The thinning took hours.Or perhaps it took no time at all. In the void between worlds, time had no reliable shape. Diamond sat on ground that was not ground, back straight, sword across his knees, and watched the ancient entity dissolve not into nothing, but into something he had no word for. A grey that was lighter than the void. A texture that was neither shadow nor light.Silence, perhaps. The original kind.Nyx sat beside him. Close enough that their shoulders touched. She had not sheathed her daggers, but they rested across her legs now rather than in her hands a compromise between readiness and rest that was very characteristic of her.Aurel paced. He was the only one who seemed unable to be still. Diamond had never seen the old man pace before and found it oddly reassuring evidence that Aurel was not, in fact, made of stone."The binding will need to be physical," Aurel said, on perhaps his fortieth circuit. "A place in the real world. Something anchored.""The Blackwood est

The road back was not the same road they had left on.It rarely was.Diamond had walked away from Redwall a dozen times across his life as a boy chasing his father's shadow, as a young soldier following orders that made him feel ten feet tall, as a hunted man with nothing but his sword and his stubbornness. Each time, the road had felt like an ending.This time it felt like the first step of something he had no name for yet.They did not take the direct route. The battlefield sat between them and the estate, and crossing it would have meant passing through the exact geography of loss, his father's death, the broken sky, the place where the cycle had shattered. Diamond was not afraid of that ground. But he was not ready to walk it alone, and the people around him needed time before they had to face it too.So they came around.Through the eastern valleys, through the villages that had watched armies pass and were now beginning to understand that the passing was finished.Word traveled

The man's name was Caron Veth.Diamond found him on the third day not through investigation, but because Veth came to him. He arrived at the estate's front gate in the late afternoon with two men behind him and the particular confidence of someone who has decided that the best defense is the appearance of having nothing to fear.He was sixty, perhaps. Well-fed. Dressed like a merchant but carrying himself like a man accustomed to being listened to."I heard the Blackwood heir had come home," Veth said, when Diamond met him in the courtyard. He looked at the construction, the repaired wall, the cleared debris, the new rope on the well with an expression that was carefully neutral. "Industrious.""What do you want, Veth?" Diamond said.A pause. "You know my name.""I know your column in the ledger."Veth's two men shifted. Not dramatically. But Diamond noticed, and Nyx, standing to his left with her arms crossed, noticed too."Those arrangements," Veth said carefully, "were made with

They came at night.Diamond had expected it. Not that night precisely he had thought Veth would need more time to organize, to convince himself that direct action was safer than the ledger reaching further than it already had. He had thought wrong.He was awake when the first torch appeared at the gate.He had been awake most nights since returning. Not from dreading something quieter than that. The habit of a man who had spent too many years where sleep was a vulnerability. He sat in the courtyard beside the tree his grandmother had planted, in the dark, and he was watching the gate when the torchlight came.Not one torch.Eight.He was on his feet before he fully decided to move."NYX."Her window was open she had insisted on it, regardless of the cold and she was out of the building before he had crossed the courtyard, sword in hand, moving without sound in a way that still struck him as slightly uncanny."How many?" she said."Eight torches. More behind them."Aurel appeared from

Diamond was running before he knew he had moved.His boots struck the courtyard stones, and the canvas roof snapped overhead in the wind. He had learned the path to the gate by counting his steps, forty-two from the great hall to the iron bars. This time he covered them in twenty-nine."Stop shouting at the guards," the voice called. "They are only doing their work."He knew that voice. It was thinner than it had been in his childhood and rougher at the edges, but it still stretched the last sound of his name like a hand held out in the dark.He stopped an arm's length from her. The smell reached him first: lavender oil, wet wool, and the smoke of a long road."Mother, is it really you?" he asked.Her hands found his face. They were cold, and they shook. Her thumbs followed the scar across his cheek, then the ridge of his brow, and they did not hurry."You are thinner than you should be," Maelis said. "I told you to eat before you worked.""I ate this morning.""You are a poor liar. I