writhing. But a cool pressure stilled him, not by force, but by gentle certainty. The figure spoke, her tongue both new and preposterously old:

 "Your mind is storm-scarred. The world’s wound festers in you, marked one. You bear too many memories, some never yours."

He shook. “I can’t—Too many voices. I don’t know what’s mine.”

She traced her fingers in the air—a spiral, a broken star. Power feathered across his temples. The Sialen began to sing, voices blending in notes too pure for despair. Other figures joined Mira and him, laying hands on brow and heart, cradling not flesh but the hurt behind breath and bone.

With each note, images shattered in Eiran’s mind: the last moments of Vael, the broken ridge, shadow-creatures writhing, blood in the snow. The star stone flashed, a beacon or a wound. Eiran’s vision filled with unlived lifetimes—an old woman’s face crying for a child, a white cat perched on a forlorn windowsill, twin boys wading through summer grass, laughter cut short by flame. He wanted to keep them all—proof he was still whole. But the music tugged, gently but inexorably, at each thread.

Mira, tears streaking her cheeks despite herself, watched helpless as the Sialen’s ritual unfolded. She sensed his agony—incoherent cries gave way to ragged breaths. The lead Sialen gestured for a basin: water poured from a stone bowl over Eiran’s brow, and with it a memory slipped away—a sacred one.

He felt it—like the sudden loss of water after a drought, both pain and relief. Gone was the warmth of Tanelle pressing a steaming loaf into his hands, the smell of baking at dawn—the one memory that had always called him home. In its place, a hollow space, clean-edged as any wound, but not festering. For the first time in days, the world ceased its doubling and shuddering. Lines stayed where they were drawn; voices, if not silent, at least retreated behind doors.

The Sialen withdrew, their song diminishing. The leader’s voice, soft as dusk: “You are mended, not made new. All healing costs. The stone will show the way now, but you must choose what remains.”

Eiran’s eyes were wet with something more than grief. He gasped—hollow, lighter, but aware of all he had lost. Mira rocked him gently, her own relief leaking out as a shudder against the stone.

“Thank you,” Mira managed, her voice warbled.

The youngest of the Sialen knelt by her. “You are all wounded, not only him. The world shreds hope and memory both. Only those who choose to keep walking belong in the stories that outlast shadow.”

Distant thunder rolled as, from the spiral’s edge, new shadows flickered. The Sialen pressed a token into Mira’s palm—a sigil-carved pebble, iridescent with inner light.

“When you forget what you need most, hold this. It cannot restore what is lost, only remind you to remember.”

Mira tucked the charm close.

The Sialen vanished into the dusk as they had come, their forms becoming mist between the stones. The storm above broke, stars blazing cold and sharp. Eiran sat up, steadier—carved from greater loss, but with new resolve flickering in his gaze.

“We have to find Narsa, and Talin if he lives,” he said. “With or without every memory, I walk the road.”

Mira gripped his hand. “We do it together, now as ever.”

As they gathered their gear and rose, the stone in Eiran’s pack glittered in the starlight—clean, unfractured for a moment, before the world’s wounds and the cult’s shadows reached anew. But for now, broken pieces joined together in the cold clarity of healing, the quest moved on, sown with pain and a promise not to break anew.